Does your setting have resurrection?

[Protato]

Does your setting have immortality? If yes or no, why? I have an idea for a world in my head but not enough written down to post yet, but a rule of my world is no resurrection, at least no resurrection without a cost. As a 5e player/DM I plan to write it for that world and many of the rules and such shall remain, except reviving the dead in their "true" state. To me, it simply doesn't make sense that bringing someone back to life could exist and still have the world exist "as it does" so to speak. Basically, if people could be brought back from the dead without much cost except perhaps money or time, it'd make death cheap, not so much for players but for the world itself. However, undeath (usually with no consciousness) exists, as does resurrecting a soul and putting it in a body. However, this is at best risky. Think of it like Fullmetal Alchemist: One can attempt to bring someone back from the dead, but all you create in a parody of life, or force someone to inhabit a body that could reject the soul outright, and that's the closest thing to bringing people back is.

[Mechalich]

Whether or not the dead can be returned to life is an important setting design function, but it's not an either/or choice. Rather there's a sliding scale that ranges from 'death is immutable' to 'death is meaningless' and all sorts of weird side routes like undeath tacked on. For instance, even in a setting where no one can come back from the dead it matters if the dead manifestly persist in some kind of afterlife and have the ability to contact the living in some fashion.

In terms of verisimilitude, 'death is immutable' is on the strongest grounds, since that's the scenario the audience is most familiar with and the only one with factual support. That being said, methods to defy death are among the most powerful tropes in fantasy and in science fiction (in the latter they have become much more plausible leading to an open embrace of transhumanist solutions to the death issue as a common method). As such, there is strong support for having some sort of device to get around death in a setting. Fullmetal Alchemist, as mentioned, has just such a mechanism at the core of its story, it's just horrifying.

Additionally, when constructing a game, mechanisms to avoid character death are highly valued to avoid frustration by the players. This is doubly true in TTRPGs where you can't just reload a save if someone dies - video games that embrace 'permadeath' of characters often presume that no player will allow this and have cut-scenes with characters who could hypothetically be dead in them, ex. Fire Emblem. One of the reasons the various raise dead type spells were baked into the D&D cake early on is that characters in early editions of D&D die a lot, so a means of bringing them back had high utility.

Note that you can have some limited availability of resurrection in a setting without it making death cheap. If resurrection is some sort of legendary event that requires direct divine intervention or priceless artifacts or some other special McGuffin then it becomes a story goal and integrates into the setting backstory. The real issue with resurrection is when it becomes sufficiently abundant and reliable that any individual in the setting - and this starts at the top so we're talking archmages or emperors - can actively expect resurrection.

[the_david]

I have an idea for a setting/cosmology/campaign where there are no undead. I suppose I should add the no resurrection clause as the whole point of the story is that something comes along and breaks a barrier between the mortal plane and the afterlife and all of a sudden undead start roaming around on the material plane.

So yes, but only after a world (plane?) shattering event.

[The Glyphstone]

My setting has resurrection possible, but only through a ritual that requires three willing sacrificial victims to die in exchange. Almost all undead are created either through performing said ritual incorrectly, or deliberate variants intended to create animated dead.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Since my setting is designed to include all the core pieces from 5e D&D, resurrection is a thing. It's restricted by two factors--

* Availability. Of the 4 major nations in the main play area, there are a total of 168 people who could conceivably cast Raise Dead (which has a 10-day window and does not replace damaged/missing organs). There are 5 who could conceivably cast Resurrection. One particular nation has no one who can cast either of those--they have druids but they don't get either of those spells.

* Religion/culture. Of those clerics and paladins, the major religions discourage "frivolous" raising of the dead. Did they die of natural causes? The Lady of Mercy says "let them rest." Did they die in battle? The Sun-Lord says "Don't cheapen their glorious deaths." Did they die of carelessness? The Shadowed Sun says "as you sew, so shall ye reap." The Spring Lady doesn't particularly care about things/people who aren't fluffy or cute. The druid circles (for reincarnate) have a strong "cycle of life" policy, so they're not likely to help much.

[brian 333]

My campaign is not upgraded to 5e, so my points may not be valid. However, even as far back as 1st ed. Resurrection was exceedingly rare, with Raise Dead being very rare. For typical NPCs, it was out of reach due to cost, and even NPCs with wealth had to find a cleric capable of performing it.

And that was the primary li iting factor: finding a cleric capable of performing the rituals. In my campaign I am aware of six NPC's with enough levels to cast Resurrection, with maybe a dozen more capable of casting Raise. Half of them aren't likely to want to raise your character because it doesn't serve their church to do so, and they already have more wealth than they can use.

They are also scattered around the world, so the PCs might find one of them, if they know where to look.

For PCs, the rare scroll drop was the only viable choice, and I only included that when I knew the challenge was very high. PCs of high enough level could raise PCs, but the cost was high, mostly because I tended to make sure they were spending as much as they were getting along the way.

From my perspective it was never an issue, but then in my campaign, an NPC at or above tenth level was very rare, and put there for a specific reason.

[Nifft]

Is there resurrection: YES.

Do people know what happens after death: NO.

Is the nature or lifecycle of "souls" well-understood: NOPE.

Can you buy & sell souls anyway: YUP.

[Grek]

My setting (a mutants and masterminds fantasy setting) has as an axiom of the magic system 'What Magic Did, Magic Can Undo' so resurrection is only possible if the person was killed by a spell. Speak With Dead and Summon Ghost also exist, but as pure counterfactual divination and calling up the memory of the departed from the mind of an acquaintance. No souls, as far as anyone knows.

[jqavins]

I haven't decided whether to make it unavailable or just hard to get, but it will be far from assumed. One factor to consider is how hard you want it to be to die. I don't know in 5e, or if you have any house rules, but if Raise Dead and Resurrection are out of the question the you need to have mechanisms that make survival very likely, such as resuscitation, a slow period of bleeding out, etc.

[AGow95]

I like the idea of resurrection being a full on quest in its own right, like in say ancient greek myth where the hero would venture into the underworld to save lost souls, like if you aren't finding an ancient and rare artifact, making a pact with an powerful magical being, or personally punching the gatekeeper of Hell, you aren't getting your buddy back.

[Grim Portent]

In my setting you're only coming back from the dead by the intervention of dark powers, so as an undead or a demon of some kind. If your party wants to be able to run a revolving door to the underworld then someone needs to learn necromancy or everyone needs to make pacts with demon lords and someone has to be able to summon their newly demonic party members. It's also possible to bust into the underworld and free the deceased the hard way, but they're still not alive in their original state, but undead/demonic just without any strings attached.

In the absence of one of the above coming back as a spontaneous undead sooner or later is possible in some regions of the world.

There is one being capable of truly ressurecting the dead, the settings most powerful god, but he is himself dead and choosing to stay that way out of what is essentially spite, because coming back to life would end the vengeful curses he put on the world when he died.

[PhoenixPhyre]

From a game perspective, my problem with "resurrection as quest" is what to do with the player of the dead character.

Can't play for N sessions? No thanks.

Replacement character for N sessions? Could work, but apt to cause issues (especially with verisimilitude if you just drop one in). And if you're just going to get an at level replacement, why bother resurrecting the dead dude? He'll be behind one he returns, so...

Something else?

[Mechalich]

Resurrection as a massive quest is unsuited to use for PCs. Taking a long time - essentially more than a single session - to resurrect a member of the party is not worth doing. An epic quest to resurrect an NPC is simply another form of McGuffin quest, though it often goes over poorly since it explicitly elevates an NPC to more important than the PCs.

