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RazorChain
2018-01-25, 07:52 PM
This is a bit D&D centric.

I have wondered what I would do in a world were I could have my loved one resurrected.

Just think about it; your parent, sibling or child dies and now you have 10 days to get your hands on 100.000$ (500 gold pieces) so you can pay for raise dead else the price doubles. Most likely you don't have access to central banking (D&D 5e)

Then you have jerkbag adventurers that maintain that they are good that stomp around with bags of holding full of wealth and the powers to help.

But they are too busy and cant be bothered

In this world you know exactly how much a life is worth: 500 GP

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-25, 07:55 PM
I know notation conventions are different in different places... is that supposed to be one hundred dollars ($100.00 in American notation) or one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000)?

NichG
2018-01-25, 09:07 PM
That's a good environment for both the concept of insurance and the concept of debt slavery to thrive. Let's rez you now and if you have to spend 20 years working it off, well, would you rather die or lose 20 years?

You'll also have the situation where, given a presumably limited supply of diamonds, there would be strong pressures on the church to 'save it for important people', which the church could either take a strong stand against or could comply with (meaning you'd have black market resurrections going around - good for druids whose method comes with side effects).

And if the resurrection economy makes the world sufficiently awful, people may just not want to come back to face it. Imagine if you do horrible things to raise that 100k for your loved one, but they refuse to return because they assume it's going to be to decades of slavery...

On the plus side, if you can transcend all of those market forces, death is just a holiday to an exotic locale for a bit, people have to learn to work out their differences because killing doesn't work, etc.

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-25, 09:20 PM
In a DnD world, you can probably save yourself a bit of money by asking your church if 1) their afterlife is awesome and 2) are you going in that direction? I mean, death sucks, but if you get to drink whiskey and party with celestials...Maybe wait a scootch to rejoin your loved ones? It's sorta a cheaper option.

In a DnD-esque world, there might also be monsters where you really want a party of adventurers to be between you and them, even if they tend to set things on fire, piss on things and sleep with everything. Sure, they might be murder hobos, but it might be better then the alternative.

RazorChain
2018-01-25, 09:38 PM
I know notation conventions are different in different places... is that supposed to be one hundred dollars ($100.00 in American notation) or one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000)?

One hundred thousand dollars, we use periods where I come from. 500 gp is 10 lbs hmm it actually should be two hundred thousand dollars in modern currency. I miscalculated

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-25, 09:50 PM
One hundred thousand dollars, we use periods where I come from. 500 gp is 10 lbs hmm it actually should be two hundred thousand dollars in modern currency. I miscalculated


Ouch. That diamond really does put a barrier on access, doesn't it? I wonder how many players realize just what kind of wealth they're casually toting around in that system.

"Adventurer 'privilege'"? :smallwink:


Unless the religious leaders are invested in maintaining a very strong belief in a wonderful afterlife in the common populace, there's going to be a LOT of class resentment and displeasure over economic inequality. The pressure to "get rich before you die trying" would be immense, perhaps.

How do these spells affect aging? Is there a point at which you'd be bringing someone back just for them to die again in a week or less? If not, or there's also a way to revitalize / rejuvenate the body, then those who can afford it just keep coming back over and over again potentially forever, resulting in a very entrenched "elite".

RazorChain
2018-01-25, 09:53 PM
In a DnD world, you can probably save yourself a bit of money by asking your church if 1) their afterlife is awesome and 2) are you going in that direction? I mean, death sucks, but if you get to drink whiskey and party with celestials...Maybe wait a scootch to rejoin your loved ones? It's sorta a cheaper option.

As a parent if I would lose a child you can bet I would sell the house and the cow (car) to get my child brought back to life. It didnt matter how awesome the priest tells me the afterlife is.

If the afterlife was so awesome then resurrection would fail because nobody wanted to come back.

Mutazoia
2018-01-26, 12:48 AM
As a parent if I would lose a child you can bet I would sell the house and the cow (car) to get my child brought back to life. It didnt matter how awesome the priest tells me the afterlife is.

If the afterlife was so awesome then resurrection would fail because nobody wanted to come back.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdMuXNa4OUA

Knaight
2018-01-26, 01:50 AM
There's usually some pickiness as to what people can recover from - violent death is usually in, natural causes is usually out. There's some leeway there around illness, but if raise dead is even on the table then it's probably well in hand.

BWR
2018-01-26, 02:45 AM
100.000$ (500 gp
500 GP


This depends on edition. It may be 500 gp in 5e, but it's 5000gp in 3.x (is the buying power of gp different in the two systems?) and free in BECMI/RC, 1e and 2e.
And I know there are certain setting supplements that specifically state that clerics (sometimes) provide their services for free. So exactly how available medical services are to the not so rich public depends on the setting, system and individuals. Good luck finding divine magic in Glantri, for instance.

