Availability of Raise Dead

The ARG system has no raise dead spell or equivalent. I agree that some sort of mechanism to decrease the risk of death in 5e to put it more on the same page as ARG would make sense, though that wouldn’t have to be raise dead/resurrection.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

While we are looking at added options for the spellcasting at temples, shouldn’t Sarishian Sorcerer-Priests be eligible for a benefit similar to divine casters? They are the clergy for their god, just as clerics are for the others.

At least they should keep Revivify, Raise Dead within a minute. I know my character keeps a 300 gp coin on his body for such eventuality.

I’m pretty sure that the only benefit is linked yo the Acolyte background feature – which is just as applicable to a sorcerer priest as it is to a divine caster, but I could have missed something.
The Living Arcanis Campaign Guide references “Acolyte or Divine caster.”

Sure, a Sorcerer-Priest could take Acolyte, but since they also include divine caster a special mention for Sorcerer-Priests may also be warranted as they are also clergy.

The d20 campaign had raise dead… I had no idea that that would have been removed from the setting. But really, ARG and 5e aren’t the same system, so one should be able to have things available that the other doesn’t – the currency isn’t even the same. I wouldn’t think it would be bad to have Raise Dead available anyway – it still has the ‘within 24 hours’ limitation from the d20 campaign.

I remember in a module (again, d20 campaign) going to Beltine’s Cauldron to rescue a soul… without some sort of raise-dead in the setting, that wouldn’t have worked out so well.

My comment wasn’t that raise dead/resurrection etc. couldn’t be in the system, just wouldn’t have to be the way to address the death concern. I also recall a lot of people who got unhappy if they only got a raise dead or resurrection vs. a true res as they lost experience compared to others.

I understand there will be differences driven by the mechanics and the early and easy availability of spells such as fly on the 5e side by level 5 that aren’t replicated until Tier 3 – say roughly 9th level equivalent, and even then only to a very limited subset of characters.

PCI has committed to keeping the adventures the same for both game systems. It will make for some interesting decisions/choices on how to challenge the players.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

My comment wasn’t that raise dead/resurrection etc. couldn’t be in the system, just wouldn’t have to be the way to address the death concern. I also recall a lot of people who got unhappy if they only got a raise dead or resurrection vs. a true res as they lost experience compared to others.

I’m afraid that you are misremembering. True Res was never available in the original campaign except in one specific certed circumstance at a battle interactive where Deopholis – a mysterious holy man whom consorts with Valinor – provided a true res to an individual PC. Aside from that unique event, raise dead and resurrection – complete with level loss – was the only choice available. People lost XP all the time and it wasn’t a big deal since there were more than enough modules to get caught up. I personally lost a total of four levels (at above 10th level) over the campaign – more than most – and still entered the final BI at 20th level without ever using a level-up cert.

The point, to paraphrase one of the original cert shirts, is that stupidity should lead to character creation, not bad luck. In 5e when one drops to 0 (a common occurrence), all it takes is two bad rolls (with no mitigation possible) over two rounds and a character is dead. Most of the time other players are good about getting downed character stabilized, but I’ve also seen some tables where other players just kept attacking the monsters and ignored the downed PC.

The core 5e system and SRD was balanced with the idea that death is an obstacle that can be reliably overcome – Arcanis d20 set itself apart by making the ‘raised by dawn or your soul is gone’ rule, which made death a scary thing. However, if Raise Dead isn’t available at all in a D&D rules set, then it makes the whole balance of the game out of whack because CR calculations can no longer be trusted.

The issue with an XP cost in the current 5e campaign is that character progression is very tightly managed – unlike the d20 campaign, there are no extra modules. The intro modules bring you exactly from 1st to 4th, and the HPs are designed to provide further linear progression. Due to this, the traditional APL system has been replaced with a more generalized system in which there is minimal adjustment to combats (usually in the form of adding or subtracting a creature or two). It works right now, because the staff can rightly know the level bands in which characters will fall.

However, the alternative of losing an ability point or some other such permanent issue also raises the problem that a character may wind up no longer being worth their level (especially if a run of bad luck has had them die multiple times). This can throw off tiering calculations, obviously.

Also, CR calculations being thrown off are because many monsters have instant-death or potentially instant-death abilities that range from Save or Die to Save or Age 2d4*10 years (which could be instant death). It is these abilities that would throw CR off, because in a no-raise-dead campaign or a campaign where the core rules are altered in a fundamental way to make death cause permanent penalties, these abilities carry much more power and threat – so much so that many PCs will choose to run once they discover a monster has such an ability. These monsters should have a much higher CR if the core rules are altered.

Final point: thus far, 5e Arcanis has been a very low-gold campaign. To be frank, I’ve played 14 modules, hit level 5, and have had to buy so many potions of healing that I barely have 250 gold (I’ve literally spent no money on anything other than healing potions, BTW) and quite often don’t even break even on modules. Everyone I’ve played with is in the same boat – even with a cleric healing the party, as a whole the tables usually go through between four and eight+ potions a module – much more for some modules. With a material component alone for Raise Dead costing 500gp, and the casting cost for non-Acolyte-background individuals likely being at least that again, I would hardly think that the spell would need an additional drawback. At an estimated total cost of 1000gp, it would likely beggar the entire table to have a party-member brought back… assuming that they could get the body to a temple before dawn. Adding permanent penalties on top of this seems a bit unnecessary and would require a much more complicated campaign infrastructure that could support a wider level-range for each module in order to account for those whom have lost XP/ability-points/etc. In a game where a +6 proficiency bonus is the penultimate in ability, even a -1 penalty is huge enough to cripple a character forever. Further, the APL problems and the issue with the viscous cycle of characters falling behind the rest of the party (dying, losing a level, then dying again due to being underleveled, etc) caused by level loss is the reason that the designers of 5e removed level-loss to begin with.

I do understand where you are coming from – in 3.5 and previous editions of D&D, level loss was a big thing. 5e, however, was designed around the fundamental idea that level loss didn’t happen – so it was not calculated into any of the formulas that they used to pick spell levels, assign CRs, tweak the XP chart, etc etc etc. In order to do as you suggest – and do it properly in a balanced fashion – PCI would have to backengineer all the balancing formulas in the core rules, reassign XP rates, reassign CRs, change spell-levels of instant-death-type effects, etc… plus increase level-bands of modules, introduce XP slop into the expected character progression, etc etc… all this on top of already working on the new Arcanis player’s guide. That’s a lot of work just to make it harder for a PC to recover and remain playable following a run of bad luck… especially when just paying for the raise dead to begin with is already a big penalty… and to be fair, the nature of the Blessed Lands (everything is many days travel away for the most part) means that getting a Greater Restoration isn’t usually possible before dawn… much less a Raise Dead – so even if the spell is made available at any temple, death will still be scary and most likely permanent anyway.

Anyway, that’s my take on the matter. As always, YMMV.