Resurrection as a method to deal with lethality issues is frankly a bad tool. It only makes sense for high powered characters which means that implementing it creates stratification and a resultant cascade of distortions that you probably want to avoid (ie. welcome to level 9, past this point you never die). Using resurrection for this purpose is really only suitable to low verisimilitude settings that aren't really interested in the implications of design choices and are all about the action. DBZ is a good example of a setting that works this way. Death is mostly a minor inconvenience that is actually used as a plot point to build fight tension - because death means you're out of the fight for a while not actually gone - rather than anything else. This works for low-concept action comedies, but is poorly suited for much else. Fair point: the lion's share of actual TTRPG games play out as low-concept action-comedies that don't sweat the details, so resurrection may work just fine.

[jqavins]

From a game perspective, my problem with "resurrection as quest" is what to do with the player of the dead character...
I'm not endorsing or condemning quest-for-resurrection in general, but in answer to this, the player often can temporarily take over a prominent NPC. I've done this successfully; it wasn't a resurrection situation, but a different case of a player who needed a character that would last only one adventure.

I was taking over as DM for one adventure to give the regular DM a chance to play a character in the world he'd created. I took a favorite NPC, a centuries old, very successful elven shop keeper, and gave him a past as a high level thief (AD&D) on a lifelong quest to regain a family heirloom. He'd gone into business on the theory that if you sit long enough in one place the whole world will pass by, and it worked; when he obtained a lead on a piece of it, he asked his friends - the party - for help retrieving it, and he went along. His skills had gone rusty over the years, but came back during play with each success. It was a great success, if I do say so myself.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I'm not endorsing or condemning quest-for-resurrection in general, but in answer to this, the player often can temporarily take over a prominent NPC. I've done this successfully; it wasn't a resurrection situation, but a different case of a player who needed a character that would last only one adventure.

I was taking over as DM for one adventure to give the regular DM a chance to play a character in the world he'd created. I took a favorite NPC, a centuries old, very successful elven shop keeper, and gave him a past as a high level thief (AD&D) on a lifelong quest to regain a family heirloom. He'd gone into business on the theory that if you sit long enough in one place the whole world will pass by, and it worked; when he obtained a lead on a piece of it, he asked his friends - the party - for help retrieving it, and he went along. His skills had gone rusty over the years, but came back during play with each success. It was a great success, if I do say so myself.

I can see that working, as long as it's explicitly "this one session" (or otherwise a known time-limited case). I had one character that died (low level so no resurrection available) half-way through a session, and his new character couldn't come in until halfway through the next session. So he ran some monsters for me. That was a bit of a punishment, since he had died through unmitigated, utter stupidity (no, that CR 9 Dire Yeti isn't an appropriate challenge for a level 2 Paladin all by himself, so when the DM says "are you sure?" a dozen times...)

[Nifft]

DM: "Here's your resurrection quest. You play the monsters in all our encounters until you manage to kill another PC. Then you can come back, and that player has to sit in the penalty box running monsters."

There, full participation for the player(s) of the dead.

[PhoenixPhyre]

DM: "Here's your resurrection quest. You play the monsters in all our encounters until you manage to kill another PC. Then you can come back, and that player has to sit in the penalty box running monsters."

There, full participation for the player(s) of the dead.

I hope that was in virtual blue text? Because that sounds like a recipe for disaster except in very particular groups. Not quite Deck of Many Things disaster, but close.

[Nifft]

I hope that was in virtual blue text? Because that sounds like a recipe for disaster except in very particular groups. Not quite Deck of Many Things disaster, but close.

It does take a particular group dynamic to support over time. We didn't do this for long, but it was fun while it lasted.

Not really sarcastic, though -- it would be more fun than sitting on the sidelines, at least, which was the competing non-blue suggestion.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It does take a particular group dynamic to support over time. We didn't do this for long, but it was fun while it lasted.

Not really sarcastic, though -- it would be more fun than sitting on the sidelines, at least, which was the competing non-blue suggestion.

I see. I happen to hate inter-player antagonism (even at the "I get rewarded if your character suffers" level), so that wouldn't fly with me. To each their own, I guess.

[jqavins]

It does take a particular group dynamic to support over time. We didn't do this for long, but it was fun while it lasted.

Not really sarcastic, though -- it would be more fun than sitting on the sidelines, at least, which was the competing non-blue suggestion.
Wait what, that wasn't a joke? Day-ahm!

[Nifft]

I see. I happen to hate inter-player antagonism (even at the "I get rewarded if your character suffers" level), so that wouldn't fly with me. To each their own, I guess. If you've got a group which really enjoys tactical combat, and wants to WIN that combat rather than breezing through on DM fiat, then it's actually pretty nice to be able to step back and referee a conflict between two separate groups, both of whom are trying their best to beat the other.

It's not what I want every single game night, but it was interesting and fun as a sometimes food.


Wait what, that wasn't a joke? Day-ahm! It's funny and also potentially useful. So it was humorous, but it was not just humor.

[Thunderfist12]

Typically, no, I don't allow resurrection at all. If death isn't a big deal to the party, they won't care if they die and will never resort to anything other than combat to solve most issues. If death is final, and they are from time to time put into actual danger (facing a level 6 at first level for example), they might want to try alternatives to Spam Attack As Much As Possible, like negotiating, bribing, setting traps, ambush, or just flat out running.

Even undeath doesn't bring back the soul once it leaves the Material. The undead in my campaigns are usually inhabited by demons or other evil spirits which will follow every command they are required to (limits depending on the spell and the spirit), but twist them to prolong their task as much as possible without actual disobedience so they can remain "alive" as long as possible.

Reincarnate isn't something I use either. When the soul leaves the body, it's gone for good.

[Honest Tiefling]

Normally, resurrection that isn't immediate is banned when I DM. It explains why you can't keep resurrecting the king, but it gives the players a little more leeway in accidentally dying. I want the world to make sense more than to run a very challenging game.

However, I do love the Came Back Wrong trope. If I could marry that trope I would. It also makes for an excellent plot hook in my opinion, as the players can either figure out what happened to summon of these abominations or attempt to stop such a ritual.


I like the idea of resurrection being a full on quest in its own right, like in say ancient greek myth where the hero would venture into the underworld to save lost souls, like if you aren't finding an ancient and rare artifact, making a pact with an powerful magical being, or personally punching the gatekeeper of Hell, you aren't getting your buddy back.

But I like the way you think. I think that idea will go to my library of stolen ideas in case someone REALLY wants their PC back.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I usually allow standard raising and resurrection when I DM, with no "came back wrong" twisting or any sort of mechanical alterations. I don't find there's really a need to explain the effect of a "revolving door afterlife" on the world, since it's not nearly as much of a revolving door as it's often portrayed.

To use 3e values, you can bring anyone you want back to life provided you can:

(A) afford to pay 7,250 gp (5,000 gp in material components plus 2,250 gp in spellcasting fees for a basic raise dead)
(B) to the one to four 9th-level-or-higher clerics you might find in a Large Town or larger settlement
(C) within 9 days after the person died
(D) if the cleric belongs to a faith that is willing to resurrect anyone who pays,
(E) if the dead person is willing to return, and
(F) if there's no law or interested party preventing the dead person from returning.

This isn't exactly an easy task. To use Forgotten Realms, the setting with the most statted high-level NPCs, there are few clerics able to cast raise dead in all 3e FR products. Of these, most are evil or crazy/selfish/evil-leaning neutral, and are therefore not likely to be trusted either by the dead person's family or the resurrected soul (who only gets to know the alignment and patron deity of its resurrector). Of the remaining NPCs, only one (Sunrise Lord Ghentilara, LG cleric 6/morninglord of Lathander 10 and high priestess of Waterdeep's Spires of the Morning) is described as being the type to resurrect petitioners, being "as comfortable tending to an ill family in a small hovel in Dock Ward as she is while attending the most extravagant gala of the year, and she makes time for both in her busy days."

