Does banning raise dead effects actually make the game more

[Lago_AM3P]

I don't think it does. People often bring up the fact that being able to come back from death makes people behave more recklessly.

Assuming that is actually a bad thing, people behave just as recklessly on games like Exalted and Shadowrun as they do with D&D. I mean, you are playing characters that use violence and crime to challenge the existing power structure. That's fucking reckless right there. Maybe they mean that they think that if your character can't come back from the dead, they'll 'put more thought into what they're doing'.

That also doesn't happen. People in games like Shadowrun are careful primarily because you can die really easily and you can fuck up really easily, not because it's hard to bring people back from the dead.

In Dungeons and Dragons, even in 3rd Edition, having a raise dead, even from an NPC, is generally not going to happen in a plurality of games. At its most generous availability, it costs a shitload of money for that level. That can be made even worse depending on the availability and willingness of clerics, the availability of diamonds, whether there's enough of a body to bring back, etc..

So what gives?

[RandomCasualty]

Well sure, permanent death is a lot more dramatic. It's really stressful and dramatic to know that one botched save and the character you put 5 months of play into could be gone permanently.

More dramatic yes, but probably not more fun. Because if he does die, that sucks pretty badly. D&D at high levels is far too deadly to not have some means of reversing death.

[rapanui]

The only objections I have with Raise Dead effects are the following:

1. Why do kings, lords, etc. ever die?
In seems to me that in the interpretation of D&D that K and Frank crafted, they only die of old age, since they do, in fact, have the resources and levels that allow for them to get rezzed for any other reason. Personally, I think that makes for a shitty game, but that's personal opinion.

2. It introduces another dimension of power disparity and some odd balance issues.

If that evil cleric of Whatshisface that you just killed might True Rezzed, then you effectively did nothing. The only way to stop him for good is to capture soul or somesuch, and how many classes have that ability natively? How many non-spellcasting classes?

Also, as a DM how do adjucate when:
a) A temple will offer rez services to a party?
b) A god will honor the request?
c) A villain will get resurrected by his minions?

I have read a few writeups dealing with this (didn't chonjurer have particularly relevant long post about this a few years back???) and haven't seen a system that I like from a purely flavor-based perspective.

[Fwib]

Since returning from death with raise dead etc. is voluntary, and the nature/existence of the afterlife/wyrd/fate/whatever is up to the DM (the reasons a soul might have to stay dead), if Major NPCs keep coming back from the dead, then that is because the DM wants it that way.

I realise that this may be restating some fallacy, but since this is to do with the actions of NPCs, then it is down to the DM roleplaying and until D&D comes with a section on 'rules of roleplaying', nothing to do with the rules.

Having said that, I should enjoy reading an analysis of how such decisions would affect a gameworld.

As far as "your character is dead, you can't have it back" goes, I think that the decision for any particular group should go with whatever they think is best for fun and the gameworld that is being used.

[SirWayne]

People in games like Shadowrun are careful primarily because you can die really easily and you can fvck up really easily, not because it's hard to bring people back from the dead.

I can vouch for that one. When our gaming group took a break from D&D to play Hunter, I redid the edges and some of the rules (such as allowing Stamina to soak Lethal damage) to make the game more action-heavy and less deadly, and as a result the players were constantly getting into melee, taking on challenges that would've been impossible in the original rules, etc., all knowing full well the game doesn't have any resurrection abilities. It's a classic risk-vs.-reward thing... it's almost always more rewarding to win a fight instead of losing or running away, and the less risk there is to you, the more likely you are to do it; raise dead being on the table or not.

As far as D&D goes, I actually think the preponderance of resurrection effects is fine-- like RC said, it's really easy to die at really high or really low levels (I don't even start games at level 1 anymore; we'd had three casters taken down by longbows in the same campaign last time we tried that), and I actually think there should be more raising effects-- that "revivify" spell that brings someone back if you get to them while the body is still warm should be like level 1 or 2, or something. As long as there's one-shot-kill effects (which is itself a problem), there should be easy ways of "undoing" them.

