Nah, this totally makes sense. Revivify costs 300 gp, which is about 5 months of work for a skilled hireling (or 4 years for an unskilled one). Laws are only for the poor.
If you convert to the relative value of labor instead of the real life value of diamonds, it’s probably something like $40k to $60k to revivify someone. Seems like enough cash on hand to somehow get away with murder.
Fun fact: that’s exactly how much it cost for a single day of the OJ Simpson defense.
Hey, that is a fun fact!
It’s fucked up that you can just pull that fact out of thin air and drop it on a DnD post.
Take my upvote you sonnovabitch
Going with the cost of living equivalent, it’s only about $15,000, which I think still does the job of pricing out the poor
But in that case, they’d probably fine you so that they get that money instead of just letting those diamonds be destroyed.
Also, Zealot Barbarians can be Revivified for free. They’d probably want to close that loophole.
Yeah. I’m running into that problem with higher level players now. They are being held to account for burglary, kidnapping and property damage they did 8 levels ago before they were nobles with land from another king.
You can’t really imprison or execute people this powerful. The amount of force you’d need to bring to bear isn’t worth the collateral damage. You just fine them and force a public apology if they want to do business in the capital ever again. Their wealth and social standing is more important.
Honestly it seems like a waste to revivify the party member post trial when they could have let the rogue fight to the death solo and revivify in the streets much sooner, or they could have revivified somebody they murdered unless that person really deserved to remain dead, but doing it at the execution is silly they’re going to have to roll initiative for all the guards again.
If anything, the DM is probably angry that they now have to freestyle regional laws about the use of revivify on death row criminals and create a brand new series of combat encounters with law enforcement, and becoming outlaws definitely has some effect on the main story arc.
Seems like enough cash on hand to somehow get away with murder.
Good point. And it’s even less on discount Thursdays.
Don’t forget they’ll likely have brain damage from being dead so maybe you can write that in somewhere
The punishment is a sentence of death. Not “being killed”. You are to be placed in the state of death for the crime. That’s why you don’t get to walk away if a lethal method fails. You can keep reviving them, but they’ll be incarcerated and killed again until it sticks. And I’ll put the rest of the party in contempt of court for attempting to subjorn lawful punishment.
But reincarnation is canon in D&D so that would require hunting down that soul and repeatedly executing them for all eternity.
It’s canon for elves, not so much for everybody else (unless you mean the spell). Though that sounds like some Mercy Killer thinking right there
There’s some stuff about devils and how souls are recruited for the whole endless demon war thing that implies that everyone gets re-incarnated but its usually random, while elves and devils are always re-incarnated as the same race except in special circumstances.
Not everyone. Most souls go to outer planes and just sit there. Lower planes have a special property of wiping memories through the river Styx and converting them into fiends. Which then either slowly evolve into useful fiends or much more likely are destroyed in the Blood War or eaten by night hags or higher level fiends.
Isnt there a story of a woman who was hung who survived and had to be let go so they changed the wording to “hung till death” or something?
Can’t it just be that one soul must be dead? So uno reverse the Cleric.
but they were put in the state of death! for a solid 5s but it should count
No, It’s one sentence of death. Not infinite sentencing. You get sentenced, you die, you get revived? That means you served your sentence.
I’m not really looking to get into fantasy legal dispute, but I will say that you are debating the count without even touching the core of what I said: the terms of the sentencing. Being sentenced to death is like being sent to prison. If you step in and then juke out, you can’t say “prison sentence over”.
We don’t specify term limits here because it’s typically not a place you come back from.
Right, but if it was a life sentence and you died in prison, would you have to serve again if you were revived?
I guess you don’t want to debate but that was just my reasoning
choose how you die
Old age.
Sure thing. You will do so in that cage over there. To the guards: He already had his last meal.
Wouldn’t he starve to death before dying of old age?
Nobody dies of “old age”. As you become older, it is becomes harder to survive various diseases or afflictions. But where do you draw the line? If someone was to weak and fragile to leave their bed, and died due to no longer getting any energie from food, is that dying of old age? And what if they are to fragile to leave their cage?
