This happened in my world. At first I told players to just deduct the gold value of the diamonds from their gold total when they used a rez of any kind. Training wheels mode. Then, later in the campaign, the capital city gets attacked by an undead army -- thousands dead. Nobles and the middle class start popping those rez diamonds, and suddenly you can't find a single diamond on the market anymore. I give each player a rez diamond that was assumed to be on their person at the time, and beyond that, finding a rez diamond is going to be an endeavor. I think controlling the diamond supply is the best way to adjust the power of the rez line of spells in 5e.
Vechs I just read the spells as they were mentioned, and was scrolling through to see whether any comments mentioned the material costs. This is such a good idea, it’s great!
The problem with that is that it specifies "a diamond worth 1000gp" (or whatever it is). So if you make diamonds scarcer, 1000gp may get you a much smaller diamond... but by RAW, it's still enough for the spell. Because the forces of magic really care about the price of luxury goods for some reason. (Obviously that's ludicrous and should be changed, my point is that *just* changing the availability of diamonds without also tweaking the rules isn't going to have the desired effect.)
@@johnnye87 Yeah, instead of requiring a diamond of a certain cash value (since that's completely dependent on the market) you could base it on the quality of its 4 Cs (its carat weight, clarity, cut, and color) regardless of the current market value. Players could potentially make a mini adventure out of having to track down a raw diamond of suitable quality then make a separate adventure to find a craftsman who's actually skilled enough to work a diamond to the proper cut.
@@johnnye87 this is where you have to make the distinction between the value of the diamond and the actual price of the diamond. I've always taken it as the spell requires a diamond with a material value of 1000gp. This diamond may have a price of 800-2000GP when your players try to buy it, but its material value will always stay the same. This makes more sense as then the "1000gp" directly refers to the physical properties and dimensions of the diamond rather than what the market sells it as; I don't think magic cares much for economic fluctuations. The use of the word "worth" in the original wording of the spell is the source of the problem here
On an alternate note; As a DM I actually really like revivify, to me it smacks of the idea that someone flatlines and you hit the with the defib paddles or epi needle and jolt them back to life before they have a chance to suffer from brain damage and the other nasty side effects of... death.
Yup, that's exactly how I think of the _revivify_ option. It's not true resurrection like the other spells, but just a last-minute way of staving off death. It's the only resurrection spell that I _wouldn't_ remove or at least nerf if I'm going for a hardcore experience.
Not to mention, it's super expensive to cast. At such a low level, you're not going to have the resources to bring people back more than maybe once or twice over a campaign.
Same. To me, death in a fantasy setting is a process. Body stopping vital functions. Body begins to decay Soul detaches from body Soul leaves mortal plane Soul arrives in waiting plane Soul is judged Soul is sent to real afterlife Soul arrives in the afterlife At each step, returning them is a different level of magic. Revivify is analogous to what real world medical science can do, so is totally within the realm of a low-magic fantasy setting as they're only "mostly dead" and really, within 1 minute, wouldn't even be considered dead today IRL. Of course, some means of death would instantly put someone outside of the reach of such a spell, and that would make those causes of death more terrifying. Further, you can easily adjust the feel of how it works by defining how hard (up to and including being impossible) each step is. To me, the obvious cut off is that once a soul is residing in the afterlife, it can't come back, but for low magic, once it leaves the material world, being out of reach is reasonable. This, combined with a bit of uncertainty at least in the duration of each step (if not even the certainty of success) can really preserve the feel of danger while allowing the party access to minor resurrection magic. Of course, you really want to make players afraid, paying attention to monsters that can steal or consume souls can become a big deal.
As a french native speaker, i realy appreciate that ALL your Web DM shows are fully understandable without any subtitles (even if i don't get all your references imo). Eatch phrase isn't speaked too fast and eatch word is well articulate. Realy some quality job done here!
The idea of an eternal warrior - repeatedly returned when the kingdom needs him - reminds me of King Arthur, slumbering in Avalon until Britain's greatest time of need. (Incidentally, if things like WWII or other terrible parts of the 20th and 21st century _aren't_ Britain's greatest time of need, I dread to think what events are yet to come that Arthur hasn't come back yet. At least according to the myth, obviously.) I'm now imagining a secret place, kept somewhere in the realm, where a great warrior king's body is kept and watched over by a secret order of holy monks and wizards. Individuals regularly casting Gentle Repose to keep the body fresh, and Circle of Protection so no ghosts try to claim it for their own. The order would probably be made - wholly or partially - of elves, since they can live for a long time. And they just stay there, guarding the king's cadaver until such time as he's needed again.
Bluecho4 I like that and turning it around on the villain. There’s an eternal champion of evil and if you know the right rituals, a nefarious cultist or foul magician can bring back this champion to cleave a path of destruction through the good and noble realms.
Bluecho4 i mean to be honest England wasn't conquered in WWII so technically it wasn't the time of greatest need. Either that or the old king has the worst case of too good to use syndrome
It's a typical savior myth. Religions have them (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam), nations (England, Germany, Ireland) have them and probably many other things have them as well.
Clone is pretty insane. There is effectively no limit on it and it also bypasses old age. Make a clone, live your life. Die. Come back. Make a new clone. Repeat forever.
Add an element of Soul Deterioration from the Clone spell. After 5 clones, you lose the ability to do X, after 10, you lose Y, after 20, your soul can't come back at all anymore.
Revivify is a godsend to me. I love rpgs (video games) that have tough as nails encounters, and you can't have these experiences in a game that has perma-death. This allows me to have difficult and interesting mechanics that allows my players to learn the encounter and slowly win without worrying whether or not I'm going too easy on them.
A small thing I like to add is that a Raise Dead has to be cast at the place where the person died. It's simple but there was one fun detour where the heroes had to excavate a collapsed evil castle in order to get back to the ritual room where the victim was sacrificed.
Jonathan Herzog what do you do if the place where he died doesn't exist anymore? Such as a collapsed plane of existence? I suppose they are rightfully boned
Here's a thought: Crawling Claw is the re-animated hand of a murderer. If the dead character has murdered, then when you resurrect him, maybe his hands fall off, leaving two annoying critters and one character unarmed.
Wow, the thumbnails get more, and more glorious over time. Between Pruitt's charisma, Jim's musings, and Travis' editing and behind the scenes work, this is fast becoming a real powerhouse of a show.
Whoa, what an awesome episode! You guys have given me so many adventure hooks just from this one topic, like what happens when the world runs out of diamonds? Who gets the last diamond? Keep up the great work!
Would you guys be able to do a video on flight? Things like air ship, flying carpets, and spells? Just trying to get an idea of what kinda of role it can play in a game
In regards to the diamond rarity discussion: I find that in my experiences, most players forget that any spell requires material components simply due to the logic, "Well I have my arcane/divine focus. Isn't that supposed to cover material component requirements?" Because they don't fully comprehend the line that says it only covers material components that aren't consumed and lack a GP cost.
I really like revivify, I had an NPC who was aware the party could do it bargain with a fallen party member for the release of a prisoner. It was beautiful because the party MIGHT have been able to beat the NPC but not within a minute.
I came up with the idea, and haven't had the opportunity to try it out in a game, that the magic brings the target back from the dead immediately, but to make the resurrection permanent, the party has to go on a quest to fulfill the life-price of the resurrected character - so you complicate the resurrections, but the PC being resurrected still gets to play their character in the adventure that saves their life.
Had a rogue in my party go the assassin route when they hit level 3. Zentarim kept approaching her to join. After refusing them 3 times they paid a group of street urchins to ambush the party and target a party member till he was dead... after they defeated the Urchins one player was dead and the Zent cointact showed up with a Cleric of Bane offering a deal... His life back, for her joining. She joined and has been doing side jobs for them ever since... Party still has no idea they were set up.
I like the idea of having the party fighting a deadly encounter with the Grim Reaper/Raven Queen. Or even making an offering of another life. Heck, even serve as a champion for them, therefore making the character multiclass into a paladin/cleric/warlock
Man, I love yall. You help expand on my ideas so perfectly. The next game I run, I believe one PC wants to be a cleric, and another warlock pact of raven queen. So I'm thinking, the cleric needs to go through the process of setting up the ritual and such. It'll cost quite a pretty penny, plus to carry that stuff around is brutal. The warlock, however, if they so choose to try and revive someone, they'll have to trade the dead soul for another whose time has come. Maybe a shitty town watch captain who's been beating up teens, maybe the jolly bar owner who always gave them a round for free.
The solution to Revivify is strick enforcement of time and 300 gp worth of powdered diamond. That, in my experience, isn't easy to achieve at 5th level. But maybe me and my DM are stingy.