Mechanics aside, I don't think it's that bad story-wise either. The Outer Planes generally give people what they deserve, and if you posit that most "normal people" are Neutral or Good, they might not even want to go back to a world of farming, taxes, disease, and Mind Flayers. Furthermore, if you're remotely educated, you probably know about the many things that can screw your soul over, like barghests, undeath, Pokeballs, etc., and you might not want to risk coming back to avenge your assassination knowing that next time you die you might not be going back to heaven.

Since adventurers being brought back isn't a problem, that leaves evil characters. While we should be loathe to accept RP solutions for mechancial issues, the best explanation probably is that evil clerics aren't generally willing to raise people, because their gods tend to be extremely obsessive about souls and the potential power they have. After all, the more important somebody was, and thus the more likely someone would want to raise them; the more likely they are to become a powerful fiend somewhere down the line and thus the less likely those gods or archfiends would be to let them go.

Of course, I think it's ultimately a self-correcting problem. After all, "The guy who brought the Dark Lord back to life" is sufficient to establish a "connection to someone you have no knowledge of" for the purposes of Scrying. I think we all know where that's going. :]

[Immortius]

If good people get rewarded by good gods for dying in a blaze of glory attempting to end great evil, then evil people should get rewarded by evil gods for dying in a blaze of glory attempting to inflict great evil.

And if I was evil I would think twice about getting resurrected with the ever present threat of some do-gooder trying to redeem me, thus messing up my afterlife.

Of course your god might have a thing or two to say about your refusal of a chance to return to life and spread the bad word.

[TarlSS]

Ressurection and lackthereof both have their merits in D&D, the game is playable with both options. As long as the DM lays off on the oneshot death spells the game is a whole lot of fun. Frankly, even WITH ressurection, oneshot death spells are a really sucky way to go, and are generally a poor idea to keep around. They're generally what turns high level games into the mage duel ugliness that they are.

Pulling out ressurection has the benefit of keeping death, in the campaign world, in it's logical place. Rulers die, bad guys aren't seen again, and PCs have meaningful funerals. The ease of readily available ressurection magic really breaks the sense of reality in a game.

Sure, it's fine as a safety net in a video game where you're at the whim of 1's and 0's, but with a DM who -should- be a competant human being, it shouldn't be neccessary. That said, if you lack confidence in your DM, go for the ressurection!

[dbb]

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: fvck no. Unless by "more dramatic" they mean "more stupidly random and aggravating".

Even with raise dead effects, everyone I know plays D&D as if it were a medieval game of Rainbow Six, where the ideal combat is not just one where the enemy gets defeated without killing a party member, but one where the enemy gets defeated without even getting a chance to take an action. Anyone who thinks the availability of Raise Dead encourages people to act "recklessly" is either deranged or playing in a game offering absurdly easy access to True Rez. Or -- more likely -- they're simply used to playing under GMs who pull their punches.

In fact, if anything, I think it ought to be harder to actually get killed in a D&D game -- the game could use more encouragements to a little reckless heroism, not fewer. As it is right now, it's far too easy to make good, sensible decisions and still get yourself killed. Considering the penalties for death in a by-the-book game, that's not much fun.

--d.

[User3]

As dbb says, it should be harder to die in D&D. The increasing number of Save or [really] Die spells and non-scaling 10-point threshold makes ressurrection spells a neccesity for anyone who doesn't like to loose their characters to random events.

But the real problem is the poor handling of unconsciousness and 'death's door.' In a generic 'high fantasy' world, ressurrection should be a fairly singular event, possibly requiring special research or (actual) divine intervention. That is, it's not an 'ability,' it's an 'event.'
But in that same generic fantasy world, characters should spend a lot more time knocked out. It should be way easier, in combat, to put someone out of commission than to kill them. Even Save or Die spells are better when the petrification wears off in an hour and the character stuck in a block of ice is in magical stasis.

The guy who just failed his save to Finger of Death is unconcious and dying, but he should not die for at least a minute, and a simple Cure Light Woulds spell should not put him back into action.

I'll be happy when death and ressurrection of main characters are story effects.

[RandomCasualty]

1164870237[/unixtime]]
The guy who just failed his save to Finger of Death is unconcious and dying, but he should not die for at least a minute, and a simple Cure Light Woulds spell should not put him back into action.

