Welcome to Guidance, Private Sanctuary’s source for tips and techniques for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, written by Everyman Gamer Alexander Augunas. Today, we’re going to be talking about the Death Tax as it relates to PCs.

We’ve been neck-deep in some pretty crazy economic articles as of late. Two weeks ago, I wrote an article that breaks down the gp economics its written in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook and devised a way to compare it to real-world US Dollars. Last week, I took that information one step further and wrote an article looking at the economics of purchasing raise dead spells based upon the four categories of living expenses listed in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, converted to the USD for my own amusement. I called the act of paying the gp cost of resurrection magic the “death tax,” and after a hilarious incident where at least one reader thought that I meant an actual tax and real-world dying, I’m back to talk about who the fantasy death tax really hits. Because it isn’t Bob the Absolamian Hobo, nor is it Venture Captain Drendle Dreng or any of the aristocratic elite of House Thrune.

It’s me and you, baby.

The Cost of Raising the Dead

So before I get started which is likely going to be a rather short article compared to the monstrous 5-page colossi that I published last week, its important to review the costs of telling Death to shut up and sit down.

Resurrection is a relatively high-level affair. The lowest-level resurrection spell comes in the form of the druidic reincarnate spell, which is available at 4th level. Reincarnate allows you to return a dead creature to life with a new, young body but with a fairly high chance to return to life as a different creature. And when I say, “relatively high,” I mean it. For most creatures, you only have a 1 in 20 chance at best to keep your race; from there out, you have an equally high chance to return as something ridiculously overpowered (like a bugbear) as something crippling bad. (Sorry kobold fans, but your favorite race’s penalties are too ridiculous even for someone like me to consider). After reincarnate, resurrection magic trickles in at a relatively slow pace. Raise dead turns online at 5th level and provides the first real way to bring YOU back to life. Breath of life, while not an out-of-combat resurrection spell, provides a helpful way to return from the edge of death without any penalties. Resurrection, a super powered version of raise dead, becomes available at 7th level while true resurrection, the pinnacle of anti-death techniques, comes online as a 9th level spell.

But as we know from last week’s article, these spells don’t have a simple “spell slot and done,” casting. They have expensive material components designed around making death a penalty in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. We talked about them last week, so let’s stop and refresh ourselves on what each death-defying spell will cost us.

• Reincarnate (4th Level; 1,280 gp [Unavailable in PFS])
• Raise Dead (5th Level; 5,450 gp or 16 PP)
• Resurrection (7th Level; 10,910 gp or 32 PP)
• True Resurrection (9th Level; 26,530 gp or 77 PP)

How wonderfully expensive! Now, let’s sit back and look at how this affects a PC.

Wealth By Level

PCs are interesting in that they have a typical amount of money based upon their level . The Wealth By Level table is interesting in that it is surprisingly vague in how GMs should utilize it, including the following disclaimer:

Table: Character Wealth by Level lists the amount of treasure each PC is expected to have at a specific level. Note that this table assumes a standard fantasy game. Low-fantasy games might award only half this value, while high-fantasy games might double the value. It is assumed that some of this treasure is consumed in the course of an adventure (such as potions and scrolls), and that some of the less useful items are sold for half value so more useful gear can be purchased.

So that value that you see in your Core Rulebook assumes that a good measure of the amount of money that your character acquired was effectively wasted on consumable items and on selling less useful items for more useful items. So basically, your PCs are unlikely to be at the wealth point on the table. In my experience, however, most PCs are at or above the level shown on the table, because giving and getting treasure is fun.

