What would be the consequences of widespread access to magical healing in a fantasy setting? Assume somebody capable of casting Cure Wounds or the like is about as common in a village as a smith or miller (i.e. very common, and if not present, available in a neighboring village).

What if the same spell also cures diseases?

>>96043277 (OP)
People can heal from all injuries by sleeping for 8 hours already and can heal from most by standing around for 15 minutes. It changes nothing.

>What about cure disease?
Already common place.

>That image
Healing is a natural function, magic deals with unnatural phenomenon. Natural functions are dictated by nature (druids) and nature in a broader sense is dictated by God (so clerics and paladins).

All of them are retarded as hell for wasting spell space on healing when it's piss easy to heal. For non-D&D games where wounds are persistent and much harder to treat, heal sluts are a much bigger benefit. Unfortunately those games usually have PCs die extremely easy so the healer winds up being useless because characters go from fine to corpse before any healing can be done.

Wow we've never had this thread before. I bet you couldnt find any answers to this vague and pointless prompt anywhere on google or youtube. Its definitely worth my time to write out a response to someone who didnt even care about the topic enough to put their own thoughts in the OP

>>96043330
>People can heal from all injuries by sleeping for 8 hours already and can heal from most by standing around for 15 minutes. It changes nothing.
That's a gameplay mechanic and is not intended to represent the way injury actually works in the setting.

>Healing is a natural function, magic deals with unnatural phenomenon. Natural functions are dictated by nature (druids) and nature in a broader sense is dictated by God (so clerics and paladins).
That's a ridiculous rationalization that ignores that sorcerers and bards can cast healing spells too.

>>96043277 (OP)
>What would be the consequences of widespread access to magical healing in a fantasy setting?

>>96043277 (OP)
>Assume somebody capable of casting Cure Wounds or the like is about as common in a village as a smith or miller
This is one supposition I have to decline, as most often the case is that it's emphatically not a common thing in most fantasy settings, not even in dungeons and dragons. Well, outside of video games. And if we are running on video game logic, very little exists outside the immediate usage for the main characters, so it's kind of a silly thing to ponder to begin with.

>>96043366
Sorcerers don't have healing spells. Except for Divine Soul subclass which is putting them into deity powered camp.
Bards are just singing hymns.

>That's a gameplay mechanic that doesn't represent in world injuries
Yup. Talking about a game though. The world and game mechanics being treated as two separate states is retarded. You want to heal the bloodied kid who is dying from his wounds? Just have him join your party for a day and take a nap.

I think there is some very compelling imagery in the whole "miraculous healing" trope. Particularly when there is something the healer gives up or loses in the process (although, admittedly, this is often not the case.)

Overall though, I don't find magical healing any more bothersome than the presence of magic in general. It does oftentimes remove some stakes, yes - but when well executed it points to the idea of self-sacrifice and altruism.

One movie series that I found interesting was Mythica because it shows just how ridiculous a tabletop RPG session would look if filmed. Let the warrior collect wounds until nearly dead, then have the cleric heal a big fraction of them after the battle. (Also shows a rouge trying to hold off a squad of attackers with about five arrows.) It does get into “healing” a birth defect, and manages to get the worst of both worlds by first saying it wouldn’t work... then having it work anyway in a later film.

>>96043425
>This is one supposition I have to decline, as most often the case is that it's emphatically not a common thing in most fantasy settings, not even in dungeons and dragons. Well, outside of video games.
Point out a D&D village in any TSR/WOTC supplement where there isn't a cleric.

Phandalin, from the Lost Mine of Phandelver, 5e:
>"forty or fifty simple log buildings"
>"Here's a quick summary of the most important NPCs": "Sister Garaele" "Elf cleric"

T1: Village of Hommlet:
>32 keyed buildings [I think, can't be fucked to double check or do a headcount of their occupants]
>Church of St. Cuthbert
>"the lesser cleric, the Priest, Calmert (3rd level" The Canon Terjon (6th level cleric"

From beginning to end, clerics are canonically everywhere.

>>96043277 (OP)
What would be the consequences of widespread access to magical plaguing in a fantasy setting? Assume somebody capable of casting Inflict Disease or the like is about as common in a village as a smith or miller (i.e. very common, and if not present, available in a neighboring village).

>>96043543
I mean, I was giving this topic an easy out, but if you really want to be that much of a bitch about it...

>What would be the consequences of widespread access to magical healing in a fantasy setting?

Nothing.
Nothing changes.
Why?
Well, with how many NPC healers price gouge the shit out of you for their healing spells, and presumably do the same thing to their fellow villagers, it's pretty much just real life health care. Except with an actual god who you can blame for being stingy as fuck.
So, yeah. The poor still live and die at the same rate, the rich still reap the benefits of the healthcare system especially with regular "contributions" to the local church, the clergy are still stingy assholes who will let children die on the streets of plague and malnutrition due to not having the proper copper pieces for it, and nobody with any common sense plays D&D or base a question from it.

>>96043586
Probably the population would be much lower than in an equivalent period of real life, population centers would be more isolated, and they would kill the people capable of casting this spell for being evil witches.

Now would you contribute or get out? This shitposting whining about threads not being to your taste is part of why /tg/ is so godawful nowadays.

>>96043592
Those clerics are canonically Good clerics of Good gods, and Cure Wounds/Cure Light Wounds in OD&D, AD&D 1e, and 5e is a free spell with no material components (not even negligible-cost material components). There is no point setting up shop in a village of 1-200 people if you are not going to heal them. You might prioritize (or milk) a rich fellow who comes by, but there aren't that many of those guys, and you get new casts every day.

>>96043633
Sorry anon, but if magical healing gets to be commonplace then so does magical plaguing. Fair's fair afterall.