The rest are all very remote, like Sovial (LG human cleric 6/hand of the Adama 4), who would probably be happy to resurrect someone but only if they follow the upright teachings of the Adama and who can be found only in the remote Golden Water bay faaaar to the east of Faerûn; unlikely to resurrect anyone, like Acting Priest-General Gorym “Brightshield” Harndrekker (CG human fighter 2/cleric 9/divine disciple of Tempus 1), who leads the Abbey of the Sword in Cormanthor (which doesn't list resurrecting people under its list of available services), is described as an aging strategist, and who doesn't habitually prepare raise dead; very picky in who they might help, like High
 Harvestmaster
 Tolgar
 Anuvien (NG
 
human 
cleric
 16/divine 
disciple 
of 
Chauntea
 3), who is nicknamed "the Patiently Vengeful," is a retired adventurer, is solely focused on running and expanding his city of Goldenfields, and only welcomes followers of Chauntea or Lathander; far too busy with other pursuits, like Sunlord Daelegoth Orndeir (LN fire genasi cleric 10/sunmaster of Amaunator 10/evangelist 5), who is an epic-level heretical priest leading a schism with and crusade against the Church of Lathander while he tries to resurrect Amaunator, and probably doesn't have the free time or the desire to resurrect much of anyone; and so forth.

While it's certainly possible that there are other 9th+ level clerics to be found using the random settlement generation rules, with the number and alignment skew of FR gods it's very likely that you wouldn't find any more clerics willing and able than those named NPCs. So even in FR, a settling stereotypically overflowing with epic-level retired adventurers and high-level bartenders with overflowing pockets full of gold, it's entirely possible that even a beloved dead king wouldn't be able to be brought back from the dead.

And that's assuming no impediments to the process as per point F above. If the creature was beheaded, zombified, snuffed out with necromancy, or otherwise killed in an unpleasant manner, they can't be raised, requiring the dead person's relatives to find someone who can cast resurrection or true resurrection which is an even harder task, and as per the Cleric Quintet assassins routinely take or mutilate body parts to prevent raising. And laws are a factor as well:


[I]n most places (Waterdeep and Cormyr definitely among them), laws prevent nobles from being raised. This stops all sorts of power struggles, conflicting claims for lands and money from "back from the dead" claimants or pretenders purporting to be someone dead centuries ago (whom nobody alive today would be able to swear is an impostor), pretenders "rewriting history" by writing diaries, accounts, false wills, documents purporting to be old agreements, and so on.

Over time, the laws are backed up by social custom: if you break it by raising someone, you threaten the social order, and are apt to be shunned, exiled, or no longer treated as noble by anyone. So folk grow up thinking it’s simply not a possibility.

So unless you're an adventurer with tons of gold and a flagrant disregard for law, social custom, and propriety, or are a member of a particular religious order with a cleric on hand for guaranteed resurrection, getting raised is a very rare, expensive, and not-at-all-guaranteed proposition.


And this all assumes you're going for a setting where death is relatively permanent. I've run high-magic settings before where people routinely lived for centuries because life-extension and resurrection magic are plentiful, dystopian settings where the nobles extorted the common people and revolution was nearly impossible because the nobles could be resurrected and punish the revolutionaries, a timeline-advanced and higher-(magi-)tech version of Eberron where House Jorasco had perfected an altar of true resurrection and guaranteed resurrection was a simple (if incredibly expensive) life insurance policy away, and other different takes on the standard setting.

So I generally find that, rather than resurrection and other powerful world-changing magic magic "cheapening" the setting, it helps get away from the standard early-Renaissance-with-magic feel of most settings and lets them stand out a bit.

[Mechalich]

(B) to the one to four 9th-level-or-higher clerics you might find in a Large Town or larger settlement


According to the standard D&D demographics a large town has a 17% chance of having a 9th level cleric (1d6+3), but a small city has a 75% percent chance of having a 9th level cleric (1d6+6, roll twice), a large city is guaranteed to have multiple 9th level or higher clerics (1d6+9, roll three times) and has a 42% chance of having a shockingly powerful 15th level cleric. A metropolis is guaranteed to have at least four 13th level clerics (1d6+12, roll four times) and has a 47% chance of having a game-breakingly powerful 18th level cleric (which also means you get an extra 2 9th levels in the bargain).

Keeping in mind that D&D defines settlements in restricted fashion, so these larger categories are not uncommon. A small city only requires 5000 people, a large city only 12000, and a metropolis only 25000. This is actually fairly common. This list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_cities_in_history) gives me 36 such metropoli in Europe in 1300 AD. A rule of thumb is you'll get a metropolis under D&D assumptions for every 50,000 square miles (depending upon environmental and political factors) an area roughly the size of Greece. That will also net you around 5 small and large cities and at least a dozen large towns. So even a relatively small kingdom (Greece is less than half the size of Italy or Poland) has a pretty good chance of having close to a dozen clerics of level 9 or higher. Assuming a roughly even distribution of alignments among the high-powered servitors of the gods (which is necessary of your kingdom is not strongly pulled in one ethical direction), there is almost certainly at least one cleric capable of casting raise dead for a person of any alignment in a given state.

And that's just clerics. Druids - which have a really weird demographic presence in D&D - can bring people back from the dead starting at 7th level using reincarnate, which is both cheaper and doesn't care about the condition of remains. Yes, it sticks you in a new form, but there are various ways around this.

Additionally, you don't actually need a 9th level caster to cast raise dead, you just need a divine caster of any level with a raise dead scroll (which only costs 6125 gp). It only takes one cleric of one appropriately greedy faith (FR has several, starting with Waukeen, any church of wealth in D&D is effectively big pharma) to flood the market with scrolls of this type. Any rich family with any sense keeps just such a scroll in a vault somewhere in case of need and has their resident cleric cast it when such a need arises. Effectively, anyone whose net worth hits the mid five figures (50,000 gp and up) should be expected to have a raise dead contingency of this kind in place, and anyone in the six-figure range swaps in resurrection instead. This certainly includes any king. A king is the highest level aristocrat in a metropolis, and therefore has a minimum level of 13 and 120,000 gp to his name personally.

Ed Greenwood's paragraph about the laws actually confirms this. It's special pleading on the part of the author intended to neutralize a distortional effect built into the rules that would ruin the feel of the world he tried to generate. In point of fact, banning the use of a rare but exceedingly valuable process from access by the upper classes is the exact opposite of how social systems work. This is one of several examples of special pleading inserted by Ed Greenwood into FR campaign materials that make it very clear how actually playing by the rules makes FR impossible.

At the end of the day you basically have one of four scenarios when it comes to any powerful magical effect that violates known understanding of living processes, and the corresponding distortions on the historical condition you are attempting to match as a result:
1. Not available at all, no distortion.
2. Requires an epic question, minimal distortion that may have historical significance but does not impact everyday life.
3. Rare, restricted to a special subgroup or those with vast resources, significant distortion that will have a broad impact on everyday life.
4. Common, available to roughly everyone to at least some degree. Distorts setting such that it bears little to no resemblance to historical model.

