Re: Last Rites considered harmful

Patrick McLaughlin (pmcl@cts.com)
Tue, 13 Sep 1994 13:45:00 -700 (PDT)

John's suggestion is viable. But I'd argue that it is simpler (waving
Occam's Razor around in a dangerous manner) to simply say LR requires a body.

If you won't or can't get it, you wait 8 months. And that gives the
necromancers their chance.

But if Rich wants to be nicer to factions and have a way to release the
dead to their rewards, recovering an NP, I think John's suggestion is
great. 5% is a good number. LR is easy if you have the body and either
impossible or very hard if you don't.

The LR locating a corpse in someone's hands is redundant. That's what
scry is for.

On Tue, 13 Sep 1994, John Morrow wrote:

> >> A faction may perform Last Rites on any dead noble from that faction.
> >> Any other faction must posess the body to perform Last Rites.
>
> >I like this. It doesn't remove the ability of a player to get his own
> >NP's back. Powerful characters can skill be killed for good, but
> >you have to fight over the body.
>
> In retrospect, you also want Necromancers to have a shot at the body,
> a situation where the player who owned the dead noble might do an LR
> go keep it away from the "bad guys".
>
> Another option is this:
>
> It normally takes 8 turns to get your NP back, correct? The idea of
> "Last Rights" is to get it back more quickly, correct? But you also
> don't want every dead body to be cleaned up so that a clever
> necromancer can actually have a chance to use his or her skills (this
> was a good point, BTW), correct?
>
> Simply make it so that "Last Rites" has a large chance of failing if
> the body is not immediately available. If LR takes 1 week to cast,
> give it a 5% chance of success at a distance. Generally, you should
> get you NP in 20 weeks or roughly 5 turns or less (about 2.5 turns on
> average), still an improvement over 8 turns but your priest will be
> busy. Adjust the percentage to suit your needs (I'd suggest no higher
> than 10%).
>
> Another option:
>
> In addition to the other idea (only a faction can LR its own at
> range), if the body is in the posession of another faction, Last Rites
> will automatically fail but tell you who is holding the body.
>
> Comments?
>
> John Morrow
>
>


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