My issues with death and reivive spells in D&D, as a DM

[StreamOfTheSky]

(My players, stay out)




I've been trying to put off and avoid this issue for as long as I could, but I will need to address it eventually. As a player, it doesn't actually bother me that much. Games where I can't revive I just make a new character and try some new concept. It's as a DM where the whole thing's become a massive headache. I've seen many threads on the topic, but none really represent my problems with it, which are sort of a paradox. I'll try to state it as simply as possible:

I don't want the PCs to be irrevocably killed, it decimates the plot I've tried to build up around their characters, while also never wanting them to know I'm trying not to kill them (to me, the golden pinnacle is frequently bringing them to the brink of it and leaving them fearful of it happening, without ever actually crossing the threshold). At the same time.... I don't want NPCs who die to come back in general, but I don't want to shut the door completely on it. At least, not when it comes to my options as DM.

One instance this became a huge issue was recently, where the entire plot hinged on the king's family all being poisoned to death, and it leading him to become paranoid and angry, starting a witch hunt of sorts to find and punish the perpetrators and anyone who conspired with them. The party asked, "why not just raise them?" And I had to bs something about the assassin using some non-dispellable magic to prevent that. I don't think such a thing actually exists. (They were level 7 at the time, I really hadn't thought about the revive issue at all by that point, nor did the campaign that had the plot) Later on, they tried to (from a far distance away) use reincarnate on a prisoner who they thought had died whom they had cut a finger off of before fleeing. Thankfully, his situation was..complicated...and he wasn't technically dead when they attempted it, so I didn't have to deal with it there, either.

I guess...I just don't like the potential of raising NPCs for its plot-breaking potential. When death isn't final, it makes things way harder on me, as DM. Speak with Dead can be dealt with by destroying the body or just giving really cryptic unhelpful answers to avoid giving away secrets way too early. But the later raise spells don't even need a body and some targets would not reasonably turn down coming back.

But! I don't want to get rid of revival completely and handcuff myself to never having a villain come back if killed. Even if I never utilize it, I hate having the option taken away.

At the same time, back to the PC's...I really don't want them to permanently lose their characters. I do worry about death feeling trivial, but on their front it's really easy to avert the issue entirely:

1. I don't use instant death effects (more specifically, I have a Gentleman's Agreement w/ the party, and they don't use them, either). Several I've scaled down to save-or-suck or save-or-lose. In some cases, I houseruled them to have a "death countdown" whereby they can avoid dying if they do X before the countdown is up. For example...I used the PF rules for Basilisk blood curing the petrification, and rather than it being instant, I had it gradually slow down and gimp those that failed their saves over 3 rounds before they fully petrified. I buffed the monster to make up for the delayed effect. Made it feel really tense, but as long as one person survived before the countdown was up, they could all live.

2. Most of the party (some joined later, unfortunately) got a a boon from slaying a foe that 1/day leaves them at -9 hp and stable when hp damage would have killed them. That was actually in the campaign already, but I really like it.

3. Also plot-related, one PC has the ability to see the future, and I homebrewed a bunch of immediate action abilities he can use to save an ally from attacks/spells/effects. They range from rerolls to giving the target an immediate 5 ft step or partial withdraw action to get out of the way, to granting an ally an immediate partial charge / melee attack (including trip, disarm, grapple, of course) or bull rush against the agressor to try and prevent the calamity from happening. It's single target only and he only has one immediate action per turn, and unless it saves someone from death it consumes a readied Diamond Mind maneuver, so it has some limits. But it's saved people lots of time.

4. I HEAVILY encourage the use of Revivify and Last Breath by the party, and even let the Druid have Revivify on her list at the same level as a cleric. To me, those spells aren't really "revive" spells. The soul hasn't fully left the body by then, so it's more of a last-second save. I also made sure the party grew to know and love the Close Wounds spell.

What can I do? I can't just ban the raise spells. Power Components that have to be quested for don't sort or discriminate who can be raised at all. Implementing some fiat "only some have the strength of will to return from the dead" ruling probably won't go over well with the players (although they would all obviously have said strength of will, it'd be to limit what NPCs can be raised).
I just...seldom see NPC-related topics in regards to revive spells. And how it can wreck a plot. Or if there is one, the solution is to remove the spells entirely, which then means PCs may perma-die, also affecting the plot.

[Morcleon]

Most people who die won't have the resources to afford resurrection (use this for NPCs without lots of resources). If they're kings and nobles and such would would have this, anyone who wants to kill them and have them stay dead would use a Thinaun weapon, which traps the soul of anyone slain with the weapon. If they wanted to permanently destroy them, they could then sell the weapon and soul to a caster who would use the soul as a material component of a spell, destroying it.

[Story]

The party asked, "why not just raise them?" And I had to bs something about the assassin using some non-dispellable magic to prevent that. I don't think such a thing actually exists. (They were level 7 at the time, I really hadn't thought about the revive issue at all by that point, nor did the campaign that had the plot)

It's very easy to kill people in a way that prevents anything short of True Resurrection. So that's not so much of an issue.

[Jay R]

First of all, yes, you can just ban the raise spells. And putting some sort of ban or control on them is the only solution in a game in which several; clerics are high enough to cast the spells.

I had a game once in which there were only two clerics in the world who could bring anybody back from the dead, and they were deadly rivals. Any Raise Dead required you to commit to serving one of them for a long time.

I also had the idea of having a Prevent Raise spell that could be cast at the time of death. I've never play-tested this, but I assume that the most feared entity in the world (by high-level people) would be the cult of cleric-assassins who could cast this.

[Blackhawk748]

Well stopping raise dead is fairly easy, just severely damage the body, a poison that eats through the victims internal organs would qualify i think. Stopping the others gets weird.

From a straight fluff perspective why would a cleric bring people back? Death is part of life, people need to accept that. Now reviving a powerful hero so he can complete his quest makes sense, as the world needs saving. Bringing back the kings family after they have been assassinated makes less sense.

[jiriku]

As I read the OP, I was imagining a movie producer complaining about how audiences were poking holes in the plots of his movies set in modern-day America, but instead of "raised from the dead" I mentally substituted "call him on his cell phone". There were all kinds of excellent suspenseful movies made in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's where the plot hinged on something bad happening because Character X couldn't be reached in time to provide important information. If those movies were set in modern times, audiences would rightfully ask "why not just call him on his cell phone?" No self-respecting movie producer can make that kind of plot in a modern movie anymore without having to consider and answer the question "well why didn't they just send him a text message?"

I bring this up because that's the kind of problem you have. There's a reliable, readily available convenience in your game world -- resurrection magic. It's not as cheap or ubiquitous as cell phones, but it's essentially a given for the rich and powerful of the world. Stories that don't acknowledge this in-game consideration have plot holes. I worry that any attempt to "fix" resurrection magic in advance so that it's structurally unavailable when inconvenient is likely to seem contrived and artificial. The game world needs a sense of internal consistency.

A stronger approach would be to construct plots without holes. Any time the plot demands that someone die and stay dead, ask yourself why some cleric doesn't just call the dead guy up on his cell phone and ask him to come back. D&D provides a variety of in-world answers to that question:

The cost of resurrection
The need for a body, possibly in a good state of repair
The limit to how long a person can have been dead
The limited availability of allied high-level clerics
Monsters, spell, and items that trap or destroy the soul of the victim
Effects that "kill" the target without rendering them truly dead (e.g. binding, imprisonment, flesh to stone)
The ability of a dead soul to decline a return to life
Conversion of the dead being into an undead creature
Misdirection tactics (e.g. doppelgangers) that conceal the individual's death (you wouldn't raise someone you think is alive)

If, after much consideration, you can't find a plot-related reason for the individual to stay dead, then perhaps death isn't appropriate. Maybe they could be kidnapped, dominated, charmed, brainwashed, tricked or misled, debilitated by a powerful curse, or suffer some other affliction that can't be conveniently solved by a trip to the local temple and a sizeable cash donation. And if none of those options would work, then perhaps it's time to invent some kind of DM plot event that answers the question (e.g. person was slain with a unique effect, resurrections are temporarily on hold due to a war in the outer planes, or some other appropriate plot gizmo).

[AmberVael]

Well stopping raise dead is fairly easy, just severely damage the body, a poison that eats through the victims internal organs would qualify i think. Stopping the others gets weird.

Stopping resurrection isn't too hard either. Putting aside shenanigans like dumping a body in acid or lava, you could also just take it with you. Resurrection still has the 'dead creature touched' target, so while the body might exist for Resurrection to take effect on, so long as they don't have the body part they need, they can't use it. Which only leaves the far rarer and more expensive True Resurrection as an option, for the low cost of having a potato sack.

[Blackhawk748]

Stopping resurrection isn't too hard either. Putting aside shenanigans like dumping a body in acid or lava, you could also just take it with you. Resurrection still has the 'dead creature touched' target, so while the body might exist for Resurrection to take effect on, so long as they don't have the body part they need, they can't use it. Which only leaves the far rarer and more expensive True Resurrection as an option, for the low cost of having a potato sack.