It might be that the only person with ready supply of diamonds is aware of why a bunch of adventurers would want some on short notice, and jacks up the price or applies additional non-monetary costs onto the bill. They know the party is on a time limit, and abuses that for all they're worth. So even just to get the materials, they might need to perform a favor for the supplier, which could be a whole other adventure or mission. Maybe they have to rush to do it before the time limit expires, or the supplier makes them sign a legally (and perhaps magically) binding contract before the material is forked over. Either way, the party can't just get their buddy raised without going to great lengths.
Bluecho4 Thing is you have a one minute time limit to cast the revivify spell. Revivify is a spell you're casting in the middle of combat not five hours afterwards. You don't have time to do a quest for the merchant to get those diamonds you need when your party member just died and all you have is the revivify spell.
When the DM's solutions to Raise Dead is to make diamonds rare, the players solution to the DM is Fabricate (if I can turn some trees and hemp plants into a bridge, I can turn a lump of coal into a lump of diamond; making diamond is easy and cheap, where do you think all those industrial grade diamonds for oil drilling diamond tipped drill bits come from, we make them). I look at Revivify as like the doctor pulling out the shock paddles, "CLEAR!!"
That's not how Fabricate works. It reshapes/reweaves materials, but it doesn't transmute them. "You convert raw materials into products of the same material." The coal could be reshaped/woven into what would normally be an impossible design/configuration, but it couldn't be transformed into a diamond, the same way the tree/hemp couldn't be transmuted into, say, oil for lamps or similar, via this spell. So yeah... unfortunately that wouldn't work.
Guys, I have been inspired by this video. Thank you very much for that. Resurrection/Raise Dead will now require: The "Soul Bag" of a Night Hag and the feather of a celestial (like an Angel, a Pegasus or a Coatl), or the holy item of some faith (the hand of St. Llwellyn, or the Sword of St. Nathaniel the Archon...etc.) Like it. EDIT: LOVE the Weyland Yutani shirt. "Building Better Worlds...then filling them with screams and xenomorphs...then nuking them..."
One of the things I found incredibly awesome about the Path of the Zealot Barbarian subclass from Xanathar's Guide to Everything is relevant to this topic: at 3rd-level, they gain the ability to be resurrected without the spellcaster needing to have/consume expensive material components. I'm currently playing one who is 1st-level, but I look forward to be able to make suicide runs with few (if any) consequences later on in the game! EDIT: Of course, Jim mentions exactly this near the end at 25:42. Very thorough job, guys!
I can't help but imagine on the opposite end of the spectrum where you have a secret dwarven kingdom that knows how o make synthetic diamonds and just create a utopia without the knowledge of anyone.
OOH, good call referencing Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell. I always saw them as Wizard vs Sorcerer. One's the lifelong book-learner. The other's the intuitive magic user. You definitely see that when he places the note into the mirror without knowing how he's going to get it back. The way Strange "intuits" the next step without knowing the inverse is incredible.
What if you have the opposite problem? Players that are so unattached to their characters that they try and switch out or kamikaze anytime they come up with a new idea?
Death taxes often work well here, say, losing magic items or your gold in the bank if your character banks it. Or, even, threaten their progress with the story. If enough of the party wipes in a short period of time then there's no one left who really cares about their original goal or even knows what that goal was in the first place, a la ship of Theseus.
My rule for this is when you create a new character, they can be half the level (rounded down) of your previous character plus two (not counting if they were level one or two when they died). So, after level four you begin losing levels for doing this. Yeah, you can end up with a fresh level twelve character after losing your level twenty character, but that's only if you: A) Didn't resurrect your original character. B) Let your level twenty character die. C) Made it to level twenty in the first place... Plus I make sure to imply to my players that playing a level twelve character in an epic-level game is not instantly perilous, and you can catch up in levels rather quickly. However, I must stress that I don't do this unless I'm DM-ing for a group that is actually prone to suicide-ing their characters. It's really not all that necessary in any other case.
There's also nothing wrong with playing multiple parties, AD&D style. In one game I ran, as the players became bigger movers and shakers they would have mandatory downtime to represent the kinds of concerns that affect tier 2+ characters being less frequent, and while their 'mains' were acting on the world during downtime they would have lower level 'alts' to go do the adventuring. That way, if a player got bored of playing one character all the time they had an out without committing suicide or sunsetting that character to never return to the campaign.
I makem roleplay it out so these characters stay within the world we play in. The cleric stayed in a town in need the wizard became an apprentice for a later villain the fighter became a sell sword for a local king the thief became a libertarian stealing scrolls and spell book and collecting past due fees and books. In this we can have and encounter and bring in someone or something new but we have a chance to see them agian.
Just my two cents in case anyone is looking at this now: maybe then the "level 1-15 epic campaign" is the wrong style of game for them. Maybe they'll like something more akin to older editions where the game plays on the scale of modules which take 2-4 sessions to go through. Look at something like "Tales from the Yawning Portal" or just convert older editions. At the end of each module you can ask the players if they want to keep going with their current characters or roll new ones. Those that like their characters can bring them into the new campaign, while those who got bored can try new ideas. Over time, you can flesh out larger background storylines and connections between the modules that the players will notice, even if the characters won't. In the end, you may have something like this (combining Keep on the Borderlands, Village of Hommlet, Scourge of the Slavelords, Against the Giants, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits). - Players solve the problem at the Keep but, in the victory celebration, one of the revelers shares concerns about strange happenings in his home town of Hommlet. -Then we cut to Hommlet, where players with new characters investigate the cult and, at the moathouse, realize that the cult was a front for a band of slavers who are part of a much larger operation. -The local baron and his knights (the players) investigate this slaving ring and destroy them. -Giants, who were the ones buying the slaves, begin launching raids against the barony in retalliation, and so strike teams (1 for all the giants or 1 for each) are formed to take them down. -After destroying the final giant stronghold, a lone drow is captured who reveals that the drow have been manipulating the giants. A party is organized to go beneath the earth and destroy them. -At the end of that campaign, Lolth is accidentally released into the world, and so the good gods intervene and send avatars of their justice (PCs) to defeat the demonweb queen once and for all. That way, you have an adventure that can be played with the same characters, but has places where it is very easy to swap out for a new character with little justification. Limit their ability to roll new characters in the middle of modules unless there is an obvious place to do so (maybe keep an NPC or two with them as back-ups just in case). And if even that is too long a story for them, then just run one-shots.
All your videos are sooo beautiful; Being in one of your campaigns is on my Bucket list, The way you talk about the game almost sounds like music. You sound like you REALLY care about the game and i think that’s really important; Thank you for helping to make every Wednesday as good as it can be 👍
I think you could have been clearer on the point about NPCs with/without raise dead - you can "ban" it from NPCs while still allowing the PCs to learn it. The PCs are meant to be extraordinary.
character idea: a zealot barbarian that can be brought back so easy not because he has a god doing it or he's magic somehow. it's because the barbarian is a master at navigating the most byzantine of bureaucracies and at some point in their life they've gotten in contact with the bureaucracy of mount celestia and filled out the right paperwork to have his resurrections approved without having to pay the processing fees.
Good video, lots of great points (like thinking about the diamond economy). One way to make resurrection spells a big deal is to require the sacrifice of a similar creature - sacrifice a human to resurrect a human, sacrifice a dwarf to resurrect a dwarf, sacrifice a horse to resurrect a horse. This mean in a sense that you not so much bring dead people back to life as changing who is dead. There is so many roleplaying opportunities and plot hooks that could be crafted from this. A murderer gets caught and is sentenced to be the sacrifice to resurrect a victim, but which victim? One PC might sacrifice himself to resurrect a loved one. Some woodelves might want help to capture an evil dark elf... to resurrect a deceased member of the tribe, it turns out.
Or make them temporary hitpoints, thus they can be dispelled and only lasting a minute per spelllevel or casterlevel. And describe how the character isn't really healed but revitalized by sacred/profane energy, still bleeding profusely and being on the brink of collapse.
Has anybody considered having only one death saving throw failure disappear after a long rest or even a week or month? Perhaps all Revivify does is take away one failed roll and give one success after they have failed all 3. Lower tier spells relating to stabilizing just suspend the death saving rolls for an hour or so. As mentioned in the great video, harsh requirements on the body and soul's condition as well as stricter material component requirements and perhaps needing to go to sacred places with guardians or ghosts trying to take the body. Take advantage of this with monsters mutilating or eating the body. People know you can rez and steal corpses or threaten you to revive Hitler or his in-game equivalent. Perhaps the player is revived 'successfully' and creates an entirely new character who possesses the body and pretends nothing has changed while they carry out a hidden agenda or just enjoy their second or third chance at life. (imagine the entire party slowly and secretly gets replaced by other spirits throughout the campaign and no one realizes it. Hilarious) There's also the harsh resting rules where a short rest is a 6 hour sleep + light activity for 2 hours and you need 5 or 7 days for a complete rest. Resource management becomes much more complex and rez spells can't be spammed daily and must be applied in a timely fashion.
