It would indeed, Maeglin. But why bother with Lifegiving TRUE? And why give the Lifegiving spells ability to raise dead after as long as a year? Lifegiving I should be MORE than sufficient for such cases.
Kevin: I'm not against penalties for dying. Nor am I against "So you died, now you're resurrected, let's continue". One could also play "The PC died, make a new one", and ignore any Lifegiving at all. I just like rules to be consistent, that's all. And I want a reason for, and a use for, the Lifegiving and Lifegiving True spells.
We played a low-magic setting without any chance of Lifegiving once. Now, we play in a high-magic setting. However, the party has very poor healing capacity, and base their healing on getting their wounded to other healers after serious injury. But when a character died, and they managed to get him to a cleric (well actually - oh, never mind the details, let's just say it was a cleric...), he got a nasty surprise when he discovered all temporary and some potential stats were at zero, so he was actually in a coma - a PERMANENT coma, since his POTENTIALS were zero.
The problem is that the "Life Mastery" spell list (which actually includes an example of raising a dead person after two days, with a recovery period of 200 days, as well as having an absolute limit of one year) is inconsistent with the "Stat Loss" rules under "effect of Death". Also, the text in the spell uses "days dead" frequently, indicating that whoever wrote it expects this spell to be cast on characters who have been dead several days.
I'll think about how I'd want this to be. Probably different depending on the setting. But a recovery period of 100 x period dead IS a decent penalty for dying (it gets better for better Lifegiving Spells, though). Combine this with the fact that the chance that Lifegiving will actually not work AT ALL increases with time dead (it's already quite low if you have a low Co stat, except for Lifegiving True), this should be sufficient to make any character more than cautious.
