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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6160203" data-attributes="member: 6681948">To me, the whole discussion started with the assertions that a knowledge check provided lots of detail about any given monster, and that pretty much everyone in the D&D world would have a pretty solid familiarity of the dangers of most, if not all, monsters and typically know them by sight.  Pretty much everyone would know a bodak, medusa or basilisk on sight, for example. If that is a ridiculous overstatement of your point, I welcome you clarifying it.First off, I never said I was assigning a penalty.  I said that such a penalty was more deserved than a skill bonus when the player of an 8 CHA character with no social skills role plays an eloquent speech on the part of that character.  More so if such speeches are routine.  I can only assume the character is a stutterer, a spitter or some such, because he seems to suffer no problems with his charisma or persuasiveness otherwise.And yes, I think it is appropriate for people to play the character they chose to build.  If you dump WIS, CHA and INT, then you should be playing an unpersuasive, imperceptive dunce.  You chose not to spend your character resources on common sense, genius or persuasiveness, so play the brute you designed.  The player who stutters and is a wallflower, but put stats into CHA, and skill points into interaction skills to build a suave, persuasive character, should not have those advantages overridden by a player who is a persuasive orator.  The ‘face’ character does not get a bonus to combat abilities because his player deftly demonstrates brilliant defensive and offensive fencing skills.  You choose the character you want to play, and work with that character’s resources.  Designing an 8 INT, 8 CHA brute, then playing him as a tactical genius beloved by all is, at least to me, poor role playing.  If you want to be a brilliant tactician and a leader of men, don’t give your character an 8 INT and an 8 CHA so you can pump his STR and CON up higher.I’m not the one suggesting everyone should be able to attempt everything (or at least, not with the possibility of success), am I?If you want a character who can cast spells, you take levels in a spellcasting class, or a feat that provides some limited casting ability.  If you want one who knows a lot about the theory of spellcasting, you take spellcraft (and if you don’t, you know nothing about it). If you want a character who knows a little bit about everything, and can answer DC 11+ questions, that is easily done by taking a rank in each Knowledge skill – you sacrifice other skill ranks you might have taken to be good at this unusual area.  Character building is about actualizing your vision of the character, within the constraints of the character building options available to you.Sure – take an axe to it.  But Disable Device allows you to sabotage it so it will work well for a while, and presumably not be obviously tampered with when the carriage driver returns.  I don’t believe “just anyone” can do that.  Or more to the point, I have no objection to restricting such an ability to those who have been trained, rather than setting the DC at 30 because “it shouldn’t be easy for just anyone to do this”.I would parse that into the game by having some people take ranks in Handle Animal, not by making Handle Animal usable untrained for those purposes.  There is no requirement “trained” mean formal training – it’s just shorthand for “took at least one rank in it”.I find needing to find less obvious ways to solve a problem because we lack the skill in the obvious one can make for a very interesting game as well. I don’t find the need to set DC’s on tasks anyone trained should be fairly competent at a level that someone with a +5 needs to roll 18+ so that high stat untrained character can’t routinely accomplish it as well makes for a better game.As I said, magic to overcome the difficulty keeping a prisoner quiet seems quite likely in a world where it carries such advantages.  But the moral issue is the more interesting one.You seem to waffle above from “clearly evil” to “mildly evil” above.  No question, taking a life is an evil act by definition, at least in isolation. So would a Good cleric ever consider casting this spell? How thorny a moral question is it? Although taking a life is clearly evil in isolation, we accept it in many circumstances – Paladins would be unplayable otherwise.  If a culture has accepted, as an example, that capital punishment is appropriate in some circumstances, is it “more evil” to use that life taken for the purpose of returning an innocent to life, or is it “more evil” to refrain from using this necessarily evil act to deliver what good it might be capable of doing? American Indian culture uses all of the animal, or as much as possible, as waste would be offensive to the animal killed.Will the adventurer who is happy making a career out of killing people and taking their stuff really balk at taking an enemy life to return life to a friend?  “Well, I have no problem slaughtering a village full of Goblins so we can use the land they held for our own agriculture – that’s just our manifest destiny, and they’re all evil Goblins anyway.  And no one should begrudge me helping myself to their possessions afterwards – that’s just a fair wage for a fair day’s work!  But kill one of those goblins to return the life of a boy taken from us by a wagon accident? That’s just WRONG!”As you say willing sacrifices are few and far between. That requirement would accomplish your originally stated goal of making raising the dead a rare and momentous event.  If I can kill someone for the privilege of returning, that just limits the willingness of Good persons to use it.  And, in the typical D&D setting, how much would it really limit it?  Would, say, worshippers of one deity balk at sacrificing worshippers of an enemy deity (oh, excuse me, when we’re opposed to their religion, they’re “cultists”, not “worshippers”).Oddly, this issue seems remarkably in keeping with the thread title, despite being unrelated to the OP’s comments.</blockquote>

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