At any rate, it isn’t the acquisition of consumption of treasure that we’re most interested in; we’re interested in how much of your gold is going to that “consumable” category, because as you might have guessed, getting raised from the dead TOTALLY counts as a consumable. Resurrections typically don’t happen until around Level 5 or so, when you’ve gotten about 10,500 gp total. Before that point, even reincarnation is a significant chunk of your wealth; you’ve got around thousand gold to your name at 2nd level, 3000 gp at 3rd, 6,000 gp at 4th, and 10,500 gp at 5th. As you can see, reincarnate is actually fairly affordable at 5th Level, and that’s a full level before your druid could even cast the spell to begin with. By 7th level (when druids get reincarnate), you should have around 24,000 gp, and at that point a simple reincarnate is pretty cheap.

Raise dead, on the other hand, is a completely different story. Costing roughly 5,500 gp, raise dead will decimate your wealth by level throughout this tier, taking over half of your wealth by 5th level, to a minimum of about a quarter of it at 7th level. Worse still, raise dead comes with some “transaction fees” that require your character to pay an additional fee (roughly 2,400 gp) in order to remove. Until you have those negative levels removed, you’re looking at a –2 to EVERYTHING; attack rolls, skill checks, damage rolls, and pretty much every other die that you roll gets penalized. This means that you’re ACTUALLY looking at spending close to 8,000 gp, which simply isn’t an option until 5th level, and even then it constitutes knocking you down to the wealth of a character of half your level. This is somewhat ironic in the sense that as players level, the power balance skews more in favor towards them unless the GM intervenes. So raise dead spells are easier to buy when you’re more difficult to kill in the first place.

This is all sort of a subversion of how video games handle dying. In World of Warcraft, for example, there isn’t much of a penalty to death because its assumed that low-level players are just learning the game and/or their class. Time is the only real cost to death at this stage of the game. But starting at Level 10, your armor degrades every time you die, which puts a slowly-increasing gp cost to dying. At low-levels, we’re talking copper. At high levels, we’re talking hundreds of gold. But regardless of the level that you die at, this cost isn’t enough to actually stop you from enjoying the game. Its an inconvenience at best.

Does Pathfinder need a system like that? I don’t think death needs to be as easily waived as it does in a video game, but the system does have its oddities that should be ironed out. Take, for example, reincarnate.

Reincarnate vs. Raise Dead

When you think about it, reincarnate and raise dead are two of the most strangely balanced spells in the game. Let’s look at a quick summary of what these spells accomplish when cast.

Afflictions

• Raise Dead: Normal diseases and poisons are cured, but magical diseases and curses are not undone.
• Reincarnate: All physical ills and afflictions repaired.
• Winner: Reincarnate.

Age

• Raise Dead: As original. Cannot bring back a creature that died of old age.
• Reincarnate: New, young adult body.
• Winner: Depends, but likely Reincarnate.

Negative Levels

• Raise Dead: Two
• Reincarnate: Two
• Winner: Tie.

Remains

• Raise Dead: Must be whole; missing parts are still missing when the creature is brought back to life.
• Reincarnate: Any small portion.
• Winner: Reincarnate.

Window of Opportunity

• Raise Dead: 1 day per caster level.
• Reincarnate: 1 week.
• Winner: Raise Dead.

Other

• Reincarnate has a very high chance of bringing you back from the dead as a creature other than your original type. If your race isn’t on the Core Rulebook’s list, this is guaranteed without GM fiat. Miracle or wish can return to the creature to its original form.

Generally speaking, reincarnate has less restrictions than raise dead. The body is cleaner and free of most harms. (Plus it’s new. Ask any mother, everyone loves that new-body smell.) The only place where raise dead bets reincarnate is in the window of opportunity, which is 2 days longer when clerics first gain access to the spell. But the thing that’s VERY interesting in this comparison is this: reincarnate builds you a new body, curing you of all physical woes and ailments, and can bring ANYONE back to life, regardless of age. And it does so at almost one-fifth the price of raise dead. Why?

The Death Tax, that’s why.

The designers of 3.5 designed reincarnate assuming one thing: you optimized your character’s race and/or are attached to that character’s physical appearance. Therefore, in order to make you want to NOT die, bringing back your character as-is, should be more expensive than bringing your character back in an entirely different body. And let’s be honest, when we stop and look at the races on the chart, who’s affected most?

