Everyone who loved the fact that in D&D crpgs you could only resurrect party members rejoice.
Everyone who isn't an idiot and realizes that this is only the removal of another option... Well yeah, you get the idea. I still have no reason to like 4E and increasingly more reasons to hate it.
Raise dead didn't make anyone immortal, you could never bring someone back who'd died of old age.
What changing the profile of raise dead does is cause some significant changes in both what PCs, and bad guys can do. Particularly PCs can't raise the dead to use as a witness, bring back victims of assassination back from the dead (a very important function of the spell), bring back an emeny minion dominate him and use him to get at his master, and so forth.
Restricting the availibity of the spell also makes little logical sense in game, why can only certain people be raised? Why are PCs so special?
It's just an option restriction that seems unnecessary. It was always easily within the DM's power in previous editions to restrict who could or could not be raised (his spirit refuses to return from the realms beyond, deal with it) so this seems another completely unnecessary 4e change.
There’s nothing lost here. Its no more effort for the DM to decide whether a character has unfinished business among the living (4E) as to decide whether a character's soul is willing to return (3E).
However, I find it more to my liking with a reasoning that the assassinated noble stays dead not because he doesn’t want to return, but because he can’t return. Death is a final thing to most people.
Except PCs and NPCs who were marked as plot critical...
There's nothing lost here... Except any sort of consistency and believability.
Current Edition: Some poor farmer was killed and now his family is going to starve. Here comes obscenely wealthy level 14 cleric of goody goody god. There you go, now you won't all die of starvation!
4E: Some poor farmer was killed and now his family is going to starve. Here comes obscenely wealthy level 30 Cleric of goody goody god. "I'm sorry miss but I can't revive your husband because he doesn't have a great fancy destiny. OMG TARASQUE! Whoa, that was close. I'm the only one left alive. Pop pop pop pop pop. There you go. All good as new... At least the farmer's daughter survived. I'm sorry little girl. I can't raise your mommy and brothers because she doesn't have some great fancy destiny, but here's a copper for being so cute."
It's been changed from something that can be determined in-game into something that is completely meta-game. It encourages meta-game thinking, and it looks like it was made simply to cater to people who weren't creative or intelligent enough to consider say, not leaving a corpse to raise.
It makes no sense at all...
4E is still set in a Fantasy Base world, anything could happen, let yer imagination fly.
By the WAY the DM is the writer of the plot of the story or campaign. What the DM says thats final. Oh! the farmer is not important. YES! he is not important because the DM says so, UNLESS the DM says he has ancestral royalty in his blood and his blood will unlock the magical key to save the Princess the PCs are destine to do, THAN the FARMER will be important.
So what? The PCs are important to the PLOT and the Farmer(NPC) NOT.
What the DM says is final. It makes no sense at all to have write that down in 4E...
What the DM says is final. It makes no sense at all to have write that down in 4E...
What? The only part of that post that really made sense was "What the DM says is final." and that goes without saying. However, any DM that goes around making random nonsensical declarations like "This farmer cannot be raised because he's not important to the plot" will quickly find themselves with no players.
Making it an official rule will only compound the problem.
It's damned hard for my imagination to fly when WoTC is doing it's damnedest to hack off my wings and stuff them in a wood chipper. At least a decent number of people seem to feel about the same way in regard to 4E as I do, so I will still be able to enjoy the previous version.
The DM deciding who comes back from the dead with raise dead has always been in their control. Even the issue of the soul wanting or not wanting to come back, while being a valid reason for whether or not a character can be raised, could in itself bring arguments on what the soul intends. The point is that even someone who died a very unsatisfying death with a lot of unfinished business in the land of the living, might not want to come back, because in the final moment they simply decided they didn't ever want to return and accepted their fate.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with raise dead being tied to destiny, but it does restrict some options, and I don't think it works for all (or many) types of campaignes.
In many campaigns, the PCs aren't doing anything that puts them in too exclusive of a club: they may be saving towns or cities or mayor's daughters or whatever, but it can be asumed that many other people are doing similar things, so you'd still kind of expect anyone of marginal importance to be raiseable. One of the central points of Planescape, for example, is that you aren't the most important thing out there.