>>96043633
>Those clerics are canonically Good clerics of Good gods, and Cure Wounds/Cure Light Wounds in OD&D, AD&D 1e, and 5e is a free spell with no material components (not even negligible-cost material components). There is no point setting up shop in a village of 1-200 people if you are not going to heal them. You might prioritize (or milk) a rich fellow who comes by, but there aren't that many of those guys, and you get new casts every day.

>He doesn't grasp how all that incentivizes healers "justifying" price gouging the shit out of desperate half-dead adventurers
>He doesn't grasp how the cleric/medical industry and alchemists/pharmacists are double-teaming the adventurers' wallets with the double-whammy of healing and health potions
>He doesn't know how commonplace this is for those few settings where healing is right around every corner
>He hasn't met any GMs that are beyond stingy as fuck with the loot either

>mfw

>>96043671
Obviously the clerics milk the out-of-towner adventurer for every gp on him, duh. I'm talking about what they do when he's not around.

>>96043685
Then they go back to milking the fuck out of their neighbors, how do you not understand this?

>>96043690
Villagers have approximately 0 money!

>>96043702
So? How many doctors in real life do you know that give health exams, medical care, and pharmaceuticals entirely out of pocket? Why do for free what you can get paid to do?

>>96043721
How many doctors in real life can just wave their hands and chant to cure what ails you?

>>96043730
Most of them can just write something on a piece of paper and get you cured.

>>96043633
>a free spell with no material components (not even negligible-cost material components).
Except for the years of training and hours of prayer to be able to cast it. Except for the opportunity cost of not using those spell slots on other things. Except for the overhead costs of maintaining your operation in general.

You might as well ask why people charge money for any form of labor.

>>96043730
Ask any alternative health clinician that does the same and still charges you money for it

>>96043747
Those spell slots will be useless if they can't sell their spells, and since every fucking village has a cleric, the value of the labor is very low, due to supply and demand. People do not suffer serious injuries in need of magical healing every day.

God, you really just want the answer to "what if magical healing was widespread and easy" to be "nothing, literally nothing would change, because nobody would cast the spell." It's fucking retarded.

>What if we had a technology that let you talk to anyone in the world?
>Nothing, it would be kept from the masses because the game designer didn't want to actually follow through with the logical consequences of something be different.

>>96043277 (OP)
Traditional games?

>>96043406
So... Clerics, druids, bards, paladins, etc are all extremely rare but wizards are common?

>>96043277 (OP)
The worldbuilding general is for questions like this. See you there next time!

>>96043770
It's cause your hypothetical was about healing in ttrpgs, anon. You clearly don't play many actual games, because most game masters have their clerics price gouge the absolute shit out of their players for even the tiniest drop of healing. So we've seen what would happen if magical healing were widespread and easy in these settings. It'd be used as another way to piss on the people living in it. Duh.

>>96043592
Why do fags love this whole "fantasy is just lightly reskinned modern day USA" so much?

>>96043805
Don't ask me. I play L5R, where the healers are also the priests and explicitly ordered to use their talents for whoever their Lord deems worthy of it, instead of leaving this shit to the free market.

>>96043802
You are supposed to create the impression that the setting continues to exist when the PCs aren't around, and that the NPCs treat the PCs the same as they would anyone else in an analogous situation.

>>96043805
Thinking is hard.

>>96043820
>the healers are also the priests
Gay

>>96043825
>the NPCs treat the PCs the same as they would anyone else in an analogous situation
...So, with utter contempt and a noticeable lack of empathy or aid that isn't first paid for in coin. Yeah, that sounds about what I was doing.

>>96043832
Eh, it means that the dumbasses who try and complain about having to do it get forced to commit seppuku, possibly with the rest of their family doing so to remove the shame. Much easier that way.

>>96043353
I searched the 4chan archives, but you're right, expecting IQ high enough to engage with a hypothetical is clearly beyond modern /tg/. I should rely on Reddit and YouTube, far more intellectually stimulating places, full of people much smarter than the modern fa/tg/uys. It's good that 4chan has accepted its place as being solely for deeply retarded posters who can never contribute anything to a discussion. That "/tg/ gets shit done" was stupid, it should clearly have been "tumblr gets shit done."

>>96043860
So why don't you tell us what YOU think then? Why don't YOU give examples of what might change if healing were so painless, easy, and widespread, instead of just complaining about the answers you got? Seriously, this shithole is inundated with so many inane threads that ask a vague non-specific question and do nothing else that it's become the default to suspect it's just some bot using the thread to scrape content than an actual human being trying to engage with a subject. So instead of whining about how people aren't engaging your oh-so-brilliant thread correctly, maybe display your own damn thoughts on the proposed subject.

You don't deserve a (you) OP, but I'll answer anyway.

>What would be the consequences of widespread access to magical healing in a fantasy setting?
Depends on what game you're running, and why, and with who. I play in a lot of fantasy settings (various rule systems) where magical healing isn't common place, but I also run games in settings where it kind of is. The one I currently run has magic massively commercialized, so while it's technically widely available, magic and magical items (including healing) are so expensive that they're only really present in the military-industrial complex or as luxury goods for the rich. There's exceptions, of course, but not on any wide scale.

>Assume somebody capable of casting Cure Wounds or the like is about as common in a village as a smith or miller
If Cure Wounds was as common as trading the cow farmer your grain for milk... Not much would change. Village folk don't actually get in trouble much. Adventurers are rare, and unless there's a war on or they're in a regularly raided territory, there's no reason for them to suffer very severe injuries. In real history, the life spans of medieval people were statically so short because of the high infant mortality, not because once they reached adulthood they dropped like mayflies or something. I see no reason this should be different. So, outside of freak accidents people don't really get injured, outside of plagues or contaminated water they don't get (seriously) ill (they lived shockingly healthy lives in the medieval era!), and outside of infant mortality rates they don't die all that young. Cure Wounds can't exactly do anything about sudden infant death syndrome, so... I guess lordlings probably have a lot of very frivolous duels with each other. There you go, the common folk die even less of weird freak accidents while farming or whatever, while the nobility and rich merchant class dick around and invent ye olde fantasy UFC, or some shit.