Good point, and im sure even Kings would blanch at how much a True Res costs (its freakin nuts if i recall) and on top of that a cleric of that level probably wouldnt do it anyway as its "just" the royal family, and thats like 4 castings, so that insanely pricy

[Hrugner]

Have people start chasing them around with crates full of deceased loved ones begging for resurrections. That would at the very least prevent them from raising people that are known to be dead. Alternatively, treat the ability to raise the dead as a closely kept secret. When a resurrection is known to have occurred, some religious group that protects this secret assassinates the resurrected person and raises them as a zombie causing fear of revival magics. The players won't suffer from this fear, and powerful religious folk would know better, but for the general public resurrection would be the same as necromancy.

[lord_khaine]

I think the important step people keep forgetting in the discussions about ressurection on D&D,
Are the clause about the soul needing to be willing to return.

Adventuring PC's are generally assumed to be so deeply driven individuals that they will come back most of the times when offered a chance.

But normal more mentally well adjusted people like NPC's, would have ended up on the plane most fitting for their aligment.
And they should not be willing to return to all the trouble that follows with being alive.

[atemu1234]

I ban the spells and use difficult Incantations instead.

[Telonius]

Fairly recently I've encountered a fictional world where they actually dealt with this issue. For purposes of royal succession, your "first" life is the one that counts, as far as inheritance is concerned. If an assassinated king is brought back, then good for him, but he's no longer nobility. (I wish I could remember where I heard this, but I can't for the life of me remember the source, and Google is not being helpful). Anyway, it was supposed to have helped smooth out some difficulties when somebody resurrected the current king's ancestor.

Discworld had something similar: if it took an Igor to put you back together, you'd been killed and it was considered a homicide.

The wording of the Raise Dead spells also gives the DM an out in this sort of circumstance: the soul has to be willing to return. If, for whatever reason, they aren't, then they don't come back. If the person is enjoying the afterlife, or is worried that the living needs to move on and heal? Probably wouldn't want to come back. Ditto if they had a wretched life, or want to somehow get back at the person who wants them back. There's also the issue of 1st-level NPCs. Unless you're doing a True Resurrection (and not every kingdom is going to have a Cleric capable of it or willing to do it) there's an unavoidable Constitution loss that can't be repaired by any means. The King (or the soul in question) might not be willing to go through that.

[P.F.]

Maybe they could be kidnapped, dominated, charmed, brainwashed, tricked or misled, debilitated by a powerful curse, or suffer some other affliction that can't be conveniently solved by a trip to the local temple and a sizeable cash donation.

I think this gets at the heart of the issue, which extends beyond death/revive and the availability of cell phones. Insofar as true resurrection is available at the local temple, it's reasonable to assume that all of these afflictions, up to and including death, can be solved by liberal application of gold and divine magic.

The problem is that magic is meant to be relatively rare, but has been made common as sawdust in a sawmill. Divine magic is even moreso because any cleric can prepare any spell form any book of any level he can cast with no more preparation than a 24 hours notice (or less).

[Venger]

I don't want the PCs to be irrevocably killed, it decimates the plot I've tried to build up around their characters, while also never wanting them to know I'm trying not to kill them (to me, the golden pinnacle is frequently bringing them to the brink of it and leaving them fearful of it happening, without ever actually crossing the threshold). At the same time.... I don't want NPCs who die to come back in general, but I don't want to shut the door completely on it. At least, not when it comes to my options as DM.
makes sense, otherwise it turns into a meat grinder, and that's no fun.

if you have a gentleman's agreement with SoD spells, then that means you're comfortable talking to your players. if this bothers you why don't you just say something like

"for story reasons, can we say that it's generally not possible to rez npcs unless I say so? it's giving me some difficulty when you do speak with dead and are privy to info I hadn't planned on, or similar. having this rule will allow me to not say things like 'the assassin used magic poison that prevented rezing' and such."

as a player who uses speak with dead/reincarnate on plot-relevant npcs sometimes, I can say we don't do it to willfully disrupt your plot, but because it makes sense to move the story forward. if we knew it was bothering the DM, we'd find other stuff to do.


One instance this became a huge issue was recently, where the entire plot hinged on the king's family all being poisoned to death, and it leading him to become paranoid and angry, starting a witch hunt of sorts to find and punish the perpetrators and anyone who conspired with them. The party asked, "why not just raise them?" And I had to bs something about the assassin using some non-dispellable magic to prevent that. I don't think such a thing actually exists. (They were level 7 at the time, I really hadn't thought about the revive issue at all by that point, nor did the campaign that had the plot) Later on, they tried to (from a far distance away) use reincarnate on a prisoner who they thought had died whom they had cut a finger off of before fleeing. Thankfully, his situation was..complicated...and he wasn't technically dead when they attempted it, so I didn't have to deal with it there, either.
yeah, there is no such thing.

a gentleman's agreement would be a lot less deleterious to suspension of disbelief than "the finger you cut off that dead guy doesn't work because of Reasons." that'd pull me out of the game a lot more than just "please don't do it, I don't know how to handle the plot if you do, I'd appreciate if you sought other avenues."


I guess...I just don't like the potential of raising NPCs for its plot-breaking potential. When death isn't final, it makes things way harder on me, as DM. Speak with Dead can be dealt with by destroying the body or just giving really cryptic unhelpful answers to avoid giving away secrets way too early. But the later raise spells don't even need a body and some targets would not reasonably turn down coming back.

But! I don't want to get rid of revival completely and handcuff myself to never having a villain come back if killed. Even if I never utilize it, I hate having the option taken away.
then your best bet is just asking your players nicely not to do it.


At the same time, back to the PC's...I really don't want them to permanently lose their characters. I do worry about death feeling trivial, but on their front it's really easy to avert the issue entirely:

anti-rez people always say that rez cheapens death. the opposite is true. in a game where rez is allowed, I'm going to want to rez character A when he is killed because I've formed an attachment with him. in a game with no rez, I'm not going to care at all because there's no way for me to bring my guy back, so I'll just go straight to character B when the party picks him up at the tavern. the meat grinder effect you said you sought to avoid.



What can I do? I can't just ban the raise spells. Power Components that have to be quested for don't sort or discriminate who can be raised at all. Implementing some fiat "only some have the strength of will to return from the dead" ruling probably won't go over well with the players (although they would all obviously have said strength of will, it'd be to limit what NPCs can be raised).
I just...seldom see NPC-related topics in regards to revive spells. And how it can wreck a plot. Or if there is one, the solution is to remove the spells entirely, which then means PCs may perma-die, also affecting the plot.

just do it on a case-by-case basis as mentioned above. if your general rule is they can't, just mention when they can, and all will be well. it's much better than trying to provide an in-universe blockade.

if a DM says out of character "please do not do thing/you are not allowed to do thing" then I'll understand he's asking for story/balance reasons and not do it.

if a DM throws up an in-character blockade to something, I'm going to think it's a puzzle and work around it, because I don't know he's trying to address an in-game issue.

e.g.

dm"venger, this book is written in a custom language that no one in the setting knows. the plot moves forward by you looking for someone who can decipher it on the other side of the jungle. no spells that decipher language will work on it.

me"okay. what route should we take, friends?"

vs

dm"comprehend languages does not work on the book"
venger"ok. augury: if I found someone who could speak odopi, could they read the book?"
dm(sigh) "woe."

since this isn't a rules issue, but a story issue, address it accordingly and talk to your players. I'm sure they'd be willing to accomodate you. after all, the same way you don't want to kill their characters, they want to win your plot, but they don't want to wreck your narrative.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by StreamOfTheSky
What can I do? I can't just ban the raise spells.


Originally Posted by Jay R
First of all, yes, you can just ban the raise spells.

I would second the notion that as DM, you can indeed ban the raise spells--at least in broad theory.

Whether or not that would be feasible in your current game is another issue, depending on whether there are strong player expectations involved. Since you managed to give them a facile explanation in one situation, you can certainly expand on that to let them gradually infer that resurrection isn't as simple as they might think.

And as for NPCs, all the other obstacles already mentioned could easily apply--or not, depending on your needs for the story. I have the impression you might be reaching too far for a one-size-fits-all metatheory of NPC resurrection, when you could probably allow for a spectrum of difficulty as required.




Originally Posted by jiriku
There's a reliable, readily available convenience in your game world -- resurrection magic. It's not as cheap or ubiquitous as cell phones, but it's essentially a given for the rich and powerful of the world.

There are two huge assumptions here: that resurrection is readily available, and that it's a given for anyone wealthy enough, no matter any other factors in the rest of the world.

In worlds for which this is the case, you would expect the rich and powerful to establish effectively immortal dynasties, which would involve individuals repeatedly resurrecting for hundreds or thousands of years.

You would also expect them to guard the secret of resurrection very, very jealously, to the point where anyone even asking about it would be hunted down and disposed of. Likely they would establish themselves as immortal god-rulers, layering the truth of their resurrections behind a pseudodivine facade.

Resurrection explicitly fails on bodies which are naturally senescent--so naturally there would be a regular cycle of ritual execution and resurrection, witnessed only by the leaders of their personal cults. Controlling the secret is as simple as offering resurrection to the few who know of it, and making spectacular examples of those who might reveal it.

