Bad DM.
Nat 20 doesn’t just let you do whatever. Cure wounds could easily be interpreted as returning the body to its natural state as the soul percieves it. If wanted his legs back more than anything so much that his soul held onto it like phantom pain, then I would say maybe a Greater Restoration could if he wanted that.
But if he’d grown accoustomed to his new life and his new legs and no longer sought to “restore” anything, having made peace with his injury, then no, greater restoration would just restore him to his own healthy self image. And a spell like cure wounds would do absolute dick.
I’d love to let this play out, narrate the lack of effect of this spell, and kick this asshole from the table.
I am unsure from what this is from, but I once read a story in which a form of healing magic exists. One requirement for it to work was that the person being healed needs to be OK with it. If someone tried to cure your paralyzed legs and you don’t want them to be “fixed” as you don’t view as an issue or being paralyzed is just part of how you are, then the magic can’t work on you.
Cure wounds could easily be interpreted as
It could far easier be interpreted as healing what the caster or their god perceives to be a wound, since IT’S THEM THAT DOES THE DAMN CURING.
I get inclusion, I really do. And if you wanna go there, the guy playing the cleric is a prick if he’s doing this to a disabled guy’s character. But you’re not escaping this with logic, because disabled guy is also a prick.
You’re in a universe of immortal gods, magic, amazing tech and telling stories. Don’t you dare pretend there’s any ailment that can’t be healed by some random cleric of Waukeen or Kol Korran, both being deities of wealth that would approve of their priests being basically traveling salesmen, exchanging healing for money. You can cure anything for the right amount of gold, and let’s not all act like we wouldn’t want our walking/eyesight/hearing/whatever restored, and actively work to pay for one of these services.
Some of the traits we want to give our characters just don’t translate into this magical world, and there’s no ruling where a DM can still have it make sense if the cleric is in character when doing this. What you want to ask yourself before you get to this situation is, would this guy have seriously been crippled all his life and was never able to raise the few hundred gold for a healing spell? And would an adventuring party even want him on?
This should’ve been nixed at session 0 if not all players agree that this setting allows for incurable disabilities/diseases. Cause I for sure don’t want a cleric in my party that “isn’t allowed” to remove curses or heal. Oh, he’s wheelchair-bound? The party exits the pub, you are unable to catch up to them as there are some stairs in the way. This is life without wheelchair ramps, better get used to some boring sessions ahead. Unless you wanna explore a dungeon and see if falling down stairs while stuck in a chair is gonna be easy to survive for your lvl1 wizard.
It could far easier be interpreted as healing what the caster or their god perceives to be a wound, since IT’S THEM THAT DOES THE DAMN CURING.
If the caster doesnt know how Tieflings are naturally supposed to look, are they going to then heal them of their “deformities” and remove their horns? I’d very much argue the caster’s intent is irrelevent. And as others have noted, there is lore of how cure wores operates to accelerate natural healing, not just reality warp into a perfect body. Splint a break and heal it, done. Cure wounds on a fresh cut, done. Cure wounds on a 10 year old scar? Thats not a wound. No effect. Otherwise no one in DnD would have any scars, even cool ones.
because disabled guy is also a prick.
You are searching hard for reasons to argue against this. Just wanting to be how you are is not being a prick.
You’re in a universe of immortal gods, magic, amazing tech and telling stories. Don’t you dare pretend there’s any ailment that can’t be healed by some random cleric of Waukeen or Kol Korran, both being deities of wealth that would approve of their priests being basically traveling salesmen, exchanging healing for money. You can cure anything for the right amount of gold, and let’s not all act like we wouldn’t want our walking/eyesight/hearing/whatever restored, and actively work to pay for one of these services.
By this logic, no character in DnD should ever have scars, or exist with anything but a pristine body. And yet, some of the most famous characters out there have scars and missing fingers. How odd.