Yeah that's the key, bringing back someone from near death shouldn't happen either. Otherwise people run arounding doing CdGs to everyone who falls to ensure the cleric doesn't heal them. You want to not give people incentives to finish off fallen people.

And of course make it so fallen people don't die instantly of course.

[Crissa]

1164874547[/unixtime]]Yeah that's the key, bringing back someone from near death shouldn't happen either. Otherwise people run arounding doing CdGs to everyone who falls to ensure the cleric doesn't heal them.

Isn't that what already happens?

You trip the guy, pin, Coup de Gras, and move on. Maybe you can raise them later, and maybe the cleric can tend their wound if you don't stand around and make sure they really do kick the bucket as their blood spills onto the floor...

But I think we still need ways to bring people back from the brink; but they should be about as rare as the current set of ablities (non abilities) like Raise and Res that are in the game.

-Crissa

[Neeek]

I've never quite gotten the whole reasoning behind that -10 hit points is dead whether your normal hit points are 4 or 400. You'd think a person who can take 400 points of damage wouldn't just immediately die after a minute amount of additional damage.

[MrWaeseL]

Why not? People with 400 hit points don't die as easily because they have 400 hit points.

[dbb]

The guy who just failed his save to Finger of Death is unconcious and dying, but he should not die for at least a minute, and a simple Cure Light Woulds spell should not put him back into action.

Make "[Dying]" a status condition, like "Petrified". Then you won't get people casting Cure Light on the dying, so getting knocked to -10 actually means something.

Of course, this requires some discipline on the part of the game designers, who need to not start adding "Remove [Dying] Condition As A Standard Action" spells all over town. That spell ought to be about as expensive as True Rez is in current edition, if it exists at all.

--d.

[Username17]

The driving forces behind the raise dead debate are that if players can't continue playing the same character, there really isn't a cooperative storytelling game. And if the player's actons don't have real consequences, the players behave as if their actions don't have consequences.

The D&D story involves fighting with swords. A lot. That means that the real consequences entailed involve getting run through. Unfortunately, that demand is squarely at odds with the need for contiguous characters.

Even worse, the D&D game mechanics are extraordinarily lethal - even when you aren't doing anything wrong. Bad rolls or just being jumped by more than one opponent at a time can send a character from fine to dead between the ticks of the initiative clock. Monsters like closet trolls and medusae have variance on their attacks so extreme that there is no guaranty that you will be "in danger" before you're dead.

So true res is basically required. Combat at 20th level is measured in how many opponents die each turn on each side. That's... not conducive to long term play unless you can be raised from the dead - often several times a day.

Truly, skilled play and randomly fvcking around with stupid crap is not the difference between living and dying - it's the difference between dying less often and dying more often. Bad play and bad luck won't kill your character - your character is going to die anyyway. Bad luck and poor play will make your character get killed more.

That's not something that a lot of people want to hear when telling the story of their favorite knight or wizard - but the fact is that D&D characters have the survivability of a Nintendo character. You seriously need Phoenix Down in this game.

And the fact is that the other side is working with the same rules. The bad guys have Phoenix Down too. You loot the enemy fortress because that way they'll have a harder time s craping together the funds to raise their heroes from the dead.

Sure, you could have a game where death wasn't a removable status effect - but you'd have to restructure all of D&D combat. D&D combat was originally written with the idea that players would have lots of Fighting Men under their control and losing a few guys wasn't a big deal. The concept that you should have just one character and give them a last name was introduced at the same time as the idea that you should get extra lives.

-Username17

[TarlSS]

That's the hammer on the head there. No one actually -likes- the fact that ressurection magic is so readily available until they're the ones being ressurected. The system really needs to be revamped so that huge burst damage effects (PSIONICS, POUNCE) and death effects get nerfed. Face it, even in other incarnations of D20, there isn't the Sheer -up in your face die- effect of many monsters and classes. Damage is typically confined to regular numbers, perhaps high ones, 3d8/4d8, but they're regular numbers.

Only in D&D do you really get the ridiculous magical/supernatural effect chains. Of course, this is an effect of splatbook mania and burst wadding.

