brock wrote:
So, to sum up:
Some DM's will allow resurrection magics in their games and some won't, house-rule-ing them out of the spell lists because of the flavor of the world that they wish to create.
I am on the lenient side of the "when should the DM let player characters die" argument. When I was a Dungeon Master in the 1980's, I would always give the player characters an out, or allow a monster to make a mistake to give the PCs a second chance, before I would allow death to come down.
However, there were not any resurrection options in my campaign, mainly due to the impression made upon me by the novel "Pet Cemetery" by Stephen King. After reading that book, it seemed to me that if you could bring something back from the dead, it would not be exactly the same and probably would be tainted. Before the first page of Stephen King's writing in "Pet Cemetery", he quoted Bruce Springsteen who sang, "everything dies, baby, that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back". Mr. King then twisted the meaning of this from the resurrection of a love that had faded to the awful results of trying to resurrect a human being that has had time to decay and putrefy, and whether the balance of good and evil in the soul of the resurrected person may have shifted radically during the process of death and resurrection, or even if something else (something dark) enters the mix when resurrection occurs. So although only one player character died in my campaign, there was no option for resurrection, thanks to how creeped out I was by the novel "Pet Cemetery".
When it comes to resurrection, like that available to those buried in a certain pet cemetery in Maine, I agree with the Ramones, who sang in the title song to the movie version of the book, "I don't want to be buried...in a pet cemetery".
