Still more Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both

[Harlune]

It's means they're immune to those effects except when it's required for the story/game/plot that they're not immune to them.

Which of course makes the ability total bullshit because that's about only time normal races are bothered by those effects as well.

And so we're back to Warforged having all the negative traits of humanoids and constructs with none of the good.

[Voss]

Its the same approach they took to NPCs. Everyone who isn't a PC automatically dies at 0 HP (and can't be rezzed) unless the DM decides he doesn't. So check everybody for plot_critical flags. Or just try to kill them because that seriously seems to be the best way to check.

Resurrection magic would cause problems in the social order of D&D land? Not anymore: in 4e it just doesn't, because thinking about it would be hard!

I swear that is the design philosophy of the damn edition:
Thinking is hard. We don't do it, why should you?

[Psychic Robot]

It is always permissible for people to explain how they rule it. This kind of dismissive comment is not allowed. To make the point, you may not post in this thread again.

Fucking ENWorld. They "ground" posters from threads? Seems a good way to shut down any nay-saying.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Apparently, they also ground posters from threads even when the offender has been warned earlier in the thread and hasn't repeated the behavior.

[PhoneLobster]

Ultimately that is exactly where most internet moderation seriously falls down.

So many moderating regimes seem to think completely disorganised, inconsistent and ultimately even outright deceptive rules and rulings are perfectly OK.

They aren't. On so many levels.

[K]

Douchebaggery never wins.

Be consistent. Don't play favorites and don't waiver from your hard line, and you are good to go.

[Psychic Robot]

See, I loathe modzism with such a passion that I'm tempted to create a new account to intercede on Bill's behalf. Unfortunately, ENWorld residents seem to care more about who is saying something than what he or she is saying. They are, in fact, the type of person that makes the political machine go 'round: if candidate X says something, it has to be right because he pisses sunshine and rainbows; if candidate Y says something, it has to be wrong because he eats babies.

[Voss]

I wouldn't bother. If they don't agree with you (or, actually, the other way around), then everything you say is dismissed out of hand. They really don't want discussion, they want a circle jerk.

[RandomCasualty2]

Its the same approach they took to NPCs. Everyone who isn't a PC automatically dies at 0 HP (and can't be rezzed) unless the DM decides he doesn't. So check everybody for plot_critical flags. Or just try to kill them because that seriously seems to be the best way to check.

Well, I don't really have a problem with having insignificant plot people die at 0. I don't want to make death rolls for them, in fact, I probably don't want to bother rolling death checks for any NPCs, except the battles where they may get healed or they can regen or something.

As far as resurrection, I've always hated it. Resurrection IMO is one of those things that deserves to be entirely a plot device. The revolving door afterlife is just fucking stupid and I despise it with a passion. Nothing is more videogamey than that.

"oh whatever he died... lets just toss a pheonix down and make him all better."

Death should always have some meaning. There should never be some quick fix bandaid to bring someone back from the dead in 10 minutes. That just makes heroic stories impossible to tell. Because at that point, you're no longer fighting to save people's lives, you're fighting to save people's money.

And when the farmer asks if there's anything you can do for his dead wife, you don't feel like heroes when you're forced to reply, "Yeah, we could totally bring her back, but that'd cost us 2000 gold, and we need that to buy magic swords. So sorry.. you're shit out of luck."

That's just not the character I want to play if I'm trying to be a hero. I don't ever want to have to make that choice. Real heroes shouldn't be putting a price tag on human life, but having resurrection in game pretty much means that you have to.

[Talisman]

I pretty much agree with RC's entire post there.

So...yeah...

[Voss]

Actually, almost every example of a hero from myth and literature involves putting a price tag on life, even if its only 'I'll give you this shiny cup/sword/whatever if you'll go kill my enemies'. Heroism is all about treating life as cheap, because your actual job is slaughtering people.

My issue with the way they handled resurrection is that they basically handwaved the problems away. They were clearly aware that rezzing had socially effects, but instead of dealing with them they pulled out the default 4e response: You just can't do that. You don't want rez in your games? Fine, take it the fuck out. But don't handwave it away and claim it only works for the PCs, who are somehow 'da speshuls' and a few plot critical npcs because you can't think up alternative scenarios if they die. Thats just lazy hack writing.