I think revivify is a nice addition because it inspires gameplay elements in its own. The party will want some diamonds so they can cast it, so you can integrate that was part of a larger adventure. Additionally, there are lots of ways that revivify becomes an unsavoury option. It can't reverse major damage like a missing hand, and so characters ressurected quick and dirty by a revivify may still be gravely wounded until an even more powerful healing spell is applied to them. On the flip side, this is a tool that can be employed by low-level baddies. It seems like an exciting encounter to face an evil cleric in an early game, and they keeps bringing back their body guards.
I actually always loved the idea of using a lovecraftian style concept for a setting, and making death more of a measure of difficulty. Such as that the world in the past had a set of magical veils applied of it, which causes living beings to perceive the world differently than it actually is. Now you could do it that there are ways of piercing/lifting these sets of veils to see the world as it truly is, and that death or returning from death is one such method. In this way you return from the dead an you might find the world around you is different more an more as you come back, maybe the monsters of the world change as their true natures are revealed (making them much harder and more dangerous), and even that lifting the veils might reveal creatures hidden behind it that notice you now (even that if you go to far the great old ones notice you an might try and devour you making it a true death no coming back).
I liked the repercussions from 3.5 and earlier..."Upon completion of the spell, the creature is immediately restored to full hit points, vigor, and health, with no loss of prepared spells. However, the subject loses one level, or 2 points of Constitution if the subject was 1st level. (If this reduction would bring its Con to 0 or lower, it can’t be resurrected). This level loss or Constitution loss cannot be repaired by any means."
One idea I always thought would be good for my world is a 'death police' of sorts. Resurrection magic works perfectly fine, but these guys will come after you if they find out. They think that trying to defy death is one of the worst of crimes, and that makes it so that as a DM you don't have to change the magic itself, but rather just change the context of the world. I mean, people are not fond of necromancy, so how is this different? And sometimes, you not only have to worry about the death police, but also that god you just angered.
I am building out my BBEG who is either a Litch or someone with a powerful necromancer under his employ using soul jar or clone. He is secretly sending out the minor bosses to create chaos and conflict throughout the realm in order to then step in as the Leader of a mighty nation and offer help under the promise of those people joining his empire. This "emperor" has extended his life multiple times and has now drawn the attention of the inevitables and a Marut is coming for him. Hence the reason he wants to grow his empire and armies to help fend off the mighty being.
What I do for deaths in games is a malfunction table that gets rolled when they get brought back with effects ranging from needing to consuming magic items for survival to having a second personality that competes for control of the body.
my players would just be like "my character died? I need to do all that to bring him/her back? I will just make a new character. who is an exact twin of my first character."
In these cases I've often seen it ruled that any new characters would start at a level lower than the character who died. This starts to hurt more when a higher level character dies (asuming you use XP for leveling).
In a scenario of dying at, say, level 17 or something...then whats the point? sure if they survive a single encounter they'll gain several levels, they are now always going to be the weakest link by far. And, assuming it wasn't just a series of really unlucky rolls, the fact that they died at level 17 makes it seem unlikely they'd survive very often at lower level...may as well just have the player retire from that campaign at that point
As a player, I do complain bout resurrection magic. It's part of my broader complaints that 5e is trying to be way too easy in order not to upset people. Combat can be challenging early on but not much later. Survival is pretty much out cause there's so many spells that make it too easy. Finding food? Outlander, Create Food and Water etc all make the process kind of unsatisfying in many respects.
On the topic of Revivify, I'm personally fine with it. I see Revivify as a fantasy version of a defibulator because they both fill the same role from a story and concept perspective. In our world most first responders (usually) carry or have access to a defibulator so if the situation calls for it (like being dead), they can quickly use before it's too late. So in a d&d fantasy if their are clerics who are always on standby or something like that, they can quickly go the "deceased" and revive them or prevent their soul from leaving or however you want to flavor it.
We had a group who had a player die and the plan was to get them a Rez. They were knee-deep in a dungeon and didn't want to drag the body around everywhere so they cut off a finger to have the spell cast upon the finger. When the time came - the spell was cast on the finger, but the DM had the magic trigger on the main body of the finger's person (the majority of the available body). I think it would have been played out different if the finger was the only part remaining, but ... The player woke up (still knee-deep in a dungeon - and now alone) with a nubby finger that was regenerating.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you create a setting where 6+ spell level casters are rare or even absent then it might be difficult to challenge players once they get high level, as you won't really have that many NPC spellcasters available to challenge them. If you are playing with a typical DND setting though, one trick is to use resurrection magic against the PCs as well. Just as players have access to resurrection magic, so too does my NPCs, which means that killing important villains require big measures! In DND, the only way to make sure you've destroyed someone is to destroy their very soul.
I've been reading the Vlad Taltos books and Brust has a cool approach. Resurrection is commonplace if you can afford it or if you're working for someone who can. However, certain injuries to the head or spine can make it so you can't come back. There's also a class of weapons that will destroy your soul, so you can't come back or even reincarnate if you're killed with one. And there are spells to keep someone from being raised, so you may have to find a wizard and make them drop the effect. Depending on the extent of damage and the time spent dead, the person performing the revivification (as it's called in the series) can have a very difficult time. These elements could be dropped into a game and work very nicely, I think.
The way to defeat a team that's resurrection heavy is to create traps that destroy bodies, enemies that swallow whole, restrict gem sales or bump up the price, make diamonds a quest to get, etc
I'm a player and was never a huge fan of how easy resurrection was. As much as I like playing my characters, the idea that the world had consequences for decisions was the biggest draw for me to Dungeons and Dragons. I like what you said about making it hard to come by and think that if I ever ran a game that is how I would do it.
I think that Matthew Mercer's resurrection system is really something that everyone should consider if they want to run a game where PC death carries weight.
The anime overlord, which draws heavily from dnd type systems, presents a world where 6th level magic is thought to be the highest level magic achievable by mortals, which makes it quite entertaining when the 20th level caster encounters someone who thinks their minions are unkillable because they are immune to 6th level and lower magic, so she drops a 7th level lightning bolt on it.
My current campaign is set in the Star Wars universe (because I'm a huge nerd) In this world Dark Adepts (a converted version of a evil sorcerer) are insanely rare and their magic is forbidden, yet the are the only ones with resurrection spells and the cost is a lightsaber crystal instead of a diamond, along with a ritual.
One aspect of resurrection magic that would be cool to analyze is how it impacts assassination attempts. While low class hitmen might operate in much the same way as always, political assassins might have to go the extra mile with elaborate, detailed rituals for preventing revivals. That could involve mutilating or dispersing the target's vitals (perhaps the heart is required for a ritual), capturing them alive for soul banishments, or taking a curse specialist along to make sure that whatever they kill stays dead.
I think for a more hardcore D&D experience, revivify might be worth outright removing. However, if you do allow it in your game, and you want things to feel more dangerous, just put the players up against something that can create an antimagic zone in a small area (which can be placed on a dead body). You could even just give a bad guy an item that does this. Suddenly that massive crutch is gone, and the players have a huge problem to overcome. I'm also of the mind that coming back from the dead should be traumatic. Giving players quirks/scars/changes or handicaps when they come back from the dead can be a good way to make low level resurrections more interesting. I have a table which I roll on whenever someone comes back to life. Some of the consequences are cosmetic, like having one of your eyes go blind, or your skin is slightly more transparent. However you might have one of the spells you know swapped with another one, or two of your ability scores altered. Maybe your alignment or personality changes. I absolutely think there should be non-mechanical consequences for coming back from the dead. Using the madness table is a really legit idea.
As a DM and as a player the ease of survival in 5E is a problem. Since you have players taking bigger and bigger risks, with seemingly no consequences.
Not sure why so many other DMs have such a problem with Revivify. It revives a creature that died within 1 minute with 1 hp. It can't revive someone who's died of old age nor does it restore body parts. It doesn't even heal wounds. All you need to do to make a character a valid target for say Raise Dead, but not Revivify is have enemies decapitate them. Intelligence IS an actual thing to think about when determining what enemies to throw at your players.
Can't say I like the idea of arbitrary anti-magic. Severe injuries and special monster abilities are much easier to implement and are more plausible and/or interesting than anti-magic. It's also a hell of a lot easier to destroy a corpse with AoE and have the body gone or too damaged then risk potentially giving an anti-magic item to a party.