Kaptin Keen
2018-01-26, 03:15 AM
That's a good environment for both the concept of insurance and the concept of debt slavery to thrive. Let's rez you now and if you have to spend 20 years working it off, well, would you rather die or lose 20 years?

That's needlessly harsh. What we'll do is, we'll animate you as a skeleton, and you'll do manual labor to the value of 15.000 gold pieces, at which point we'll ressurrect you. Upon revivification, you get 1.000 gold to get yourself started, and you're back in the game.

RazorChain
2018-01-26, 03:22 AM
That's needlessly harsh. What we'll do is, we'll animate you as a skeleton, and you'll do manual labor to the value of 15.000 gold pieces, at which point we'll ressurrect you. Upon revivification, you get 1.000 gold to get yourself started, and you're back in the game.

So if we are talking about 5e then you'll most likely be resurrected 99 years later.....or dangit we passed a century but who's complaining? Not mister undead here, he's happy as a hippo!!

NichG
2018-01-26, 03:30 AM
That's needlessly harsh. What we'll do is, we'll animate you as a skeleton, and you'll do manual labor to the value of 15.000 gold pieces, at which point we'll ressurrect you. Upon revivification, you get 1.000 gold to get yourself started, and you're back in the game.

Some would do that just for the 1000 gold, given that it's the rough equivalent of $400k USD (though I suspect gold is just less valuable in a D&D setting - using loaves of bread as a reference, I'm getting something like 500gp ~= $35k USD). But that 15k gold manual labor is pretty optimistic - that means their skeleton (and the society making these promises for that matter) would have to hold up through centuries or millenia of work (2000 years at 2cp/day wages)...

Interestingly, it looks like a trained hireling (3sp/day) minus meals (1sp/day) but with their own lodging would actually make enough to be Reincarnated periodically (1000gp each time = 14 years labor, or 28 if we assume 50% taxes) and essentially be immortal. So the economic divide isn't quite so bad as adventurers-only.

RazorChain
2018-01-26, 03:56 AM
Some would do that just for the 1000 gold, given that it's the rough equivalent of $400k USD (though I suspect gold is just less valuable in a D&D setting - using loaves of bread as a reference, I'm getting something like 500gp ~= $35k USD). But that 15k gold manual labor is pretty optimistic - that means their skeleton (and the society making these promises for that matter) would have to hold up through centuries or millenia of work (2000 years at 2cp/day wages)...

Now I'm not familiar enough with the wages in D&D so i just used the weight of gold coins 50 per lbs and turned it into real world value of gold.

I know that D&D suffers from devalued gold because of it's abundance and the designers had no sense of economics

Kaptin Keen
2018-01-26, 05:41 AM
So if we are talking about 5e then you'll most likely be resurrected 99 years later.....or dangit we passed a century but who's complaining? Not mister undead here, he's happy as a hippo!!

Frankly, it's win-win. Perfect deal for everybody - something that's only ever possible via magic =)


Some would do that just for the 1000 gold, given that it's the rough equivalent of $400k USD (though I suspect gold is just less valuable in a D&D setting - using loaves of bread as a reference, I'm getting something like 500gp ~= $35k USD). But that 15k gold manual labor is pretty optimistic - that means their skeleton (and the society making these promises for that matter) would have to hold up through centuries or millenia of work (2000 years at 2cp/day wages)...

Interestingly, it looks like a trained hireling (3sp/day) minus meals (1sp/day) but with their own lodging would actually make enough to be Reincarnated periodically (1000gp each time = 14 years labor, or 28 if we assume 50% taxes) and essentially be immortal. So the economic divide isn't quite so bad as adventurers-only.

Well, reincarnated is pretty random, right? So one day you come back as a squirrel - sure, you're good at collecting nuts, but you don't live that long, and you can't make enough to earn your next life.

On the other hand, ressurrection doesn't extend your natural span.

It's a trade off. But regardless, I'm sure the Firm would eventually figure out a spell that does extend your life - only it's twice the cost.

SilverCacaobean
2018-01-26, 07:39 AM
I've thought about that sometimes. To be honest, I don't like the idea of resurrection but if it could happen, what would follow death would depend on the society in question.

More specifically on the healthcare they'd have. Maybe the taxes they pay cover some or all of the costs in case of death depending on how one died. Or maybe it's just a barrier of money that only adventurers can pass. I mean it wouldn't be substantially different than a disease, would it? Only thing they'd have to do first is communicate with the spirit to figure out if they want to be resurrected.