Same with death. Either everybody dies at 0, Con score, -10, or whatever, or you're playing silly buggers. The fact that you can't tell stories about unconscious or dying enemies without the DM stepping in with magical fiat powers is utterly pathetic. Nothing is gained by it. Death checks aren't necessary... keeping track of an extra 10 or so negative hit points isn't hard, and doesn't add anything in the way of additional bookkeeping.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

While I can respect the fact that there are good (though I disagree with them) reasons not to have resurrection magic in the game, such as the fact that it disrupts the social order of the system, screws with the combat system, or whatnot, this:

That's just not the character I want to play if I'm trying to be a hero. I don't ever want to have to make that choice. Real heroes shouldn't be putting a price tag on human life, but having resurrection in game pretty much means that you have to.

Has to be the most craven reason I've heard of.

While we're on the subject, you know what else we should get rid of?

Effects that create food, make goods, and cure diseases. When there's effects in the game that clothe orphans, you're left with the uncomfortable choice of either giving hundreds of children dignity and a slightly happier life or another plus one on your Shiny Sword of Not Compensating For Anything!

GASP! SHOCK! SHAMEFUL MASTURBATION! The game would be so much fucking better if our characters weren't constantly burdened with the guilt of blowing legendary wealth on miniscule bonuses while there's famine going on in the next town over.

This is a subtrope of the the Superman dilemmia. Or more prosaically, the Bleach dilemmia, where the characters easily have the power to make things significantly better in their crapsack world but don't do it because taking time out of their cycle of violence to make things better for the people is just too damn hard for the writers to deal with.

You know what I say to that? Suck it the fuck up, you callow, crybaby bitch. You don't want to shell out 2000 gp to save someone's life because you want to save up for a magic sword? Fucking deal with your inferiority as a human being, assbandit; I don't feel like massaging your damn ego and easing your Scrooge-induced guilt.

[Talisman]

I'm working on a theory here that 13 Buttlords has absorbed all the vitrol associated with Jerry and Angry Pessimist and grown stronger thereby.

That's just not the character I want to play if I'm trying to be a hero. I don't ever want to have to make that choice. Real heroes shouldn't be putting a price tag on human life, but having resurrection in game pretty much means that you have to.

Has to be the most craven reason I've heard of.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course (it's the name of the forum, after all), but I disagree with you.

You're a gang of Big Damn Heroes. You've slain the Nastysaurus, collected your hard-earned gold, and are trekking back to civilization (for some damn reason) to convert it to shiny magic.

Along the way, you stay the night at a small town. You find it's having troubl with orcs. Because you're the good guys, you offer to help deal with them.

The orcs attack. There's a big fight between them and you + the militia. You win, because you're awesome. However, in the fight a young lad of 17 dies, the son of the innkeeper who put you up.

Now you have a dilemma. Do you spend your cash on a resurrection for the poor lad, or keep it to maintain your edge? There's no right answer here; either one is bad for someone. It's uncomfortable and awkward, and not a game I want to be playing.

[Voss]

Then don't play that. You're making an awful lot of assumptions about the game, and none of them are solved by the 4e designers decreeing from on high that
You Just Can't Do That.


Your example isn't even a dilemma, frankly, since had the group not been there, the orcs would have killed all sorts of people. You already saved a boatload of villagers, some angst ridden sob story about some punk kid isn't going to make it more or less heroic.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

Now you have a dilemma. Do you spend your cash on a resurrection for the poor lad, or keep it to maintain your edge? There's no right answer here; either one is bad for someone. It's uncomfortable and awkward, and not a game I want to be playing.

You are missing the point. Resurrection isn't special in this "uncomfortable and awkward" moral dilemma. The heroes wealth/magic items (even time) are also in competition with life and death choices for non-heroes.

Every life has a price tag. That price tag is the cost to save/maintain that life.

To remove any costs, you couldn't have a gameworld. The 13 WB gave only a few examples. You would have to add to his list: Commissioning fortified walls to protect town X. Or even digging ditches to stop non-intelligent creatures from attacking. Etc, etc. There is always a moral choice in everything a supernaturally powerful person/creature does.

[Tydanosaurus]

Now you have a dilemma. Do you spend your cash on a resurrection for the poor lad, or keep it to maintain your edge? There's no right answer here; either one is bad for someone. It's uncomfortable and awkward, and not a game I want to be playing.

IMO, that's the route to madness.

Do I buy the +5 Holy Avenger? 3 Million gold would put in a mighty fine irrigation system in East Nowherevile . . . and probably buy mosquito netting for four generations . . . and any decent horde of peasants is just as effective as I am at stopping a dragon. . . Hmmmm. This is awkward. . .

Virtually any answer any PC gives except "Dedicate Life to Selflessly Working for the Poor and Oppressed" is arguably "bad for someone" in some way. These are adventurers - their deal is killing bad guys and solving bad guy problems, not taking care of every peasant's problem. Once you start going down that path, there's really no end to it.