Revivify is very limited tho. The mage can't find their diamond stash in the confusion (if they keep it in a pouch, make checks everytime they go to town to see if it gets stolen) ? Time up, can't revivify. 60s is short. Burnt by a fireball ? Dissolved in acid ? Decapitated ? Body not a valid target anymore. Need a bigger gun.
I like the idea Age of Sigmarhas for the Stormcast Eternals; each time one dies, its essence is drawn back up, and reforged into a new body. But each time this happens, memories and personality are lost until the Eternal is little more than a robot. Might discourage players from even wanting multiple resurrection - the first time gives you a weird quirk, but the third time might leave you basically a robot.
I think one stipulation i might add to revivify is the death saves dont go away right away. Maybe takes a long rest to get your death saves wiped away. Any time before that rest if they hit zero hp they die. You could revivify again. Maybe add exhaustion lvs every time there rezed. At low lvs this could burn through there resorces.
In a world of mine there are 3 gods of death that are all brothers and all of them have a different personality. Upon dying you meet one of them and if you've done a favor for them or they have a task they think you can accomplish for you to acomish, they can give you new chance or you can make a bargain in role-playing
Just had an idea that I'm totally going to be using is adding a loooong cast time for every single spell that taxes any time limits by adding a meditation period. Since you're appealing to a divine power to bring them back, then it might make sense for there to be a meditation required so that resurrection magic isn't used emotionally in the heat of the moment. You have to think "what does it mean to me and the world to bring a person back? Is this really a good idea?" And be very strict on where souls would go and who it might anger. Maybe that high-level PC was going to be a powerful soldier in some divine army after death that the god was prepping for and now they don't have their soul and they get a little pissed (really pissed if it was a character going to hell)
The thing is though, there are ways to balance it in game. For instance, my paladin at lvl 10 just learned revivify and has 2 spell slots to cast it. It also consumes a small diamond each casting. You could make diamonds a rarer item as yous said or just let the paladin have a somewhat cool spell other than divine smite (99% of what I use other than rp spells) maybe adjust it for other classes that get the spell slots for it too early. Additionally you could make it a spell that only brings them back for a day before they start to decompose again (great quest intro) or make it so that it they come back very weak and have restricted actions and movements for x amount of time
I think by how you describe it revivafy probably just needs tweeking cause having a specific character being that valuable it makes things interesting if they're targetted or the party is in a toght spot and they have to book it. It sounds like it really helps stop party wipes. I don't actually play dnd I'm just going off what you say and looking at it from a game design perspective.
what i did is i added a few "soul trap" effects. the reason being the spells require the soul to be "free and willing". if they arent free, they cant be rezzed. i have only actually used it twice so far(once was the player making a deal with death, the other was a sorcerer using soul trap on a wizard while the boss beat the stuffing out of them). so this means that the players wont always be able to come back, though its usually a possibility. so they have to play it safe. the effect is rare, but when i use it, its in high-danger areas. i also didnt enforce material components early on, so thats kind of my way of retroactively enforcing?
We have had a house rule for 3.5 and I plan to take it over into 5e - basically, if you have all the material components, a character can get raised once with scars to the soul, body etc. If you want to be raised again, than it has to be a powerful spell (resurrection or true resurrection) which is also tied to a quest for either a deity or like some holy organisation. The 3rd and last time requires a wish spell. Although to be fair, most campaigns were lower level so it didn't happen. One other thing which occurs as a possible "plot hole" is the reviving of ancient heroes, kings, etc. but I fix this by saying that their rightful heir (or like the dynasty that took over) banned this.
How my Dm has dealt with this idea is one time we are in a mass war setting. WW1 dnd edition basically. Reviving another player or character requires time and vocalization and the enemy isn't just gonna let that slide once they hear you.
I spent 3 months building and play testing a full lvl 1-20 homebrew class with a full character backstory for my long running campaign only to have him die on the 2nd session. I was sad at the time but next session I was right back to having fun as a Dwarven VanHelsing. Roll with the punches and have fun with it.
I agree, Revivify is usually the major problem. My preference though, if my PCs are looking to any NPCs for resurrection, the spell they always get is "Reincarnate". It's a way of holding onto the same character, but the chance of them being the same race is pretty dang low, so death at least has a permanent change. (And if they would roll and stay the same race, they can't see the chart behind your screen. I just change it anyways.)
It is pretty traumatic so it is possible to give the character a madness effect either as a permanent thing or a temporary one. Give a saving throw most likely wisdom. This is a way to add some consequences but will work better with some people then others. Plus it adds a nice roleplaying element that the players can pull out while playing.
I'm rebuilding the Doomguide cleric to bring a viable version up to 5E speed and this particular episode really added some perspective. I was perusing the spells to replace animate dead and create greater undead, and had pondered using revivify. After this show, I think some kind of domain based heal similar to lay on hands may be a better alternative.
always liked the idea of 10th day adventists, a cult (hell)bent on reviving those who need reviving for their evil cause. regarding the spell components, it could be interesting as the dwarves and to some degree gnomes have an edge over accessing those over the other races it would be logical for a character who died due to a dragon to come back and have a fear of dragons (always fail fear saving throw) or a character who drowned might come back and have a fear of large bodies of water and never willingly enters a boat
Nice video, per usual. I like some of the ideas to make res. magic a journey for the players, with negotiating prices, doing favors in return, and locating a priest to handle it. Makes it more thematic overall. For my current campaign, I borrowed an idea from Critical Role and give a DC for a res. spell to work. The caster rolls a D20 and adds their spellcasting modifier. The DC starts at 10 and each time a character dies, the DC increases for them. My players are cool with it, because they see how res. spells could break the game and they want the stakes to remain high.
As DM I often bullshit some deaths, if a player is just attacked by a boar or stabbed a few times I'll "kill" them by knocking them out or putting them in a coma-like state. In this state they can only be revived by a magic spell or similar means. However if a player is straight up decapitated or dismembered then magic can bring them back as undead or it takes much stronger to bring them back as their original state. The player could instead decide to put their faith in their team to work hard and revive them, or make a new character if they want.
I like the idea of the person being resurrected having to make a Wisdom save or have some form of indefinite madness, and the DC increases each time you're brought back. So maybe your character comes back, but now they only speak Celestial, and they need to spend downtime relearning their old languages. Until then, hopefully someone else knows Celestial, or you won't be able to communicate effectively with the rest of the party
I like the idea of no revivify, increased difficulty on other res spells, more not necessarily bad but different consequences as in whatever the spell that changes race or age or gender and stuff is, and the person having to fight their way out of hell also. Something is guarding the gates, or something tries to tag a ride and the only one who can stop this is the person being res'd's soul.
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This happened in my world. At first I told players to just deduct the gold value of the diamonds from their gold total when they used a rez of any kind. Training wheels mode. Then, later in the campaign, the capital city gets attacked by an undead army -- thousands dead. Nobles and the middle class start popping those rez diamonds, and suddenly you can't find a single diamond on the market anymore. I give each player a rez diamond that was assumed to be on their person at the time, and beyond that, finding a rez diamond is going to be an endeavor. I think controlling the diamond supply is the best way to adjust the power of the rez line of spells in 5e.
Vechs I just read the spells as they were mentioned, and was scrolling through to see whether any comments mentioned the material costs. This is such a good idea, it’s great!
The problem with that is that it specifies "a diamond worth 1000gp" (or whatever it is). So if you make diamonds scarcer, 1000gp may get you a much smaller diamond... but by RAW, it's still enough for the spell. Because the forces of magic really care about the price of luxury goods for some reason.
(Obviously that's ludicrous and should be changed, my point is that *just* changing the availability of diamonds without also tweaking the rules isn't going to have the desired effect.)
@@johnnye87 Yeah, instead of requiring a diamond of a certain cash value (since that's completely dependent on the market) you could base it on the quality of its 4 Cs (its carat weight, clarity, cut, and color) regardless of the current market value. Players could potentially make a mini adventure out of having to track down a raw diamond of suitable quality then make a separate adventure to find a craftsman who's actually skilled enough to work a diamond to the proper cut.
@@johnnye87 this is where you have to make the distinction between the value of the diamond and the actual price of the diamond.
I've always taken it as the spell requires a diamond with a material value of 1000gp. This diamond may have a price of 800-2000GP when your players try to buy it, but its material value will always stay the same. This makes more sense as then the "1000gp" directly refers to the physical properties and dimensions of the diamond rather than what the market sells it as; I don't think magic cares much for economic fluctuations. The use of the word "worth" in the original wording of the spell is the source of the problem here
On an alternate note; As a DM I actually really like revivify, to me it smacks of the idea that someone flatlines and you hit the with the defib paddles or epi needle and jolt them back to life before they have a chance to suffer from brain damage and the other nasty side effects of... death.