Also, many campains have multiple arcs, each of which typically ends with a confrontation with a BBEG. Does a character's destany always refer to "the last arc of the campaign?" Or can the PCs occasionally get hung out to dry by destany as well? Maybe it was the King's destany to get assasinated, the Evil Mastermind's destany to die fighting the PCs, and the Paladin PC's destany to die during the battle. It kind of strains belief if the PCs are always destined for bigger and better things than their current death, but their enemies and allies are often destined to die just when they did.
Lastly, I never really had a problem with Raise Dead in the first place. As was pointed out on the EN world forums, the list of things that can kill you deader than Raise Dead can cope with is actually pretty extensive. The Resurection spells have greater power, but they're also higher level, and even still can be defeated through the rather mundain measure of kidnapping the target instead of killing them. Raise Dead then just ensured that important people in the campaign world don't die of being gored on a hunt, slipping down the stairs, or getting stabbed by Joe Nobody, which is exactally how things normally work, IME.
To go off on a tangent:
I think it would be kinda neat to do a campaign where Lawful characters can be raised or not depending on whether or not they have some divinely mandated destany they still have to fulfill, while Chaotic characters can be raised or not depending on whether they want to come back.
I thought that they did away with law and chaos...
Anyway, I think the problem that most of us have with the new rules of resurrection is the metagaming element. The rules of D&D are, by definition, metarules - set in place by the DM to create a sense of consistency. Consistency by itself is not, however, necessarily belieable. To add a sense of believability to the game, the metarules must be cleverly hidden behind (and explained by) believable fluff. 4e focuses way too much on the rules and treats the fluffy coating as a mere afterthought. While I've not read the rulebooks, the various examples leaked to the web make it seem like the rulebooks are saying "Why can only PC's resurrect? Oh, I dunno, how about because they're special." Yeah, that's believable!
Can someone post a link to the exact wording? Where does this 4E info come from?
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Agreed. To be more specific, tying resurection to fate works in campains where the PCs are legendary, predestined heros. This is the case in some campains, but most certainly not in all. In campains where it is not the case, the destiny thing could end up looking a little silly if used to explain why only PCs can resurect, or being almost the same as the previous system, if followed logically.
In fact, to my mind one of the central ideas of DnD is that the PCs are not predestined and that victory is not assured.
-420
Relevant Quote, from EN world:
Link to quoted article: http://gloomforge.livejournal.com/
So many things in 4E seem to be there just to make the game more like a cRPG, and they're not even really bothering to deny it... 
It’s worth pointing out that Eberron's creator (the source of this news) was wording the concept in his own way:
Chaotic and Lawful alignments appear to in, by the way. There have been released stats on gnolls which list them as Chaotic Evil.
Every edition of D&D starts out as being supposedly for new players, and often they need to spell things out clearly for them. Raise Dead is certainly one case.
While I find it amusing that there are "quest cards" it's something I laughed at with all the controversy about them, when they are almost like designing quests in the Neverwinter Nights engine. However the 2e Planescape modules almost had something like that, as I remember all of them specifically gave XP values to certain story points completed.
Exactly! If the campaign world rules are coherent, then the game rules will follow! This does not even make sense to say that someone can come back if he agrees so, or if he's got an important destiny. why? You cannot choose to come back or not when you get animated as an undead! And who the hell decides you're important or not? destiny? I thought D&D was a polytheist wolrd...
To my liking, raise dead is a clerical magic spell only, because it lets the gods choose (in other words: the MD)
A god will not raise that character because he does not see the point in it. Or because he's not important enough that the power goes and fish a petitionner in another's god realm, to great expense in power. In other words, the rule should be: a deader can be raised if the MD agrees on it (maybe the MD would be wise to come up with a plausible explanation to avoid frustrating the players, but that's his job)
When they creat too much stupid rules like this, do they think of the fact that the players read the rules too?
Whe you've got a player starting arguing with the DM because he's not applying the trice damned rule to the letter, it just spoils the fun out of the gaming. And takes away any believability. (people don't argue with the gods or with destiny..)
What's this obsession with rules anyways? this isn't a video game. You need the base material and the fluff. The rest you can make up as the game goes...
Based on the uproar, I was expecting something a lot worse, but the paraphrased quote actually sounds pretty good to me. If the rule basically comes down to "only certain people can be brought back by Raise Dead," then isn't it still up to the DM to decide which people those are? How does that change anything, in the end?
I'd certainly wait to see the actual text in the rulebook before I made final judgement, but, like Captain Barbossa, I've always seen the rulebooks as "more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." House rules wouldn't exist if we didn't sometimes need to reinterpret things to fit our styles or campaigns.