If one is allowed to set timespan for “execution” to “however long it takes me to die of old age”, then I argue it is also perfectly fine to take some liberty with the definition of “die of old age”.
Back in 3.5, there were specific rules for dying of old age. 5e is less clear about it.
That actually worked once, for a Jester named Triboulet who did things like slap the King’s bottom and spread gossip. He chose his execution method as a joke and the King actually laughed, so he was exiled.
In earlier editions, Ghosts rapidly aged anyone they touched by draining their life force. Just saying.
And now just seeing it (and failing a save) ages you.
Still would.
“big ass tiddies, your honor”
DEATH BY SNU SNU
Okay someone go get my horse.
“Not that merciful. Guards, off with his head!”
And that’s how you get your whole party executed.
tbf, the rest of the party is probably awaiting sentencing
Someone will have to keep a Revivify scroll up their ass to make this work
“Where did you get that, you’re not wearing any clothes!”
I mean, at least use wristpocket
One should expect that in a world where resurrection is a well known possibility, courts will take that into account. Even if it’s expensive and can only be performed by a selected few, the law should make sure that one cannot escape punishment by simply having money and connections.
Then again, when you look at our world…
Using our world as a template, it probably would be illegal to revive a convict, but itd be an open secret that a few well placed bribes and a bit of influence is all it’d take to bend the rules
No, no. It would be illegal to revive a convict using abilities that are affordable or available to the general public. And it would be a crime to both use those methods and to be revived by them.
For more elite methods, though, they wouldn’t even be covered by law. They’d go unmentioned and unregulated by statutes and edicts.
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Oh but that’s clearly the opposite of what the law is for!
That’s why in my setting criminals get tossed into a kiln if they’re sentenced to death without parole
death without parole
🤣
That only works if they can’t be brought back with resurrection spells.
With a 9th level slot, sure
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Can you Wish for a Wish spell to fail? :)
Yes, but only for eight hours if you want it guaranteed to work. And you still have a 33% chance of losing that spell slot, which is much too large a risk to take.
Roll it
Of course you let them do it. You also let the victims’ family be horrified by the miscarriage of justice and make it their life’s work to seek revenge.
I like this. It’s Faust, but make it fun. Keeps things moving
And their complete mistrust of the justice system.
Vive la revolution anyone?
This is my long standing hot take and point of contention with rules as written in conventional D&D fantasy rule sets: death, if the rules of the game were actually applied to the setting, is less about finality (except for the lifespan limitation contrivance) and more about health insurance or lack thereof. People who die that have enough money should by all means have family that pay for raises (or resurrections when the body isn’t available) as a matter of course and the material consequences of that would be that premature death from violence, illness, or accident would be mostly a poor people thing. Funerals would be awkward in setting: “sorry you can’t afford a rez. The divines bless the departed I guess, lol.”
There’s this constant tension with D&D where it wants to be medieval and it wants to have easily-reproducible magic. Follow the magic through to its logical conclusion and you get essentially modern technology with a mystical/medieval aesthetic, ignore it and you get big blatant plot holes.
There’s this constant tension with D&D where it wants to be medieval and it wants to have easily-reproducible magic. Follow the magic through to its logical conclusion and you get essentially modern technology with a mystical/medieval aesthetic, ignore it and you get big blatant plot holes.
For decades, Forgotten Realms tried really had to be this “peasants have their minds blown if they see even a level one Magic-User spell being cast; this is a grounded and gritty setting sort of” pretense in the official materials, but then there’s basically a magocracy running most cities (even the fucking Luskan pirates and other “savage frontier” big mean guys!) and maps full of “oh a web spell is on this window at all times” sorts of signs that maybe those peasants should be a lot more familiar with the very special very rare spellcasters that rule over them and make all the important decisions.
Yeah, it kind of makes sense if magic is rare, difficult to obtain, but not entirely foreign. Basically a luxury good.
