Resurrection

[pwykersotz]

So, they combined spells with similar effects into one spell that's usable at multiple levels. Has there been any speculation on why Revivify, Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection need to be separate spells for the Cleric?

[Pex]

Possibly as a balance factor. Since the cleric would need to choose to prepare Resurrection, he can't choose some other 7th level spell while having chosen Raise Dead as a "common" 5th level spell to cast in his 7th level slot should he need to. I guess it's to emphasize how special and an ordeal it is to come back from the dead.

[da_chicken]

So, they combined spells with similar effects into one spell that's usable at multiple levels. Has there been any speculation on why Revivify, Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection need to be separate spells for the Cleric?

I think it's for a simple reason. To make the lexicon more discrete. You just say, "you need raise dead," or "he's been turned undead, you need true resurrection". All that is much easier than having to say "raise dead cast as a 4th/5th/6th/7th/8th/9th level spell or higher" every time you want to describe what's going on.

It would make for more confusing spell descriptions if it were unified, too. Raise dead would say "closes wounds but does not cure poisons or diseases" and then later in the *same spell description* it would also say "when cast as a 7th level spell, the target is cured of all poisons and diseases". It's legalese level rules, where the descriptions contradict themselves. The spells do the same thing, but they're different enough that having different spell descriptions actually makes the effects easier to determine. Even 3e, which had numerous "XXXX", "XXXX, greater", "XXXX, lesser" and "XXXX, mass" type spells used different descriptions for raise dead and resurrection. Indeed, those greater/lesser/mass spells often had different description blocks. It just used them to make the differences that much more clear to the player.

Fireball, on the other hand, is very easy to describe. You just add damage dice, and can refer to a "5th level fireball" or "8 die fireball". Even if you just say "fireball", you're not expecting the spell to suddenly not deal damage to unattended objects or deal ice damage.

[Millennium]

It would make for more confusing spell descriptions if it were unified, too.
This. Although one typically uses the spells you named for the same general purpose -bringing someone back from the dead- their actual effects are quite different: there are issues with what condition the body can be in, whether a body is even needed, whether or not there's a penalty for coming back from the dead, exactly what and how much gets healed in addition to coming back from the dead, and so forth.

In other words, this is not a matter of simple scaling like it would be for fireball or the cure wounds family, nor is it just a means of adding only one or two additional effects like teleport. There comes a point when the effects of two similar-sounding spells are so different that it no longer makes sense to roll them into one, and the raise dead family -which, tellingly, has only one spell with either of the words "raise" and dead" in its name- is past that point.

[Knaight]

This might just be legacy design. Revivify is a different niche - specifically a short term, in or immediately after combat spell - but the other three are all pretty iconic, and might be kept separate for that reason.

[Person_Man]

No way to know until the Basic set comes out. But my guess is that the distinction is being kept for legacy reasons.

Although I beleive that da_chicken is correct, I honestly can't think of a real reason you need four different "I bring another player back from the dead" spells.

Yes, there might be distinctions about the conditions required to bring back your ally and/or what happens to him once he is brought back (does you lose a point of Constitution permanently, is he cured from Poison or other conditions he was suffering from prior to being raised, etc) But those distinctions are largely artificial game constructions.

There's no real reason to have one spell that brings a player back from the dead under X conditions but a higher level spell that brings back a player from the dead under Y conditions. If you as a game designer have decided that it's ok to bring back players from the dead without a penalty, just allow it at whatever level you think it's appropriate to allow. Punishing players by putting preconditions on it and confusing players by having 4 different versions of the spell doesn't accomplish anything but frustrating your players.

[Millennium]

No way to know until the Basic set comes out. But my guess is that the distinction is being kept for legacy reasons.
Wizards has had two whole editions to demonstrate that they care very little for sacred cows. The number of traditions and legacies disregarded in 4e alone is ample proof, but we can also look to the fact that although Wizards has returned to a vague semblance of some earlier editions' tropes in certain particular aspects, they have not gone back completely in any event: 5e superficially bears a stronger resemblance to 3e than 4e, but going any deeper than the surface shows significant differences from both.

5e's spell list contains many spells that are clearly based on D&D's most iconic spell families (cure wounds being a prominent example), but many if not most of these have been consolidated into a single, scalable spell apiece. In light of this, it's clear that Wizards does not care very much about "legacy" as a reason to keep a given spell or line of spells as-is. They've proven that already, many times over.

There's no real reason to have one spell that brings a player back from the dead under X conditions but a higher level spell that brings back a player from the dead under Y conditions.
Actually, the fact that they work under different conditions is one of the biggest reasons to split them into two. The basic conditions under which a spell works should not change as the spell scales. If there needs to be a change (and the raise dead family presents a very strong case where there needs to be a change), then there needs to be another spell.

[pwykersotz]

Actually, the fact that they work under different conditions is one of the biggest reasons to split them into two. The basic conditions under which a spell works should not change as the spell scales. If there needs to be a change (and the raise dead family presents a very strong case where there needs to be a change), then there needs to be another spell.