Well I'm upset because it's another in the ever growing list of things I'm not going to want to use, and it's a direct parallel to what's going on in the Video Game industry right now where every game is being made to appeal to as wide an audience as possible by making them as derivative as possible.
It seems to me that the rules for Raise Dead are there to give the DM an "in character" reason for why the spell won't work on someone they don't want raised for plot/story purposes. (Instead of simply restricting the spell's power.)
In 3rd edition the DM would say, "The murder victim can't be raised because his spirit does not wish to (or can't) return." In 4E it's not as clear why, in game terms, the corpse can't be raised: "He can't be raised because he isn't important to the plot." just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Maybe WotC expects DMs to house rule the in-game reasons for certain mechanics.
-420
I've never really liked the idea of bringing people back from the dead being a commonplace ocurrence. I think the idea that only certain people (and it doesn't have to include the PCs) are allowed to be raised is a cool one.
It does make me wonder though why they didn't just go all out and implement the NWN2 system where PCs never ever die unless it's part of the plot in which case it's unavoidable. In combat if they're reduced to zero hitpoints they drop unconscious and stay that way until the end of the battle, at which point they get up again just fine regardless of how their hitpoints were reduced. All "Raise Dead" does is allow you to wake them up in the middle of the fight, and of course it's casting time is shortened considerably. Also, there are no material components for any spells, so it's all much simpler.
Seems like allot of people would love that system.
Really a stupid way to take the mystery and magic of an amazing spell and turn it into a "well, I only like this character".
This is the type of spell that ought to be left with a vague explanation, like- the forces behind death and life are strange and fickle. The journey back is mysterious and harrowing. The very act of dying changes the nature of the soul, and many are unwilling or unable to return. PCs should understand that they are messing with forces beyond their ken. Gods, magic users, and even the souls of the departed themselves may interfere with the return to life.
Do not expect this spell to always work, or to have have unforseen concequences. (insert % chance -if DM wishes- of there being an extra result\price to pay beyond the spell description. The effect is entirely up to the DM)
Examples- a mini-adventure of the PCs travels back to the real of the Living, the Raised in question being granted his Life Force by a possesing entity, an incomplete result leaving the Raised as some sort of quasi-undead, or the Powers the Be requireing a soul of equal power in return(i.e.- a powerufl animal for an animal, a thinking bing for a thinking being, a characeter of equal level\HD of the Raised.
Just saying that- "it only works on People Important to the Plot" explanation goes hand-in-hand with WOTC's new policy of hand-feeding abitrary roles to things, like Fighters being "Defenders" of that the PCs are "Points of Light".
And last but not least, why use a bad line from a President to describe the role of the PCs? Why not just say Adventurers are those who take a road that leads ever onwards?
Just house-rule away the stuff you don't like... 
At least that's what I'd do, if I were going to go to DM* with 4th edition rules.
(*I am aware of the possibility that this sentence might include a major grammatical flaw.)
If it's that easy to make up house rules then why bother paying WotC for their broken game at all? Just make your own.
Seems like a waste of money to buy something new at full price that's actually more broken than your old one.
Right now I'm working on my own 3.75e compiled from extensive house rules and when done I'll throw it out on the net. Since I'm inputing everything into a tiddlywiki it will all by hyperlinked and easily transportable. Though not so easily printed.
Sounds Keen... Or even Vorpal. ... Um... Yeah... Well I'll be interested in seeing it.
There is alway Pathfinder, guys. It's Paizo's 3.75 system in development. It's currently in open playtest, and unlike certain wizards who live on the coast, they actually listen to feedback on their work. It's a great system , and meant to be mostly backwards compatible with 3.5 too. You should go to Pazo's website and download the alpha release and then tell them what's wrong with it so they can fix it. They plan on updating the PDF every few weeks with new changes.
Indeed I've been keeping up with Pathfinder & intend to buy the final version. Doesn't mean I won't keep working on my own D&D, everyone should have their own version of the game just to confuse people.
Amen. But a good sytem to use as a base helps.
Anyone taken a look at their new magazine- Kolbold? It apprears to be the new Dragon.
See what happens when you kill a venerable Dragon? A kolbold rises to take it's mantel.
Bet he's named Meepo.
I guess I'm an idiot.
I love the fact that very wealthy people no longer effectively are immortal.