So resurrection which is readily available, a given for the world's wealthiest, will have a profound impact on the deep history and political structure of the entire game world. If resurrection really is ubiquitous for the most powerful people in the world, it's hard to imagine how it could be any different.

.

[Keltest]

Whenever I as a DM need someone to not be resurrected, I contrive something that prevents the soul from being able/willing to return. Got a raise dead spell? Oops, the body got fed to the lions. Resurrection? Body was tossed in the ocean whole. True Rezz? Soul is trapped/destroyed/happy where it is.

If you think about it, theres really only going to be one of 2 reasons a soul would want to come back. They have something they want to do, or they like the mortal world better than the afterlife. Presumably number 2 will be very rare, so just ask yourself in NPC victim no. 176 has enough of a reason to come back. The best part is "a good enough reason" can vary from person to person, so they cant even call you out on that inconsistency.

[Venger]

Whenever I as a DM need someone to not be resurrected, I contrive something that prevents the soul from being able/willing to return. Got a raise dead spell? Oops, the body got fed to the lions. Resurrection? Body was tossed in the ocean whole. True Rezz? Soul is trapped/destroyed/happy where it is.

the problem with this is, if a DM says "I made up some contrivance why this specific spell won't work," then the natural response is to try something else.

all this will do is waste your players' time and frustrate them. if you won't allow them to rez people, just say so to them out of game so they'll do something you approve of.

[Starbuck_II]

Whenever I as a DM need someone to not be resurrected, I contrive something that prevents the soul from being able/willing to return. Got a raise dead spell? Oops, the body got fed to the lions. Resurrection? Body was tossed in the ocean whole. True Rezz? Soul is trapped/destroyed/happy where it is.

If you think about it, theres really only going to be one of 2 reasons a soul would want to come back. They have something they want to do, or they like the mortal world better than the afterlife. Presumably number 2 will be very rare, so just ask yourself in NPC victim no. 176 has enough of a reason to come back. The best part is "a good enough reason" can vary from person to person, so they cant even call you out on that inconsistency.

If you tried the whole body fed to the lions, do you say the lion was then thrown in the ocean?
Because I'm pretty sure they asked in ascending order.

[StreamOfTheSky]

As I read the OP, I was imagining a movie producer complaining about how audiences were poking holes in the plots of his movies set in modern-day America, but instead of "raised from the dead" I mentally substituted "call him on his cell phone". There were all kinds of excellent suspenseful movies made in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's where the plot hinged on something bad happening because Character X couldn't be reached in time to provide important information. If those movies were set in modern times, audiences would rightfully ask "why not just call him on his cell phone?" No self-respecting movie producer can make that kind of plot in a modern movie anymore without having to consider and answer the question "well why didn't they just send him a text message?"

I don't think that's a fair analogy at all. Cell phones would be more like telepathic bond or scrying. Limited forms of communicating over a distance. Checking their call log for clues might be like Speak With Dead.
Reviving the dead goes way beyond that. It doesn't even have to be used "in the heat of the action." It can literally come in weeks after every's happened and undo it. It removes all finality.
It's not just about information-gaining. That's also very annoying, but the easiness of revive magic also means death's just not that big of a deal. When I mentioned the thing w/ the king's family.. the players asked "why not just raise them?" because they didn't know why he was so angry and feeling loss. From their perspective, while his family may have suffered some pain and horror, murdering them was more akin to getting punched a few times in the real world: something that can be patched up and healed with some time. He'd still be upset they got roughed up and he had to blow a lot of money, but it wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal. And the one who was trying to usurp power from him (he was supposed to be poisoned too, but ended up missing the dinner) would never even bother to try the scheme because it'd be freaking pointless.

The advice about "they don't come back if they don't want to" will not always help. And if the killed person doesn't want to come back because they're happy in their afterlife...it also significantly lessens the emotional impact. They're happy now, so much that they prefer it to their former lives, so why be upset?

That's really plot-breaking.


I bring this up because that's the kind of problem you have. There's a reliable, readily available convenience in your game world -- resurrection magic. It's not as cheap or ubiquitous as cell phones, but it's essentially a given for the rich and powerful of the world. Stories that don't acknowledge this in-game consideration have plot holes. I worry that any attempt to "fix" resurrection magic in advance so that it's structurally unavailable when inconvenient is likely to seem contrived and artificial. The game world needs a sense of internal consistency.

I'm trying to deal with it in advance for the SAKE of internal consistency...


Any time the plot demands that someone die and stay dead, ask yourself why some cleric doesn't just call the dead guy up on his cell phone and ask him to come back. D&D provides a variety of in-world answers to that question:

And there are a lot of times these really don't apply, and it'd be incredibly contrived to make them apply. Not every assassin is high level *and* a spellcaster, willing to shell out on soul-trapping gems or have the ability to destroy a soul. Not every victim is unwilling to return. Limited availability of high level clerics forces you to only use a small subset of types of settings and is not the norm for what D&D expects.


A stronger approach would be to construct plots without holes...
If, after much consideration, you can't find a plot-related reason for the individual to stay dead, then perhaps death isn't appropriate. Maybe they could be kidnapped, dominated, charmed, brainwashed, tricked or misled, debilitated by a powerful curse, or suffer some other affliction that can't be conveniently solved by a trip to the local temple and a sizeable cash donation. And if none of those options would work, then perhaps it's time to invent some kind of DM plot event that answers the question (e.g. person was slain with a unique effect, resurrections are temporarily on hold due to a war in the outer planes, or some other appropriate plot gizmo).

And maybe I don't want to go to all that work for every single plot-relevant NPC that's ever killed throughout the game, or can't make any of those fit believably. Seriously, I'm running a level 1-20 game with hundreds of NPCs to interact with across the world throughout. You're acting like you're asking for some little trivial extra work.

The revive spells, like just about all spells in the game, were written almost entirely w/ the PCs in mind. So they'd have a way to continue after Game Over. They become very problematic when applied to the rest of the game world...much like many other spells, such as ones that lead to infinite money economic schemes. But you can just ban those spells without affecting the PC's dungeon-crawling, monster-fighting abilities much. I can't just ban revive spells if I want them available for the PCs.

Even if I was capable of creating a plot with no holes at all (lol, what?), that'd be pretty incredibly limiting not to mention time-consuming. Until I crafted an ultimate checklist of foiling anything that could possibly undermine the plot and boiler plate copy paste it to any situation involving a death. I bet that'd be fun for the players.... :smalleek:

[Keltest]

the problem with this is, if a DM says "I made up some contrivance why this specific spell won't work," then the natural response is to try something else.

all this will do is waste your players' time and frustrate them. if you won't allow them to rez people, just say so to them out of game so they'll do something you approve of.

Being a DM of reasonable intelligence (and also being the keeper of the character sheets) I have a fairly good understanding of what resources the party has access to. if I know they have a true resurrection on hand, im going to skip the lions and the ocean and go straight to the soul trapping, which conveniently denies the lower level revive effects as well.

I may toss the lions in the ocean anyway just for kicks though.

[Honest Tiefling]

1) Don't ban Resurrection. Ban True Resurrection. Resurrection/Raise dead have enough problems happening (in that you need the corpse, usually) that'll only work some of the time. Still available, just...Not in all cases, such as the aforementioned lava.

2) People really do have this magic to prevent resurrection. See, it's this cult of a Death god, who grants the ability to their followers. But maybe this can be tied to the plot? See, this death god isn't really that bad of a guy. He just wants to prevent resurrection because each time it happens, it tears a little bit at the veil between life and death. It can recover after a few times, but if hundreds happens, well...Do you want undead? Because that's how we get undead. The Death God was willing to help whack off (or temporarily grant this ability) Kingypants, because his familial line had a nasty habit of buying up resurrections, so they kinda had to go as they were making enough problems.

[BWR]

As the DM you (via the god/philosophy/whatever force the character is devoted to) control what spells divine characters get. You don't want them to have access to resurrection magic, they don't. You might add some vague, nebulous 'don't do it except in extreme circumstances' and 'the Powers What Is don't look kindly on raising folks' clause to the thing. That, along with a simple explanation to your players that you don't want them to use it except in special circumstances, should do the trick unless your players are *****.

[Bronk]

Fairly recently I've encountered a fictional world where they actually dealt with this issue. For purposes of royal succession, your "first" life is the one that counts, as far as inheritance is concerned. If an assassinated king is brought back, then good for him, but he's no longer nobility. (I wish I could remember where I heard this, but I can't for the life of me remember the source, and Google is not being helpful). Anyway, it was supposed to have helped smooth out some difficulties when somebody resurrected the current king's ancestor.

This is actually the Kingdom of Cormyr in Faerun. (There could be others too, though)

Greenwood came up with that, I believe, and he featured it in a lot of his novels. One set was the 'Cormyr Saga', where the king at the time was pitted against a great wyrm black dragon that the kingdom was founded around. He was nothing special, but even then, the author had to resort to extreme story means to really ramp up the tension...

The king wound up afflicted with a previously unknown anti-magic poison that resisted all normal attempts to neutralize.

