Raise Dead / Resurrect / etc. Costs

[Ulfskar]

Hi All,

I'm starting SCAP next week and I've got some doubts in my parties ability to survive. They have a tendency of "Charge first, ask questions later" and tend to not consider too many alternatives over fighting through everything. So, I have tried to hint at other options in pre-campaign details (we'll see how far that goes), but knowing the party I know they will get in to deep at least once. I want to maintain the challenging aspect of the AP without having to pull to many punches, so this raises the question of resurrection costs. I think I remember seeing someone who scaled the costs based off levels, but I can't seem to find it anymore.

So, Has anyone considered scaling the cost of reincarnate/raise dead/resurrection/etc to be affordable for lower level characters. More so for reincarnate and raise dead (as resurrection and true res are powerful). I don't mind punishing the party for their ill-thought out ways, but I don't want to utterly destroy the effort they put into their characters in what I expect to be a tough AP.

Cheers,
Ulf.

[christian mazel]

Another problem is that there's no cleric able to cast raise dead in Cauldron, the only one die in the second (third if you play with the hardcover) adventure comming back from the capital.
I don't think it's a good idea to allow raising to soon, if there's no consequence for failure there's no challenge.
I had around 7 deaths in the 3 first adventures, at least 4 of them could have been avoided easily, playing with a group of 6/7 PC with above average abilities.

[Sheharan]

I solved the problem in my campaign in a different way. I gave them as part of a side story four bags of magical diamond dust of true resurrection. OK, maybe a little overpowered, but it worked quite good. During chapter 1 the group had 2 deaths, in chapter 3 also 2 deaths. But they learnd from these deaths and are now much cleverer when getting to an encounter.
These little bags saved many lifes in the first chapters so that the players got a smooth start into the campaign.

By the way:

christian mazel wrote:

Another problem is that there's no cleric able to cast raise dead in Cauldron,...

Well, you forget Embril Aloustinai :-)

In my campaign Jenya started with level 9. Especially after the events in chapter 3 (HC) as a highpriest she should be above lvl 6 or so.