Maybe that's what they were thinking, after all Lesser Restoration and Greater Restoration were split as well. I'd hoped they'd measure it by a different standard though. Instead of the basic conditions under which a spell works not changing, I think the basic effect a spell has not changing is more important. I like spells to have discrete effects that don't feel like I'm retreading water. I'm happy that Teleport and Greater Teleport seem to have become one spell, for example.

[Millennium]

Maybe that's what they were thinking, after all Lesser Restoration and Greater Restoration were split as well. I'd hoped they'd measure it by a different standard though. Instead of the basic conditions under which a spell works not changing, I think the basic effect a spell has not changing is more important. I like spells to have discrete effects that don't feel like I'm retreading water. I'm happy that Teleport and Greater Teleport seem to have become one spell, for example.
Not changing the basic effect is also important, but I wouldn't call it less important than the basic prerequisites. I'd put them at equal importance with each other, and with one other thing: what changes and does not change while the spell is being cast.

If we were to draw a comparison to functions in software engineering, these three things make up what's called a function's contract: the preconditions (what needs to be true before the function can work), the postconditions (things that will be true when the function is finished), and the invariants (things that the function is guaranteed not to change).

When a spell scales, its contract generally shouldn't change. This doesn't have to mean that it does exactly the same thing at every level: if that were the case, then the concept of scaling wouldn't make any sense. There actually are some "safe" ways to change a contract, and the Raise Dead family does change its contract in some of these safe ways, but it also does some unsafe things.

Why are some changes "safe" or "unsafe"? It all has to do with the ways they interact with one another, and with the ways that one effect can be based on another. Broken effect combinations come about because things interact in ways that the game designer didn't foresee, and while there are ways to mitigate that, they usually involve carving out exceptions and nuances into the spell description, which is itself an error-prone process. If you restrict the ways that a spell scales to safe changes, you can be confident that interactions remain predictable and bug-free: a 9th-level fireball, for example, is not going to do strange things that a 3rd-level fireball would not. You could call this a matter of game robustness: it becomes easier to design effects that interact with each other in predictable ways, and it becomes easier to spot "red flags" for potentially broken interactions.

The first safe way to change a contract is to make its preconditions less specific. The Raise Dead family almost manages to hold to this principle throughout: anything that you could cast Raise Dead on, you could also cast Resurrection or True Resurrection on. Note that the reverse is not true -there are corpses that are eligible for True Resurrection but not for Raise Dead- but this is not a problem, because True Resurrection is higher up in the family. The problem spell here is Revivify, which narrows the precondition too much in relation to its casting time: a corpse that could be raised with Revivify cannot be raised by the other spells in the family, because their casting times are simply too high. By the time that these other spells go off, the corpse will likely be eligible for them anyway, but this is largely a coincidence, because they will no longer be eligible for Revivify by then.

So we need to split off Revivify, but that's only one spell in the family (and, perhaps not coincidentally, the newest of the bunch). What if we had Reincarnate (which no one argues should be part of this family anyway, but I'm listing it for completeness), Revivify, and a scaling Raise Dead?

The second safe way to change a contract is to make its postconditions more specific: you can add effects, but you should not take them away. This is where True Resurrection -the second-newest addition to the family, after Revivify- becomes problematic, because it removes the death penalty. It would be silly to claim that this makes it a bad spell; I'm only claiming that from a game-design standpoint, it needs to be a distinct spell.

So now we've got four spells: Reincarnate, Revivify, a scaling Raise Dead, and True Resurrection. But what about Resurrection? Could it not still be combined with Raise Dead?

And they almost could. Raise Dead and Resurrection actually do work in ways that could safely scale. The preconditions have only become less specific: anything that you could cast Raise Dead on, you could also cast Resurrection on (though again, the reverse is not true). The postconditions have only become more specific: Resurrection adds greater healing to Raise Dead, but does not remove any effects from it. The invariants haven't changed: Resurrection doesn't make any fundamental changes to the creature that Raise Dead would not (it heals the target by a greater amount, but both spells heal the target, so the fundamental effect hasn't changed).

The problem with Raise Dead scaling into Resurrection has nothing to do with safety. Instead, it's a matter of numbers: Raise Dead heals you to a bare minimum, while Resurrection heals you to full. There's nothing in between. There's really only one level of scaling that makes any sense, and while that might be OK when going from an 8th-level spell to a 9th-level one (where there's only one slot's worth of room for scaling anyway), we want to make Raise Dead available earlier than that, and we want to leave some room for True Resurrection to use a stronger slot anyway. To make it scale in this situation would be to introduce a spell that can't be meaningfully scaled from its minimum level all the way up through 9th level, and that means it's not a good candidate for scaling in the first place.

And at that point, there's nothing left to scale. We've got a need to keep each spell right where it is, and to make them distinct from one another.