In D&D, resurrection operates under the third grouping, but the distortions are largely ignored in extant settings along with the impact of a massive number of other magical abilities because at the end of the day no one has any idea what really results because you're dumping too much weirdness into the system and attempting to redesign from first principles throws up possibilities that are not amenable to functional gameplay - such as eternal rule of dragons over everyone else with humanoid civilization never developing.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

*statistics snipped*

I'm well aware that on a global scale raise dead is relatively common, but it's the local scale the small chances of having a raise-capable cleric in a given settlement are noticeable. If Baron Joe dies in Joeburg, a small city that rolled the 25% chance of not having a raise-capable cleric, and the next city is more than 9 days away on a galloping horse, he's out of luck. If Joeburg is a metropolis, Baron Joe is CN, and the four randomly-rolled high-level clerics are LG, LG, LN, LE and refuse to raise insufficiently-lawful people, he's out of luck.


And that's just clerics. Druids - which have a really weird demographic presence in D&D - can bring people back from the dead starting at 7th level using reincarnate, which is both cheaper and doesn't care about the condition of remains. Yes, it sticks you in a new form, but there are various ways around this.

Assuming druids are willing to bring back a noble who spent all his time cutting down forests to build his towns and flattening hills to build his roads and didn't even pay lip service to revering nature, which again isn't a guarantee.


Additionally, you don't actually need a 9th level caster to cast raise dead, you just need a divine caster of any level with a raise dead scroll (which only costs 6125 gp).

This is true...but of course a cleric with CL below 9 has a chance of failing to cast the spell from the scroll and having a mishap instead, which one shouldn't chance with raise dead lest the person Come Back Wrong.


Ed Greenwood's paragraph about the laws actually confirms this. It's special pleading on the part of the author intended to neutralize a distortional effect built into the rules that would ruin the feel of the world he tried to generate. In point of fact, banning the use of a rare but exceedingly valuable process from access by the upper classes is the exact opposite of how social systems work.

Except that "the upper classes" include both King Bob who would like to get resurrected upon his untimely death and Crown Prince Bob Junior who would like to inherit the kingdom upon King Bob's untimely death, to say nothing about various Cousin Robs and Uncle Roberts in the line of succession and Dubiously Evil Vizier al'Bob who might also want a piece of things. If nobles don't want to hand back their wealth to resurrected ancestors and kind-hearted nobles don't want to see their families disrupted by succession crises and nations torn by civil war after their passing, that sort of law is a perfectly reasonable one to pass.


Look, I'm not trying to argue resurrection doesn't happen a lot in D&D and affect the setting; like I said, I run it by-the-book in my games and there are plenty of twice- or thrice-resurrected rich people running around, noble families who keep scrolls of resurrection and experts with high Use Magic Device modifiers on retainer, and cities where the legal code allows you to portion out inheritances only after the resurrection timer runs out. I'm just saying that the common perception that death loses all meaning in D&D settings is false, because there are plenty of existing flavor and mechanical reasons why "Just resurrect him!" isn't the solution to any and every death-related plot point, and you don't need to ban or heavily houserule resurrection effects to prevent society from becoming unrecognizable.

[drakir_nosslin]

Additionally, you don't actually need a 9th level caster to cast raise dead, you just need a divine caster of any level with a raise dead scroll (which only costs 6125 gp).

I don't agree with the 'only' in this sentence. How many individuals, or even families, can shell out 6125 GP in case of a accidental death, or even a expected one? I think that's out of reach of most of the population, making death the standard for everyone but the 1%. Sure, a few people in society has a lot of money and can afford services which elevates their life above that of most, but that does not change the 'world', it changes life for a small part of the population.

A peasant or merchant might dream about being able to resurrect their dead relative/lover, but it's unlikely they can afford it.

It's important to remember that adventurers are often statistical outliers, able to do things most people can't, and not shape the world after them.

[PhoenixPhyre]

One note is that using 3e's demographic information for this produces some weird results--of all editions 3e is very far on the "high-power NPCs are common" spectrum. 5e hasn't published demographic information like that (and probably won't), but 9th level-equivalent casters aren't exactly growing on trees--you might have a dozen or so per nation, lumping clerics, wizards, and druids together. And then you run into the issues of cash (3500 gp is ~ 1 year of aristocratic lifestyle), willingness, time, etc.

People who can cast resurrection are even scarcer.

[jqavins]

According to the standard D&D demographics a large town has a 17% chance of having a 9th level cleric (1d6+3), but a small city has a 75% percent chance of having a 9th level cleric (1d6+6, roll twice)...
I'll read the whole wall of text and its responses when lunch time comes, but for the record 1d6+6 rolled twice gives an 89% chance of yielding 9 or higher at least once.

-------------------------

OK, it's lunch time and I've caught up.

Some time back there was a thread about resurrection and inheritance; I can't find it now, I'm afraid. One of the possibilities proposed as I recall, and one I liked, is that nothing is inherited, be it wealth or ruling title, until the Raise Dead clock runs out. After that, the inheritance is final even if someone is resurrected. The family of the returned would probably take him/her in as a member of the household, but not as the owner or ruler. (Of course, if they choose to give back some comfortable amount of wealth and personal items, that's all well and good, but the law does not make the returned entitled to it.) I can even see a king's will saying "Resurrect me, but wait a while and don't Raise me! This is my retirement."


I don't agree with the 'only' in this sentence. How many individuals, or even families, can shell out 6125 GP in case of a accidental death, or even a expected one? I think that's out of reach of most of the population, making death the standard for everyone but the 1%. Sure, a few people in society has a lot of money and can afford services which elevates their life above that of most, but that does not change the 'world', it changes life for a small part of the population.
Raising and Resurrecting only directly affect the 1%, but those include the rulers, both official economic. If the rulers are able to live so much longer (should they want to) that will have indirect effects on life for 99% as well.

[Mechalich]

Raising and Resurrecting only directly affect the 1%, but those include the rulers, both official economic. If the rulers are able to live so much longer (should they want to) that will have indirect effects on life for 99% as well.

Exactly. Having a special capability that is only available to the 1% has massive impacts on life, since the 1% have dramatically outsized influence, power, and wealth. There are real-world examples of things like this - a relatively mild one being private air travel - but in D&D context they are so much greater. The availability of magic to allow the rich to bypass all the horrors and ills of the medieval world is a setup more like the dystopian movie Elysium than anything in most D&D settings (except, as usual, Dark Sun, which always seems to get closer to what the rules actually imply than any other setting).

[PairO'Dice Lost]

D&D commoners are hardly mired in the "horrors and ills of the medieval world," though; D&D is much more of a Renaissance-tech-meets-modern-day-values setting by default. The population are all literate by default, libraries and universities are common, serfdom isn't a thing, cities are clean and relatively plague-free, there's a strong middle class of artisans and soldiers and such and they're all decently paid, religion is a strong force in daily life but churches of various gods don't run things (except in theocracies, obviously), and so forth.

Part of this can be attributed to post-1e editions dropping detailed disease rules and lack of lordship-at-name-level class features and such, but a lot of it can be attributed to background assumptions of minor magic use bringing things up to a more enlightened standard; you can have a cure disease on the local water supply here, a prestidigitation to clear out the scent of sewage there, and so forth without going full magitech.

So D&D nobles vs. D&D commoners is hardly a dystopian nightmare because of the existence of resurrection, teleport, and the like; most people in the world can't afford to regularly take a private jet to another continent for life-saving highly-experimental medical procedures, but we don't live in Elysium. And Dark Sun is hardly the exemplar of what the default rules imply, because it changes the default rules to deprive common people of magic, quality weapons, education, and so forth--and in fact ends up much closer to a Medieval setting than the standard rules do!