Whyrocknodie
2018-01-26, 07:42 AM
If all you import is the actual ability to raise the dead for a diamond of <whatever value>, then the important question of how you determine the value of a diamond becomes the key factor in how it affects society. Mass artificial diamond production, elimination of market constraints on diamond mining - these things should become the biggest industries in the world if the price of diamonds can be set by a specific mortal agency. The pricing of the material component is a entire topic by itself!

If you also import the various D&D afterlife type stuff, then suddenly the value of being raised from the dead crashes into the gutter as finding the best afterlife is way more important. There's still some call for being raised, if you haven't secured that afterlife yet for some reason - however, as they just require you to follow a 'good' alignment, it won't be expensive. People doing 'evil' deeds would need some kind of raise dead insurance until they'd finished with them and moved on to 'good' for afterlife purposes.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-26, 07:42 AM
Now I'm not familiar enough with the wages in D&D so i just used the weight of gold coins 50 per lbs and turned it into real world value of gold.

I know that D&D suffers from devalued gold because of it's abundance and the designers had no sense of economics

That part I bolded -- that's pretty much the beginning and end of it.

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-26, 11:50 AM
As a parent if I would lose a child you can bet I would sell the house and the cow (car) to get my child brought back to life. It didnt matter how awesome the priest tells me the afterlife is.

Yeah, probably...Unless you had other children. Sorry Timmy, you're low on the priority list! No food for you!


If the afterlife was so awesome then resurrection would fail because nobody wanted to come back.

I assume one reason Adventurers get priority on this matter is that they're willing to come back from the big ol' Celestial party to finish some business, aka, punching the baddies.

SirGraystone
2018-01-29, 10:59 AM
To get access to a raise dead spell, you need a cleric at least 9th level, a 500 gp diamond and pay for the Cleric time and effort. Adventure's league put the price of raise dead at 1,250 gp (which I assume includes the diamond).

Unless you are a nobleman or rich merchant, even rich peoples have most of their money in lands and things not at the bottom of a chest, and most will never get the 1,250 gp. Next if you the coins, you have to find a cleric, you don't find 9th level cleric in most small town or village that can mean travelling to the capital for it, remember you only have 10 days for a raise dead to work. Once in the capital, you have to get access to the cleric which may mean bribing so clerk to let you in (more gold to spend).

But least say you are a Duke, you have the gold, you personally know the Bishop, but you have a 2nd son who now that the elder son is dead is going to inherit you fortune and may try to stop it.

Last in medieval time (and most of the world history really) many had large family and losing young children while sad was not surprising, it was a common thing.

Sebastian
2018-01-30, 05:34 PM
On the plus side, if you can transcend all of those market forces, death is just a holiday to an exotic locale for a bit, people have to learn to work out their differences because killing doesn't work, etc.

Ah, but killing does work. You just need to be a little more ... thorough. like burn the corpse to ashes (and spread the ashes), hide it where it can't be found (or even just the head) or use a souls stealing weapon/item.

Of course there is true resurrection, but that is a whole different league (and there are ways around it if you are creative enough)

Florian
2018-01-30, 06:32 PM
As a parent if I would lose a child you can bet I would sell the house and the cow (car) to get my child brought back to life. It didnt matter how awesome the priest tells me the afterlife is.

If the afterlife was so awesome then resurrection would fail because nobody wanted to come back.

That's a bit the crux of the matter. In D&D land, the afterlife is a proven and pretty reliable thing. You can even visit it and take a look for yourself. The rules on how to get there are also pretty simple, like pick the right god or pantheon, match the alignment, done.

So spells like Resurrection are more of a "unfinished business" thing. "Whoa, sorry you lot of angels, much as Iīd love spending eternity with you, but I've got to go back and kill the evil Lich!".

Else, I donīt really see why someone wants to come back.

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-30, 07:02 PM
Else, I donīt really see why someone wants to come back.

As a question, how would the spouse or child in question feel about coming back once they are back? Especially if there are other family members who were made to suffer to bring them back when they'd be reunited in a bit. Especially if in your twilight years, where the wait wouldn't be THAT long.

I could easily see a spouse getting very irate at being drug back to the realm of the living if it mean that the children lost several opportunities for a better life. It'd make more sense in smaller families, but small families are very modern concepts for a lot of history. You'd have to take resources away from your grandparents, parents, cousins and other family members of a clan to do this. And considering the cost? You could be risking the well-being of many people to say hi to your wife a few decades early.