I think the direction that TOB, TOM and Complete Mage have the right idea. The Warlock. Replace huge burst damage with regular sustainable damage over long periods of time (Reserve Feats)

Not only does it give your character a 'schtick', which is good for roleplaying, lowering the amount of general violence inflicted on someone per round is a good way to increase the longevity of a player.

Honestly, if all magic was kept at level 4-6, like it is in D20 Modern, the game would be alot less deadly. That's why levels 7-12 are so popular. That's when magic comes into it's own, but isn't immediately devastating.

[PhoneLobster]

If spare lives are required for keeping the game alive then maybe the requirement for having spare lives should be that you are important to keep the game alive.

Conservation of imaginary medical resources, that's all I'm sayin'.

[Username17]

I think the direction that TOB, TOM and Complete Mage have the right idea. The Warlock. Replace huge burst damage with regular sustainable damage over long periods of time

Here's a true and relevent story:

Last night I was playing in a 7 person, 7th level party with a lot of people who didn't much know what they were doing. There was a big undead invasion in a city and people running around like they were on fire.

Anyway, the team is composed of various ass random stuff: a Bard/Assassin, a Ranger/Fighter/Scout, a Sorcerer, a Rogue who never remembers what his abilities do, that sort of thing. In this party, however, are two characters that I designed: a Cleric (my character), and a Wizard (being played by an excitable new recruit).

So there's a fight going down in a crowded city street. The bad guys have armies of zombies, 2 vampires for some reason, an evil Cleric, and a fvcking 12th level Wizard shows up buffed up to hell and gone to taunt and destroy us.

And we don't lose anybody. We don't even take any damage. And we do this because we pull out some crazy tactics (and I'm not talking about the fact that the druid has figured out that he can operate a call lightning and a flaming sphere at the same time for five whole dice of damage against a single target each round.

No. We don't take any damage because the first rank of zombies gets fireballed by the sorceress, and the next rank of zombies get cut off with an evard's black tentacles. Then the vampires get obliterated with a Greater Turning attempt and the Cleric gets silenced and runs away.

The fight against the Wizard is interesting, he's running blur, and energy resistance, and stone skin, and mirror image, and repulsion, and shield, and probably some more stuff. Annd a lot of that got cleared off with - I'm not kidding - fairie fire. But the really important thing is before he even got a chance to cast a spell in the combat he got hit with a sinking cloud (DC 19) and couldn't do jack shit for about 4 rounds.

Before that was up, I got a chance to cast wrack on his ass and dropped him good and proper. But in all that time, the miss chances, the DR, the ER, the arbitrary immunities, and all that crap meant that he was still up.

The point of this story is that in a very real way, absolutely everything in the entire battle was accomplished by two characters - and everything they accomplished was accomplished with arbitrary effects. Not damage. Silence, black tentacles, destroy undead, stinking cloud, and wrack - the fact that any damage was ever inflicted by any player character over the entire course of the confrontation was essentially wasted die rolls.

In short, the ability to inflict damage at a measured pace is worth absolutely nothing. The way things currently stand, I didn't even write a weapon down on the wizard's character sheet. The DM was like "You could totally have like an acidic dagger or something" and I said "Fvck that noise, he's a wizard, he's got shit to do."

-Username17

[User3]

Well, that's all fine and dandy for D&D, but what about Shadowrun? How come there isn't a huge driving force to implement raise dead effects even though, in some ways, Shadowrun combat can be more lethal than D&D?

[dbb]

D&D is a game about getting into fights. A D&D game where you never get to flourish a magic sword heroically, cast a Fireball, smite the undead with the holy might of Pelor, or stab someone in the back isn't much of a D&D game. If engaging in heroic melee is something you're expected to do regularly, the system being uncomfortably lethal is a bug.

Conversely, Shadowrun is a game about avoiding fights. Getting into a gunfight in a Shadowrun game is a good sign that you've probably horribly blown whatever mission you were supposed to be completing. And in this case, having a relatively lethal combat system is sort of a feature.

For that matter, is Shadowrun really even as lethal as D&D? It's been five or six years since I actually played in a Shadowrun game and I was never very expert at it, but memory records a lot less in the way of "blow one roll on a high-variance RNG and you die" effects than D&D offers from first level up. And that's not even counting the strong setting-based incentives to avoid actually killing people, even when you do get into a fight with them.