Some of the traits we want to give our characters just don’t translate into this magical world, and there’s no ruling where a DM can still have it make sense if the cleric is in character when doing this. What you want to ask yourself before you get to this situation is, would this guy have seriously been crippled all his life and was never able to raise the few hundred gold for a healing spell?
Usually no. A few hundred gold in most settings is actually quite a large amount for a non-adventurer.
And would an adventuring party even want him on?
Because the disabled are without worth if they inconvenience the party even slightly? Nevermind that all your ranting aboht how magic could affect the body could much more cheaply and immediately apply to objects like a wheelchair, and thus make sense for them to have worked around their disability than to have afforded some of the most expensive healing that exists to treat it.
This should’ve been nixed at session 0 if not all players agree that this setting allows for incurable disabilities/diseases.
Yea I don’t think that most see “curing my disabled friend by force” as something that session 0 would even need to touch on. Most of these spells have “willing creature” as an assumed condition.
Cause I for sure don’t want a cleric in my party that “isn’t allowed” to remove curses or heal. Oh, he’s wheelchair-bound? The party exits the pub, you are unable to catch up to them as there are some stairs in the way. This is life without wheelchair ramps, better get used to some boring sessions ahead. Unless you wanna explore a dungeon and see if falling down stairs while stuck in a chair is gonna be easy to survive for your lvl1 wizard.
This whole paragraph again is some hateful ableist shit with 0 imagination. I’m not even going to bother listing the dozens of simple creative solutions to “omg stairs!” that escape you, and simply point out that, again, cure wounds is a low level healing spell not even a greater restoration. And long-term scars and illnesses canonically exist in DnD. So get over yourself. If the player doesnt want “cure my legs” to be their whole fucking quest, then let them have their magical wheelchair with equivalent mobility and move the fuck on.
Jesus its not even hard. “The wheels of my contraption have a minor strength buff so i can push it easily, and some years later a kind enchanter cast a permanent low grade spider climb on the wheels so i can go up stairs and uneven terrain fairly easily now. It’s not strong enough to climb walls, unfortunately. But I appreciated it immensely all the same. I get around as well as most now, I suppose. Still can’t see over countertops all the time though.”
There’s a book I read that takes place in Faerun where a cleric is getting tortured by ogre clerics by having his limbs broken and then they use heal spells to heal his limbs at odd angles. After he’s freed, they break his limbs again, heal them in braces, but he had a permanent limp
DnD healing can only do so much before its just some high power reality changing magic.
Exactly. If that adventurer wanted to “cure” what he saw as a flaw, he could quest for a much more specialized magical healer or more powerful spell to enable it. I mention greater restoration, but true polymorph to his original form, or some kind of time manipulation, etc. There are options, at a high enough toer of magic, to undo injury, but that power has to have been attained.
This is why amputations aren’t cured by a cure wounds. You can’t just grow a pile of pork by hacking into a live pig and repeatedly healing it.
My read of simple HP restoring magical healing, at least in D&D, is simply that it is equivalent to accelerated natural healing with no potential for complications. So if whatever ailment you’re trying to heal wouldn’t also be healed by any arbitrary amount of rest and recuperation then Cure Wounds won’t cut it either.
Player: “I do something to Eric’s character against his will.”
A good DM: “No, you don’t.”
End of discussion.
Eric just needed a better backstory for his wheelchair-bound character. And really in most high fantasy settings the only way it makes sense to have a permanent disability like that would be from a curse.
Your words are poorly chosen. This is a very low effort response.
First of all its just inaccurate. Many heros in many fantasy settings have some kind of limitation/disability
Not usually MC but sometimes even MC
First of all its just inaccurate. Many heros in many fantasy settings have some kind of limitation/disability
Name 3
You’re assuming there are enough >2nd level casters around to cast Lesser Restoration (or whatever the equivalent is in your campaign). As far as I’m concerned, magic should be extraordinarily rare. Does every preacher get cleric powers? Does everyone with draconic ancestry get sorcerer powers? Can anyone with an instrument kill a commoner with an insult?