To use an example luxury good, we all know what a private jet is. We couldn’t build one or buy one, but we know there are people who can. It’d be cool to be in one but not some unimaginable experience.
That is why I enjoy settings like the Netherese so much more. Where magic is common and everyone uses it, even the cleaning staff have magical autonomous brooms that sweep on command.
Netherese is also old Forgotten Realms.
It’s the same thing with superhero and paranormal ttrpgs. Everyone wants that 🤯 moment when civilians sees the party in action, because it’s very rewarding.
I haven’t played it other than in videogame form, but I think Vampire: The Masquerade is one of the few systems that addresses this problem head-on
I don’t know if 5e has starting age tables? 3e and Pathfinder do, it’s an optional character creation thing that helps show the general age of most things. It starts off with the starting age of a given race and then has a table with different classes and dice. So for a human the starting age is 15, Barbarian/Rogue/Sorcerer is 1d4, Bard/Fighter/Paladin/Ranger is 1d6, and Cleric/Wizard/Monk/Druid is 2d6.
So a typical cleric starting age would be 16-27. At that point they are a level 1 Cleric and have a grand total of one level 1 spell per day. 5e is more generous and gives them two level 1 spells per day.
That spell should do a lot, and in a small village would be amazingly effective, but at a certain point there just aren’t enough spells per day for everyone. It should actually be hard for adventurers to get healing because the local cleric should probably have spent all his healing for the day by the time they get to him, he can probably squeeze them in tomorrow when he’s recovered spells.
Except that it’s exceptionally expensive. 5e is probably the most forgiving with its currency, a Raise Dead spell costs only 500 GP (assuming no extra fees) and while it’s hard to approximate wealth in the game I found an old Reddit post that approximated it to ~1 GP = ~$1,000. So $500,000 minimum for a Raise Dead.
While there are probably people in your life that would sell everything to bring you back, would you really want them to? How many times could your family and friends pull together $500,000 to raise someone in the group?
If you’re so obscenely wealthy that you could afford multiple Raise Dead in your lifespan you’d have other, more political problems. For example you’d have people lined up down the street asking you to raise [insert tragic story].
Speaking of Political problems, you have to find someone willing to raise you and someone willing to finance it. If the king dies and the Prince takes over what are the odds that he’s going to raise his dad and give up that power? If he’s a bad king it might be hard to find a cleric willing to do so and even if he’s a good king a benevolent cleric might not have 500 GP to finance it himself. You could leave the money with a cleric you trust, but he could always just keep the money. If the Prince isn’t willing to Raise the king he’d also probably go out of his way to hide, protect, or destroy the body to make a Raise Dead by an outside source more difficult.
In setting I think you’re right, a good person, who is exceptionally wealthy, can probably ignore death. Someone like Lord Nasher from Neverwinter probably doesn’t have to worry about a simple stabbing, someone will Raise him in 10 min and probably be rewarded 100 fold. However, if you’re able and willing to attempt that sort of assassination you’d also know how limited the effect would be and probably wouldn’t even try something so simple.
I would at least grab the body from the corpse pile later. It’s a little less suspicious. Unless there is a time crunch then the rogue might get animated instead.
Gotta be able to get to the body within a minute for Revivify, right?
Yes, although you could use Gentle Repose can look like a post death ritual and give you a ten day window.
Isn’t this just the Jesus strat?
That’d be if he sentenced himself to death to appease himself for everyone else breaking the rules he wrote, then re-vivified himself.
The ol’ single deity circlejerk.
The Holy Trinity is just 3 demi-gods in a trenchcoat.
…tremi-gods?
It is totally something that a sufficiently wealthy medieval or imperial society would do to kill and revive someone as a form of punishment, or even to kill someone and allow them to be revivified as a way of letting the rich get off easy.
Death by russian roulette
Lord Vetinari approves
The Rogue gets stabbed by a Red Wizard blade, made by the Red Wizards of Thay that prevents any sort of resurrection by a cleric.
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