The dystopian part of D&D isn't the magical 1%ers oppressing commoners, it's that whole thing where you can get mind-controlled by succubi or eaten by a hungry dragon with no warning while you're walking down the street or have a necromancer turn your city into zombies or cultists sacrifice your city for the glory of their dark god while you look on helplessly, but that's a problem that afflicts the nobility as much as or more than the commoners.

[martixy]

There is a difference between "does it have resurrection" and "does it have immortality".

My setting has both, and both in extremely rare cases.

Immortality is a high-level thing, achievable through a variety of methods, from lichdom(which is honestly, kind of the poor man's version of immortality) to several varieties of magic rituals, powered by different sources that achieve proper immortality. After the third century expect inevitables on your ass.

Resurrection isn't a mechanical thing in my game, more of a narrative one. It usually involves special conditions and quests. Akin to Orpheus's descent to the underworld from ancient Greek mythos. I play D&D and basically only True Resurrection, a spell of the highest level possible works mostly as advertised. Mostly because even it prompts an audience with the gods and carries a number of strings attached.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Question for those who have "resurrection is really hard/impossible" in a game setting--

How do you handle PC deaths? As I see it, the options are

1) tone down threats enough that death is very rare
2) meatgrinder
3) shoehorn in new characters and lose the acquired knowledge and relationships
4) ??

All seem to have downsides--

1) some people love challenge and the risk of death. This removes that.
2) This promotes treating characters as disposable playing pieces
3) either you metagame or you lose a lot of coherence.

I've never actually had this come up--only one character has died in a game I've been in, and that was low enough level that resurrection wasn't an option and replacement was easy. Oh, and he totally deserved it, so...

[Max_Killjoy]

[I]n most places (Waterdeep and Cormyr definitely among them), laws prevent nobles from being raised. This stops all sorts of power struggles, conflicting claims for lands and money from "back from the dead" claimants or pretenders purporting to be someone dead centuries ago (whom nobody alive today would be able to swear is an impostor), pretenders "rewriting history" by writing diaries, accounts, false wills, documents purporting to be old agreements, and so on.

Over time, the laws are backed up by social custom: if you break it by raising someone, you threaten the social order, and are apt to be shunned, exiled, or no longer treated as noble by anyone. So folk grow up thinking it’s simply not a possibility.

Translation, "Please don't break my beautiful setting by actually following through with the system".

[jqavins]

Question for those who have "resurrection is really hard/impossible" in a game setting--

How do you handle PC deaths? As I see it, the options are

1) tone down threats enough that death is very rare
2) meatgrinder
3) shoehorn in new characters and lose the acquired knowledge and relationships
4) ??4) Make resuscitation relatively easy, even though resurrection is not. That is, make coming back from -10 < HP ≤ 0 not so hard, put a brake at -9 HP on any single damaging incident, etc.
5) Let limited resurrection, i.e. Raise Dead still be a thing, maybe shorten the time limit. A half measure, since the one percenters can deal with this as easily as the PCs.
6) Watch as the players adapt by acting more cautiously.

Comments in red:
All seem to have downsides--

1) some people love challenge and the risk of death. This removes that.
No, easy resurrection removes it; hard or no resurrection enhances it.
2) This promotes treating characters as disposable playing pieces
For those players who choose to handle it that way, I suppose so. For most, see 6 above.
3) either you metagame or you lose a lot of coherence.
As DM, you can clamp down on metagaming and be sure to emphasize that loss of coherence. Then 6.
If your group is into reckless play so 6 is unappealing, and also cares a lot about coherence, then easy resurrection is probably a necessity. In my experience, coherence is a big thing mostly to players who go in for immersive role playing, and those are rarely the ones who prefer recklessness.

[Max_Killjoy]

Actual Resurrection (as opposed to resuscitation or immediate "miraculous" healing) is one of those things that (IMO) works better as a plot point in a story, than it does in an RPG.

In a story, the desire to bring someone back from the dead can be a major character motivation and plot framework. It can take an entire "act", or be the point of the entire work. The living characters might have to travel to a lost monastery, or find the hidden gates of hell, or make a deal with a deity. The dead character might have to make a Faustian bargain of some sort, or make some other sort of difficult choice.

Try to do the same thing in an RPG, and everything else going on gets sidetracked and one of the players is sitting around doing nothing for however many hours or sessions it takes. The alternative is that resurrection is "cheap" and death becomes a speedbump.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Translation, "Please don't break my beautiful setting by actually following through with the system".

That's hardly fair. As I pointed out above, for every person who wants to get their stuff back when they get resurrected, there's someone else who wants to inherit that stuff. If tomorrow someone invented a medical procedure that could bring back someone who had been dead for several days, you can bet that the first "I love you Mom, but I want my inheritance!" lawsuit would happen within days of it being used, and the laws to control it would be passed very shortly thereafter.

Resurrection isn't unique in that respect at all. Nothing in the descriptions of teleport, plane shift, and the like requires someone traveling to a large city to appear in a designated receiving area to be questioned by guards, checked for contraband equipment, and so forth, but it's not at all unreasonable for laws to be made to that effect in basically every major nation. And to use the real-life analogy again, if Star Trek-style beaming were invented tomorrow you can be damn sure that while you could beam to any point on the globe using the transporter, major governments would immediately make laws requiring international beaming to only occur between designated points (and in the US, those points would come with annoying TSA checkpoints because we can't have nice things).

It's kind of silly to argue that resurrection should be banned or altered to keep the setting internally consistent, and then turn around and say that societies shouldn't establish laws and social mores around powerful magic to limit their ability to disrupt the lives of the common folk and just ignore their existence when that would make the setting even more inconsistent than just not having that magic around at all.

[Max_Killjoy]

That's hardly fair. As I pointed out above, for every person who wants to get their stuff back when they get resurrected, there's someone else who wants to inherit that stuff. If tomorrow someone invented a medical procedure that could bring back someone who had been dead for several days, you can bet that the first "I love you Mom, but I want my inheritance!" lawsuit would happen within days of it being used, and the laws to control it would be passed very shortly thereafter.

Resurrection isn't unique in that respect at all. Nothing in the descriptions of teleport, plane shift, and the like requires someone traveling to a large city to appear in a designated receiving area to be questioned by guards, checked for contraband equipment, and so forth, but it's not at all unreasonable for laws to be made to that effect in basically every major nation. And to use the real-life analogy again, if Star Trek-style beaming were invented tomorrow you can be damn sure that while you could beam to any point on the globe using the transporter, major governments would immediately make laws requiring international beaming to only occur between designated points (and in the US, those points would come with annoying TSA checkpoints because we can't have nice things).

It's kind of silly to argue that resurrection should be banned or altered to keep the setting internally consistent, and then turn around and say that societies shouldn't establish laws and social mores around powerful magic to limit their ability to disrupt the lives of the common folk and just ignore their existence when that would make the setting even more inconsistent than just not having that magic around at all.

It was a snarky aside -- Mr Greenwood has a repeat history of begging the players to "please please don't break my beautiful Forgotten Realms setting".

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I hadn't heard of that, actually, but given the frequency with which people like to kill off Drizzt and Elminster first thing, and how 4e mutilated the Realms, I'm not at all surprised.

[Mechalich]

The Forgotten Realms blatantly doesn't work if you apply the rules - even the 2e AD&D rules - with any rigor whatsoever. None of the D&D settings that actually attempt to model a functional world do (the D&D meta-settings of Planescape and Spelljammer simply don't bother), because D&D according to any incarnation of the rules produces outcomes that are simply too high-magic and high-powered to remain stable for even a decade and therefore have to function according to comic book logic in the same manner as the DC, Marvel, and other major superhero universes.