In my campaigns, very few NPCs are even 1st level in a class. Maybe one in every 20 villages has a 1st level cleric in their church. It takes a 130 IQ to even start learning to be a wizard. Basically everyone can trace some line back to a dragon in their family tree, but maybe 0.001% ever get strong enough powers to even cast a Light cantrip
The levels in D&D represent adventuring levels, so your average person wouldn’t have any adventuring abilities unless they’ve done something to earn experience. And magic will be as rare as the deities in your setting want it to be since they can basically just give magic to anyone. Hell, some powerful beings even grant magic and powers to their subjects against their wills.
In Pathfinder, magic is common enough that either your village or the next will have a healer capable of that powerful of a heal spell. The only catch is that the casting costs about a year’s worth of wages for a peasant
ITT- Nerds take a 4chan green text way too seriously.
The problem is that newbies see this shit and think it’s normal. One in every 20 rolls is a nat 20. It just means that what you tried went as well as it possibly could have. It doesn’t make possible anything that wasn’t already
I’m not taking the green text seriously in the comment you replied to, I’m complaining about the effect the general meme has had on the game
One in every 20 rolls is a nat 20
…no, no. this is not how probability works, even if it should seem to given the way we describe the odds.
On average. On average. On average!
One in every 20 rolls is a nat 20, ON AVERAGE. That’s how probability works. Are you happy now that I corrected it? Was it worth leaving the most pedantic comment on the entire internet?
Should it not be up to the DM? Sounds like the players here had a good time. Srsly this is what keeps players from DND: people who stick way too much to the rules
I play with these noobs, and explaining that a nat 20 is not an automatic success on whatever the player wants comes up every other session. It’s a problem because it both makes the game more annoying for me to play, and less enjoyable for the person who thought their plan was going to succeed. I’m not concern trolling, I’m offering personal experience to the discussion
A 20 does not mean the spell achieves something out of its capabilities, what is this five year olds playing DnD?
D&D is ultimately a set of rules to guide a group improv storytelling session. One of the first rules of improv is “yes and” so you go with it within the confines of the game rules as well as what people are comfortable with. This is where /u/starbuck@lemmy.world’s suggestion of “Ranlar slowly rises from his wheelchair before collapsing under his own weight as his atrophied legs give out. Your party must now find a way to move him away from the orcs without using his newly healed legs, perhaps on a nearby chair with wheels.” Fits so well. It "yes and"s the spell while remaining true to the other player’s wishes.
The DMs job is to maintain the fun for the players, and if one player is ruining others fun they need to be spoken with and kicked out if they aren’t able to be a team player. Personally, I treat a NAT20 (and critical failures) as an opportunity to do something comical that helps advance the story and improve the lore, because that creates the moments you tell to others when sharing fun stories about D&D
Honestly, as a DM, when this doesn’t infringe on other player’s fun like here I don’t mind doing extraordinary stuff for the Nat 20
Taking away someone’s intentional, roleplayed disability definitely falls under “infringing on someone’s fun”, though. If the player (not just the character) is also disabled and trying to represent themselves in the game, this goes beyond infringing on fun straight into lowkey offensive. I would never let this nat 20 work. Maybe it fixes the wheelchair or something.
Main issue is the wheelchair itself. No adventurer would ever use a wheelchair, the only reason we can use wheelchairs now are uniform roads and ada mandated ramps. Magic carpets exist and are cheap in game and don’t make you a liability.
I have had players make persuasion checks against me before when they want to do something that’s explicitly outside the rules but I think it would be cool. Depending on how cool I think it would be, the DC can be anywhere from 10 to 20, and the player doesn’t have proficiency
What gave you that idea? Games make other players do stuff they don’t want all the time.
Do people actually roleplay as cripples in a standard fantasy genre RPG? I thought that was just some dumb joke.