Yup, that's exactly how I think of the _revivify_ option. It's not true resurrection like the other spells, but just a last-minute way of staving off death. It's the only resurrection spell that I _wouldn't_ remove or at least nerf if I'm going for a hardcore experience.
Not to mention, it's super expensive to cast. At such a low level, you're not going to have the resources to bring people back more than maybe once or twice over a campaign.
Same. To me, death in a fantasy setting is a process.
Body stopping vital functions.
Body begins to decay
Soul detaches from body
Soul leaves mortal plane
Soul arrives in waiting plane
Soul is judged
Soul is sent to real afterlife
Soul arrives in the afterlife
At each step, returning them is a different level of magic.
Revivify is analogous to what real world medical science can do, so is totally within the realm of a low-magic fantasy setting as they're only "mostly dead" and really, within 1 minute, wouldn't even be considered dead today IRL.
Of course, some means of death would instantly put someone outside of the reach of such a spell, and that would make those causes of death more terrifying. Further, you can easily adjust the feel of how it works by defining how hard (up to and including being impossible) each step is. To me, the obvious cut off is that once a soul is residing in the afterlife, it can't come back, but for low magic, once it leaves the material world, being out of reach is reasonable.
This, combined with a bit of uncertainty at least in the duration of each step (if not even the certainty of success) can really preserve the feel of danger while allowing the party access to minor resurrection magic.
Of course, you really want to make players afraid, paying attention to monsters that can steal or consume souls can become a big deal.
Clerics could hold a resurrection auction. Everyone brings important people that dies that day and revive goes to the highest bidder
As a french native speaker, i realy appreciate that ALL your Web DM shows are fully understandable without any subtitles (even if i don't get all your references imo). Eatch phrase isn't speaked too fast and eatch word is well articulate. Realy some quality job done here!
Idem, by an italian cousin.
You don't get all the American cultural references?😂
The idea of an eternal warrior - repeatedly returned when the kingdom needs him - reminds me of King Arthur, slumbering in Avalon until Britain's greatest time of need. (Incidentally, if things like WWII or other terrible parts of the 20th and 21st century _aren't_ Britain's greatest time of need, I dread to think what events are yet to come that Arthur hasn't come back yet. At least according to the myth, obviously.)
I'm now imagining a secret place, kept somewhere in the realm, where a great warrior king's body is kept and watched over by a secret order of holy monks and wizards. Individuals regularly casting Gentle Repose to keep the body fresh, and Circle of Protection so no ghosts try to claim it for their own. The order would probably be made - wholly or partially - of elves, since they can live for a long time. And they just stay there, guarding the king's cadaver until such time as he's needed again.
Bluecho4 I like that and turning it around on the villain. There’s an eternal champion of evil and if you know the right rituals, a nefarious cultist or foul magician can bring back this champion to cleave a path of destruction through the good and noble realms.
How do we know that King Arthur didn't awake during those times? Sounds like a kick ass campaign idea/comic book.
Bluecho4 i mean to be honest England wasn't conquered in WWII so technically it wasn't the time of greatest need. Either that or the old king has the worst case of too good to use syndrome
NeflewitzInc King Arthur as a Spitfire Pilot fending off the Huns
It's a typical savior myth. Religions have them (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam), nations (England, Germany, Ireland) have them and probably many other things have them as well.
Excuse you! The polite term is living impaired!
No it's cadaverific.
Differently living
Vitally challenged
Surprised there was no mention of Clone, probably the craziest resurrection spell of them all
Clone is pretty insane. There is effectively no limit on it and it also bypasses old age. Make a clone, live your life. Die. Come back. Make a new clone. Repeat forever.
True
Gninthgil or something like Gandalf the Grey
If you want real fun, don't let someone play their own clone - use it as an opportunity to bring in a new player... with limited amnesia, of course :)
Add an element of Soul Deterioration from the Clone spell. After 5 clones, you lose the ability to do X, after 10, you lose Y, after 20, your soul can't come back at all anymore.
Gentle repose is a second level spell not a cantrip
I really like the thing about the rarity of gems, that was something I never even considered.
Revivify is a godsend to me. I love rpgs (video games) that have tough as nails encounters, and you can't have these experiences in a game that has perma-death. This allows me to have difficult and interesting mechanics that allows my players to learn the encounter and slowly win without worrying whether or not I'm going too easy on them.
Well right at the beginning you solved it for me. My bad guys are getting resurrected now.
I got a sicknesses and the only cure is more web DM
How about a Minotaur Bard/Cleric who plays the cowbell and worships Hathor, the Egyptian bovine goddess?
TheOtakuGamer Wut
TheOtakuGamer I am screaming
I gotta have more Cow Bell
DEAD LAUGHING and no Rez...hahaha
A small thing I like to add is that a Raise Dead has to be cast at the place where the person died. It's simple but there was one fun detour where the heroes had to excavate a collapsed evil castle in order to get back to the ritual room where the victim was sacrificed.
That's a fun house rule!
Jonathan Herzog what do you do if the place where he died doesn't exist anymore? Such as a collapsed plane of existence? I suppose they are rightfully boned
That's a great idea, just stolen for our own house rules.
Here's a thought: Crawling Claw is the re-animated hand of a murderer. If the dead character has murdered, then when you resurrect him, maybe his hands fall off, leaving two annoying critters and one character unarmed.
Wow, the thumbnails get more, and more glorious over time. Between Pruitt's charisma, Jim's musings, and Travis' editing and behind the scenes work, this is fast becoming a real powerhouse of a show.
That intro was more WebMD than WebDM 😆
Whoa, what an awesome episode! You guys have given me so many adventure hooks just from this one topic, like what happens when the world runs out of diamonds? Who gets the last diamond? Keep up the great work!
Would you guys be able to do a video on flight? Things like air ship, flying carpets, and spells? Just trying to get an idea of what kinda of role it can play in a game
In regards to the diamond rarity discussion: I find that in my experiences, most players forget that any spell requires material components simply due to the logic, "Well I have my arcane/divine focus. Isn't that supposed to cover material component requirements?" Because they don't fully comprehend the line that says it only covers material components that aren't consumed and lack a GP cost.
I really like revivify, I had an NPC who was aware the party could do it bargain with a fallen party member for the release of a prisoner. It was beautiful because the party MIGHT have been able to beat the NPC but not within a minute.
I came up with the idea, and haven't had the opportunity to try it out in a game, that the magic brings the target back from the dead immediately, but to make the resurrection permanent, the party has to go on a quest to fulfill the life-price of the resurrected character - so you complicate the resurrections, but the PC being resurrected still gets to play their character in the adventure that saves their life.
Had a rogue in my party go the assassin route when they hit level 3. Zentarim kept approaching her to join. After refusing them 3 times they paid a group of street urchins to ambush the party and target a party member till he was dead... after they defeated the Urchins one player was dead and the Zent cointact showed up with a Cleric of Bane offering a deal... His life back, for her joining. She joined and has been doing side jobs for them ever since... Party still has no idea they were set up.
Phil Gagnon sounds like something a crime syndicate would do!
Talk about railroading.
I like the idea of having the party fighting a deadly encounter with the Grim Reaper/Raven Queen. Or even making an offering of another life. Heck, even serve as a champion for them, therefore making the character multiclass into a paladin/cleric/warlock
Jim Davis is probably pretty excited, because Zealot did make it into Xanathar's Guide. :)
Man, I love yall. You help expand on my ideas so perfectly.
The next game I run, I believe one PC wants to be a cleric, and another warlock pact of raven queen. So I'm thinking, the cleric needs to go through the process of setting up the ritual and such. It'll cost quite a pretty penny, plus to carry that stuff around is brutal.
The warlock, however, if they so choose to try and revive someone, they'll have to trade the dead soul for another whose time has come. Maybe a shitty town watch captain who's been beating up teens, maybe the jolly bar owner who always gave them a round for free.
I've seen a lot of RPG stuff on youtube, but you guys are hella premium! I love both your interactions!
The opening was my favourite part, and I loved the rest of the video.
This episode is why I love you guys. Great discussion and ideas. Thank you
The solution to Revivify is strick enforcement of time and 300 gp worth of powdered diamond. That, in my experience, isn't easy to achieve at 5th level. But maybe me and my DM are stingy.
It might be that the only person with ready supply of diamonds is aware of why a bunch of adventurers would want some on short notice, and jacks up the price or applies additional non-monetary costs onto the bill. They know the party is on a time limit, and abuses that for all they're worth. So even just to get the materials, they might need to perform a favor for the supplier, which could be a whole other adventure or mission. Maybe they have to rush to do it before the time limit expires, or the supplier makes them sign a legally (and perhaps magically) binding contract before the material is forked over. Either way, the party can't just get their buddy raised without going to great lengths.