A fantasy setting with as much magic floating around as D&D has one of two possibilities:
1. Provide reasonable controls that insure magic is restrained and utilized for the common good and launch a magic-powered post-scarcity utopia (there are many variants, but the Age of Legends of the WoT is a decent model).
2. Magic goes to war and the survivors establish an oppressive grimdark magocracy over the ashes of the world. This is more or less the setup of The Dying Earth, and Jack Vance's work was one of the principle inspirations for D&D.

If you want a stable quasi-medieval world using D&D rules that doesn't depend on comic book logic and special pleading you have to massively depower the system. There's simply no way around it. Now, there's nothing wrong with going with comic book logic - it's worked out just fine for DC and Marvel for decades - but it's not considered implicitly part of the world-building in the way it is for those settings. Frankly, I actually give Ed Greenwood credit for being willing to at least tacitly admit to the situation. Few others have been willing to go even that far.

[jqavins]

The Forgotten Realms blatantly doesn't work if you apply the rules - even the 2e AD&D rules - with any rigor whatsoever. None of the D&D settings that actually attempt to model a functional world do... because D&D according to any incarnation of the rules produces outcomes that are simply too high-magic and high-powered to remain stable for even a decade...It doesn't have to be a huge problem if you make one simple change: High level characters and the monsters that can challenge them are extremely rare. I mean rare like in a whole world of a half billion people, there are about 50 or 100 people of 15th level or higher, and dragons are so rare that lots of people don't believe they're real, etc. Often we players forget that one does not find a PC-class indicvidual around every corner.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The Forgotten Realms blatantly doesn't work if you apply the rules - even the 2e AD&D rules - with any rigor whatsoever. None of the D&D settings that actually attempt to model a functional world do (the D&D meta-settings of Planescape and Spelljammer simply don't bother), because D&D according to any incarnation of the rules produces outcomes that are simply too high-magic and high-powered to remain stable for even a decade and therefore have to function according to comic book logic in the same manner as the DC, Marvel, and other major superhero universes.

A fantasy setting with as much magic floating around as D&D has one of two possibilities:
1. Provide reasonable controls that insure magic is restrained and utilized for the common good and launch a magic-powered post-scarcity utopia (there are many variants, but the Age of Legends of the WoT is a decent model).
2. Magic goes to war and the survivors establish an oppressive grimdark magocracy over the ashes of the world. This is more or less the setup of The Dying Earth, and Jack Vance's work was one of the principle inspirations for D&D.

If you want a stable quasi-medieval world using D&D rules that doesn't depend on comic book logic and special pleading you have to massively depower the system. There's simply no way around it. Now, there's nothing wrong with going with comic book logic - it's worked out just fine for DC and Marvel for decades - but it's not considered implicitly part of the world-building in the way it is for those settings. Frankly, I actually give Ed Greenwood credit for being willing to at least tacitly admit to the situation. Few others have been willing to go even that far.

Aside from the fact that pretty much all published D&D settings are neither stable (wars and necromancer lords and fiendish invasions and dark gods coming to earth and...) nor quasi-Medieval in the slightest, those aren't the only two options, you know. There are several other possible and reasonable local equilibria:

3. High-level casters largely leave the Prime and go gallivanting around the planes, leaving their home sphere with its existing pseudo-Renaissance setup untouched.
4. High-level casters prefer to hoard power for themselves and manipulate things behind the scenes.
5. The gods are very meddlesome, and the god of agriculture and god of smithing do what they must to keep mortals farming and forging by hand instead of using create food and water and fabricate on a massive scale.
6. Both the good guys and the bad guys have high-level magic, and there's a rough balance between the two preventing the good guys from going option 1 or 3 or the bad guys from going option 2 or 4.

Published settings use all of these to some extent; Dark Sun is a mix of 2 and 4, Eberron is well on its way to 1 but was held back by the Last War killing off most high-level characters, Dragonlance is a mix of 4 and 5, and Forgotten Realms is a mix of 1, 5, and 6. And those aren't the only possibilities, of course, just some big ones I could think of offhand.

To expand on 6 in FR a bit, for all the joking on the internet about high-level NPCs popping in to massively alter the setting or solve the PCs' every problem (and bad DMs who actually do that sort of thing in real games), the setting as published is locked in a cold war that prevents that sort of thing. The Hathrans can't turn Rashemen into a magical utopia because they're constantly under attack by the Red Wizards, who can't commit their full forces to the effort because they have to defend themselves from the Simbul leading assaults to kill them, who can't focus on making life better for the Aglarondans because the Society of the Kraken is constantly trying to undermine the country, who can't devote more effort to the task because the Harpers are always up in its business, who can't wipe out all the bandits and mercenaries on the Sword Coast because the Sharites and Shadow Weave adepts are always causing trouble, who can't advance their plots against Mystra because Elminster is always ruining their schemes, who can't try to advance the Dalelands because the Zhentarim are always meddling and raiding there, who can't expand farther north because the Hathrans guard their borders against such miscreants, who can't turn Rashemen into a magical utopia because they're constantly under attack by the Red Wizards, who....

The option 5 bit in FR affects not just magic, but also non-magical ways of improving the lives of the common folks; Mystra rewriting the laws of the universe because mortals got too uppity is the famous and obvious example of divine meddling, but Gond suppressing things like smokepowder and mundane clockwork that would allow for non-magical technological advancement, Lolth pushing the drow Houses into conflict so their society never stabilizes, and so forth also play a part. If the FR gods were much less dickish to mortals and the good guys ever managed to get themselves some breathing room to start making the world a better place, it too could turn into an Eberron-style world that makes everyday life great for everyone, but with said gods and baddies that's not going to happen any time soon. (And hey, if you consider the gods to be just big meddlesome spellcasters, you basically end up with option 2 on the divine scale, so I'll give you that.)

And the backdrop of the setting involved quite a bit of option 1: the Realms that are Forgotten in the name refer to all the ancient magical empires that actually did go the utopia route. Netheril had floating cities and a decadent and almost-universally-spellcasting population, Jhaamdath had a unified populace with imbued psionic capabilities, Imaskar had portals and golems and all sorts of crazy artifice, Narfell had bound fiends doing everything from guarding their borders to fetching their mail, Raumathar had place magic and battle magic that would turn the Hathrans and Red Wizards green with envy, and so on...and that's just the major human empires, the elven empires did plenty of crazy stuff on their own. Of course, these empires eventually fell due to a bit of options 2 and 5 (Imaskar by those pesky meddling gods, Netheril by its own magic, Jhaamdath by Elven High Magic, and Narfell and Raumathar by each other), sending civilization crashing down and leaving enough successor states, ancient relics, and such to lead to the modern cold war situation.

So published settings are hardly the illogical and childish messes held together with spit and duct tape that you're making them out to be. You may not like or agree with all of the explanations (or justifications or rationalizations, however you want to put it), and that's fine; I rarely run Greyhawk because I find the setting less internally consistent in that respect than Eberron, FR, or Planescape (or Birthright, an old 2e favorite of mine). But to claim that the settings don't work at all is to ignore massive chunks of the background flavor and setting assumptions.

[Mechalich]

It doesn't have to be a huge problem if you make one simple change: High level characters and the monsters that can challenge them are extremely rare. I mean rare like in a whole world of a half billion people, there are about 50 or 100 people of 15th level or higher, and dragons are so rare that lots of people don't believe they're real, etc. Often we players forget that one does not find a PC-class indicvidual around every corner.

