Friday, February 4, 2022

Raising Questions about Raising the Dead

In a comment to yesterday's post about my ongoing House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, I was asked why I balked at giving player characters' access to spells like raise dead, when the game itself allows them? That's a very good question and I'm glad it was asked, because it made me explore my feelings on the matter a bit more.

In original Dungeons & Dragons, raise dead is a 5th-level cleric spell, the highest level of such spells available prior to the publication of Greyhawk. The earliest a player character can gain access to this spell is 7th level (50,000 experience points). The spell is described thusly:

The Cleric simply points his finger, utters the incantation, and the dead person is raised. This spell works with men, elves, and dwarves only. For each level the Cleric has progressed beyond the 8th, the time limit for resurrection extends another four days. Thus, an 8th level Cleric can raise a body dead up to four days, a 9th level Cleric can raise a body dead up to eight days, and so on. Naturally, if the character's Constitution was weak, the spell will not bring him back to life. In any event raised characters must spend two game weeks time recuperating from the ordeal.

 Greyhawk introduces two new spell levels for clerics, 6th and 7th, with the latter including the spell raise dead fully that is functionally identical to its 5th-level counterpart, except that "no rest or recuperation is required thereafter." This spell first becomes available at 17th level, which I suspect effectively put out of easy reach of most player characters.

The Empire of the Petal Throne equivalent is revivify, the highest level "priestly skill" in the game. At level 1, EPT characters begin with 2 to 5 abilities chosen from a chart. How many of these abilities an individual character gets is randomly determined, That said, revivify is available to a priest no sooner than level 8 (120,000) and no later than level 11 (440,000). Bear in mind, too, the XP penalties the game employs to slow progression, starting at level 4. This is significantly later than in OD&D by any metric.

The description of revivify is as follows:

Depending on the character's constitution (Cf. Sec. 413 above), this spell restores one slain human or intelligent nonhuman to life. A newly revived being cannot engage in fighting for a period of one week. This spell must be used within one week of the being's death; otherwise he or she cannot be revived. Usable once a week by persons of eighth level or below; usable once a day by those above eighth level.

It's fascinating to note the mechanical similarities and differences, which are no surprise, given that EPT's rules were heavily inspired by those of OD&D. What I think is most notable, though, is how much more difficult it would be for an Empire of the Petal Throne player character to gain access to revivify, compared to raise dead in Dungeons & Dragons. I suspect this is intentional, as one M.A.R. Barker's early criticisms of D&D was that the game's rules were devoid of any social context, seemingly existing in a societal vacuum. Tékumel is, in part, an answer to that perceived vacuum, grounding its mechanics in a social structure so that there are consequences and stakes to the implications of the rules.

Ultimately, I think my unease with raise dead rests somewhere in this vicinity. It's both too readily available to player characters – 50,000 XP isn't all that much in OD&D, even after the Greyhawk changes – and without any larger context. Mind you, that's a problem with D&D generally, though I understand that many, not without reason, don't see this as a problem per se but rather a kind of design agnosticism. That's fair, I think, but it does little to answer my own concerns, except perhaps to say, "If you don't like it in your campaign, change it." 

In the case of the House of Worms campaign, I haven't changed anything with regard to the revivify spell. None of the priest characters in the group is yet high enough level to cast the spell. Likewise, the two instances of resurrection to occur didn't involve the spell but instead near-miraculous events outside the control of the players. Rather, they were orchestrated by me as the referee, because I saw an opportunity to use a character's death(s) to do something interesting in the campaign. That's the crux of it for me: I don't actually object to the idea of raising a character from the dead, even multiple times. What I object to is the reduction of this event to something ordinary, something that can happen at the beck and call of player characters. If a character is to rise from the dead, I want it to be special.

If that makes me a hypocrite or inconsistent, I'll own that. It certainly wouldn't be the first time I've talked out of both sides of my mouth and likely won't be the last.