I agree with some of the others too: There are plenty of ways to prevent NPCs coming back, from their souls being trapped or destroyed, to it being too expensive to bring back everyone they'd like to, all the way to them not wanting to come back.

[torrasque666]

I'd just throw some Pushing Daisies reason. Death has to happen. If you raise one person, it kills another. If you're resurrected once, it can't happen again.

[GilesTheCleric]

As the DM you (via the god/philosophy/whatever force the character is devoted to) control what spells divine characters get. You don't want them to have access to resurrection magic, they don't.

This is one solution; another that's not mechanics-based but fluff-based: Depending on your cosmology, death can be a sometimes/always thing. Perhaps if a soul is sent to the Wall of Souls, then it can never be brought back. But, for certain souls favoured by a deity or arch devil or what-have-you, their soul is intercepted before it gets to the wall, and they have a chance at resurrection. Other souls bound for elysium/baator/celestia/etc directly either may or may not be raised generally (your choice). Maybe the PCs get an answering tone that says "this soul cannot be resurrected; please intercede with the relevant deity for more options" before they spend all their diamond dust if it's not going to work.

[Red Fel]

I would keep it down to several things.

First, I would avoid any plots that could be resolved by resurrecting or communicating with the dead, if at all possible.

Second, I would have my baddies be savvy. If they absolutely had to kill an important person to shut them up (as opposed to killing a random villager, or killing for some other purpose) I would make sure that they're aware of the fact that there are spells which would undo their hard work, even though they might be uncommon or rare.

Which leads us to my third point. In a D&D world, if I wanted to kill someone and keep them dead, and keep them from communicating in any way with the living, I have options. People have mentioned Thinaun, but I'd like to point out another: I'd drive them insane before killing them. Torture them until their minds break. Why? Several reasons. First, it prevents resurrection. No person, having escaped from endless agony and arrived at the place the soul belongs, would willingly return to the place where they suffered so badly. They'd refuse. Second, the madness would shatter the living remnant of their memory; even if the party managed to communicate with them without raising them (see Speak With Dead), they could provide no useful answer, only mad shrieks. I might even drive them to madness and then let them commit suicide; attempting to revive them would be futile while an Allip (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/allip.htm) wanders the world.

No need to ban revive spells. If it's plot-important that the dead be truly dead, you pull this once or twice. After that, the players will stop pushing it.

This has a great secondary effect: It conveys to the players the fact that whoever did this is a freaking terrifying individual. And that's a great plot hook.

[Afgncaap5]

I'm trying to deal with it in advance for the SAKE of internal consistency...

...And maybe I don't want to go to all that work for every single plot-relevant NPC that's ever killed throughout the game, or can't make any of those fit believably. Seriously, I'm running a level 1-20 game with hundreds of NPCs to interact with across the world throughout. You're acting like you're asking for some little trivial extra work.

Some valid concerns, and I don't think you'll get a one-size-fits-all answer for each NPC, unfortunately. Most of the good answers have already been taken, so I'll just toss out two other options that may or may not work for you.

1) You may have hundreds and hundreds of NPCs, but if you can narrow it down to a couple of plot-significant ones that simply Must Not Live after they've been killed, I recommend introducing early on (in Act One, if you will) a vial of Chekhov's Poison (don't call it that.) Something like "Liquid Hopelessness" or "Final Curtain" or something more poetic than that, basically a poison that's harmless to the living but prevents the resurrection of the dead due to some horrible ancient pact ("The demon who gave it to me was confused when he said I wanted to use it to kill the coppersmith. He said that he needed to forever lose five imps and a succubus while imprisoning an archon to make the poison, and that it should be used on kings. Whatever. The copper market's mine now.") Introduce the concept of it early on, and the right kinds of conditions for it to be used (Final thirty minutes between dusk and evening, must be drink while a lie is told to the drinker, etc.) and express upon the players how big a deal it is way before it comes to be the time for that particular NPC. That'll make it seem more "real" when it's used on an actual NPC. (Again, this can't be done for hundreds and hundreds of NPCs, you can get this to work once, maybe twice, per campaign without it feeling cheap.)

2) If you happen to be in an intrigue-heavy world like Eberron, you could try this: while the PCs aren't watching, petrify the body of the victim (or cast Flesh To Stone on it), and cast Stone To Flesh on a pre-existing statue of the victim (good to establish the statue before the murder happens). Have the body and statue replaced. The PCs can't revive a corpse that was never alive to begin with. (Or if they CAN then you've got yourself a really fun Ghostwalk-appropriate plot hook about the victim not remembering his or her identity.) Make sure to have an NPC with a decent Spellcraft check available so that if the player's don't think to, someone can eventually learn in-game that the body wasn't really, well, the body. (Note: this is, admittedly, exactly the same as stealing the body and carrying it to a swamp in a distant kingdom, removing all identifying things, and leaving it there, but it'll *feel* different.) Again, this is something that'll work maybe once (maybe), and basically assumes that the NPC will wind up dead from the start, not doing anything good against NPCs who die randomly.

Probably not much help, but I hope you figure something out soon. :smallsmile:

[The Evil DM]

I use several techniques mentioned above, such as the magic is rare, and only a few priests in the world actually know how to affect resurrection. But my campaign world has an additional fun an unique dynamic that makes reviving one from the dead interesting.

Mortality in my game is built upon some ancient philosophical concepts on the trinity of Soul, Spirit and Body. Your soul contains your consciousness and is what lives on in the afterlife, your spirit contains the primal life force of the universe, it returns to the Ethereal Spirit and eventually the life force is reincarnated on the prime plane. A druidic sect that reveres the eternal cycle of life death and reincarnation of the spirit views resurrection just as anathema to nature as undeath. Those that get resurrected find themselves enemies of these druids who seek to put you back into the ground permanently. These druids also have a variety of rituals to prevent resurrection and can be employed to do so.

[Psyren]

And there are a lot of times these really don't apply, and it'd be incredibly contrived to make them apply. Not every assassin is high level *and* a spellcaster, willing to shell out on soul-trapping gems or have the ability to destroy a soul. Not every victim is unwilling to return. Limited availability of high level clerics forces you to only use a small subset of types of settings and is not the norm for what D&D expects.

Without meaning to state the obvious - if that assassin is operating in a setting where 7th-level divine magic is flying around, you'd better bet your boots he is indeed doing one of the above things, or else dropping the profession "assassin" entirely. Either such magic is extremely rare (which solves your problem) or it's not, in which case assassins would not stay in business long without obtaining such countermeasures, since few of their clients would exactly be thrilled with having their targets popping up again.

You haven't actually addressed the Thinaun weapons et al., but in truth, restraining or damaging the soul to prevent resurrection isn't really that expensive - it's just very evil, which an assassin's guild presumably wouldn't care about.

And if it's just Raise Dead flying around, brutalizing the corpse is all you need.


If the above isn't your cup of tea, replacing the raise spells with inordinately difficult incantations that do the same thing is another way to go that was mentioned and not addressed. That way, it's available to the PCs when they need it (since they are the folks with the ability and time to go trekking off to the Zondar Plains for silver dragon tears or whatever esoterica you deem necessary) while the majority of NPCs won't have access or likely even knowledge, preserving your plots.

[Saintheart]

In a D&D world, if I wanted to kill someone and keep them dead, and keep them from communicating in any way with the living, I have options. People have mentioned Thinaun, but I'd like to point out another: I'd drive them insane before killing them. Torture them until their minds break. Why? Several reasons. First, it prevents resurrection. No person, having escaped from endless agony and arrived at the place the soul belongs, would willingly return to the place where they suffered so badly. They'd refuse. Second, the madness would shatter the living remnant of their memory; even if the party managed to communicate with them without raising them (see Speak With Dead), they could provide no useful answer, only mad shrieks. I might even drive them to madness and then let them commit suicide; attempting to revive them would be futile while an Allip (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/allip.htm) wanders the world.

This is an awesome idea, but per your own sig I think it really needs to be in purple text. :smallbiggrin:

[Keltest]

This is an awesome idea, but per your own sig I think it really needs to be in purple text. :smallbiggrin:

Honestly, I think all of Red Fel's text should be assumed evil unless indicated otherwise.

[jiriku]

I don't think that's a fair analogy at all.

Sorry, I guess I made a poor analogy. A better analogy might be something like the instant-replay technology that's used to confirm controversial referee calls in some sports games. Without the tech, we can argue about bad calls. With the tech, the refs review the footage and correct bad calls. A player who wants to fool the referee has to go to special effort to ensure that illegal moves aren't identifiable on camera. In the same way, if there's no resurrection magic around, dead is dead. But since resurrection magic IS available, dead is really more like "critically injured and has assumed room temperature". It's fixable. An assassin who wants to prevent a cleric from raising a dead guy has to go to special effort to ensure that resurrection isn't an option.

My point here is that if resurrection is available at all, then it's available to everyone in the game world who has resources and influence equaling or exceeding a mid-level PC, barring some logical in-game reason to the contrary. As such, it's a brute fact that plots involving death need to confront and interact with.