>>96043934
The reason people don't include their own thoughts when asking these questions is that in that alternate universe this thread would have had one reply, and it would be this one: >>96043778

But, sure. Widespread, cheap magical healing would lead to greatly increased life expectancy, and greatly lowered infant mortality. Historical populations engaged in a variety of techniques (infanticide, delayed marriage, extended breastfeeding for its contraceptive effects, etc) to maintain consistent population at their Malthusian limits. These societies would do the same, even more than their historical equivalents, since they don't get to watch 50+% of all babies die before ever reproducing without needing to lift a finger.

With anti-disease, expanding urban environments without constant deaths become possible, so you likely see policies intended to vastly curb the immigration of people from the boonies to the cities (since there is no "spare room" created by a guy dying in it last week of tuberculosis).

Disease historically also serves as "the great leveler"; over time, the wealth of a society becomes more unequally distributed, since wealth reproduces itself. This probably leads to societies with more intense class conflict. Wealth-equalizers other than plague are mass mobilization warfare, social revolution, and state collapse; state collapse happens without anybody wanting it to (it's bad for everybody, it's just the rich have more to lose). Combined with more population-stable cities, it probably increases social revolutions (almost unheard of in the premodern era IRL), and ensures better long-term function of states with mass mobilization warfare (e.g. Greek city states, Roman Republic).

>>96043277 (OP)
>More anti-healing measures being formulated for high-profile assassinations and similar undertakings.
>The positive energy of healing magic causes villages to attract undead seeking to snuff it out in greater droves.
>The rigidness of healing over medicine means that any newly-introduced affliction is near impossible to counter except for the 1% of the most powerful casters who can actually craft new spells.
>Anyone attempting to experiment with healing magic is subject to far greater risks and potential negative outcomes, such as tearing open rifts to other planes.

>>96044005
I do think that your hypothetical is reliant on the notion that as society changes, the healers are going to a) continue operating at low costs both in labor and in payment, and b) not going to end up stratified themselves in regards to somehow staying completely uninvolved with the the subsequent class conflicts
But you did at least have an answer, so I can't complain about that

>>96043277 (OP)
Read the Vlad Taltos novels. It's a very high magic setting where magical healing, including some kinds of resurrection, are relatively common, if expensive.

>>96044021
>More anti-healing measures being formulated for high-profile assassinations and similar undertakings.
I had something like this in my modern magic campaign where not just standard healing but also resurrections were fairly available the same way that super-expensive life-saving surgeries are, you might have to travel across a couple of territories at most. To counter this, necromancers created the art of "soul-splicing", taking two dead individuals and merging them both in body and spirit into a singular new entity possessing an identity independent of its halves so they do not qualify as targets for resurrection. This soul-splice is then usually either killed or kept as a servant, with some being able to escape out into the wider world. Also prevents scrying corpses which is a widespread practice in magical forensics as well.

>>96044037
>continue operating at low costs both in labor and in payment
Baumol effect; you think services are much more expensive than they historically were, because you live in a society where goods are dirt cheap. The miller constantly shat on in contemporary fiction, but in the end people did in fact get their shit milled.

>not going to end up stratified themselves in regards to somehow staying completely uninvolved with the the subsequent class conflicts
I'm sure peasant-healers and noble-healers will have very different perspectives on how society should be organized.

>>96043994
Cont.

>What if the same spell also cures diseases?
That's a completely different spell. Whatever, fine. Cure Wounds now does the same thing as Cure Disease. Okay, I guess there's no more plague outbreaks and contaminated water and food sources are also voided. Everyone lives a little longer. Population size increases exponentially. Maybe snake oil salesmen have an even easier time hoodwinking gullible bumpkins, with healing magic seemingly so abundant, who would question the Cure All Miracle Elixir of Edgar? Now we've got shortages of things like food. Maybe this ultra healthy peasant population overthrows their current government. Maybe they form a communist government to micromanage the food to mitigate shortages and starvation. Or maybe they don't manage to mitigate supply shortages. Maybe all the healers form gangs where they extort people into giving up their own food/stuff/whatever in exchange for healing. Uh oh, Cure Wounds+Disease can't fix starvation, people are dropping like flies. Do they resort to cannibalism? Do they all get laughing sickness from the cannibalism and then use Cure Wounds+Disease? Does Cure Wounds+Disease maybe not work on laughing sickness because it's a prion disease? Do they start eating babies since muh Cure Wounds+Disease can't fix SIDS so infants are still dying at the same rate they always were?

Anyway, that's just my two cents

>>96044064
I do think there's a bit of a misconception due to my lack of clarification. I don't mean solely "healers do it for pennies", I mean that if we're to assume in this hypothetical scenario that healers function like other fantasy settings and that there will be healers who naturally show themselves to be more powerful or efficient than others, rather than every single healer being equally as good at doing their job with no effort on their part. I don't imagine that the imagined population boom will happen nearly that soon or be nearly that clean

>>96043277 (OP)
This local lord tier creative writing prompt... Traditional games?
t. Sage

why you guys answering as if wizards learning healing = setting automatically becomes extremely magical and everyone knows all spells ever?
just keep the wizards rare. Just like other classes should possibly also be rare, especially magical ones.
Also, if you want magic to be rare, don't make all your priests be clerics, that's gay even if it has been part of d&d since early on.
the moment you make healing magic be the default way to treat all health issues, you're already in a high magic bullshit setting and might as well add magic Starbucks and make all shopkeepers be level 20 retired adventurers.

