@ Ryan: If you think Ultimate Mercy is 'too good' a feat you probably really dislike Healing the Dead I drafted near the bottom of the last page.
I'm pretty sure i already covered how i feel temp penalties aren't restrictive enough to stop chain resurrection and a massive shift in cosmology of the game and permanent penalties are too harsh an option to be tenable for adventurers.
Making it resource intensive keeps it rare and explains why every city with a 9th level or higher cleric ever has anyone of note die.
True enough. Granted the feat I'm referencing is only available at level 15 [unless a class gets accelerated access to Legendary Proficiency in Heal]
And to clarify about "too good" A character who builds into ultimate mercy is going to suffer from being basically a healbot unless their gm has opted for some very high attribute generation systems.
Its "too good" in that the effect is really too powerful and game skewing, but the feat requirements are probably going to shoehorn your pc into a kind of not very fun role and dampen their combat and adventuring capabilities quite a bit.
Paladins can do it significantly earlier, if they're so inclined.You are all aware witches exist, right? (How could I forget, duh)As a level 18 ability.
By level 18 anyone who wants to resurrect out their ears has the discretionary budget to do so.
Im going to try not to be salty about this but when i brought that feat up people railed against it as just unbelievably feat heavy, and requiring at least 3 to be useable. On top of which its raise dead, which means you need the body, and missing bits dont come back etc etc.
That said, its probably too good of a feat, but i understand the balancing aspect, its forcing cha primary on a paladin, which makes their role as a martial combatant suffer, and they don't have the spell list to play as a caster. I disagree with the balancing aspect of it but its restricted practically if not by direct rules to a high level, alignment restricted class that all but requires you to commit (10 levels or lots of feats). Even then i kind of think its bad for the game, because as i pointed out when i was espousing it on the pf1 boards, the dynamic of adventures changes rapidly when you can simply raise that dead npc to get information and gratitude from them for a minor inconvenience (1 negative level).
Depending on your reading, a psychic with the Pain discipline may also qualify for the feat chain, as the Live On class feature explicitly grants you lay on hands and mercies as a paladin of lower level, and the Ultimate Mercy feat grants you an alternate way to consume the resource. Your GM may rule that the feat is bound by the restrictions that you can only use Lay on Hands on yourself, but I could see using the feat to experience the pain of someone else's death as fitting the theme.
And to expand, the returning to life is the more obvious setting changing aspect of removing costly components, a scroll of wish costs about 4k without the component costs.
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Alignment, Material components, all things that are easier to simply houserule away than to houserule into existence.
Alignment is not very easy to houserule away in 3.x.
(It is easier to remove than it would be to design from scratch, but that is true of pretty much every rule in the game.)
If I had one wish for Pathfinder 2, it would be to make alignment less important as a game mechanic. I expect to be disappointed!
I'm not against keeping costly materials for Resurrect-like spells. But I just want to point some inconsistencies :
- People want to keep costly materials for Resurrect to reduce Resurrect-spamming
- People say you can have enough gold to Resurrect without it impacting your group too much
It seems bizarre to me. People want to reduce the Resurrect-spamming problem, but you can Resurrect-spamm at higher level. So it only efficiently reduces it for lower levels.
Maybe can we make a compromise to reduce Resurrect-spamming at EVERY level ?
For exemple, instead of a costly material, we can say it's a per-level-restriction. Resurrecting damages the soul because it's against the law of nature, and it has to recover. You can resurrect only once per level. Once you are resurrected, if you die another time before leveling up, you can NEVER be resurrected : no spell, no feat, no god can resurrect you. You could also had a mental illness in the mix to penalise the dead player, so that he tries his best to not die again (some mental illnesses, like amnesia, can be quite deadly when you are about to have a boss fight).
If we use the Friendly Neighborhood Glabrezu's costly materials rules (which look a lot like Unchained's esoteric material components), we could say sacrificing a diamond worth 10 000 gp reduces or the mental illness's effects, or reduces the list of random mental illnesses you can have from resurrecting so that you can only get the less dangerous ones.