You're acting like you're asking for some little trivial extra work. Even if I was capable of creating a plot with no holes at all (lol, what?), that'd be pretty incredibly limiting not to mention time-consuming.

Red Fel and Psyren and afgaancap5 and Keltest have all given you good ideas, as have I. For each of us, I'm willing to wager that it was only "some little trivial extra work" to come up with those ideas. We think this way all the time in our plot design. Maybe it's not as difficult, limiting, or time-consuming as you think it is. Why not give it a try? If you find that you can do it as easily as we can, that's a major win for you. Seems like a safe gamble to me.


Honestly, I think all of Red Fel's text should be assumed evil unless indicated otherwise.

Ever since his Collateral Damage Man thread, I have always assumed such. :smallbiggrin:

[ellindsey]

This is actually the Kingdom of Cormyr in Faerun. (There could be others too, though)


It's also a rule in the Girl Genius webcomic. Although the resurrections there are via mad science rather than magic, the law is the same. Dying and being resurrected forfeits your noble title and position. Of course, this rule is routinely ignored by both the protagonists and the villains of the comic, and is mostly a background detail.

[Red Fel]

This is an awesome idea, but per your own sig I think it really needs to be in purple text. :smallbiggrin:

Yeah... Probably... Re-reading it, I guess I could see how it might come across as slightly Evi-


Honestly, I think all of Red Fel's text should be assumed evil unless indicated otherwise.

Hey, hey... All of it? Do you have any idea how expensive purple ink is?

... I mean, not everything I say is Evil. Yeah. That's what I meant. Totally.


Red Fel and Psyren and afgaancap5 and Keltest have all given you good ideas, as have I. For each of us, I'm willing to wager that it was only "some little trivial extra work" to come up with those ideas. We think this way all the time in our plot design. Maybe it's not as difficult, limiting, or time-consuming as you think it is. Why not give it a try? If you find that you can do it as easily as we can, that's a major win for you. Seems like a safe gamble to me.

Pretty much this. What it boils down to is the fact that you wanted your plot to involve a story, which is fine, but that there was a big gaping Resurrection-sized hole in it. For some of us, that means cutting out Resurrection and its ilk; as a GM, that's totally your prerogative. For others, myself included, it means rewriting the story to accommodate the existence of the hole.


Ever since his Collateral Damage Man thread, I have always assumed such. :smallbiggrin:

Now hold on a minute - that thread wasn't about Evil!

... It just entailed massive, wide-scale, repeatable destruction wielded by a single, likely-unhinged individual.

... Totally not Evil.

... Probably.

[StreamOfTheSky]

Now that they're higher level it might be less of a problem to use higher level magic, though I don't like that I have to do that just to deal with reviving. Brutally desecrating the body isn't something you can do all the time, and torturing to death so they don't want to come back leaves out any quick assassinations.

I might just ban the higher level raise spells, Ressurection and True Ressurection. Raise is at least fairly limited. Though Reincarnate is not that limited.

It was also an issue back then because while the king could afford the spells, the assassin was supposed to be something the party fights against. In what was then still a fairly low level game. Soul trapping and stuff would have required a far more powerful enemy than they'd have any hope of beating. Again, I hadn't even considered the effects of these spells yet because at that point, they were only just getting the ability to use any of the spells themselves.

Maybe I should ban all of them and just make Revivify and Last Breath more lenient in the timing they can be used. And then still allow villains to come back by selling their soul to a devil or the like.
Or I could cease being so lavish with the treasure such that they have no trouble shelling out loot to revive various NPCs. When money's tight, maybe they'll get stingy and stop being so darn altruistic. :smallsmile:

[jiriku]

I find that the "big three" effects that I have to account for in plot design are divination magic, travel magic, and resurrection magic. When these three come online, they trivialize certain types of situations that were previously challenging, and their mere presence in the world imposes creative constraints on me as a storyteller because they imply the existence of other people in the world who can trivialize those challenges, even if the PCs can't yet do so themselves. After all, why does the king hire the PCs to travel three months overland to retrieve the macguffin from the Gorge of Peril at great risk to themselves when his court wizard is powerful enough to teleport there, defeat all the monsters in the Gorge singlehandedly, and be back with the macguffin in time for lunch? How will the Bob the assassin get away with killing the duke when anyone at anytime can just cast commune and ask "Did Bob kill the duke?" Answering these kinds of questions is not always easy. I'd like to think, though, that telling a story within constraints forces one to be more creative, and that the resulting story is more interesting and engaging than the simpler stories that are crafted in the absence of constraints.

[StreamOfTheSky]

Yes, those are definitely the big three. They cause more concern and demand more thought than just about everything else combined.

I'm lucky in that the campaign I run, teleportation at least is unsafe early on, and even once the party can overcome the hazards...by then anti-teleport "technology"* has become widespread enough that they can't feel secure trying to teleport to any hostile major area of civilization or villainous lair without being utterly boned. So they can teleport to the general vicinity of whatever, but trying to pop directly in is...a bad idea.

And Divination...ugh.

*Beacons that re-direct any long-range teleports into or out of a several miles-wide radius to themselves and come with a built-in delayed arrival effect, similar to Anticipate Teleportation. Organizations tend to trap the utter hell out of the containment facilities the beacons draw victims into, as well. It was introduced in one spot (they discovered it exploring, not by porting), then they got caught by one later but it wasn't a hostile locale so they were ok. But now they rightfully expect the use has spread all over.

[golentan]

Limit the availability of diamonds?

Seriously. Require the entire material component be paid with one stone, and limit the availability. Just because you have 100,000 gold pieces for 4 true resurrection spells, that doesn't mean that 4 25,000 gp exactly diamonds are available for sale. By the treasure table the average diamond is worth 5000 GP, so maybe... 1 in 1000 is high quality enough to qualify for true-res status. And since those get used up by people who can afford them, consumed by the spell. Plus some of those are going to be worth more, so maybe as supply and demand work their magic at the start of the campaign a true-res would cost someone 25,000 plus donation to the church, and if they want a bargain pack of 4, that jumps to 200,000 (because you had to pull the 100,000 GP crown jewel and flash cook it to get back the crown prince who was planning on wearing it), and if you want more and more, you're going to have to get imaginative in acquisitions (Read: send thieves to retrieve gems from the wealthy) or impose backbreaking taxes and risk revolution, even before the challenge of seeking out a level 17+ divine spellcaster, which is likely an epic quest in and of itself...

Meanwhile, Druids won't reincarnate folks without good reason because of the Balance of Nature, and it turns out that the populace isn't okay with rulership by bugbear anyway, and Raise Dead is fairly easy to get around, and even Basic Resurrection, well, Assassins have Death Attack, which trumps Resurrection (being a Death Effect), helpfully keeping assassins employed (also applies to most of the others)...

If a villain needs to stay dead, well... even if they have someone on the payroll capable of casting a return from death spell with the contingencies to acquire all of the required materials (body, diamonds, whatever else), ask yourself if that person is personally loyal to the villain, or might be looking at this as an opportunity to promote themselves to head of Evil Inc.

[jiriku]

[Nasty horrible death for cocky teleporters]

Oh dear me. I think from now on I'll preface every teleport into hostile territory with a divination asking "Is the area I'm about to teleport into warded to redirect teleportation?" And I'll interpret any answer of "unknown" to mean "you're doomed". That's... really a good response to teleportation though. Must research something similar for my wizard to use when he takes over the world.

[Honest Tiefling]

...And flash cook it to get back the crown prince who was planning on wearing it...

Pardon my ignorance, but what does Flash Cook mean?

[golentan]

Pardon my ignorance, but what does Flash Cook mean?

Basically "cook in seconds/turn to ash" (The dragon turned his fire breath on the knights, flash cooking them in their armor before they could scream), exposing it to sufficient energy (resurrection magic) to render whatever it is (diamond) into something else instantly (ash).

[DrMartin]

you could say that coming back from the dead is something evil that taints your soul, requiring foul rituals and whatnot. Put your protagonists under some kind of mantle (a-là we're on a mission for god (https://onlygreatmovies.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/the_light1.jpg?w=300) ) so that normal resurrection spells work for them.

It's maybe a bit metagamey :D but if you have a story-centered campaign it could be tied in-game nicely.

I really like your solution for teleport magic by the way - In my campaign i have all teleport spell deal damage of a random kind for every mile traveled, so that limits things a bit, but of course there are ways around it (ways to prevent most damage forms, buff hit points and so on).

[BilltheCynic]

It was also an issue back then because while the king could afford the spells, the assassin was supposed to be something the party fights against. In what was then still a fairly low level game. Soul trapping and stuff would have required a far more powerful enemy than they'd have any hope of beating. Again, I hadn't even considered the effects of these spells yet because at that point, they were only just getting the ability to use any of the spells themselves.