>>96043753
They charge far lower rates you actual moron, it's why people even go to them in the first place.

>>96044499
But they're still not free, jackass

>>96043702
Rural communities pretty much still use a bartering system to this day. If there's a healer in a rural village then they're gonna be trading their services for goods. Fish, eggs, farm animals, furniture, house repairs, etc — currency is just a medium for transferring value, you can still sidestep it and earn shit.

>>96044212
Healing spells in my setting mostly just work on scratches/bruises, mute pain, and boost life force. Good enough to keep someone in a fight but unless you're on the way to divinity you ain't closing fatal wounds on the fly.

Proper "healing" that mends life-threatening wounds, cures diseases, and reattaches limbs is the stuff of ritual and alchemy, meaning it's time-consuming, expensive, and requires formal education. Naturally this means that it's heavily commercialized by mages while priesthoods offering free/cheap treatment either don't have the resources to do it often in rural communities and are perpetually swamped in large population centers. Unless it's an immediate emergency and you have the church's favor, you might be waiting in line for months or years.

>>96043277 (OP)
wizards don't cast healing spells because healing is gay and wizards are too rad to want to be gay. it's not that complicated.

>>96043277 (OP)
Nothing changes, because those settings usually already have that in them going in the way described and almost never require sacrificing 50 virgins to the demon god to heal a papercut.
What's the real point of this thread, other than shitposting? Especially considering it's not the first time you ask this non-question?

>>96044869
>Healing spells in my setting mostly just work on scratches/bruises, mute pain, and boost life force. Good enough to keep someone in a fight but unless you're on the way to divinity you ain't closing fatal wounds on the fly.
at that point it'd be silly to restrict the spells to priests only then.

Also, why the fuck are all the priests running hospitals instead of churches anyway? Is this some sort of "well what else can people even do in a church" thing?

>>96043277 (OP)
I guess it would result in no change, due to the consequences of widespread access to magic and disease causing magic. Some village kid magic missiles someone he falls out with, the kid's mom heals it. Some evil cleric causes blindness, the village cleric heals it, A witch casts a curse, the local wisewoman removes it, etc.

>>96044985
Some people still haven't heard of blogs these days

>>96044985
>Nothing changes, because those settings usually already have that in them going in the way described and almost never require sacrificing 50 virgins to the demon god to heal a papercut.
Ah, yes, because D&D settings are very carefully-thought-out interpretations of the consequences of magic, gods, and monsters being real, that's why every village looks like a fusion between Pentiment's Tassing and modern day San Francisco. That's simply the most logical way for them to look.

>What's the real point of this thread, other than shitposting?
I was hoping in vain that there might be some interesting discussion here, but unfortunately /tg/ is not capable of interesting discussions any longer.

>Especially considering it's not the first time you ask this non-question?
Nope, first time.

>>96045797
It's because you started off your thread like a bot would, you dipshit

>>96045892
Are these bots in the room with us right now?

>>96045894
If you were serious about this thread, you would actually give us your own opinions to the question instead of just bitching and whining about all the responses you get. You know, have an actual discussion.

>>96043277 (OP)
Depends heavily on what can and cannot be healed, and how easy it is to do so.

At the low end, you have settings like FF14. In FF14 healing magic exists, but it really only serves two purposes: sharing aether (which is, essentially, a magical blood transfusion) and accelerating the healing of the body. This is an important distinction, because it means that while healing magic can vastly increase the speed at which a person recovers from injury, it cannot save someone from a wound that their body cannot heal from. As a result, grievous injury like lost limbs are still unhealable, and their setting still has surgeons because for bad wounds you still need to stitch the body back together even if you almost immediately follow that up with healing magic to finish the job.
As a result, despite access to healing magic getting stabbed through the guts with a sword can still kill you even if you have your healer on hand to immediately respond.

On the high end, you have a healing magic that 'just works' and as a result injury is treated as inconsequential. This is the sort of setting where the nobility will very common have bloody duels because they know that so long as no one shoots the other guy in the brain, they can have the healer standing 10 ft away save them from even mortal wounds and its like nothing ever happened. Disemboweling your friend over a game of cards becomes commonplace, because its not actually any more consequential than just punching them would be.
This kind of society would appear basically psychopathic to us, and their wars would be horrible and bloody specifically because the expectation of everyone involved is that they won't die even if they are killed. Some of them obviously WILL die, but the risk-reward logic of the situation gets super fucked because they expect healing to save them.
In this scenario, one also has to answer the question of what the difference between magically healing any injury and pure life extension is.

>>96045915
I did. >>96044005

To be clear, though, it's actually quite normal to open a discussion with an open-ended question rather than a thesis statement. It helps avoid anchoring too strongly to the OP's opinions/focus/material, or turning the discussion into some irrelevant minutiae of the original post. Only on modern /tg/ is this called "bot posting".

>>96045934
Then stop being a baby and actually engage with the other people that answered.

>>96043277 (OP)
Wizards are already the most game breakingly flexible classes in the game without question. They simply do not deserve healing spells.

>>96043330
>People can heal from all injuries by sleeping for 8 hours already
What edition is this lmao

>>96046027
5e.

>>96045966
Since combat healing is a weak option it'd actually make wizards worse off as players choose, prepare and spend spell slots on healing instead of anything else.

Instead of "magical healing" I make "healing magical". As long as you have access to the right herbs and potions, you can heal.

>>96043746
Throwing prescriptions at a problem isn't a cure, especially when they have numerous side effects.

>>96043277 (OP)
Big potion would go out of business

>>96043427
>>96043427
>The world and game mechanics being treated as two separate states is retarded.