Anyway, there's no doubt about it : we need to balance the most powerful spells (I'm thinking Resurrect, Animate Dead, Wish...), be it by making people spend money or by adding specific rules for each spells. But costless components ? I don't feel like there are balancing aspects to them. Component pouches are cheap enough so that every spellcaster buys one level 1, and the few instances where you can loose it and thus can't spellcast are too few and are already the instances where you can loose your spellbook (if you ever need a spellbook). It feels like keeping an old solution which only solves less than 1% of situations, like the "print to PDF" function on some softwares. It's cool for a very particuliar customer base who wants to use the most hidden features, but most of the time, people either don't know about this, or simply never encounter a situation where they need this.
I get that some people want to keep these costless components for lore flavor. Then, if we remove MANDATORY costless components, you can still say spells still require some sort of ritual with costless components in your universe, thus letting a wizard use the components they wish if they think it's more appropriate (like, for exemple, a box of matches instead of bat guano for a Fireball).
(Now that I think about it, I'd like that : if we can't remove costless components, at least we could use use any component we want. I hardly imagine my royal mage descending from a long line of nobles pull out bat sh*t or a troglodyte egg from his pockets to cast a spell in front of the royal family)
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You can't raise people who have died of old age, so eternal life isn't an issue.
Eh, it very well can be with Reincarnation allowing older people to get a new young body. But I think the larger problem isn't so much natural lifespans, but being able to have a life tragically cut short still be terrible. If the only reason people don't come back is because they are already enjoying the afterlife and don't want to, death loses a lot of meaning.
I'm not against keeping costly materials for Resurrect-like spells. But I just want to point some inconsistencies :- People want to keep costly materials for Resurrect to reduce Resurrect-spamming
- People say you can have enough gold to Resurrect without it impacting your group too muchIt seems bizarre to me. People want to reduce the Resurrect-spamming problem, but you can Resurrect-spamm at higher level. So it only efficiently reduces it for lower levels.
That's because the larger issue isn't adventurers coming back to life a lot, it is making it so random NPCs aren't coming back willy nilly. High level PF1 play is so rocket tag based it's not an inherently bad safety net to have. And high level adventurers are basically gods-- being able to beat death is just one of the many ways they can tell reality where to stuff it. But high level characters are exceedingly rare, and high level PCs are several times richer and rarer than high level NPCs. And while resurrecting an ally multiple times may be feasible, it is harder to Resurrect entire towns that get wiped out by whatever evil thing.
Theoretically, a high level PC could Resurrect a LOT of people, but with the exception of a few outlier builds that is really only feasible for the post-game: after the world has been saved, the PC has the treasury of the final boss to throw around, and doesn't need to prioritize upgrading themselves. At this point PCs are usually encouraged to reshape the world using their incredible power and fame, and the next adventure starts a new timeline. Tying it to wealth at least means there is a finite bound, though, and means you COULD have the next campaign occur in the same timeline as the first.
Maybe can we make a compromise to reduce Resurrect-spamming at EVERY level ?
For exemple, instead of a costly material, we can say it's a per-level-restriction. Resurrecting damages the soul because it's against the law of nature, and it has to recover. You can resurrect only once per level. Once you are resurrected, if you die another time before leveling up, you can NEVER be resurrected : no spell, no feat, no god can resurrect you.
This isn't a terrible idea, and definitely better than unrestricted Resurrection, but I would never implement it. Again, the game can get so rocket taggy that you very well might die multiple times a level. And while it doesn't allow limitless NPCs coming back to life, it does make death less meaningful while drawing more attention to the game mechanics where you shouldn't be thinking about them. "Oh no! Farmer Joe died. Wait, did he died in that fire last year? Has he leveled up since then? What's a level? How do NPCs gain them?"
You could also had a mental illness in the mix to penalise the dead player, so that he tries his best to not die again (some mental illnesses, like amnesia, can be quite deadly when you are about to have a boss fight).
The risk of coming back WRONG works as a better narrative explanation for people staying dead with free Resurrection. I think it could make for a really cool origin story for lots of undead and other mutated human type things. It's not a perfect solution as some players find it unfun and can't rationalize their good aligned characters taking the risk of coming back bad and hurting people, and it would pretty drastically change the lore around a lot of stuff. Still, it's a cool idea and one I'd love to try in a new game and/or setting.
Now, everything I've said above is based on PF1 mechanics, where death is more likely the higher the level. There is good reason to think that we may see the chance of death even out across all levels. Higher starting HP, deadlier fall damage, more unified level progression, replacing negative hit points with the new death mechanics, and a bigger focus on making higher level play work well are all things which can make a level 3 character about as likely to die as a level 15 character. It's also reasonable to assume WBL will get big overhaul if it is still uses at all.