Humans. Why? Humans are designed with the most desirable racial traits; a bonus feat and extra skill ranks. Certainly not the flashiest racial traits, but certainly the most applicable ones. Most players I meet go human specifically for that bonus feat, not particularly because they care about being human, and there are plenty of builds that rely on being human for various reasons.

Take me, for example. If one of my kitsune characters died and the only way for me to keep playing that character would be to cast reincarnate, what would I lose? For four of my 5 PFS kitsune, the answer is, “Not much.” Hirokyu, my swashbuckler, certainly makes good use of his ability score bonuses and almost all of my kitsune are trained in Acrobatics to take advantage of the kitsune’s racial trait. (My sorcerer being the only exception, and that might not be true.) Heck, if my bloodrager were any other race, that would likely end up being a BUFF for him, as he’s a Strength-based class with a racial Strength penalty. But as said, with the exception of the sorcerer none of my builds are hedging on the fact that I’m a kitsune. That isn’t the case for human characters; loosing a feat often means significant rebuild or begging your GM to let you keep the “mental racial traits,” as they are loosely defined by the reincarnate spell

Regardless, reincarnate is basically designed to be the poor-man’s raise dead, when in honesty it shouldn’t be. Reincarnate has far fewer restrictions than raise dead. Even true resurrection has a window of opportunity, but reincarnate doesn’t. Yet its 4,000 gp cheaper than raise dead. Should it be?

Suspend Your Disbelief, Please

Whenever the subject of raise dead comes up, it seems like folks are divided into two parties: the “please don’t kill me” party and the “eh, I’ll make a new character” party.

I’ve had players in both groups. When one of my players drew The Cyclone from a Harrow Deck of Many Things and was beaten to death by a cyclone, I gave him and his party the opportunity to find his corpse. The player declined. He said, “I like having this be the end of this character, and I sort of want to try something different.” That’s all well and good. That’s the player’s choice.

I know that I’m not in that same mindset. I want to see my hero’s adventures, and switching to an entirely new character, especially when my party is reaching fairly high levels, is jarring for me. Just who is this 9th-level character who appeared out of nowhere and how/why does he even want to join this new party? In the real world, circles of people are relatively tight and difficult to enter into. That’s simply how humans are. I have a hard time imagining that a party of PCs who have fought, bleed, and even died with one another wouldn’t have a difficult time accepting a new person into their party. And besides, just what did your character do to get to 9th level, anyway? The higher in the game that you climb, the less likely it seems that you’re going to have a ready supply of these characters who just HAPPEN to exist. You need story. You need background. And that isn’t something that everyone is good at.

Plus, that isn’t even including the financial implications of adding a new party. You have an all-new character with (often) perfectly optimized wealth entering your group. That’s sort of unfair. And what happens to all of the previous character’s stuff? Or do the PCs have to sell the old stuff to buy gear for the new player? Is the new player going to be competitive with what effectively amounts to half wealth, and even if he is, why would the PCs spend a small fortune on someone that they’ve just met; at high levels; the PC’s gear is often worth months of a lavish lifestyle after all? Or are they just going to keep the dead player’s loot, sell it, and drastically benefit from their comrade’s death in terms of the party’s Wealth By Level? I know some groups insist upon burying dead PCs with their equipment, but really? You’re on a mission to save the world and you’re just going to let the small treasure trove of ancient, powerful magic objects rot beneath the earth?

Honestly, the whole “raised from the dead” thing seems MORE believable to me then the “Come new guy! Join us!” method, but that’s just my pessimistic thought processes, I guess.

A Comparison to 5th Edition

So now we’ve got what is clearly an early-entry resurrection spell that is specifically designed to tax players who want to maintain story cohesion and play their characters combined with irrational questions and fast influxes of wealth that comes with adding a new character to the game out of the blue. Both don’t seem like particularly great strategies, so what are we to do?