Bluecho4 Thing is you have a one minute time limit to cast the revivify spell. Revivify is a spell you're casting in the middle of combat not five hours afterwards. You don't have time to do a quest for the merchant to get those diamonds you need when your party member just died and all you have is the revivify spell.
When the DM's solutions to Raise Dead is to make diamonds rare, the players solution to the DM is Fabricate (if I can turn some trees and hemp plants into a bridge, I can turn a lump of coal into a lump of diamond; making diamond is easy and cheap, where do you think all those industrial grade diamonds for oil drilling diamond tipped drill bits come from, we make them).
I look at Revivify as like the doctor pulling out the shock paddles, "CLEAR!!"
That's not how Fabricate works. It reshapes/reweaves materials, but it doesn't transmute them. "You convert raw materials into products of the same material." The coal could be reshaped/woven into what would normally be an impossible design/configuration, but it couldn't be transformed into a diamond, the same way the tree/hemp couldn't be transmuted into, say, oil for lamps or similar, via this spell. So yeah... unfortunately that wouldn't work.
Guys, I have been inspired by this video. Thank you very much for that.
Resurrection/Raise Dead will now require: The "Soul Bag" of a Night Hag and the feather of a celestial (like an Angel, a Pegasus or a Coatl), or the holy item of some faith (the hand of St. Llwellyn, or the Sword of St. Nathaniel the Archon...etc.)
Like it.
EDIT: LOVE the Weyland Yutani shirt. "Building Better Worlds...then filling them with screams and xenomorphs...then nuking them..."
One of the things I found incredibly awesome about the Path of the Zealot Barbarian subclass from Xanathar's Guide to Everything is relevant to this topic: at 3rd-level, they gain the ability to be resurrected without the spellcaster needing to have/consume expensive material components. I'm currently playing one who is 1st-level, but I look forward to be able to make suicide runs with few (if any) consequences later on in the game!
EDIT: Of course, Jim mentions exactly this near the end at 25:42. Very thorough job, guys!
I can't help but imagine on the opposite end of the spectrum where you have a secret dwarven kingdom that knows how o make synthetic diamonds and just create a utopia without the knowledge of anyone.
OOH, good call referencing Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell. I always saw them as Wizard vs Sorcerer. One's the lifelong book-learner. The other's the intuitive magic user. You definitely see that when he places the note into the mirror without knowing how he's going to get it back.
The way Strange "intuits" the next step without knowing the inverse is incredible.
Yep. Just Eric agreed. I feel like Norrell could be a tomelock but I like the wiz/sor interpretation better.
"I hope the Zealot Barbarian makes it into Xanathar's..."
Congrats, guys, you got your wish!
Why does it look like a green screen now Producer-Nerd? Are left and right Nerd CGI?
They do their own mo-cap.
Andy Serkis is incredible as Pruitt. His best work since Cesar.
It’s just the FoV on the Camera, I think it looks kinda cool.
Err... DoF depth of Field. Whoops.
What if you have the opposite problem? Players that are so unattached to their characters that they try and switch out or kamikaze anytime they come up with a new idea?
Death taxes often work well here, say, losing magic items or your gold in the bank if your character banks it. Or, even, threaten their progress with the story. If enough of the party wipes in a short period of time then there's no one left who really cares about their original goal or even knows what that goal was in the first place, a la ship of Theseus.
My rule for this is when you create a new character, they can be half the level (rounded down) of your previous character plus two (not counting if they were level one or two when they died). So, after level four you begin losing levels for doing this. Yeah, you can end up with a fresh level twelve character after losing your level twenty character, but that's only if you: A) Didn't resurrect your original character. B) Let your level twenty character die. C) Made it to level twenty in the first place... Plus I make sure to imply to my players that playing a level twelve character in an epic-level game is not instantly perilous, and you can catch up in levels rather quickly.
However, I must stress that I don't do this unless I'm DM-ing for a group that is actually prone to suicide-ing their characters. It's really not all that necessary in any other case.
There's also nothing wrong with playing multiple parties, AD&D style. In one game I ran, as the players became bigger movers and shakers they would have mandatory downtime to represent the kinds of concerns that affect tier 2+ characters being less frequent, and while their 'mains' were acting on the world during downtime they would have lower level 'alts' to go do the adventuring. That way, if a player got bored of playing one character all the time they had an out without committing suicide or sunsetting that character to never return to the campaign.
I makem roleplay it out so these characters stay within the world we play in. The cleric stayed in a town in need the wizard became an apprentice for a later villain the fighter became a sell sword for a local king the thief became a libertarian stealing scrolls and spell book and collecting past due fees and books. In this we can have and encounter and bring in someone or something new but we have a chance to see them agian.
Just my two cents in case anyone is looking at this now: maybe then the "level 1-15 epic campaign" is the wrong style of game for them. Maybe they'll like something more akin to older editions where the game plays on the scale of modules which take 2-4 sessions to go through. Look at something like "Tales from the Yawning Portal" or just convert older editions. At the end of each module you can ask the players if they want to keep going with their current characters or roll new ones. Those that like their characters can bring them into the new campaign, while those who got bored can try new ideas. Over time, you can flesh out larger background storylines and connections between the modules that the players will notice, even if the characters won't.
In the end, you may have something like this (combining Keep on the Borderlands, Village of Hommlet, Scourge of the Slavelords, Against the Giants, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits).
- Players solve the problem at the Keep but, in the victory celebration, one of the revelers shares concerns about strange happenings in his home town of Hommlet.
-Then we cut to Hommlet, where players with new characters investigate the cult and, at the moathouse, realize that the cult was a front for a band of slavers who are part of a much larger operation.
-The local baron and his knights (the players) investigate this slaving ring and destroy them.
-Giants, who were the ones buying the slaves, begin launching raids against the barony in retalliation, and so strike teams (1 for all the giants or 1 for each) are formed to take them down.
-After destroying the final giant stronghold, a lone drow is captured who reveals that the drow have been manipulating the giants. A party is organized to go beneath the earth and destroy them.
-At the end of that campaign, Lolth is accidentally released into the world, and so the good gods intervene and send avatars of their justice (PCs) to defeat the demonweb queen once and for all.
That way, you have an adventure that can be played with the same characters, but has places where it is very easy to swap out for a new character with little justification. Limit their ability to roll new characters in the middle of modules unless there is an obvious place to do so (maybe keep an NPC or two with them as back-ups just in case).
And if even that is too long a story for them, then just run one-shots.
All your videos are sooo beautiful; Being in one of your campaigns is on my Bucket list, The way you talk about the game almost sounds like music. You sound like you REALLY care about the game and i think that’s really important; Thank you for helping to make every Wednesday as good as it can be 👍
21:08 Kingsman will come for me? Hell yea, where do i sing up for that game?
"Stuff a body full of snow to keep it fresh" lmao I wasn't expecting that.
Another quality episode. You guys are the best D&D RUclips channel!
I think you could have been clearer on the point about NPCs with/without raise dead - you can "ban" it from NPCs while still allowing the PCs to learn it. The PCs are meant to be extraordinary.
Now i feel the need to get a Feyland-Yuanti t-shirt. Thanks Pruitt.
character idea: a zealot barbarian that can be brought back so easy not because he has a god doing it or he's magic somehow. it's because the barbarian is a master at navigating the most byzantine of bureaucracies and at some point in their life they've gotten in contact with the bureaucracy of mount celestia and filled out the right paperwork to have his resurrections approved without having to pay the processing fees.
Now I imagine a barbarian bullying death into letting him leave the after life.
Good video, lots of great points (like thinking about the diamond economy). One way to make resurrection spells a big deal is to require the sacrifice of a similar creature - sacrifice a human to resurrect a human, sacrifice a dwarf to resurrect a dwarf, sacrifice a horse to resurrect a horse. This mean in a sense that you not so much bring dead people back to life as changing who is dead. There is so many roleplaying opportunities and plot hooks that could be crafted from this. A murderer gets caught and is sentenced to be the sacrifice to resurrect a victim, but which victim? One PC might sacrifice himself to resurrect a loved one. Some woodelves might want help to capture an evil dark elf... to resurrect a deceased member of the tribe, it turns out.
I like the idea of revivify is temporary. It is used in emergencies and thus only keeps the person alive for lets say a random number of days.
Or make them temporary hitpoints, thus they can be dispelled and only lasting a minute per spelllevel or casterlevel. And describe how the character isn't really healed but revitalized by sacred/profane energy, still bleeding profusely and being on the brink of collapse.
This was SUCH a helpful discussion. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate the deep dives into these interesting topics 👌🏻
Has anybody considered having only one death saving throw failure disappear after a long rest or even a week or month? Perhaps all Revivify does is take away one failed roll and give one success after they have failed all 3. Lower tier spells relating to stabilizing just suspend the death saving rolls for an hour or so.