But none of the published settings have managed to maintain anything resembling this prohibition. FR is the worst about it - the named dragons appendix at the back of dragons of Faerun runs to like ten pages and includes more than a dozen CR 30+ entities - but all of the settings have this problem. Even in Dark Sun the core tablelands area is only about the size of the Great Basin in the US and includes many high level casters and a number of ludicrously powerful monsters. The actual 3e demographics tables absolutely produce a reality where there's a person with a PC class (though few levels) around every corner.

Of course the general reason for this is that people expect to be able to play the entire presentation of the level range, which means you need a sufficient number of beings in the world of level 15+ such that a single party can't murder them all in the course of a campaign. Heck, in BGII you can burn through that many high-level NPCs in a week. So you're talking about a change that is essentially imposing E15 on the world. I would contend that E15 is still too high, and that to make things work you need to be talking about E10 (in large part because of Planar Binding, you can go higher if you edit that out), but the overall principle is the same. At some level of power you stop having a world of fantasy adventure and instead you have a world of low-tech superheroes. There's nothing wrong with low-tech superheroes, that's a long and glorious storytelling tradition, but if you're going to create such a setting you have to acknowledge that the worldbuilding principles for superheroes are different than they are for traditional fantasy adventures.

D&D settings are built to function for fantasy adventures and handwaves the superheroes into sustaining the status quo. D&D is not the only offender in this regard. Exalted handed characters phenomenal power and then spent hundreds of thousands of words refusing to let them change the world to the point that the setting immediately became nonsensical and positively bursting with grimderp. World-Building a good superhero setting is hard. None of the big comic universes even try, and most game attempts have been miserable failures. It is intrinsically difficult to handle a setup wherein a tiny number of individuals holds functionally absolute power over billions while keeping the players of characters with said power from using said power to crack the setting like an egg or reducing the game to a DBZ-style power-up cascade.

[martixy]

Question for those who have "resurrection is really hard/impossible" in a game setting--

How do you handle PC deaths? As I see it, the options are

1) tone down threats enough that death is very rare
2) meatgrinder
3) shoehorn in new characters and lose the acquired knowledge and relationships
4) ??

All seem to have downsides--

1) some people love challenge and the risk of death. This removes that.
2) This promotes treating characters as disposable playing pieces
3) either you metagame or you lose a lot of coherence.

I've never actually had this come up--only one character has died in a game I've been in, and that was low enough level that resurrection wasn't an option and replacement was easy. Oh, and he totally deserved it, so...

5) Make PCs hard to kill, but no more difficult to incapacitate than normal.
6) Provide "resurrection" options that are highly conditional (e.g. Revivify which places a tight time constraint on usage, or a homebrew version of the Heal skill which can be used for CPR).

This has the upsides that the party is now, both more resilient and significantly more cautious, because in combat, unconscious is just as debilitating as dead, but is easier to fix later. This lifts some of the burden on the DM on being careful with his effects, since he can more comfortably throw around his creature's abilities without fear of accidentally murdering a PC.

[jqavins]

But none of the published settings have managed to maintain anything resembling this prohibition...

Of course the general reason for this is that people expect to be able to play the entire presentation of the level range, which means you need a sufficient number of beings in the world of level 15+ such that a single party can't murder them all in the course of a campaign. Heck, in BGII you can burn through that many high-level NPCs in a week. So you're talking about a change that is essentially imposing E15 on the world. I would contend that E15 is still too high, and that to make things work you need to be talking about E10 (in large part because of Planar Binding, you can go higher if you edit that out), but the overall principle is the same. At some level of power you stop having a world of fantasy adventure and instead you have a world of low-tech superheroes...

I generally don't give the south end of a north-going rat about published settings. Never used'm, probably never will.
Look again at this thread's title. The OP clearly isn't talking about published settings either.
Look again at this thread's title. We're not talking about how to make a world internally consistent in all or even most respects; we're talking how to keep resurrection from running roughshod over those aspects that it could. Making casters capable of performing resurrection super rare is one way of doing that.
I'm pretty nearly imposing E10 or even lower on most of the world, but not on the players. I'm talking about customizing the demographics so that high level people are very few and far between, but not putting major impediments in the way of the PCs becoming some of them. When one of the six dragons on the whole continent does show itself, it's the PCs that must deal with it because they're the only one's in hundreds of miles who can. Half of the high level people in the world are bad guys, and the good guys get XP keeping then down. And so on.
I disagree with the distinction between superhero and fantasy-adventure worlds. There's plenty of traditional sword and sorcery in which the main characters are either the most power people in the world or among the few most powerful.

Tolkein is, rightly, often held up as the spring from which a great deal of other fantasy literature and gaming comes. Look at The Hobbit: Gandalf is one of - what is it? - a dozen or so wizards in existence; Thorin is a great king (in exile) and the grandson of a legendary one; they go fight what may well be the only dragon in the world; Bilbo returns from one campaign and has almost unimaginable wealth by Shire standards; one of the few overtly magic item encountered turns out be a fearsome artifact. All of these people are among the way-less-than-one-percenters, and there's no way one can claim that this is not fantasy adventure.

These things expand to such a great degree in gaming settings (published and otherwise) because, I think, people think "Ooh, I want to have one of those too". So they make up another one. It's that which changed Pegasus from a proper name for a unique creature into a common noun indicating a species. If one refrains from doing this, then resurrection is not a problem.

[King of Nowhere]

Is it so rare to take the opposite direction? I made resurrection common enough and I tied to worldbuild around that.

In my setting every large city has at least a handful of 9th level casters, main cities have a handful of 13th level ones. People capable of 17th level spells are exeedingly rare - I estimate around 30 clerics and 50 between wizards and sorcerors in the whole world - but they are highly famous people and everyone with power and money can contact them. It's like the pope: there's only one of those around, but everyone knows him and where he can be found, and if you have money and power you can negotiate an audience.
No inevitables, either. why assume that the universe would try to punish people for defying the law of death? it's no more "defying a natural law" than using fire, or, in a sci-fi setting, antigravity. And it smells too much of a DM just saying "no, you can't do that, because."

Consequences on the game:
- once you hit mid-high levels, death is a speed bump. Because of that, you can expect encounters to be very deadly. the DM is not afraid to start an ambush with 2 destructions and one finger of death, if it made sense for the npcs to use them.
- death is no problem, losing your equipment is. Because while your patron nation considers you important enough to get you a true resurrection even in case of tpk - and ways to trap the soul are regarded with extreme fear, sort of like weapons of mass destruction, and everyone agreed to not use them except in retaliation - you can be sure that whoever killed you also looted you of everything of value. Sure, your nation that values you so much may also give you some 20thousand each to buy back a basic equipment, and you may have some savings in your bank account. Good luck restoring your build of +5 goodies with one unique item or two.
- it applies to npcs too, and it makes defeating them more intriguing. Killing the evil baron will accomplish nothing; exposing his crimes will work. assassinating a king is pure futility; undermining a nation by hitting its strategic economic interests and international credibility can make for a good plot. And yes, if you kill enemy high level people they will come back, but they will have a much reduced gear, because you looted theirs.

All in all, my players are still cautious enough - because they know I am not pulling back on my punches, and they are still risking something. Killing people matters enough to be meaningful, but it's not the end of the story. I can have a bunch of high level enemy baddies and I don't have to invent implausible justifications for them to not cast banshee's wail at the party; they will cast it, and if it drops half the party, it only shows how badass was their opponent, and it's that much honor to them for ultimately defeating him.