Well, D&D 5th Edition several interesting propositions for us.

1. Reincarnate is now a 5th level spell, up from 4th.
2. The random race reroll is now MUCH more condensed and limited to Core Rulebook races.
3. Reincarnate does not grant any penalties for coming back from the dead..
4. Raise dead’s material component costs 500 gold instead of 5,000.
5. Raise dead does not grant negative levels; instead, it imposes a –4 penalty on all rolls that is slowly removed, one –1 per day, until it is fully gone.

The other big change is the existence of a new spell, called revivify. Revivify is a 3rd-level cleric spell in 5th edition with the following effects:

You touch a creature that has died within the last minute. That creature returns to life with 1 hit point. This spell can’t return to life a creature that has died of old age, nor can it restore any missing body parts.

Wow! It’s basically an out-of-combat version of breath of life, and at Level 3! Unlike breath of life, revivify costs 300 gp and leaves the target feeling rather vulnerable; 1 hp will do that. But ultimately, it is a great way to make sure that the ground can keep adventuring without a major delay in what they can do. The concept of revivify is awesome, and its one that I would love to see get brought into Pathfinder.

Aside from these three spells, resurrection magic in general hasn’t changed in 5th Edition. Negative levels have been replaced with the penalty mechanic for resurrection, but both it and true resurrection maintain their prior cost.

There are things that I like about this approach, and there are things that I don’t like about this approach. First, balancing raise dead and reincarnate against one another was a great choice. It allows reincarnate to live in its own design space rather than be the poor man’s raise dead, which is what it is in Pathfinder. Second, this new system encourages you to stick with your character rather than reroll or change a fundamental aspect of your character. Finally, it does away with the additional gold tax on bringing you back to life.

Now, there’s one last aspect that I want to talk about regarding the Death Tax, and it has to do with the place where death hurts the hardest: Pathfinder Society.

Death, Wealth, and Pathfinder Society

I don’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned my feelings about dying in Pathfinder Society before, but I’m really not a fan of how it works. There are a few rather big stumbling blocks in the mechanic that can make death particularly nasty. I’m going to take some time to go over what those stumbling blocks are; in my experience, anyway.

#1 — You’ve Got One Chance To Save Yourself

So this restriction makes a little bit of sense. A little bit. When your character dies, you effectively have one shot at bringing the character back to life. You have to resolve the “Death Condition,” before you walk away from the table at the end of the game. If you don’t (or can’t), then your character is reported as being permanently dead.

This is tricky at lower-levels, when the cost of raising the dead is so very high compared to your wealth by level. Players are able to use Prestige to bring themselves back from the grave, but typically not until Level 3 or 4 if we’re operating under the assumption that said player has earned 2 prestige points in every game she’s been a part of. Which the Pathfinder Society coordinators don’t. Typically, you’re expected to only earn about 4 prestige from every 3 games played, meaning that most players won’t have enough prestige to pay for a resurrection until Level 5. Further still, neither of these figures count the cost of two restoration spells. Before Level 10 or so, these prices are absolutely devastating to PCs because of one simple reason.

#2 — You’re Alone Wealth-Wise

One of the things that makes resurrection affordable in home games is that your fellow party members exist, and everyone has their own wealth by level progression. In my experience, most groups have a party fund that they use for consumables like wands, potions, and resurrection; each player allocates a small amount of treasure, usually 10% of their cut or the like, to the party fund so that these items can be bought and distributed as needed. The group pitches together to buy that oh-so-lovely wand of cure light wounds, for example.

In Pathfinder Society, your wealth is alone. Whereas a home group will often work together via the party fund to bring a fallen comrade back from the dead, a lone PFS character doesn’t have anyone else who can help him, not even that player’s other characters. He’s gotta take the full hit from the raise dead spell himself, which either means draining all of his prestige or crippling his gear. Rather than allocate a small percent of his wealth to the consumable “raise dead” spell, he’s forced to allocate a static amount that just happens to be a massive burden until he effectively “grows out” of the cost.