There's an easy way to let the assassin counter resurrections while still managing to be someone the party could realistically defeat: scrolls. Both rogues and assassins have UMD as class skills and any sane one will have it maxed. There is a nifty spell called Barghest's Feast (SC 24) that can be cast over the victims to prevent them from being raised. And if someone tries to use Wish, Miracle, or True Ressurection, flip a coin. If it comes down tails, the victim can not be raised by mortal magic. At all. This is a 6th level cleric spell, which means it requires a DC 26 UMD check to activate a scroll of it, not unreasonable since it can be retried until it is cast. You could have some evil organization making and selling these scrolls to assassin specifically so that they don't have to deal with resurrections. The assassin buys the scrolls and heads off to backstab some aristocrats. Now you have a badguy your PCs can still fight while also giving him a way to permanently kill off the royals. Fun!

[torrasque666]

How about this: each resurrection brings back a little less of your soul, eventually there's nothing left to return. People get a bit scared of it, and only the most important people are revived since it can be assumed that losing a portion of soul hurts on a physical level (represented by non-healable con damage/drain) Maybe make it that you can be resurrected up to your original con modifier+1 (lvl 1 con mod + inherents, pre-death) and say that those who were too weak (con of 9 or less) couldn't withstand the journey back. Not even True Resurrection can negate this, and might actually hurt worse given that there's no base for it to form in/around/on/you get my point(since TR doesn't necessarily mean you have a body, and if you have a body and its been within the same timeframe, why not just use resurrection?)

Maybe get around Speak with Dead by saying that memories fade quickly, and that the spell can only work on creatures that have been dead for less than [CL] days.

[Honest Tiefling]

I know there are no offical stats for children, but I assume that not all of them have 10 constitution. That...Might get dark, quickly, if they cannot be raised due to poor stats.

[Sacrieur]

We must be twins OP, because I had the same thoughts.

Death is just too boring and reversible in my opinion. You'd think you were playing a Dragon Warrior game.


Fortunately I'm developing a solution. I copied the same way Death works in The Old Kingdom series. (http://oldkingdomwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Death) My players all know that Death is some mysterious river like thing and that necromancers and clerics (and sometimes paladins!) have to walk into to deal with the dead. Also once they're past the last gate that's it they're gone, forever. It creates a very real, gritty, and dangerous edge to resurrecting anyone, while not barring it totally.

My current rules are that Death is its own "special" plane and you cannot use the Gate spell to travel to it. All resurrection abilities have been removed.

[nedz]

Some ideas — options:

Ban Raise Dead etc. but allow Re-incarnation. I once ran a 1E game where this was the norm (by party choice, they preferred the old Druid table): the party ended up being a menagerie, but they are adventurers. Would the King want his family turning into a zoo ? You could also randomise Gender - just to add to the hesitation. In terms of party balance this can nerf mundanes more than casters, though it is pretty random here. Maybe this is too old school ?

Change the material components to make them a (willing) life for a life - or maybe just level drain the caster ? Adding a significant xp cost to the caster is another, lesser, option.

Have the gods ration access to this stuff, possibly requiring a quest of some kind. This would fit with certain games though you might not want the distraction.

I routinely ban this for level 1 characters - which would also help with the rich being able to afford it for their kids.

[Bronk]

Some other options:

There's an assassin's guild in the Epic Handbook whose top member has a cloak that prevents resurrection.

You could contrive to have the NPC die of old age, through curses, fast time planes, natural causes, Time Dragon breath, etc.

If you decide to limit the availability of diamonds, as has been suggested, you could run a game where suddenly mages using 'trap the soul' is in vogue, and afterwards there's a shortage.

Perhaps revise True Resurrection so that you need one single diamond worth 25000g instead of totaling that amount, you could make them go on a Molydeus hunt every time they need one...

Another way to get around this is to avoid killing the NPC at all. Maybe instead of assassins, there could be a guild that petrifies people and stashes them in a sequestered room somewhere, or puts them to sleep and sticks them in quintessence, or abducts them and stashes them in a timeless demiplane, or brings them to another planet and casts imprisonment on them, or stash them in a Living Vault, etc, etc.

Either way, I suggest that if your players care about the NPC, you might as well take what they probably assume are logical in-universe steps to bring them back into account. If you hard counter them without talking it out with them out of character, they may very well feel frustrated, punished for finally having access to high level magic.

[lord_khaine]

It's also a rule in the Girl Genius webcomic. Although the resurrections there are via mad science rather than magic, the law is the same. Dying and being resurrected forfeits your noble title and position. Of course, this rule is routinely ignored by both the protagonists and the villains of the comic, and is mostly a background detail.

What..? no it isnt.. its just not relevant for neither the protagonist nor the villains.
The protagonist dont rule due to a noble title or position, but because she is the current head of a house of depraved madmen.

And the villain


Is a body jumping maniac who is ruling though mind controling bugs

[captain fubar]

in this comic (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/index.php) it is established that though people can be revived it isn't all that common for a high ranking political figure to come back because when one dies their heirs take over the family coffers and any hereditary titles and then should the ancestor happen to come back he is just some guy with no claims to anything. even a lifetime of political blackmail that the former stiff might have accumulated would have diminished somewhat in value as none of his former associates have as much interist in him as they one had. that and the common people don't trust reserectionists for a number of reasons.

as it applys to dnd the former prince may not want to pay a significant sum to abdicate his new found authority to a leader who's policies he may never agreed with.
it wouldn't even be unreasonable for the succession laws of some kingdoms to have codified this.

[Jay R]

This has a great secondary effect: It conveys to the players the fact that whoever did this is a freaking terrifying individual. And that's a great plot hook.

Back in original D&D, before Raise Dead was a touch spell, or required the recipient's cooperation, I had my players walk through a graveyard. On one of the gravestones were these words:


<Name>
1428-1472
He was my enemy.
I swore eternal revenge.
So every week I come here,
cast Raise Dead,
and walk away.

[Psyren]

I wanted to add that Heroes of Horror has some neat (and officially sanctioned) ways to muck with resurrection - from removing the spells entirely as was suggested previously, to risking victims "come back wrong," (mentally, physically or just cosmetically), to having the deity of death demand a balancing of the scales in order to grant your request etc. These are aimed at a horror campaign obviously but they can see use anywhere the GM wants to add more grit.

[OttoVonBigby]

having this rule will allow me to not say things like 'the assassin used magic poison that prevented rezing' and such."As a fairly "simulationist" DM, I share your concerns, OP, about in-universe stuff being too contrived. But I also believe/hope that my players aren't so self-centered as to mistake "NPC knows about rez magic and compensates accordingly b/c he's smart" for "DM inventing nonsense from whole cloth to more thoroughly railroad us." I mean, all kinds of popular fantasy and fantasy-derived fiction integrates devices like the aforementioned magic poison *all the time*, and if such devices are good enough for million-dollar franchises, I guess (speaking for myself here) I can put aside my own narrative snobbery long enough to make this ad hoc rez restriction work so we can get back to the story that we all want to participate in. I try to remind myself often that my ambition w/r/t narrative and style is not at all a prerequisite for an awesome, memorable adventure. In the last session I DM'ed, the very-powerful villain got taunted to his face about his crimes via a series of PC Bluff rolls so lucky that he didn't even realize he was being deliberately taunted. Kind of a hackneyed scene from a Hollywood screenwriting perspective, but when the PCs' lives are on the line and they pull off something like that anyway, nobody cares.


People really do have this magic to prevent resurrection. See, it's this cult of a Death god, who grants the ability to their followers. But maybe this can be tied to the plot? See, this death god isn't really that bad of a guy. He just wants to prevent resurrection because each time it happens, it tears a little bit at the veil between life and death. It can recover after a few times, but if hundreds happens, well...Do you want undead? Because that's how we get undead. The Death God was willing to help whack off (or temporarily grant this ability) Kingypants, because his familial line had a nasty habit of buying up resurrections, so they kinda had to go as they were making enough problems.
I love this. I wish it could work with my setting's pantheon :smallbiggrin:


As the DM you (via the god/philosophy/whatever force the character is devoted to) control what spells divine characters get. You don't want them to have access to resurrection magic, they don't. You might add some vague, nebulous 'don't do it except in extreme circumstances' and 'the Powers What Is don't look kindly on raising folks' clause to the thing.
Or on raising *particular* folks. If the issue of Perma-Dynasties ever came up in my campaigns (and don't think I haven't worried about it), I'd lean towards the notion that the gods (A) consider rez magic worthy of their notice, since life and death are obviously major cosmic matters, (B) are aware of the nature of autocratic systems of government, and (C) are willing and able to squelch a particular rez attempt if they don't want it to work.

I could even retcon this. Multiple times now, PCs attempting to rez NPCs have been thwarted by the spell just failing. In-game, they don't know why for sure. Those in the know assume the NPC is happy in the afterlife. Maybe it was divine intervention. (For reasons of "game universe balance." We're gods, we're unknowable. Deal with it. Contrived? Maybe, but less so, I think, than magic assassin poison. There are some things players do actually accept as beyond their influence, and the acts of gods IME are one such thing. (But then I've not yet run an epic game...))