16 comments:

  1. Doesn't EPT also include other means of reviving the dead? There's at least one Eye IIRC, which is certainly rare and will doubtless be confiscated by the authorities as soon as they learn you've found one, but a party could stumble over one. Probably some other excuses for rejoining the living involving ancient tech or (as is probably the case with your campaign) intervention by an extradimensional deity.

    That said, EPT does restrict access to revivification a lot more than D&D, which also offers even more ways back what with Resurrection, Reincarnation, Wishes (most likely through items, since casting it normally is much harder than Raise Dead), and a few other items. So inherently rarer in EPT and you've probably got another decade or more before your PCs reach the required level to raise people at will - but what will you do if/when that happens? You'd think such a powerful ability would be treated the same way the Eyes are - something to be held close by the elites of society. Maybe reaching such exalted heights is the edgame for an adventuring career as you get recruited to serve teh Petal Throne directly?

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    1. There is indeed the eye of bestowing life, which restores any slain within the previous three weeks, even if all that's left is a very small fragment of his body. No such eye currently exists in my campaign, though (and I doubt it ever will).

      There's also a reincarnation spell, which functions much as in OD&D. It's also potentially accessible at a much lower level (4th, if the dice favor you). I haven't restricted its use in my campaign, but no one has chosen it. Who wants to become an Ahoggyá, after all? Better off dead.

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    2. Ironically, the ahoggya think even worse of the idea of coming back in a human body. :)

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    3. I’m ever curious about how you match up later evolution of Tékumel with the presentation in EPT. Reincarnation in that form seems to have vanished in later game systems. By Gardásiyal, you could only re-embody a spirit in its own species, and this was preserved in later systems. (I don’t have S&G volume 2, but I suspect this was true there as well.)

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    4. EPT also provides magic that prevents revivification, like the Grey Hand.

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  2. I'm a big proponent of wishes in A/D&D, and as a DM I am liberal in placing them in my campaigns. I treat wishes 1974 style:

    Under the entry for the ring of three wishes in the 1974 D&D rules, Gary wrote: "Wishes that unfortunate adventures had never happened should be granted."

    Imagine an unfortunate encounter with spectres in which half-a-dozen 8th-level adventurers are reduced to two adventurers of 2nd level each. A wish would restore four corpses and a dozen lost levels in one swoop. Of course, the wish would also make any treasure gained from the spectres reappear in the spectres' lair, along with any destroyed spectres being restored to unlife.

    I am pretty stingy with what a wish can give you that you never had before. (After all, a wish in AD&D will add only one point to an ability score, which I think is reasonable in D&D as well.) But restoring stuff you lost? The wish will restore all of it when used as a reset button.

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  3. Raise Dead is a reset button, which is why I don't like it. It's game-y, and has no connection to the swords and sorcery fiction that D&D purports to replicate, or even the Tolkien stuff it does replicate. In either example, being returned from the grave is extremely rare for mortal protagonists (like the PCs) to experience or cause.

    It's why I dislike rust monsters, ear seekers, potions that change your gender and all that game-y stuff. It isn't rooted in fantasy fiction and breaks the suspension of disbelief.

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    1. You raise a very good point about gamey-ness. I'll have to think about that a bit more. Thank you.

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  4. I allowed raise dead and resurrection spells in my campaigns, but I enforced the resurrection survival % (based on constitution) without compromise. If the survival roll failed, the character was forever dead, and not even a wish could undo it.

    To be fair, I ran pretty merciless campaigns. If I hadn't allowed the players raise dead/resurrection spells, they wouldn't have stood much of a chance.

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  5. Raise Dead usually doesn't ring true in games. If your wife or son died, and you knew that there was a way to get them to come back to life, wouldn't you do virtually anything to ensure that? Wouldn't you steal the crown jewels or round up an army of dragon-hunters or whatever to get the necessary coin? And wouldn't someone capable of the feat be followed around by throngs of people all the time? And yet most games treat it like it's an expensive luxury service that only PCs and kings can afford, but kings aren't even interested. Very weird.