Florian
2018-01-30, 07:37 PM
The weirdness would also not be Resurrection, but rather Planar Binding, as that should work with Petitioners. Not only can you ask your dead family member how itīs on the outer planes and discuss a Rezz or not, but on top you can still bind them to tasks, like doing the cooking and laundry.

NichG
2018-01-30, 08:36 PM
That's a bit the crux of the matter. In D&D land, the afterlife is a proven and pretty reliable thing. You can even visit it and take a look for yourself. The rules on how to get there are also pretty simple, like pick the right god or pantheon, match the alignment, done.

So spells like Resurrection are more of a "unfinished business" thing. "Whoa, sorry you lot of angels, much as Iīd love spending eternity with you, but I've got to go back and kill the evil Lich!".

Else, I donīt really see why someone wants to come back.

The D&D afterlives are pretty dystopian in general though. First all your abilities and memories are washed away unless you get direct intervention by a deity. Then, your ability to learn and form new memories is lobotomized. Then you're slowly dissolved into whatever plane you end up on - fading into a pleasure-induced oblivion on Elysium, ground into dust and bone fragments in Acheron, purified into nothingness in Celestia, etc. Being a petitioner sucks.

To actually come out on top of that, you need to not just be Good or whatever, but be relevant enough to warrant special attention and make it into the 'break glass in case of Armageddon' hall of heroes reserve of a given deity. So it might make sense to come back if you die before Lv11 say (e.g. wait to register to legend lore)

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-30, 08:57 PM
The D&D afterlives are pretty dystopian in general though. First all your abilities and memories are washed away unless you get direct intervention by a deity. Then, your ability to learn and form new memories is lobotomized. Then you're slowly dissolved into whatever plane you end up on - fading into a pleasure-induced oblivion on Elysium, ground into dust and bone fragments in Acheron, purified into nothingness in Celestia, etc. Being a petitioner sucks.

To actually come out on top of that, you need to not just be Good or whatever, but be relevant enough to warrant special attention and make it into the 'break glass in case of Armageddon' hall of heroes reserve of a given deity. So it might make sense to come back if you die before Lv11 say (e.g. wait to register to legend lore)


Most afterlives in most RPG worlds and most fictional and real religions really really fail to live up to the "why would you ever come back" hype once you look at what they're supposed to actually be.

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-30, 09:01 PM
I kinda just assumed that for the purposes of the exercise, the afterlife wasn't a terrifying nightmare. Through the more canonical answer does explain why selling your soul and getting some chance of coming back as a devil has some appeal.

Mechalich
2018-01-30, 09:05 PM
The availability of magic to raise the dead is only one of many mystical capabilities that induce massive distortions to a D&D fantasy world that quickly render it unrecognizable.

For instance, cure disease is a relatively low-level spell in all editions (it's moved around on various spell lists over time). It'll cost a few hundred gold at most, probably less if you go to an appropriately affiliated temple. As a result, no one above a certain economic status - figure upper level merchants/lower-level nobility - dies of disease ever. If you interpret 'disease' broadly to include even things like cancer and heart disease as opposed to just bacterial and viral infections (and even if remove disease does not cover these, remove curse or restoration presumably does), then you have just outright eliminated something like 90% of the causes of death from the reality of the upper classes. Likewise the presence of cure spells will massively reduce the likelihood of death from accidents, since any incident that doesn't kill a person outright can be healed so long as they can be stabilized at all by any means - including emergency potions (it only costs 50 gp to have a cure light in the house in case of emergency).

As a result, aside from people who go to war or face active assassination attempts, the chances of actually dying of something other than old age would be fairly rare among the rich - and D&D raise dead does nothing in the face of old age. This creates immense pressure in D&D worlds for the rich to avoid warfare, which is actually the opposite of the European Middle Ages - when the rich were disproportionately represented in the martial arena.

So you get the Dark Sun style dystopia of a small class of rich that lives in fortified city compounds with an average lifespan in the mid-80s (among humans, rich elves are averaging over 500 years) while the masses conduct hard labor and are bribed with bread and circuses to remain docile and die in their 30s.

D+1
2018-01-30, 09:05 PM
As a parent if I would lose a child you can bet I would sell the house and the cow (car) to get my child brought back to life. It didnt matter how awesome the priest tells me the afterlife is.

If the afterlife was so awesome then resurrection would fail because nobody wanted to come back.
This is, in fact, my house rule which applies to ALL NPC's. With only extraordinary, rare exception, the afterlife is one that no NPC will willingly choose to give up, or if they would, their chosen deity will not permit them to return. PLAYER characters are exceptions, and players may choose whatever they like. NON-player characters choose as I say they do, and I say that the afterlife is a state of bliss that they WILL NOT abandon, or if it's not bliss then it is a state that they are religiously/cosmologically prevented from backtracking from.