--d.

[Username17]

For that matter, is Shadowrun really even as lethal as D&D?

Heck no! Damage in Shadowrun, in every edition, is structed to the point where "dying" is astundingly easier to come up with than "dead".

Heck, in 4th edition the rules for healing are so generous that a single gunshot wound can often be healed as a cut scene during a non-combat encounter. The default rules are essentially "if you have a cut-scene where they work on you, you're fine the next time the action starts".

I think that goes a little bit too far into the realm of cinematic healing, but even with the optional rules I'm trying to get through editting - replacing eyes and livers is a matter of days not months.

Shadowrun is a deadly setting, but it's not a deadly system. It's very easy to drop, but people have to go out of their way to kill you permanently - and in-setting people rarely do that.

-Username17

[shau]

For that matter, is Shadowrun really even as lethal as D&D? It's been five or six years since I actually played in a Shadowrun game and I was never very expert at it, but memory records a lot less in the way of "blow one roll on a high-variance RNG and you die" effects than D&D offers from first level up. And that's not even counting the strong setting-based incentives to avoid actually killing people, even when you do get into a fight with them.

I seem to remember third edition as having a very small line between a foe that could barely even scratch you and one who would almost cetainly have you dead in an initiative pass or two. I think shadowrun is one of those RPGs that gets played differently depending on where you are. My buddy always described his shadowrun games as beginning with busting down the door and killing everything that moves. If my group told my DM that we were going in the front way guns blazing she would just tell us that we all died and it was time to roll up new characters.

[TarlSS]

The point of this story is that in a very real way, absolutely everything in the entire battle was accomplished by two characters - and everything they accomplished was accomplished with arbitrary effects. Not damage. Silence, black tentacles, destroy undead, stinking cloud, and wrack - the fact that any damage was ever inflicted by any player character over the entire course of the confrontation was essentially wasted die rolls.

In short, the ability to inflict damage at a measured pace is worth absolutely nothing. The way things currently stand, I didn't even write a weapon down on the wizard's character sheet. The DM was like "You could totally have like an acidic dagger or something" and I said "Fvck that noise, he's a wizard, he's got shit to do."

But here's the crux of the situation:
Did he -DIE-? Did the above spells neccissitate a Raise Dead ro recover from? Did they occur in a suitable amount of time that the targets could run away?
Yes. You WON big, but this thread isn't about winning or losing or shit like that. It's about -dying- and the above situation, if it were reversed, your PCs wouldn't need ressurection to recover. They'd have to run like pussies, yes, but they wouldn't be dead with no chance of running.

Status effects have that very much Shadowrun effect of whooping your butt, but not having you -dead-. DAMAGE and DEATH effects kill you, which neccessitate raise dead.

Like any other good writer/GM, you just have to come up with a reason why the enemy doesn't just CDG your sorry butt. Hell, even Tom Clancy does it, so there's no shame in it.

So yeah, the crux is, you need to get rid of shit that just kills players outright on a flub. It's alright if -losing- is common; someone always has to lose in a fight, it's -dying- that's the big kick in the nuts.

As you said, most systems without ressurection-pops have very easy ways to be taken out of a fight, or be placed at -dying-, but make it very difficult to kill someone without outright CDGing them.

[Essence]

In real life, the only reason people don't die more often is that we have a moral code that tells you not to kill your fellow humans. That's why dehumanization is the first step to every lethal conflict, across history, world-wide.

D&D starts on the premise that the people that aren't "your people" aren't people at all, so the dehumanization is implict in the system. There's no moral reason not to murder the shit out of everything that doesn't live in your village.

As long as that moral impertiave (which is fully operational in most modern-era games like Shadowrun) is defunct, the everybody-dies paradigm will exist. The only question is whether to deal with it by having Ressurection-style effects happen constantly or to deal with it by making sure your bad guys aren't really powerful enough to consistently threaten the life of your character.

[Draco_Argentum]

There is the option of making killing someone much harder than reality. As long as stuff goes down and stays that way for the rest of the fight death and near death are the same. Just as long as going from near death to actual death is rare and going from near death to fightin fit can't happen in combat resurrection can be really rare.