Who else hates seeing enemies Raised / Resurrected / Wished Back?

[frankthedm]

One of the big reasons I loathe revivification magic is because of how much it sucks away the joy of a hard won victory to see a previously dead foe strolling out of a Temple. I'd rather play in a game with no raising than have the possibility of a confirmed dead foe showing back up living and breathing.

 

[TerraDave]

Well, the characters should hate it. That should be the point.

But ya, for the players, what goes around comes around.

 

[jedavis]

Eh, I tend to give villains one more chance via reanimation as undead, deals with devils, cyborg reconstruction, or other Means Most Foul. But only one. Rematches are nicely climactic, and given how often villains who were supposed to be recurring die off the first time, I find myself pretty OK with it as both a player and a DM, as long as it's only once. More than that and it gets annoying / ridiculous.

 

[Storminator]

The PCs in my campaign killed off the fantastically wealth prince of Cyre. They chopped up his body and threw the parts in the street. So naturally he had a True Res, which gave him a brand new body - downy hair and baby smooth skin. Nary a scar, bruise nor blemish.

They hate that guy.

PS

 

[TerraDave]

Eh, I tend to give villains one more chance via reanimation as undead, deals with devils, cyborg reconstruction, or other Means Most Foul. But only one. Rematches are nicely climactic, and given how often villains who were supposed to be recurring die off the first time, I find myself pretty OK with it as both a player and a DM, as long as it's only once. More than that and it gets annoying / ridiculous.

We just had a session with the now undead priest of orcus...good stuff.

 

[jasper]

Sorry if it is good for the PCs it is good for the NPCs. That said it is a cheesy move by DM if over done.

 

[Soramain]

The general rule in my group's campaigns is that good NPCs usually won't return from the dead because they are content with their eternal rewards, and most evil NPCs don't have trustworthy help to bring them back. It can and does happen sometimes, but only if it somehow helps the story.

 

[Skyscraper]

I DMed a short series of home-made one-shots 20 years ago, where the BBEG was always the same guy coming back in resurrected, undead and finally demon form to do evil, but the PCs were always there to save the day! I usually hate bad guys being resurrected (and I've never done it apart from those one-shots I believe) but in that particular instance the players expected and wanted the BBEF to show up, and I'm not one to disappoint a group of players

In fact, resurrect/raise dead has been pretty much absent from my games for a few decades now. PCs rarely die, but if they do, it means a new PC for the player. Though I always leave the door open by stating that resurrection is believed to exist as a dark and rare ritual... So the day a player really wants to resurrect his PC, I'm sure he'll find a way

 

[gamerprinter]

This is why in my Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story setting resurrection does not work for anybody - PCs, monsters, villains or otherwise. When anyone dies, you are forcibly reincarnated using the perverse reincarnation rules in Kaidan (based on things like accrued karma score, based on deeds done in your life and previous lives...)

At least in that setting, this is not an issue.

 

[MarkB]

Well, the characters should hate it. That should be the point.

But ya, for the players, what goes around comes around.

I dunno, if the players put in a great deal of work to solve a problem, they probably want to feel that they're done with that, time to move on. It's certainly quite possible for it to get frustrating on a player level if their hard work is undone too easily.

When we were playing a close-to-epic-level campaign some years ago, I recall that the party went to quite some lengths to find ways around resurrection options. The favoured methods took advantage of the no-return-after-natural-aging clause, either via polymorphing the subject into a naturally short-lived creature such as a mayfly, or sending them to a time-displaced pocket plane where they'd age to death in just a few prime-material-plane minutes.