I rule that way to solve all manner of stupid game-setting problems with death being meaningless for NPC's. Assassinate kings need to STAY dead. Slain BBEG need to STAY dead. Eventually PC's will fail a resurrection roll and then they can roll up a new PC, but NPC's that just keep coming back again and again and again has always just felt exceedingly lame to me. I finally realized it wasn't a RULES problem - it was a ROLEPLAYING problem and as DM I have always had it in my power to solve it. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz I simply needed to realize that to make it happen. :)

Mordaedil
2018-01-31, 05:05 AM
Now I'm not familiar enough with the wages in D&D so i just used the weight of gold coins 50 per lbs and turned it into real world value of gold.

I know that D&D suffers from devalued gold because of it's abundance and the designers had no sense of economics

Doing this doesn't work because gold value right now isn't like gold value at any point previously. We're not using a gold standard anymore, so the price of gold right now is in terms of decorative use, not value in terms of worth.

D&D worlds are closer to the barter system society, only recently having adopted coinage for simplicity, but even then there's a lot of disagreements with how their gold works, whether it is dependant on kingdoms and it doesn't have a system for supply-demand that a proper barter system would need. There's also the fact that D&D has literal dragons hoarding and saving large masses of the gold ore which would probably drain all of the gold supplies in the real world. And then there's the gold you spend on casting spells and the like, where that goes (do extraplanar entities also trade in gold? How cynical and capitalistic!) not to mention how many diamonds are available to the populace and wasted on bringing back the dead.

It's kind of a nightmare to translate because D&D has unique circumstances that the real world is free of. You'd be better off tracing wages for certain professions, but even that doesn't quite hold up as a lot of professions just aren't in a similar situation. Nothing really is.

Mechalich
2018-01-31, 05:15 AM
Doing this doesn't work because gold value right now isn't like gold value at any point previously. We're not using a gold standard anymore, so the price of gold right now is in terms of decorative use, not value in terms of worth.

D&D worlds are closer to the barter system society, only recently having adopted coinage for simplicity, but even then there's a lot of disagreements with how their gold works, whether it is dependant on kingdoms and it doesn't have a system for supply-demand that a proper barter system would need. There's also the fact that D&D has literal dragons hoarding and saving large masses of the gold ore which would probably drain all of the gold supplies in the real world. And then there's the gold you spend on casting spells and the like, where that goes (do extraplanar entities also trade in gold? How cynical and capitalistic!) not to mention how many diamonds are available to the populace and wasted on bringing back the dead.

It's kind of a nightmare to translate because D&D has unique circumstances that the real world is free of. You'd be better off tracing wages for certain professions, but even that doesn't quite hold up as a lot of professions just aren't in a similar situation. Nothing really is.

In D&D you can go to the Elemental Plane of Earth (and in certain editions the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral) and acquire massive quantities of any metal you like so long as you're powerful enough to fight of the elementals this sort of extraction aggravates. The Dao, as a species, spend the majority of their time directing some absurdly massive number of slaves to do nothing but mine the Elemental Plane of Earth and can supply can quantity of precious metal you need so long as you're willing to trade with evil genies at crummy rates.

Mordaedil
2018-02-01, 02:24 AM
In D&D you can go to the Elemental Plane of Earth (and in certain editions the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral) and acquire massive quantities of any metal you like so long as you're powerful enough to fight of the elementals this sort of extraction aggravates. The Dao, as a species, spend the majority of their time directing some absurdly massive number of slaves to do nothing but mine the Elemental Plane of Earth and can supply can quantity of precious metal you need so long as you're willing to trade with evil genies at crummy rates.

Right, I forgot that every commoner in D&D are wizards.

Max_Killjoy
2018-02-01, 07:34 AM
Right, I forgot that every commoner in D&D are wizards.

They don't have to be. The actual wizards have ways to get non-wizards to other planes.

It provides another source of gold that doesn't exist in the real world.

It also creates a drag on the value of gold -- as gold gets more valuable, there's more incentive to set up one of these extraplanar mining operations. It's a bit like the current situation with oil in IRL, with certain reserves that become profitable to extract from when the price of a barrel goes above a certain threshold, which are also outside the control of those who would like the price to be quite a bit higher.

NichG
2018-02-01, 08:56 AM
In 2ed, forget about the Elemental Plane of Earth, just go with Limbo. Illusion spells had a small percentage chance of becoming real every time you cast them on Limbo. So just cast 20 illusions of, say, a 20x20x20ft cube of solid gold, and one of them will stick around.