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
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.
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.
Realistically I imagine that having access to resurrection would have fairly dramatic consequences on how a society applies punishment. It’d probably be a crime of some sort to revive the executed, sorta equivalent to breaking someone out of jail, states might be more harsh with handing out death penalties when it is possible to undo them if new evidence is found, and the remains of the executed probably would be carefully stored and locked up to prevent unwanted revival and to have in case the state decides to bring someone back, assuming the body is needed for it.
Might also get things like a monarchy which kills off heirs to the throne after a certain age and stores them careful to revive when the current monarch dies or abdicates, to prevent scheming between them to increase their place on the line of succession or take over from the current ruler early, and to ensure they are young and healthy when they take the throne.
In the Forgotten Realms, the Kingdom of Cormyr has strict penalties against resurrecting monarchs. The penalty is death for the resurrector, and castration + exile for the former king. And the famed War Wizards of Cormyr absolutely have the capability to enforce that law.
I’m not certain (and don’t have either my notes or the novel those notes were taken from to hand), but IIRC a resurrection of someone formerly in the line of succession puts them at the end of the line, even if they were as high up as the king’s eldest son prior to death.
This naturally creates an issue if the prince dies and is resurrected while a long way from the capital, and returns to the kingdom to find the king has also died while he was gone. Who died first is going to matter greatly, but might be rather difficult to determine.
Whose idea was that law? If I were the king and someone discovered resurrection, I’d say that if I die, I get resurrected and keep my kinghood. Likewise if I conquer an area and become a king after it already exists.
Does it at least not apply to cloning? That’s the only way to avoid old age as far as I know, and I can’t imagine kings would be in favor of a law that requires they grow old and die.
You forgot revival being included in the sentence, possibly multiple times over.
Imagine getting burned on the stake multiple times.
This has been stored away in my gm vault for demonstrating what an evil government might mete out as punishment.
PCs walk into town and there’s a public execution happening, it’s all horrifying screams burning flesh etc, until it finally stops and a hush falls over the gathered crowd. The silence is broken when chanting, faint at first, gradually grows louder and louder until it feels like you can hear it in your mind, just when it feels intolerable a flash emanates from the stake, and the screaming begins anew.
Death row is just instant execution, and the date you would be killed is now the last day you could be revived with common means.
If a trial is ongoing during the date you’d become unrevivable or it’s considered important to extend the date for some other reason, maybe they just revive you and kill you again to reset the timer
And that’s how you get your whole party executed.
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.
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.
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
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.
That’s why in my setting criminals get tossed into a kiln if they’re sentenced to death without parole