Now, if organized play had a mechanic that rewarded players for cooperating with their comrades, this might be a non-issue. But it isn’t because of the next PFS stumbling block when it comes to resurrection magic.

#3 — The Game Doesn’t Reward Most Players for Investing In Your Life

For an organization that prides itself on exploring, reporting, and cooperating, there is surprisingly little incentive for players to cooperate financially with their fellows. Pretty much every time I go to Pathfinder Society, I find at least one player chiding another over not buying themselves a wand of cure light wounds or some other form of consumable. I get that players shouldn’t rely on the generosity of others, but is that really an excuse not to be generous? I, for one, relish the opportunity to be a team player and support my party by spending my wand charges on them. I would rather burn my wand charges on my friends out of combat then worry about them dropping dead in-combat, because dead party members translates into a worse action economy for my group, which makes victory for the group more difficult. I can have Ryan Costello back me up on this; after literally every fight on my bloodrager, I was asking our party’s oracles in Siege of Serpents if they wanted to use my wand to heal people. Because I literally do not care, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that I am apparently in the minority with my line of thinking in the Pathfinder Society.

This applies doubly to resurrection, because being raised from the dead is SUPER expensive. I’ve been at several tables where players have died (one time being my swashbuckler, Hirokyu Yoishi), and every time my first response is, “Do you need any money to help pay for the resurrection.” And as I say that, everyone else looks around the table, mumbles into their character sheet, and starts shuffling papers like I asked them if they were ready to do their taxes. I understand that everyone wants to save their money for the next big upgrade that they want to buy for themselves, but let’s be honest for a minute: when you’re forced to allocate 5,500 gp from your Wealth By Level to continuing to play, especially at Level 5, are you worth bringing along to the adventure? That’s a MASSIVE hit to the number of resources that your character has; it literally puts you halfway behind your peers, which means your death in subsequent adventures becomes even more likely. Donating as much as 1,250 gp to your dead friend helps tremendously, because here’s an immortal truth of Pathfinder Society.

People without characters don’t necessarily have a reason to return to next week’s game.

Wrap-Up

There are a couple of other hardships of dying that I’m going to gloss over quickly. In PFS, a permanent death means that you lose whatever boons were attached to your characters, and plenty of chronicle sheets now have these special little story perks that acknowledge that your character did something or saved someone in some way. Many scenarios are multi-part, so you get more out of them in playing the same story with the same character to its conclusion. But more than wealth or continuity is the simple truth of choice.

In the previous example, I mentioned how my friend chose to simply make a new character rather than bring his old one back to life. He decided for himself that he didn’t want his character’s death “cheapened” by returning from the grave. That was cool by me; I had no problem with him feeling satisfied with the “conclusion” of his character’s story (so he thinks, mwuhahaha) and wanting to pick up a new character. That’s fine by me because it was his choice. But games where raise dead is so prohibited expensive to the point where that choice is taken away for me, as it often feels in Pathfinder Society, isn’t very fun. I think that many of Pathfinder Society’s character building “laws” would vanish if raise dead cost a thousand gold to cast, as it does in 5th Edition, but I’m not entirely sure how many people share my sentiments when it comes to this Death Tax on the PCs. Because as we saw last week, if the spell costs a thousand gold or more, chances are that an NPC couldn’t raise enough money in raise dead’s allocated time frame to bring the dead creature back to life anyway. So at that point, who’s the money really hitting? House Thrune, or you?

If you have any comments or questions, leave’em below! Remember that this is an opinion piece; I have tons of well-researched arguments and mathematical backing, but it ultimately comes down to my own opinion. As such, be respectful! In the meantime, that’s all the Guidance I have for you today; I’ll be back with a new article (and a new topic) next week! Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.