If a villain needs to stay dead, well... even if they have someone on the payroll capable of casting a return from death spell with the contingencies to acquire all of the required materials (body, diamonds, whatever else), ask yourself if that person is personally loyal to the villain, or might be looking at this as an opportunity to promote themselves to head of Evil Inc.
Yes, politics is great for this. In my setting virtually any NPC of high enough level to cast true resurrection is either (1) a top-ranked Pope-like figure in his/her church who can easily have all kinds of reasons for not rezzing a king, or even any kings, or (2) a free agent off on extended planar jaunts who has no time for you dirt-walkers (and who in any case probably wouldn't want to piss off Group 1 by doing your rez).

Now, if the *PC* is of high enough level to cast true rez, well, they're probably high enough level for some Solar agent of their deity to stop by and sit them down for a Serious Talk about the facts of life/death.

[ShurikVch]

That kind of plot-relevant poison should have "liquid AMF" component
In that case, nobody will be able to raise (resurrect/reincarnate/make undead) victim, because Antimagic...

[Psyren]

2) People really do have this magic to prevent resurrection. See, it's this cult of a Death god, who grants the ability to their followers. But maybe this can be tied to the plot? See, this death god isn't really that bad of a guy. He just wants to prevent resurrection because each time it happens, it tears a little bit at the veil between life and death. It can recover after a few times, but if hundreds happens, well...Do you want undead? Because that's how we get undead. The Death God was willing to help whack off (or temporarily grant this ability) Kingypants, because his familial line had a nasty habit of buying up resurrections, so they kinda had to go as they were making enough problems.

http://i.imgur.com/btk5hYQ.jpg

[Segev]

For plot-important NPC deaths where the NPC is not the sort to normally afford 5th+ level divine spells with 5000gp material components (or even more expensive), just kill them. If the PCs blow the resources to pay for the raise dead themselves, they've spent resources in non-insignificant chunks.

For NPCs who could afford it themselves, or have friends or families who would and could, consider much of what's been said in this thread already. Don't reject it because it's "too much work." Consider something other than death, is all.

What's the goal? Who's doing it and why?

Your poisoner plot could be one of two things off the top of my head:

1) Don't use a lethal poison. Use one that's addictive or debilitating (or both). The king watches his beloved family waste away before his eyes, never dying but becoming less and less the people he loves. They're insane, broken-minded husks.

2) The perpetrator is actually backed by the local clergy, who are secretly of evil gods. The whole ploy is designed to make the king dependent on them; he has to keep paying to get his family brought back to life, and even if the gp cost is merely annoying, the fact that if he alienates the clergy the raise dead spells might stop coming is worrisome.


In addition, there's an even cheaper solution that would have bypassed this concern: neutralize poison. If the king can afford regular services of 9th level clerics, he can certainly afford 7th-8th level clerics who can prepare and cast Neutralize Poison on the king and his family before meals, or on the family food platter if that takes fewer spells.

Commissioning items of detect poison for himself and his family, too, would allow them to simply avoid it.


So it's really not the raise dead line that's the problem for you, here.

(Heck, if it's just raise dead and not resurrection or better involved, then his family members are getting weaker and weaker each time they're brought back. First losing levels if they're above level 1, then losing Constitution.)

[NichG]

All you really need is an easy answer for 'why can't X be revived, but when its a PC its not a problem'. I'd start from the observation that even when PCs die, its generally not a TPK - and even with resurrection magic, with a TPK there's no one to bring back the PCs anyhow.

So, what if the time window for resurrection spells isn't measured in years or days per CL, but is a strict cutoff at 36 hours, with perhaps a low-level spell to extend that if used preventatively. 36 hours means that if the party Cleric survives, there's time for him to prepare new spells and at the very least cast the low-level preservation spell until the resurrection can be performed. On the other hand, all an assassin has to do is prevent the body of their victim from being discovered for 2 days - non-trivial, but something you can design a bunch of strategies for. If the body is utterly destroyed, then you have the additional issue that the preservative spell doesn't have a target, so then 36 hours becomes a true hard limit (and at that point, since you need True Resurrection, you need to get a 9th level cleric and a sufficient quantity of diamonds on-site within 36 hours, which sounds like a reasonable questy-type thing to do).

[Jay R]

Don't forget that when the king dies, all other family members move up in power, influence, and stature.

There may be some very interesting laws about succession and resurrection, and there is certainly a large faction that don't want him back.

[Barstro]

The party asked, "why not just raise them?" And I had to bs something about the assassin using some non-dispellable magic to prevent that.

You can houserule in Morganti Weapons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragaera#Morganti_Weapons). They are highly illegal and produce an aura so that it will be difficult for a PC to hold onto one. Since there usually isn't a reason to totally end an NPC, the PCs shouldn't feel too bad about them being of little use.

[Segev]

Oh, there's another approach, actually, you could take. What if "adventurers" were unique in more than just their choice of profession? What if the setting was such that some people have a unique property about their spirits that permits them to return from death? It may require divine intervention, but it's possible. For them, they can be raised, ressurected, reincarnated, etc.

Everybody else, death IS permanent.

All PCs, and a few NPCs, are the ressurectable kind. Perhaps there's a particular form of divinatory event which heralds this fact about them.

All left-handed people, or they all have a particular eye color, or they're all born under a falling star, or merely being able to enter a PC class (rather than an NPC class).

[Red Fel]

All PCs, and a few NPCs, are the ressurectable kind. Perhaps there's a particular form of divinatory event which heralds this fact about them.

All left-handed people, or they all have a particular eye color, or they're all born under a falling star, or merely being able to enter a PC class (rather than an NPC class).

I like this. And I think a lot of settings do something like this, to distinguish certain characters as inherently unique or special. (E.g. parceltongue, l'Cie brands, Dragonmarks. Also, you should totally let every PC take a Dragonmark. Just saying.) Royals may have the privileges of noble heredity, but that doesn't mean they have the favor of whatever divine voyeur decides who gets to treat death as a revolving door and who doesn't.

One issue this creates, however, is the fact that if such people are rare, why does resurrection magic even exist? I mean, if you could make a widget that could only be used by five people in the world, or even five people in the country, would you even bother to design it, let alone sell it?

[Segev]

I like this. And I think a lot of settings do something like this, to distinguish certain characters as inherently unique or special. (E.g. parceltongue, l'Cie brands, Dragonmarks. Also, you should totally let every PC take a Dragonmark. Just saying.) Royals may have the privileges of noble heredity, but that doesn't mean they have the favor of whatever divine voyeur decides who gets to treat death as a revolving door and who doesn't.Exalted - the (formerly) White Wolf game - goes so far as to spell out that PCs are, well, Exalted by the highest of the gods. (Interestingly, that system has as one of its explicit design fundamentals that death is always permanent; you are not what you were before if you come back, and you cannot, ever, be resurrected.)


One issue this creates, however, is the fact that if such people are rare, why does resurrection magic even exist? I mean, if you could make a widget that could only be used by five people in the world, or even five people in the country, would you even bother to design it, let alone sell it?

Don't make it quite that rare. It's as rare as Adventurers are in your setting, really. Maybe slightly LESS rare, since not all adventurers bother.

As to why they exist...consider how rare even mid-high level casters are supposed to be. The spells are already highly uncommon. It's just that royalty is about as uncommon, if not moreso, so can often afford to seek out and hire or patronize one.

So the ressurection magics came about because adventurers who gained enough power to cast them lost friends and prayed for them (or sought other means to revive them)...and it worked. But then they tried it on non-Adventurers, and it didn't.




Other possibilities: The various death-defying spells require a willing target. If the murderer has some blackmail on the target, or has threatened to cause still greater torment and harm, such that the dead man is afraid to come back...

[nedz]

Oh, there's another approach, actually, you could take. What if "adventurers" were unique in more than just their choice of profession? What if the setting was such that some people have a unique property about their spirits that permits them to return from death? It may require divine intervention, but it's possible. For them, they can be raised, ressurected, reincarnated, etc.

Everybody else, death IS permanent.

All PCs, and a few NPCs, are the ressurectable kind. Perhaps there's a particular form of divinatory event which heralds this fact about them.

All left-handed people, or they all have a particular eye color, or they're all born under a falling star, or merely being able to enter a PC class (rather than an NPC class).

I don't like this. PCs being special snowflakes would break verisimilitude for me.

It's kind of like Deus Ex Machina from the beginning.

Now this would fit certain tropes — I can think of several TV series where the main characters hardly ever die — but it's not to my taste.

[NichG]

One issue this creates, however, is the fact that if such people are rare, why does resurrection magic even exist? I mean, if you could make a widget that could only be used by five people in the world, or even five people in the country, would you even bother to design it, let alone sell it?

Its divine magic. The clerics can just know it (or be granted it by their deity on the day it'll be needed), they don't have to invent it.

[Telonius]

in this comic (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/index.php) it is established that though people can be revived it isn't all that common for a high ranking political figure to come back because when one dies their heirs take over the family coffers and any hereditary titles and then should the ancestor happen to come back he is just some guy with no claims to anything. even a lifetime of political blackmail that the former stiff might have accumulated would have diminished somewhat in value as none of his former associates have as much interist in him as they one had. that and the common people don't trust reserectionists for a number of reasons.

as it applys to dnd the former prince may not want to pay a significant sum to abdicate his new found authority to a leader who's policies he may never agreed with.
it wouldn't even be unreasonable for the succession laws of some kingdoms to have codified this.