You're beyond retarded anon, would you also argue that weapons and armour are impervious to wear and tear as well just because the game doesn't have a maintenence mechanic? Or that every action you take with a chance of failure can be perfectly expressed as a whole number divisible by 5 between 5 and 100%? Or that nutrition isn't a thing and all food is equivalent because the game doesn't bother to differentiate what kind of food you have to eat?

>>96043543
Sister Garaele doesn't have curemhmrj wounds

>>96043730
Have you never been to a doctor's office anon? All they do 90% of the time is ask you what your symptoms are and then prescribe you medication and tell you what you should do to get better.

>>96047059
You're an irrecoverable dumbass

>>96046027
That anon is falsely interpreting hit points to be representative of physical wounds and injury (something never stated)

>>96043330
>Healing is a natural function, magic deals with unnatural phenomenon
LMAO YEAH LIKE FIRE AND ICE THOSE TOTALLY UNNATURAL FUNCTIONS FUCK OFF YOU TWAT YOU ARE THE OP IMAGE LMAOOOOOOOOOO

>>96046179
True.
Plus other players would pester them for healing so they get less time doing cool shit and more time supporting other players so they do cool shit.

>>96043791
All of them but bards, yeah kind of.

How many prophets, paragonic living inspirations, or shamanic great sages do you know?

Bards are more common, because bard is a learned skill as much as wizardry.

Artificing would be as common as Wizardry and Bardery, except its much newer, and inherently less organized. It's not just being an engineer, it's being an inventor, and by their nature no two inventors are going to be the same, you don't break new ground by retreading old.
But take a world like Eberron for instance, where artificing has been around for a while, it's much, much more common. In contrast, a world like Athas probably has single digits if it has them at all and all of them in the employ of Sorcerer-Kings.

>>96046027
4e and 5e.
AD&D is 1hp per day, 3 if full bedrest with medical attention.
3.5 accelerates that to level # of HP per night, 2x level if a full day's bedrest.
And 4e and 5e are full heal every night, plus a resource pool to spend throughout the day during short lunchbreaky rests (healing surges / HD rolls). Though they do have alternate rules that slow them back down to a more traditional speed.

>>96048222
vitamins are a druid conspiracy

>>96048302
It's crazy how the standard D&Drone's response to people criticizing/complaining/wondering about D&D's weird quirks is elaborate justifications that appear nowhere in the books and often are nonsensical.

You can't just say, "yeah, in D&D wizards can't cast white magic, because." It has to be some elaborate metaphysical bullshit.

In conclusion, D&D causes brain damage.

>>96043592
>>96043805
>>96043842
The issue with this idea is that the primary source of healing magic would still be good aligned priests, which are by duty the exact guys expected to actually run charity.

If we are going to be bringing the real life analogues, the different religious organisations were the main providers of alms to the poor and sick in preindustrial period. In a DnD style setting where each priest worth his salt is an actual miracle maker, this means that at least low level magical healing would be relatively common place.

Now, for the implications - since actual disease curing spells are fairy rare and priests would likely be split between other duties like religious ceremonies, blessings, purifications, etc. the full time healers would be rare types working in almshouses and full on disease healers would still be too rare to create a penicillin style life expectancy boon. Still, the relative prevalence of low level cure wounds and equivalents would still lower the mortality, both by closing wounds that couldn't be fixed with premodern medicine and by lowering the chances of infections, since each wound blessed away is one less vector for the infections. Not to mention potentially leading to an advancement of the surgical techniques themselves, since the cure spells would vastly simplify the "put the patient together" part of the process. I assume that people figuring out how to do it in case of caesarean birth would be an early invention, since a lot of very rich people would pay fortunes for saving their wives in case of complicated pregnancies.

In such an arrangement, the idea of price gouging medical practitioners would be a hard sell outside the very specialised applications of the healing magic, simply because the presence of good aligned clerics, paladins and even the celestial pact warlocks (as oxymoronic as the name sounds) getting their healing abilities as literal miracles would create a stiff competition for any enterprising wizard

>>96048281
Your concession is accepted.

>>96048735
>The issue with this idea is that the primary source of healing magic would still be good aligned priests, which are by duty the exact guys expected to actually run charity.

Always funny how that charity and good will seems to be extended up to everyone but the people protecting their lambs.

But for real, I've never seen it shake out like that, either during actual games or in fluff, where the healers actually use their blessings free of charge. I've sadly seen plenty more examples where nominally good aligned clergy based healers price gouge the hell out of adventurers, even ones that believe in the same faith as them, and yet are still given the approval of their deity by still being allowed to daily pray for their spells, which makes me believe they must do the same to their flock. It does lead me to genuinely believe that either good with a capital G has a big caveat when it comes to making money, or that this discussion is predicated on a somewhat romantic presumption that everyone that can use magic to heal would be altruistic about it, which should be included in the OP if that was the case.

>>96048414
Definitely. I really can't understand what would drive someone to lie about a game they like instead of just saying "fuck you I like it that way"

>>96048864
It's the issue of the grandfathered gameplay conceit clashing with what should be logical in the setting. The DnD established the standard of the adventurers being treated almost antagonistically by everybody around them, with the prices that make zero sense when compared to the officially written wages for normal people and of course with the assumption that PCs can't get help from the NPCs, especially not for free, even if it doesn't make sense from the in-universe standpoint.

Again, by the realistic standards, good aligned religions would run charity. Even in today's world the Catholic Church is the single biggest provider of the medical charity and in the pre-industrial times the different churches and temples were basically the ones running any almshouses and hospitals. In fact, if we were using realistic standards, a lot of paladins should be hospitaliers since hospitalier orders were one of the more notable groups of the crusaders irl.

Point is, by the in universe logic the local priest should gladly bless and heal people protecting his flock, both due to his god's dictum and due to the practicalities of supporting your own side. In the same way, he should be the one helping his own flock stay healthy and safe.