So I think it is fair to speculate on new ways Resurrection can work beyond a gold cost. It just needs to:
A) Allow for the vast mjority of NPCs to stay dead
B) Allow for an unlucky critical to not NECESSARILY be the end of a PC's story.
C) Allow some degree of flexibility so the chances of death and the permanence of death can be adjusted to fit the tastes of specific groups.
TL;DR The main concerns around Resurrection are narrative based, not mechanics, and it should be balanced around such.
Except "this treatment is too expensive" is also a narrative issue to overcome. In fact we deal with that constantly IRL too so it even has versimillitude.
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Except "this treatment is too expensive" is also a narrative issue to overcome. In fact we deal with that constantly IRL too so it even has versimillitude.
I'm not sure who you are arguing with in that quote, but I'm saying that Resurrection being expensive is better than simply ditching the cost. I'm not sure it's the best solution but it is better than a lot of what has been suggested in this thread.
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I'd say Resonance would be a good way to "pay for" spells like Stoneskin that used to have expensive components...
Wouldn't be enough to balance something like Wish, but, that's on a different tier entirely.
Agreed about material components. Just get rid of them and, if necessary, require resonance.
Wish is probably a 10th level spell, now, so it will have special rules.
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I think resurrection should have a cost, but not cash. Every time a PC is raised, it should just be down time because it is not cool to force the dead PC's player to sit it out. However, NPCs should have a harrowing experience going to Hades to get the soul back. When PCs raise an NPC, they should have a similarly harrowing experience.
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So just for discussion. How about we say that instead of daily casting limits for spells you can cast spells as many times as you have material components. Material components would not be fluff but tangible and important. Costs would depend upon the level and other factors, but would limit the number of spell a character would be able to cast in a natural and logically way. Also doing away with the requirement for Vancian casting and the normal differentiation between Wizardry and Sorcery.
So, I'm wondering, based on most spells in 1e being a standard action, and thus allowing a move and a spell-casting, if in the new edition, MOST spells will not use material components, and instead will be V,S - thus requiring 2 actions to cast, leaving the thirds to still move (as per 1st edition).
So just for discussion. How about we say that instead of daily casting limits for spells you can cast spells as many times as you have material components. Material components would not be fluff but tangible and important. Costs would depend upon the level and other factors, but would limit the number of spell a character would be able to cast in a natural and logically way. Also doing away with the requirement for Vancian casting and the normal differentiation between Wizardry and Sorcery.
This would pretty much be the opposite of what they are doing with Resonance, by letting you continue your adventuring day as long as you have enough items in your pocket.
Setting that aside, it might be a fun thought experiment and something to try homebrewing, but it would no longer be Pathfinder. The biggest constraint on casters is that their limited slots per day. Removing that restriction and keeping the cost of material components negligible would completely invalidate the need for martials because casters could theoretically cast all day. If the costs aren't negligible, then suddenly the game becomes about tracking this minutia and calculating the expected returns of any given spell material. I could see it working in a video game. Wouldn't be all that different from stocking up on different types of ammo in a Fallout game. But not in a table top.
Frankly, at that point, you may as well cut out the middleman and just stop using spellcasters and just switch everyone over to scrolls/wands/potions for all effects. So either you make martials pointless in practice or casters pointless as a design space.
I'm a weirdo who likes components and the flavor they offer in general (even if coming with a cost).
But I'm reading this particularly as a problem with needing extremely costly components for spells like resurrection and the like rather than components necessarily in general (even if they can be inconveniencing to come). And I DO understand the problem, when it comes to high level play, of burning all your money on diamonds for raising rather than say the money you could spend on buying gear that might keep you from dying to begin with. Even that problem though is highly circumstantial based on play style--I've played games of Pathfinder where no one dies ever and no one has needed to pay for a raise, and I've played games where death was common. A lot of it has to do with the GM's style and the feel they're going for. I don't know how much the system can "fix" a GM who just loves to go for a TPK, costly spell components or no.
THAT SAID, cost of raising dead PCs could certainly be changed either way, e.g., balancing healing and death mechanics in some different manner. I would be all for that. (Lengthy ritual for dead-raising sounds good to me.)
"A death for a life" type of ritual?