Quote Originally Posted by Venger View Post
If risen martyr were a template you got applied for killing yourself in the name of your god, you'd be right.

But it's not. You need to plan things out far in advance, take garbage feats, make sure your skills, saves, etc, are up to snuff for risen martyr. You gotta get into this on purpose. It's not just something that happens to you.

While you may not get HD, you get a boost to your ba/saves like a normal level.

What I'm saying is compared to being dead, anything is a power boost. That's a weird thing to compare it to, especialyl given how trivial being rez'd in dnd is.

I don't disagree that its prerequisites are odd and/or mediocre. Shooting for Risen Martyr is a weird idea, but in a campaign that was already running BoED, it could well happen without the player planning. Or perhaps a player might hedge his bets and confer with the DM about having a backup plan in case of TPK.

You don't get BA (first BA gain is at level 2, following .5 BA progression from there) and the book doesn't even say that you gain level 0, only that the abilities of level 0 are added to you. I still maintain that it is not a level, they just didn't write clearly when writing the book. You and I might never agree on that. I was hoping they had an example Martyr to look at, but no such luck...

And again, given that its primary function is "dead guy not dead for a bit", there's very little else to compare it TO. It's for when all other resurrection is off the table but you still have things this character was striving to accomplish. When the party cleric dies and the party's in the home stretch against the BBEG, with no chance to backtrack and pick someone else up, nobody else who can resurrect, and no hope of victory without him. The quest is failed, the world is doomed, but the gods sent him back specifically for this task. It's not a normal class, for you to consider getting deliberately; it even has a "You messed about too long when trying to accomplish your goal, now get back to the afterlife" failsafe built in. It's a weird class, for weird circumstances, but not entirely without conceivable use.