As mentioned in the great video, harsh requirements on the body and soul's condition as well as stricter material component requirements and perhaps needing to go to sacred places with guardians or ghosts trying to take the body. Take advantage of this with monsters mutilating or eating the body. People know you can rez and steal corpses or threaten you to revive Hitler or his in-game equivalent. Perhaps the player is revived 'successfully' and creates an entirely new character who possesses the body and pretends nothing has changed while they carry out a hidden agenda or just enjoy their second or third chance at life. (imagine the entire party slowly and secretly gets replaced by other spirits throughout the campaign and no one realizes it. Hilarious)
There's also the harsh resting rules where a short rest is a 6 hour sleep + light activity for 2 hours and you need 5 or 7 days for a complete rest. Resource management becomes much more complex and rez spells can't be spammed daily and must be applied in a timely fashion.
I think revivify is a nice addition because it inspires gameplay elements in its own. The party will want some diamonds so they can cast it, so you can integrate that was part of a larger adventure. Additionally, there are lots of ways that revivify becomes an unsavoury option. It can't reverse major damage like a missing hand, and so characters ressurected quick and dirty by a revivify may still be gravely wounded until an even more powerful healing spell is applied to them.
On the flip side, this is a tool that can be employed by low-level baddies. It seems like an exciting encounter to face an evil cleric in an early game, and they keeps bringing back their body guards.
I actually always loved the idea of using a lovecraftian style concept for a setting, and making death more of a measure of difficulty. Such as that the world in the past had a set of magical veils applied of it, which causes living beings to perceive the world differently than it actually is. Now you could do it that there are ways of piercing/lifting these sets of veils to see the world as it truly is, and that death or returning from death is one such method. In this way you return from the dead an you might find the world around you is different more an more as you come back, maybe the monsters of the world change as their true natures are revealed (making them much harder and more dangerous), and even that lifting the veils might reveal creatures hidden behind it that notice you now (even that if you go to far the great old ones notice you an might try and devour you making it a true death no coming back).
I liked the repercussions from 3.5 and earlier..."Upon completion of the spell, the creature is immediately restored to full hit points, vigor, and health, with no loss of prepared spells. However, the subject loses one level, or 2 points of Constitution if the subject was 1st level. (If this reduction would bring its Con to 0 or lower, it can’t be resurrected). This level loss or Constitution loss cannot be repaired by any means."
One idea I always thought would be good for my world is a 'death police' of sorts. Resurrection magic works perfectly fine, but these guys will come after you if they find out. They think that trying to defy death is one of the worst of crimes, and that makes it so that as a DM you don't have to change the magic itself, but rather just change the context of the world.
I mean, people are not fond of necromancy, so how is this different?
And sometimes, you not only have to worry about the death police, but also that god you just angered.
GalacticCoach there are monsters who might be against resurrected PCs as well.
+GalacticCoach I really like that idea and some I'm going to steal it.
The Raven Queen might literally have patrol ravens that seek out people who were resurrected.
I am building out my BBEG who is either a Litch or someone with a powerful necromancer under his employ using soul jar or clone. He is secretly sending out the minor bosses to create chaos and conflict throughout the realm in order to then step in as the Leader of a mighty nation and offer help under the promise of those people joining his empire. This "emperor" has extended his life multiple times and has now drawn the attention of the inevitables and a Marut is coming for him. Hence the reason he wants to grow his empire and armies to help fend off the mighty being.
I love this intro😂😂😂. Jim’s reassurance to Pruitt claiming it’s nothing to be a shamed of is great😂
What I do for deaths in games is a malfunction table that gets rolled when they get brought back with effects ranging from needing to consuming magic items for survival to having a second personality that competes for control of the body.
my players would just be like
"my character died? I need to do all that to bring him/her back? I will just make a new character. who is an exact twin of my first character."
In these cases I've often seen it ruled that any new characters would start at a level lower than the character who died. This starts to hurt more when a higher level character dies (asuming you use XP for leveling).
In a scenario of dying at, say, level 17 or something...then whats the point? sure if they survive a single encounter they'll gain several levels, they are now always going to be the weakest link by far. And, assuming it wasn't just a series of really unlucky rolls, the fact that they died at level 17 makes it seem unlikely they'd survive very often at lower level...may as well just have the player retire from that campaign at that point
Yeah, a twin that doesn't have all the magical gear as the dead one, sure.
As a player, I do complain bout resurrection magic. It's part of my broader complaints that 5e is trying to be way too easy in order not to upset people. Combat can be challenging early on but not much later. Survival is pretty much out cause there's so many spells that make it too easy. Finding food? Outlander, Create Food and Water etc all make the process kind of unsatisfying in many respects.
Hey guys. Just wanted to say thanks for the great discussion and some excellent ideas on how to handle resurrection magic.
What a great discussion, so glad I found this channel!
On the topic of Revivify, I'm personally fine with it. I see Revivify as a fantasy version of a defibulator because they both fill the same role from a story and concept perspective. In our world most first responders (usually) carry or have access to a defibulator so if the situation calls for it (like being dead), they can quickly use before it's too late. So in a d&d fantasy if their are clerics who are always on standby or something like that, they can quickly go the "deceased" and revive them or prevent their soul from leaving or however you want to flavor it.
We had a group who had a player die and the plan was to get them a Rez. They were knee-deep in a dungeon and didn't want to drag the body around everywhere so they cut off a finger to have the spell cast upon the finger. When the time came - the spell was cast on the finger, but the DM had the magic trigger on the main body of the finger's person (the majority of the available body). I think it would have been played out different if the finger was the only part remaining, but ... The player woke up (still knee-deep in a dungeon - and now alone) with a nubby finger that was regenerating.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you create a setting where 6+ spell level casters are rare or even absent then it might be difficult to challenge players once they get high level, as you won't really have that many NPC spellcasters available to challenge them.
If you are playing with a typical DND setting though, one trick is to use resurrection magic against the PCs as well.
Just as players have access to resurrection magic, so too does my NPCs, which means that killing important villains require big measures!
In DND, the only way to make sure you've destroyed someone is to destroy their very soul.
I've been reading the Vlad Taltos books and Brust has a cool approach. Resurrection is commonplace if you can afford it or if you're working for someone who can. However, certain injuries to the head or spine can make it so you can't come back. There's also a class of weapons that will destroy your soul, so you can't come back or even reincarnate if you're killed with one. And there are spells to keep someone from being raised, so you may have to find a wizard and make them drop the effect. Depending on the extent of damage and the time spent dead, the person performing the revivification (as it's called in the series) can have a very difficult time. These elements could be dropped into a game and work very nicely, I think.
The way to defeat a team that's resurrection heavy is to create traps that destroy bodies, enemies that swallow whole, restrict gem sales or bump up the price, make diamonds a quest to get, etc
That was definitely your best intro
I'm a player and was never a huge fan of how easy resurrection was. As much as I like playing my characters, the idea that the world had consequences for decisions was the biggest draw for me to Dungeons and Dragons. I like what you said about making it hard to come by and think that if I ever ran a game that is how I would do it.
You guys should do videos on all of the races of 5e like you did with classes!
I think that Matthew Mercer's resurrection system is really something that everyone should consider if they want to run a game where PC death carries weight.
The anime overlord, which draws heavily from dnd type systems, presents a world where 6th level magic is thought to be the highest level magic achievable by mortals, which makes it quite entertaining when the 20th level caster encounters someone who thinks their minions are unkillable because they are immune to 6th level and lower magic, so she drops a 7th level lightning bolt on it.
My current campaign is set in the Star Wars universe (because I'm a huge nerd)
In this world Dark Adepts (a converted version of a evil sorcerer) are insanely rare and their magic is forbidden, yet the are the only ones with resurrection spells and the cost is a lightsaber crystal instead of a diamond, along with a ritual.
4:00 Revivify costs 300 gold and has to be cast within one minute. Essentially it is extreme CPR.
How fitting that I would have just been resurrected this Monday... Rip my halfling bard. Hello Half Orc Bard
One aspect of resurrection magic that would be cool to analyze is how it impacts assassination attempts. While low class hitmen might operate in much the same way as always, political assassins might have to go the extra mile with elaborate, detailed rituals for preventing revivals. That could involve mutilating or dispersing the target's vitals (perhaps the heart is required for a ritual), capturing them alive for soul banishments, or taking a curse specialist along to make sure that whatever they kill stays dead.
ZeLuftewaffle very good points and worth considering for your plots and schemes!
Web MD tells you how you're dying.
Web MD tells how to come back to life.