Consequences on worldbuilding
- diamonds are a strategic resource akin to oil. nations hoard them to use in case of need. diamond sheiks are filthy rich with money coming our of their ears (one of them literally, he commissioned a custom magic device to achieve the effect).
- assassination is rarely done. When it's done, it targets a bunch of low level people affiliated with the intended target, forcing the intended target to choose between spending a lot of money, or declaring that he won't do it - in which case he'll lose prestige and influence, because
- high level people prefer to work for those that can guarantee them resurrections. To destroy a powerful organization you have to work at destroying its capacity to grant that.
- churces sell "life insurances" that guarantee you'll be resurrected. they also smoothen inheritance problems a lot.
- if you can pay for a resurrection, the penalty for manslaughter is significantly smaller. Turned out useful when a pc accidentally killed an innocent in a fight.
- high level adventurers only die of old age. because of that, most low level adventurers are humans or halfling, which have faster breeding rates. most high level people are dwarves or elves, because those ffew that make it that high stay then around for a long time.
- churches are filthy rich for selling magic, but resurrection is only a small part of it. Minor healing is actually their main source of income, as people get hurt much more often than they die, and they are more likely to pay for that.

well, not that I think about it, the consequences on worldbuilding aren't really that far-reaching. other high magic, like teleport being available like transoceanic flight in our day, has a much greater impact. Basically, it only means you don't kill somebody unless you already eroded all his support beforehand, or unless you just want to loot him and are ready to accept that he'll be back and he'll be angry. And it means that nobody is left out of sessions, but somebody may have to restart a loot collection from scratch.


One note is that using 3e's demographic information for this produces some weird results--of all editions 3e is very far on the "high-power NPCs are common" spectrum. 5e hasn't published demographic information like that (and probably won't), but 9th level-equivalent casters aren't exactly growing on trees--you might have a dozen or so per nation, lumping clerics, wizards, and druids together. And then you run into the issues of cash (3500 gp is ~ 1 year of aristocratic lifestyle), willingness, time, etc.

People who can cast resurrection are even scarcer.

the problem is that simple monsters aren't a threat to pcs past 12th level or so, unless you go with ancient dragons (which, being sentient, can be considered npcs) or epic stuff, which however opens up all kind of questions.
So, to challenge the pcs you have to have enough high level npcs around. also to explain why that 20th level guy didn't just take over the world. high level npcs don't need to be abundant, but assuming that a greece-sized plot of land has one to five people that can cast 9th level spells is reasonable enough.


Typically, no, I don't allow resurrection at all. If death isn't a big deal to the party, they won't care if they die and will never resort to anything other than combat to solve most issues. If death is final, and they are from time to time put into actual danger (facing a level 6 at first level for example), they might want to try alternatives to Spam Attack As Much As Possible, like negotiating, bribing, setting traps, ambush, or just flat out running.
problem with this, the players are terrible at figuring out the odds, unless they already know the monsters involved or you explicitly tell them the difficulty. In my experience, players will spend hours planning to overcome a minor random encounter, and then jump into a high level one with no preparation assuming it easy. It leads to a lot of head-scratching.

[Mechalich]

Tolkein is, rightly, often held up as the spring from which a great deal of other fantasy literature and gaming comes. Look at The Hobbit: Gandalf is one of - what is it? - a dozen or so wizards in existence; Thorin is a great king (in exile) and the grandson of a legendary one; they go fight what may well be the only dragon in the world; Bilbo returns from one campaign and has almost unimaginable wealth by Shire standards; one of the few overtly magic item encountered turns out be a fearsome artifact. All of these people are among the way-less-than-one-percenters, and there's no way one can claim that this is not fantasy adventure.

But they aren't, with the exception of Gandalf (who is a deity interacting with the world via specific conditions just as Sauron is), superheroes. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are skilled warriors but not invincible and face significant threats from relatively modest numbers of 1st level orc opponents. Boromir - who's only a marginally worse fighter than Aragorn - gets killed in precisely this fashion. The entire E6 format derives from articles in Dragon about how Aragorn functions as a 5th or 6th level character, and he's the best warrior in the world.

So yes, LotR is about some of the worlds most powerful and important people - that's because it's a story in the epic mode - but none of those people are superheroes. If you put 100 1st level orcs in an inescapable box along with Aragorn, the heir to Isildur is going down. But if you put 100 1st orcs in an inescapable box with Drizzt using his actual stats as a high-level ranger he will turn them into paste and is unlikely to even take damage.

High-level D&D characters can walk into a town or even a small city and almost effortlessly murder everyone there. Epic-level characters and high-level casters are worse. If Manshoon gets himself banished to Baator, Elminster could burn Zhentil Keep to the ground in an afternoon (actually he can do this even if Manshoon is around, since Elminster can take him with ease, but he'd at least have to kill Manshoon first) and there is absolutely nothing the tens of thousands of people living there could do about it.

[PhoenixPhyre]

But they aren't, with the exception of Gandalf (who is a deity interacting with the world via specific conditions just as Sauron is), superheroes. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are skilled warriors but not invincible and face significant threats from relatively modest numbers of 1st level orc opponents. Boromir - who's only a marginally worse fighter than Aragorn - gets killed in precisely this fashion. The entire E6 format derives from articles in Dragon about how Aragorn functions as a 5th or 6th level character, and he's the best warrior in the world.

So yes, LotR is about some of the worlds most powerful and important people - that's because it's a story in the epic mode - but none of those people are superheroes. If you put 100 1st level orcs in an inescapable box along with Aragorn, the heir to Isildur is going down. But if you put 100 1st orcs in an inescapable box with Drizzt using his actual stats as a high-level ranger he will turn them into paste and is unlikely to even take damage.

High-level D&D characters can walk into a town or even a small city and almost effortlessly murder everyone there. Epic-level characters and high-level casters are worse. If Manshoon gets himself banished to Baator, Elminster could burn Zhentil Keep to the ground in an afternoon (actually he can do this even if Manshoon is around, since Elminster can take him with ease, but he'd at least have to kill Manshoon first) and there is absolutely nothing the tens of thousands of people living there could do about it.

High level 3e D&D characters. Not all D&D is 3e; 3e is not all D&D. This has been your daily reminder to beware of the Playgrounder's Mistake (I hate the word fallacy).

[Mechalich]

High level 3e D&D characters. Not all D&D is 3e; 3e is not all D&D. This has been your daily reminder to beware of the Playgrounder's Mistake (I hate the word fallacy).

High level 1e, 2e, and 4e characters can also do this (heck there as sequence in BG II Throne of Bhaal where your party explicitly does this to a large contingent of the Tethyrian Army). 5e is the only edition where this is particularly challenging.

[jqavins]

If Manshoon gets himself banished to Baator, Elminster could burn Zhentil Keep to the ground in an afternoon (actually he can do this even if Manshoon is around, since Elminster can take him with ease, but he'd at least have to kill Manshoon first) and there is absolutely nothing the tens of thousands of people living there could do about it.
Ah, but he can only do this if Shmegolin is there to back him up, and even then Argodiddimup could stop him. I take your point, I'm pretty sure, but I believe I did imply that I don't know from published settings nor particularly care to. And again, for this thread, published settings are irrelevant.

[martixy]

~snikt~

Neat concept. In my game, diamonds are also a strategic resource, but that's because I don't use XP, so any such costs can only be paid via diamond.

This solves my currency problem:
Gold is the low-level currency (levels 1-8)
Diamonds are the mid-level currency (levels 9-16)
Magic is the high-level currency (17+)


High level 3e D&D characters. Not all D&D is 3e; 3e is not all D&D. This has been your daily reminder to beware of the Playgrounder's Mistake (I hate the word fallacy).

Heh, yea. While I mostly loiter around the 3/PF forum, any time I venture out I regularly remind myself other RPGs exist and not everyone who talks RPG in the forums, is talking about 3e/PF. Though, honestly, I'm surprised how many are.