[K]

The orcs attack. There's a big fight between them and you + the militia. You win, because you're awesome. However, in the fight a young lad of 17 dies, the son of the innkeeper who put you up.

Now you have a dilemma. Do you spend your cash on a resurrection for the poor lad, or keep it to maintain your edge? There's no right answer here; either one is bad for someone. It's uncomfortable and awkward, and not a game I want to be playing.

There are two entirely different answers to this:

The metagame answer is that your wealth needs to stay at a constant level for you to be a character of your level. That mens you can blow it all every adventure because you are supposed to find treasure big enough to put you back to your Wealth-by-level. You raise the kid because the money comes back.

The setting answer is that you teleport to a diamond mine/upper plane/Plane of Earth, grab a handful of diamonds and raise the kid. Money wealth has no limit when there are actual planes made of the things that make up your currency.

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Ressurrection Morality is so easily solvable that I'm surprised that people even have any problems with it.

If you're trying to avoid this question, resort to this copout: The Afterlife is so fun and awesome for the non-evil people that the vast majority of people don't want to come back. For evil people, Hell has such a tight grip on their souls that they can't come back.

Occasionally, resurrection magic actually works because there are a few people out there (notably your band of psychos) who would kick their 72 virgins, Nintendo Wiis, and Ultrapizzas to the curb for the opportunity to trudge several months through the Wastelands of Pure Dookie to hit a goblin in the face with a log. Or on the evil side, they're just SO EVILLY AWESOME that Satan can't keep a firm grip on them.

But 'having to spend my shinies on people besides myself makes Gollum feel sad, so make it so I'm not allowed to' is an uberlame excuse. What are you, some kind of 4th Edition designer?

A bigger problem altogether would be the issue of solving hunger and disease, but I don't see people wringing their hands over that. Shit, we can hardly get anyone to care in the real world, so what the tittyfuck?

[The 13 Wise Buttlords]

Or you could also solve it (and the issue of feeding and curing orphans) just by not coupling weapon power to money.

Therefore, you could if you wanted to actually spend millions of gold pieces researching and administering the cure for UltraAIDs. In fact, that could be the point of an adventure or a nice in-game reward for killing the Ancient Red Wyrm.

In fact, I'm starting to actually resent the magic item system in the game for forcing me to choose. Thank god for the Wish economy.

[Kaelik]

See, I'm with K, when I read people trying to set up raising McCuteKid as a moral dilemma, I was wondering what game you are playing.

I mean, Joe Cleric gets access to Planeshift at the same level as he does Raise Dead, so as soon as he can actually do anything with Diamonds, he already has an infinite supply.

You either raise him because that's the type of guy you are and it doesn't cost you anything, or you don't because that's also the type of guy you are (Clerics of Vecna FTW.)

[Manxome]

Whether the resurrection spell specifically forces you to choose between spending money on yourself or spending money on others is clearly just a special case of the general issue. I can certainly see why some people would want to play a game in which their characters need to make difficult moral choices and others wanting to play a game where they don't, and those both sound like perfectly reasonable play styles to me. And for any particular choice of this sort, one could potentially make a lot of complicated arguments that non-intuitive solutions are actually the correct ones.

Game mechanically, though, there's several problems going on here. The first problem is that the traditional RPG has two separate metrics of character power, exactly one of which is ablative, and it pretends (even requires) that they're correlated. If level X characters need to have level X equipment in order for the game to work, they should just have level X equipment. The paradigm that you somehow have to jump through hoops in order to get the equipment without which the game doesn't work is crap, because the game is specifically creating a possible outcome that it cannot handle.

The obvious ways to fix this are:
(1) Don't assume wealth and XP are linked--which probably means that the kind of encounters you face is going to vary based on both your level and your wealth, which means you've just multiplied the amount of content you need.
(2) Don't link wealth and character power--you just have level-appropriate equipment (which might actually mean that all non-plot equipment is abstracted). Full stop. Any wealth worth tracking is a purely narrative device and cannot be exchanged for non-narrative power.
(3) Wealth, for some setting-dependent reason, is determined entirely by level and cannot be changed. Your artifact sword cannot be sundered or stolen, the king cannot pay you a spectacular reward for saving his daughter, and all the ale and whores in the world have no lasting effect on your bank account. Obviously, in order for this to make sense, you'd need a fairly specific and unusual setting.
(4) Abolish XP as a metric of power, or make it interchangable with wealth (so you can buy and sell "character levels," which are probably just an abstraction for how awesome most of your stuff is). There's only one metric of character power, and it is all ablative. Not sure how this would look in practice, but it's at least a theoretical option.