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    1. Indeed, the spells quickly make implausible the faux-medievalism of most D&D campaigns settings when they're readily available as a service. How is there a hereditary line of monarchs when monarchs might effectively live nearly forever so long as they can recruit a high-enough level cleric? For that matter and speaking of, why don't the various religious orders have a hammer-lock on politics derived from their ability to grant and withhold extremely long lives? Why aren't all these resulting theocracies living in a state of perpetual peace or cold war resulting from the clergy's power to routinely undo the results of a day's battle (perhaps instead of targeting the Magic-User, everyone should be targeting the enemy's arch-clerics; perhaps the politics are driven by a mix of immortality and attempts by various factions to assassinate enough rival priests quickly enough to keep them all from being resurrected in short order).

      It isn't game-breaking: like somebody said upthread, it's actually gamifying, giving players a chance to keep beloved characters in which they've become heavily invested chances for do-overs. What it is, however, is world breaking. The logical consequence of these spells is a world where death might be sort of irrelevant unless you come up with some counter-weight: the gods don't allow it for reasons, or there's some strict caste system defined by the ability to buy Raise Dead services, or some other limit--but that's nevertheless a very different cultural setting than the "Middle Ages with dwarves and magic" that most tables default to.

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    2. It would be fun to play in a deconstructed Greyhawk where all these weird things are brought to their natural conclusion.

      Another example is Know Alignment and Detect Lie. How can any Thieves Guild survive with these spells available to the local authorities? The result might be the Thieves Guild launching a campaign to exterminate all spellcasters in their territory. Or the authorities and the Thieves Guild forming an alliance, which is pretty common in our world too!

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    3. Don’t most revivify-type spells preserve age and have a (at least potential) cost of attributes, not to mention possibly failing based on the target’s constitution? That would prevent immortal monarchs, at least by that mechanism.

      Yeah, you wouldn’t expect to permanently eliminate an opposing leader in a minor battle, but after a major victory there would be a benefit to honoring the high-ranking enemy dead with a cremation and scattering of the ashes.

      So, these might not break the world quite as much as stated.

      That said, these services don’t seem to be used as much as expected. In Tékumel, even though emperors wouldn’t live forever, wouldn’t there have been attempts to resurrect Emperor Hirkáne or Prince Eselné?

      A Hall of Blue Illumination discussing revivifications in Barker’s games and in the historical record would be useful.

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  6. Yeah, the existence of Raise Dead (especially in its later easier incarnations) is weird isn't it? I did a blog post long ago on exactly how world-breaky stuff like "Raise Dead" and "Know Alignment" might be: https://mockman.com/2017/02/27/a-magic-user-in-the-hundred-years-war-using-dd-with-historical-settings/

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  7. My favorite game in college, a friend's home brew, Cold Iron, didn't have any form of resurrection but what it did have is an ability to restore a very severely wounded character. The trick was you had 6 melee turns to do it. What made that trick not so impossible is the Flesh to Stone spell would stop the clock. So you had to take time in combat to turn your buddy to stone, then you had to prevail in combat, or at least be able to retreat with the body, or at least return to the battlefield and hope your buddy's statue wasn't smashed. Then off back to town.

    Some PCs in my campaign invested in magic items that could cast Flesh to Stone at range just for the purpose of being able to save their buddies without having to wade into the melee.

    Still a bit gamey, but actually, it's really just modern paramedic medicine as magic.

    It doesn't negate assassination, you just need to hold the line around your target for 6 melee turns. It may not help with poison, but even if it does (not actually tested in game to my remembrance), you're just back to keeping help from getting to the target within 6 melee turns.

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    1. “Flesh to Stone” is the equivalent of the Excellent Ruby Eye. Both brilliant solutions to the problem.

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