>>96047059
>Throwing prescriptions at a problem isn't a cure, especially when they have numerous side effects.
You're literally describing american medicine.

>>96043721
>How many doctors in real life do you know that give health exams, medical care, and pharmaceuticals entirely out of pocket?
The majority of civilized countries in the world have socialized medicine, subsidized by the government because they recognize it as a necessity for a functioning modernized society, much the same way as socialized postal service, socialized education, socialized road construction, and socialized firefighting, among other benefits.

Even the medieval world had hospitals which were ran and funded by the church as missions of mercy, providing not merely healing and midwifing, but a single nights stay to traveling pilgrims, a civilized sequester for lepers, a consecrated cemetery for those who die there, and lodging as almshouses for the vagrant poor, the elderly, and the disabled.

Admittedly, even though it was frowned on, some did charge one-time entrance fees to those they housed in their capacity as almshouses, Typically the beggar to be housed paid off the fee with services due to the monastery during their stay, such as gardening, brewing, baking, nursing aid, etc unless they had some kind of sponsor footing the full bill. Also micro-praying for their benefactors more than 300 times per day and attending mass.
But even those entrance fees were a pittance. Roughly $12K after adjusting for inflation and conversion for lifetime corrody is a steal, that would barely get you a year of expenses here. Heck, I don't know if $12K would get you a lifetime of bare minimum clothes, food, and shelter even at production cost, with all the middlemen and markups removed. It's definitely still subsidized by the church.

>>96048973
That puts this kind of discussion at odds then, primarily because this is a tradtional games board. Do we approach this kind of question from a fully setting agnostic "if this were our world" kind of mindset, or one based on actual examples from fictional media we can point to, like the actual tabletop games or the media based off of them? I presumed the former, since this is the main focus of the board, but maybe I was wrong to do so?

>>96049023
*latter, sorry. Long day.

But yeah, it feels weird to be talking about "what would realistically happen" when we're talking about settings where there should be a lot of debates if a healing spell should help abort a baby or not.

>>96049023
Being fair, a good example of tabletop RPG that actually spells it out is Unknown Armies where the Healer avatars are expected to be healers and are essentially given a rather simple choice - be a good capital "H" Healer or lose the mojo you get from it.

And since you mentioned media with tabletop influence, I feel like a good example would be a recent anime, Frieren. Priests in this setting are actually expected to be good priests and it shows. Though this setting is skewed up a bit, because the divine magic is an explicit divine gift from their monotheistic goddess and actively comes with the clause that even those who aren't divinely chosen to wield it can still get basic healing out of it. Basically, the charitable healing magic, and more general white magic, is backed into how the healing magic works in the first place.

>>96043277 (OP)
I've never liked ease of access to magic. Even if the world is very magical I feel like control should be limited and rare. At most a universal healing should be weekly act of god or something like a communal mass that requires you being righteous or pious. Something should stop magic simply being technology, but gayer.

>>96048864
>I've sadly seen plenty more examples where nominally good aligned clergy based healers price gouge the hell out of adventurers, even ones that believe in the same faith as them, and yet are still given the approval of their deity by still being allowed to daily pray for their spells, which makes me believe they must do the same to their flock.
The Bible says "take all you have and give it to the poor," not "take all you have and give it to the murderhobo with a net worth of tens of thousands of gp."

By fleecing adventurers, you can then take that money and reinvest it in your local community, as well as performing pro bono work. One adventurer paying 100gp provides enough wealth for a cleric to live off of for a year, which in turn means he can be the respectable kindly priest/doctor for the local peasants.

>>96049070
Funny that you mention anime, cause plenty of manga and anime I've seen go for the opposite track where healing magic either isn't explicitly tied to faith or just requires being a devout follower of a deity to perform. Though it also has a big difference in that a healers' capacity is far more limited in that their magic is stamina based, meaning that unless they're some kind of special protagonist or explicitly some kind of divine "saintess", both regular and adventurer clerics can only perform their magic a few times a day before crapping out and forcing the party to rely on healing potions. Hell, the whole "saintess" cliche seems to be based on the idea that it's exceptional for someone to go full on mother theresa and mass heal a bunch of injured and sick people in one go instead of fixing up one person and then telling everyone else to wait till tomorrow.

They also tend to tie a lot of healers to poliltical affairs such as having churches monopolize the idea that there's a right and wrong way to be a healer, or nobility buying up private clerics the way one would get a private doctor, or the government funding institutions and issuing licenses over it.

And that's just for the idea of clerics and wizards having access to free healing magic. Healing potions and alchemy is an even nastier beast altogether.

>>96049185
Lol, what a load of crock. No wonder npc clerics get bullied so much if their own god encourages that kind of double-standard.

>>96045915
The OP generally avoids giving his opinion to leave the discussion open. This is how 4chan always worked before retards started shitposting about bots.

>>96049212
Well, that unironically depends on the setting. As I have said, Frieren is a setting where the divinely chosen priests are either busy being priests to their communities, chaplains or wandering healers. It's also a setting where the main deity explicitly lets anybody who can read her holly books and has their own magical power get some healing, even if they aren't as strong or efficient as the chosen ones.

For other anime settings, it literally depends. The sword isekai has a prominent side character chosen one run orphanage as a charity. Archdemon's Dilemma actually goes into nitty gritty of local church running the usual charity and alms, though it's a setting without common healing magic, especially of the divine kind which is usually reserved to the actual literal demigods (albeit the actual level of demi skews towards "powerful mortal"). In general, a very few anime settings have the good religious healers nickle and dime others for healing. In fact, even the corrupt ones aren't usually portrayed as greedy penny pinchers nickling and diming people for services, choosing other more ambitious or depraved forms of vices.