The second issue is that the wealth scale is too darn big to make any sense. The fact that you can go to a store and buy a personal weapon by dropping the worth of a small kingdom in cash implies some pretty twisted things about the economy. Who the hell can afford to produce one of these weapons, or keep it sitting in the shop in case someone decides to wander in and buy it--and why wouldn't they go purchase a small kingdom instead? How many people need to be buying these things regularly in order to stabilize the price? What does the merchant do with the money he receives as payment? No doubt you could fashion some setting where this works, but I don't even know what it would look like.

The third issue is that the setting just doesn't cope with the abilities that PCs are game mechanically supposed to acquire. If there's one guy in history that's blessed by the gods with the power to raise dead, then yes, the pre-existing world is going to function as if raising the dead were impossible--and that guy will have the capability to seriously disrupt its regular workings. If you want the world to be filled with NPCs that can raise the dead, and/or if you don't want players to disrupt the setting when they can raise the dead, then the setting needs to somehow deal with the fact that death isn't permanent, and have conventions for how that works. Same goes for teleportation, divination, illusions, etc. A world where fantastic powers are routine does not work the same as a world where they're not--you don't get a fantasy setting just by slapping pointy ears on a few people.

[Kaelik]

A lot of your talk about needing some crazy weird setting to justify X is missing a huge point:

Read the Tomes. D&D already has that setting.

You don't walk into some random shop and throw down tons of money, you are in a Planar Metropolis and you trade Hope for a kickass Sword, and the reason you didn't spend that Hope on a kingdom is because:

1) The sword is worth more then the Kingdom
2) You want a Kingdom? Wish up some money and go buy one.
3) Whoever "owns" that Kingdom doesn't want you Hope, because they can't play in the Big Leagues.

[Manxome]

A lot of your talk about needing some crazy weird setting to justify X is missing a huge point:

Read the Tomes. D&D already has that setting.

My impression from the Tomes was that WotC doesn't think that D&D has that setting, but Frank & K rewrote the setting to justify the rules as much as possible. And I'm still not sure they covered all the important bases--I know of nothing in the Tomes that explains why characters of level X should always expect to have Y amount of Hope to exchange for a kickass sword in a Planar Metropolis except that the DM is supposed to use his powers of fiat to ensure it, nor do I understand why the Big League players don't run the entire Little League, and it sounded like scry-and-die is a major setting issue even with their 40' of solid material rule. I believe Frank has also stated several times that they assume the game isn't going to make any sense at all anymore by around level 18.

But I haven't actually read any official D&D books or played tabletop D&D, so I suppose it's entirely possible that impression is incorrect.

[Tydanosaurus]

The orcs attack. There's a big fight between them and you + the militia. You win, because you're awesome. However, in the fight a young lad of 17 dies, the son of the innkeeper who put you up.

Now you have a dilemma. Do you spend your cash on a resurrection for the poor lad, or keep it to maintain your edge? There's no right answer here; either one is bad for someone. It's uncomfortable and awkward, and not a game I want to be playing.

There are two entirely different answers to this:

The metagame answer is that your wealth needs to stay at a constant level for you to be a character of your level. That mens you can blow it all every adventure because you are supposed to find treasure big enough to put you back to your Wealth-by-level. You raise the kid because the money comes back.

The setting answer is that you teleport to a diamond mine/upper plane/Plane of Earth, grab a handful of diamonds and raise the kid. Money wealth has no limit when there are actual planes made of the things that make up your currency.

While those are excellent technical solutions, because they are technical they beg the question.

IOW, they depend on the DM not being a prick who wants you to have a moral dilemma. The DM can always be a Sundermaniac who thinks it's funny that you're behind the gold curve, or decide that all diamond minds are populated by hordes of L20 Miners w/ appropriately annoying powers or (fill in appropriate way DM can be lame).

I think the better answer would be, is your game about fixing every problem every NPC in the game is going to have, or having interesting adventures that entertain you?

[Bigode]

I'm working on a theory here that 13 Buttlords has absorbed all the vitrol associated with Jerry and Angry Pessimist and grown stronger thereby.

Jerry doesn't have any vitriol - just a lot of crybaby. Good to see someone with the real vitriol backing their arguments (F&K aside, of course).

The orcs attack. There's a big fight between them and you + the militia. You win, because you're awesome. However, in the fight a young lad of 17 dies, the son of the innkeeper who put you up.

If you are able to ressurect people (a.k.a. are powerful) and let "son of whatever" fight alongside you, you personally are retarded. If you didn't, you have no more to do with that death than with "old useless #X" hitting the dust.