I think for a more hardcore D&D experience, revivify might be worth outright removing. However, if you do allow it in your game, and you want things to feel more dangerous, just put the players up against something that can create an antimagic zone in a small area (which can be placed on a dead body). You could even just give a bad guy an item that does this. Suddenly that massive crutch is gone, and the players have a huge problem to overcome.
I'm also of the mind that coming back from the dead should be traumatic. Giving players quirks/scars/changes or handicaps when they come back from the dead can be a good way to make low level resurrections more interesting.
I have a table which I roll on whenever someone comes back to life. Some of the consequences are cosmetic, like having one of your eyes go blind, or your skin is slightly more transparent. However you might have one of the spells you know swapped with another one, or two of your ability scores altered. Maybe your alignment or personality changes. I absolutely think there should be non-mechanical consequences for coming back from the dead.
Using the madness table is a really legit idea.
www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/3p9w7h/5e_revivify_thoughts/?st=j9rrp4kh&sh=537370b0
As a DM and as a player the ease of survival in 5E is a problem. Since you have players taking bigger and bigger risks, with seemingly no consequences.
Not sure why so many other DMs have such a problem with Revivify. It revives a creature that died within 1 minute with 1 hp. It can't revive someone who's died of old age nor does it restore body parts. It doesn't even heal wounds. All you need to do to make a character a valid target for say Raise Dead, but not Revivify is have enemies decapitate them. Intelligence IS an actual thing to think about when determining what enemies to throw at your players.
Can't say I like the idea of arbitrary anti-magic. Severe injuries and special monster abilities are much easier to implement and are more plausible and/or interesting than anti-magic. It's also a hell of a lot easier to destroy a corpse with AoE and have the body gone or too damaged then risk potentially giving an anti-magic item to a party.
Revivify is very limited tho.
The mage can't find their diamond stash in the confusion (if they keep it in a pouch, make checks everytime they go to town to see if it gets stolen) ? Time up, can't revivify. 60s is short.
Burnt by a fireball ? Dissolved in acid ? Decapitated ? Body not a valid target anymore. Need a bigger gun.
I like the idea Age of Sigmarhas for the Stormcast Eternals; each time one dies, its essence is drawn back up, and reforged into a new body. But each time this happens, memories and personality are lost until the Eternal is little more than a robot. Might discourage players from even wanting multiple resurrection - the first time gives you a weird quirk, but the third time might leave you basically a robot.
I think one stipulation i might add to revivify is the death saves dont go away right away. Maybe takes a long rest to get your death saves wiped away. Any time before that rest if they hit zero hp they die. You could revivify again. Maybe add exhaustion lvs every time there rezed. At low lvs this could burn through there resorces.
Favorite outro ever.
In a world of mine there are 3 gods of death that are all brothers and all of them have a different personality. Upon dying you meet one of them and if you've done a favor for them or they have a task they think you can accomplish for you to acomish, they can give you new chance or you can make a bargain in role-playing
Just had an idea that I'm totally going to be using is adding a loooong cast time for every single spell that taxes any time limits by adding a meditation period. Since you're appealing to a divine power to bring them back, then it might make sense for there to be a meditation required so that resurrection magic isn't used emotionally in the heat of the moment. You have to think "what does it mean to me and the world to bring a person back? Is this really a good idea?" And be very strict on where souls would go and who it might anger. Maybe that high-level PC was going to be a powerful soldier in some divine army after death that the god was prepping for and now they don't have their soul and they get a little pissed (really pissed if it was a character going to hell)
Love the content and love the Weyland shirt worn by Pruitt!
The thing is though, there are ways to balance it in game. For instance, my paladin at lvl 10 just learned revivify and has 2 spell slots to cast it. It also consumes a small diamond each casting. You could make diamonds a rarer item as yous said or just let the paladin have a somewhat cool spell other than divine smite (99% of what I use other than rp spells) maybe adjust it for other classes that get the spell slots for it too early. Additionally you could make it a spell that only brings them back for a day before they start to decompose again (great quest intro) or make it so that it they come back very weak and have restricted actions and movements for x amount of time
Huge fan of your shirt, Pruitt!
I love that whenever I look up your videos RUclips tries to see if I want to watch web md instead.
I think by how you describe it revivafy probably just needs tweeking cause having a specific character being that valuable it makes things interesting if they're targetted or the party is in a toght spot and they have to book it. It sounds like it really helps stop party wipes. I don't actually play dnd I'm just going off what you say and looking at it from a game design perspective.
what i did is i added a few "soul trap" effects. the reason being the spells require the soul to be "free and willing". if they arent free, they cant be rezzed. i have only actually used it twice so far(once was the player making a deal with death, the other was a sorcerer using soul trap on a wizard while the boss beat the stuffing out of them). so this means that the players wont always be able to come back, though its usually a possibility. so they have to play it safe. the effect is rare, but when i use it, its in high-danger areas.
i also didnt enforce material components early on, so thats kind of my way of retroactively enforcing?
We have had a house rule for 3.5 and I plan to take it over into 5e - basically, if you have all the material components, a character can get raised once with scars to the soul, body etc. If you want to be raised again, than it has to be a powerful spell (resurrection or true resurrection) which is also tied to a quest for either a deity or like some holy organisation. The 3rd and last time requires a wish spell.
Although to be fair, most campaigns were lower level so it didn't happen.
One other thing which occurs as a possible "plot hole" is the reviving of ancient heroes, kings, etc. but I fix this by saying that their rightful heir (or like the dynasty that took over) banned this.
How my Dm has dealt with this idea is one time we are in a mass war setting. WW1 dnd edition basically. Reviving another player or character requires time and vocalization and the enemy isn't just gonna let that slide once they hear you.
I spent 3 months building and play testing a full lvl 1-20 homebrew class with a full character backstory for my long running campaign only to have him die on the 2nd session. I was sad at the time but next session I was right back to having fun as a Dwarven VanHelsing. Roll with the punches and have fun with it.
Im waiting for the day someone does something interesting such as using the clone or simulacrum spell
I agree, Revivify is usually the major problem. My preference though, if my PCs are looking to any NPCs for resurrection, the spell they always get is "Reincarnate". It's a way of holding onto the same character, but the chance of them being the same race is pretty dang low, so death at least has a permanent change.
(And if they would roll and stay the same race, they can't see the chart behind your screen. I just change it anyways.)
It is pretty traumatic so it is possible to give the character a madness effect either as a permanent thing or a temporary one. Give a saving throw most likely wisdom. This is a way to add some consequences but will work better with some people then others. Plus it adds a nice roleplaying element that the players can pull out while playing.
I'm rebuilding the Doomguide cleric to bring a viable version up to 5E speed and this particular episode really added some perspective. I was perusing the spells to replace animate dead and create greater undead, and had pondered using revivify. After this show, I think some kind of domain based heal similar to lay on hands may be a better alternative.
always liked the idea of 10th day adventists, a cult (hell)bent on reviving those who need reviving for their evil cause.
regarding the spell components, it could be interesting as the dwarves and to some degree gnomes have an edge over accessing those over the other races
it would be logical for a character who died due to a dragon to come back and have a fear of dragons (always fail fear saving throw) or a character who drowned might come back and have a fear of large bodies of water and never willingly enters a boat
Nice video, per usual. I like some of the ideas to make res. magic a journey for the players, with negotiating prices, doing favors in return, and locating a priest to handle it. Makes it more thematic overall. For my current campaign, I borrowed an idea from Critical Role and give a DC for a res. spell to work. The caster rolls a D20 and adds their spellcasting modifier. The DC starts at 10 and each time a character dies, the DC increases for them. My players are cool with it, because they see how res. spells could break the game and they want the stakes to remain high.
If you're giving your players enough 300gp diamonds at 5th level for them to play wack-a-mole, then there are other issues involved
As DM I often bullshit some deaths, if a player is just attacked by a boar or stabbed a few times I'll "kill" them by knocking them out or putting them in a coma-like state. In this state they can only be revived by a magic spell or similar means. However if a player is straight up decapitated or dismembered then magic can bring them back as undead or it takes much stronger to bring them back as their original state. The player could instead decide to put their faith in their team to work hard and revive them, or make a new character if they want.
I like the idea of the person being resurrected having to make a Wisdom save or have some form of indefinite madness, and the DC increases each time you're brought back. So maybe your character comes back, but now they only speak Celestial, and they need to spend downtime relearning their old languages. Until then, hopefully someone else knows Celestial, or you won't be able to communicate effectively with the rest of the party
I like the idea of no revivify, increased difficulty on other res spells, more not necessarily bad but different consequences as in whatever the spell that changes race or age or gender and stuff is, and the person having to fight their way out of hell also. Something is guarding the gates, or something tries to tag a ride and the only one who can stop this is the person being res'd's soul.