>>96049308
Nice revisionism, pal.

>>96049316
So again, is this kind of discussion predicated upon how things would go from the way most of these fantasy games and media actually shake out when people are given free access to magic, or are we going for more ideal situation where healing is explicitly altruistic based, free and plentiful to have a specific effect upon the general health standards of humanity?

>>96049212
>double-standard

Do you whine when poor countries charge (comparatively extremely wealthy) foreign tourists more to enter places than the locals? The priests job is to see to the people under his care not milk them for profit. Wealthy outsiders are fair game.

>>96049379
If they're good aligned, then they should logically lose their god's favor for their greed

>>96049361
Well, I wouldn't go with just the altruism, rather the altruism mixed with the religious duty and the practicalities of caring for your own community.

Besides that, OP's question was about DnD style arcane vs divine split where the average wizard has no healing magic, so I answered based on the implications of the setting containing multiple religious groups that logically should be providing the miraculous healing as alms for the poor.

>>96049340
Here, went to look through the archives for a thread from times of yore with a similarly light start to this one (actually, much lighter). 100+ post thread and nobody's bitching about "bot posting" or lazy OP: https://desuarchive.org/tg/thread/8322448/#8322448

This board is dragged down by people replying to threads just to complain about them. If the linked thread were made today it would have 20 posts of which 10 would be variations on "traditional games?" and "what system?" because kicking off /qst/ and enabling /pol/ to pollute the board were both disasters for /tg/.

>>96049407
If that were the case, then yeah, I should suspect that there'd be a general increase in overall health. Though this is partly presuming that most villager just suffers the normal occasional accident and fall and that they're not being raided by bandits or orcs every week, since most low level clerics are only potent enough to treat smaller trauma injuries with their magic alone before busting out the surgical tools. Though I suppose that might incentivize a bigger recruitment drive for chosen or compel more clerics to go adventuring to get stronger till they can reattach arms.

Though I have to wonder if any of this arrangement might change if the healing magic was being supplied coming from, say, a more neutral aligned deity. Or theoretically an evil deity as unlikely as it is. (And I'm mainly discounting law focused and chaos focused since I presume that Law deities would jive with the Hippocratic Oath, and Chaos deities wouldn't make a fuss how you use their blessings as long as it's of your own volition)

>>96049429
>This board is dragged down by people replying to threads just to complain about them
So, like you?

>>96049477
>So, like you?
No, I'm complaining about the secular decline in board culture, not the thread. Keep up.

Also I have contributed to this thread, elsewhere.

>>96049477
That's a very interesting question. Being honest, I focused on the good aligned healers because they were the most relevant to the question about costs of healing magic as the biggest potential factors driving the prices down.

For evil deities, fleecing the needy for money is the least of the concerns, since they might demand the people to pay them via their immortal souls, either indirectly by joining their cult or helping them carry out their dark biddings or directly getting souls as a payment.

For the neutral deities and their clerics, it's hard to say since the neutral deities are such a broad category that nothing can be generalised about them. Some may allow the priests to fleece the needy, some my command a form of charity, some may forbid charity and a few might even expect their priests to be greedy misers as a part of their creed.

>>96043277 (OP)
similar to the consequences of modern medicine

>>96043277 (OP)
There probably wouldn't be a lot of adventurers in wheelchairs

>>96049566
Probably means in a setting with a pantheon, one's more likely to see healing treated on a very case by case basis, since while "good" deities tend to have healing domains, you still have instances of numerous neutral and evil deities getting their clerics access to healing spells and thus a lot of competition

>>96045405
>at that point it'd be silly to restrict the spells to priests only then.
Who said they were?
>why the fuck are all the priests running hospitals instead of churches anyway?
Who said they were?

Of course running churches is the priesthood's main priority, but priests being at the forefront of healthcare and treatment is true to history. Retired priests being sent for their final duty in hospitals, dedicated religious orders of healing, military chaplains doubling as field medics, monasteries for the mentally unwell, etc. My setting just has that aspect.

Tho one of the wackier examples is a God of Blood/Agony/Glory who offers a path of repentance to monsters like freshly-turned vampires, turning them into living blood filters that can convert the vitae of monsters and even demons into pure universal donor blood — a precious source for both alchemical and ritualistic healing. The practice is inevitably fatal and painful, with the vampire eventually turning into a mummified husk that can also be ground down and used in crafting sacred relics.

>>96048735
>priests would likely be split between other duties like religious ceremonies, blessings, purifications, etc. the full time healers would be rare
how can one be a full time healer when it takes like half an hour to use your daily allotment of spells?
it shouldn't be too hard for even a busy person to find the time for a couple casts daily
triage would take more time than treatment, and that can be delegated

>>96049185
>give it to the murderhobo
Except in most games the adventurers are saving lots of people. Healing the adventurers helps them save more people instead of fucking dying. It's literally just healing for a fair price, not "give all your belongings" to the adventurers.
The whole murderhobo shit is just for meme retards and nogaems.

>>96043425
Never played in Runequest/Glorantha, I see.
Everyone (well, every adult) can use magic, mostly from spirits and gods, and most have access to healing magic. And then there some that follows the healing goddess and are full fledged healers that can heal wounds, diseases, poisons with plants, skills, spirits and spells, and even resurrect people (if they know the appropriate skills/spells). And some are shamans that deal with spirits and they have basically access to all spirit spells. And some are cult leaders that have access to more and more powerful magic than a normal adult.

So yeah, plenty of magic in any given village, but - will they use it for foreigners, is it already spent for other things, e.g. blessing crops, do they need to keep some in reserve because say divinations predicted bad luck?

>>96048302
Yeah, the fire and ice are acting in an unnatural fashion. Unless you think creating fire without a fuel source or spark is natural and ice being created with no water just happens in nature.