That's the one I was trying to think of.

[Red Fel]

I don't like this. PCs being special snowflakes would break verisimilitude for me.

It's kind of like Deus Ex Machina from the beginning.

That's a fair point. But it also does a good job of explaining why some people become adventurers.

Segev mentioned Exalted (the game), which is a perfect example. Exalted (the characters) are intended for great things, truly amazing things. Staying home and working a steady job or quietly raising a happy family generally isn't in the cards for them.

You could say that anyone who has this "divine spark" permitting resurrection feels an irresistible compulsion to do something with it. Many (but not all) adventurers result from this compulsion. You can also contrast those adventurers who have the spark with those who don't, creating a clever dichotomy (a la Amuro Ray vs. Char Aznable) between those with natural talent and those with drive and experience. You could even make it a plot point, as perhaps one such person with a spark has developed the means to "harvest" this ability from others, unnaturally prolonging his own life or otherwise fueling his power.

There's a lot you can do with it, is the point.

More importantly, if these "snowflakes" aren't quite as rare - make them, say, 1/100, or 1/1000, or something like that - it avoids making the PCs into the exclusive snowflakes of the world. They're sort of part of a caste of snowflakes, rather than the sole heritors of some great legacy.

[nedz]

That's a fair point. But it also does a good job of explaining why some people become adventurers.

Segev mentioned Exalted (the game), which is a perfect example. Exalted (the characters) are intended for great things, truly amazing things. Staying home and working a steady job or quietly raising a happy family generally isn't in the cards for them.

You could say that anyone who has this "divine spark" permitting resurrection feels an irresistible compulsion to do something with it. Many (but not all) adventurers result from this compulsion. You can also contrast those adventurers who have the spark with those who don't, creating a clever dichotomy (a la Amuro Ray vs. Char Aznable) between those with natural talent and those with drive and experience. You could even make it a plot point, as perhaps one such person with a spark has developed the means to "harvest" this ability from others, unnaturally prolonging his own life or otherwise fueling his power.

There's a lot you can do with it, is the point.

More importantly, if these "snowflakes" aren't quite as rare - make them, say, 1/100, or 1/1000, or something like that - it avoids making the PCs into the exclusive snowflakes of the world. They're sort of part of a caste of snowflakes, rather than the sole heritors of some great legacy.

I guess it depends upon the setting and the kind of game you are trying to run. Sure, if the PCs are all godlings then that would work — but if they are meant to be mortals then they kind of aren't.

[Red Fel]

I guess it depends upon the setting and the kind of game you are trying to run. Sure, if the PCs are all godlings then that would work — but if they are meant to be mortals then they kind of aren't.

Don't think of it as "godlings" and "only mortals." Think of it as "mortals" and "mortals++." Or Mortals: The Next Generation. Or Newtypes, if you want.

[Segev]

It doesn't work for games where the PCs are "nothing special" except that they happen to choose to be, no.

Consider, though, that if you go with 1/100 people being Adventurers, then your typical village of 400ish people (including all the surrounding farms) will have roughly 4 Adventurers living in it. Conveniently JUST enough for the iconic party!

Meanwhile, in a "big city" of 40,000, there would be roughly 400 Adventurers amongst the local population.

It may actually be higher (and the population of Adventurers in smaller villages lower) due to large cities attracting Adventurers, but since Adventure mostly happens in wilderness areas...probably not.

[Barstro]

It's kind of like Deus Ex Machina from the beginning.

That's because you look at the beginning of the story as the true beginning.

The odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 50 million. Just because the chances are very slim that a random individual will win the lottery, it does not mean that the odds are slim for anyone to win the lottery. D&D isn't usually about a person picked at random; it's about the small subsection of the population that has what it takes to gain non-NPC levels. THAT's the sort of person who is able to be resurrected. You have already been the Dues Ex Machina by creating the character. If you don't want that, then go play the farm boy who stays home to tend the field and feed his ailing mother instead of picking up a sword and following some rumor from a stranger. :smallwink:

As a real world example; nobody on this site is going to spend $60 per week, every week, on scratch-off tickets. But there is a particular subset of the population that does. And every now and then, one of them wins big. And THAT is why people can make a living off of commemorative Elvis plates.

[Honest Tiefling]

You could make it a curse instead. Yes, they are still special snowflakes, but now it sucks. They could be linked to the land of the dead, and see spirits...But not very clearly. So they get odd premonitions they cannot figure out, whispers in their mind, and a sneaking suspicion about the sausage maker they can never explain. Plenty go insane or try to become hermits, but others try to work past these issues to become truly great heroes, through ones that might tend to talk to the furniture a bit too much.

Or it could suck in another way. See, there are gods, the ones that the clerics worship. But even they must bow down to to the REAL Gods, whose mere voice would cause mortals to explode. These guys don't really care for creation much, as they can just call a mulligan if it gets too infected with aberrations or cat girls. They might not want to, because they find mortals with their limited senses, life span and overall squishiness really amusing. So they mark their favorites to use in games against each other. But sometimes they want to play again, so these people, and only these people, are permitted the right to be reborn for the God's own amusement. Thing is, not many people have an idea that these Gods truly exist, so have no idea what it means to be marked by destiny other then you can return from the dead and your life will be...Interesting.

[Nibbens]

Here's an idea. The big caveat to all revive spells is that the target must be willing to come back. Spirits unbound by their bodies enjoying their afterlife - who'd want to come back to pain and misery?

Kings family was attempted to be revived - didn't want to come back. They didn't have anything left to accomplish or they have a higher view of existence now and can wait for their family member to come to them, etc etc.

The NPC they tried to revive, the prisoner just went from 3 hots and a cot to everlasting enjoyment of his own style - why would he want to come back. Etc etc.

Players like to come back - why - they have unfinished business. Maybe they find the idea of existence with a body better than the muteness of the soul.

Something like this?

[NichG]

Here's an idea. The big caveat to all revive spells is that the target must be willing to come back. Spirits unbound by their bodies enjoying their afterlife - who'd want to come back to pain and misery?


Big important people or people who want to be big and important are likely to want to come back if they have any sense of responsibility, which may mean lots of NPCs who are important to keep dead. It might even be to the point that killing the king on his coronation and then reviving him becomes part of the ritual in order to weed out lazy or unmotivated regents - the king has to feel the call to rule more than he likes what's waiting for him in the afterlife.

Also, transparency is good with things like this. For this kind of thing its best to avoid the feel of DM-ex-machina if possible, so things which are arbitrary and unknowable (what the NPC wants or feels like doing) aren't as good as things that are measurable (pre-existing qualification for resurrection) or directly calculable (specific rules on how resurrection works). That way the players can reason 'should we try a resurrection or not?' rather than it being a crapshoot.

[Keltest]

You could make it a curse instead. Yes, they are still special snowflakes, but now it sucks. They could be linked to the land of the dead, and see spirits...But not very clearly. So they get odd premonitions they cannot figure out, whispers in their mind, and a sneaking suspicion about the sausage maker they can never explain. Plenty go insane or try to become hermits, but others try to work past these issues to become truly great heroes, through ones that might tend to talk to the furniture a bit too much.

You enjoyed Pillars of Eternity, didn't you.

[Segev]

"Kill-and-raise-the-king" sounds like a great way for the clergy to make sure they have final say on who gets to sit on the throne, too. "Oh, looks like he wasn't dedicated enough. What a waste of perfectly good glas--er, diamond."

[jedipilot24]

As I'm reading this thread, I can't help but remember Saph's two Campaign Journals: Red Hand of Doom (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?94243-Campaign-Journal-The-Red-Hand-of-Doom!)and Seven Kingdoms (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?139572-Campaign-Journal-Seven-Kingdoms). In the former it seemed like a character died almost every session and sometimes more than one, the results of the reincarnate spell sometimes proved to be quite humorous and I'm still laughing at the Teleport Mishap; Seven Kingdoms wasn't so deadly but still had its moments.

[Honest Tiefling]

You enjoyed Pillars of Eternity, didn't you.

No idea what that is. I was thinking more Discworld, personally.

[Keltest]

No idea what that is. I was thinking more Discworld, personally.

The main plot is that the character suddenly becomes one of the rare individuals who can see spirits. Naturally, its quite distressing.

[Elandris Kajar]

I really like the dea of afterlife is bliss.
This also helps NPCs get rezzed easily, especially if evil. I mean, everyone loves being a tortured soul in the Nine Hells or the Abyss. Who would want to come back?
On another note, what If a villainous organization stole the corpse and replaced with one of there recently deceased executives? Disguise works on corpses right? Besides, what PCs will really check the corpse (at least the first time) to make sure it is the right one?

[Honest Tiefling]

I really like the dea of afterlife is bliss.
This also helps NPCs get rezzed easily, especially if evil. I mean, everyone loves being a tortured soul in the Nine Hells or the Abyss. Who would want to come back?

Those who know they can win and take over the dump on their climb to power, actually. For those types, yes, it sucks, but they know that one day, they'll be ruling this place and might not be in a hurry to go back to the prime. To them, it could be a paradise.