>>96048414
Haven't played D&D in decades. OP was looking for an excuse as to why something exist mechanically. I gave him one. Didn't say it had to be a good excuse.

>>96043277 (OP)
Workplace safety would probably be a little looser. As would safety practices during training.
I have a city in my setting where healing magic is readily available to the upper-classes so they engage in dangerous sports like sharp-blade dueling "to the death", wild animal wrestling, gladiatorial fights, and knife juggling.
video is where I got the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAzY28C8Syc
I don't know a lot about warfare, but I imagine it wouldn't change that much. The number of deaths would go down but the tactics probably wouldn't change. Mayyybe formations are less likely to break from people running for their lives, but probably not by a lot. People don't act rationally when fighting.
>pic for pic
>>96043592
>setting hypothetical thread
>DnD bitching
did gary fuck your mum or something?

>>96055638
>>pic for pic
Healing spells are the Cleric's niche, that's why Artificers, Druids, Warlocks, Bards, and Sorcerers are allowed to heal. Paladins and Rangers too.

Almost like you didn't even read the OP pic, since it specifically notes that 5 other full casters can cast healing spells.

>>96055638
>I don't know a lot about warfare, but I imagine it wouldn't change that much
I could think of one. The enemy clerics and medics would be prisoner targets #1 for the fact they're the best option for combat medicine available. Might not decrease the casualty numbers by a lot, but considering how many military leaders die of wounds or infections from their wounds, that one cleric's efforts will probably make a massive difference later on

>>96055638
Evil clerics have been a part of TTRPGs (and fantasy in general) since forever without really having flavor associated with healing.
Keeping "totally not catholic" clerics as the default healbots only so they have excuses to get handsy with all other characters is silly.

>>96055671
I was more responded to the "Wizard" part of it and in the mind of old DnD. however my pic also works in response to those other classes except paladin and druid.
>>96055814
yea can't believe I missed that lol. capturing the healers would essentially force a surrender or desperate last attempt since your side could much more easily recover from any efforts while their would have to make due with mundane medicine. They'd probably be ransomed like knights or even kept and enslaved depending on the culture.

>>96043277 (OP)
It makes life for a medieval peasant not as short and awful as it would be. Most injuries or illnesses that would be actual inconveniences or more are trivialized. If you get attacked by a monster or hurt yourself in the woods, you will likely be fine within a couple days as long as you survive. Things only become difficult when there is widespread injury or illness and clerics can't keep up, or the clerics do not have the specific means to fix a problem.

>>96043592
>NPC healers price gouge the shit out of you for their healing spells, and presumably do the same thing to their fellow villagers, it's pretty much just real life health care. Except with an actual god who you can blame for being stingy as fuck.
The church would blow the majority of their slots per day on charitable actions towards the common people. Its a fucking ridiculous comparison to actual healthcare because you can't fucking stockpile spell slots. They are going to blow them all every day unless they are actively expecting worse shit to come later that day because to do otherwise would be an affront to Good. They'll only charge if there are more requests for healing per day, every day, than they can supply which isn't going to happen in a small town of a few hundred serviced by one cleric.

>>96043406
>Many children profitable for parents forcing them to work on their behalf
Fixed the phrasing of that one. I was thinking about this the other day and I think the economic interests of the parents are probably the most significant reason that isn’t being stated enough. Here it is being stated that the parents “need” lots of children to work on their farm. It’s a euphemism. In the “developed countries” children have compulsory schooling which takes time away from working on their parents’ behalf and child labor laws which restrict the work they can do. Investment in education is investment for things like tech and healthcare companies and highly automated industries at the expense of the interests of low skill industries and parents. When people argue against compulsory schooling, they often do so from the perspective of parent’s rights rather than children’s rights.

Anyway, I’m not convinced magic healing would progress you up the graph all that much. The economic basis of society would still be in family businesses and low-skill careers, where having lots of children is beneficial.

>>96056006
>medieval
?
"default fantasy settings" aren't medieval, and if you're indeed playing a medieval setting: why would wizards be fucking common there?
and why does it only apply to wizards and not to bards, druids, clerics/priests or so on?

>>96062506
Why do you think fantasy settings aren't medieval?

>>96043277 (OP)
It's less a setting problem and more a mechanical one.

Wizards are already the most versatile, powerful casters. Giving them healing on top of that causes several mechanical issues:

>Wizards now have access to every type of spell in the game
There is now no reason to play a Bard, Cleric, Sorcerer, or Warlock. Druid holds a place because of Wildshape, maybe.
>Wizards now have way too many spells
While the above is true, this is more of a character-by-character problem. Having another wizard nullifies it, but if you're the only wizard, other players will pick classes without innate healing abilities since they'll assume the wizard will do it since they can. Problem is, Wizards can only have X amount of spells prepared at any given time.Thus, they're giving up wider utility or damage for healing. And while this in theory helps balance things out from the first point, in practice it just means a Wizard will keep Cure Wounds or Healing Word prepared all the time, and have their other slots full of more generalist spells.

TL;DR it isn't a lore issue, it's a balance issue.

>>96048291
Anon, hp is 100% representative of physical wounds. The system doesn't make any sense if it doesn't.

>>96064234
It also doesn’t make sense if HP is meat points. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a game mechanic that abstracts a bunch of things together and then hope you don’t notice.

>>96064376
>It also doesn’t make sense if HP is meat points
yes it does

>>96064428
Regenerating all damage overnight makes sense? Recovering most injuries by taking an hour rest?

>>96065064
what doesn't make sense about it?

>>96065092
That isn’t how injury works?

Even ignoring that, why does it take more magic to heal a level 10 from near death than a level 1?

>>96065230
because their meat is tougher

>>96065230
Same reason it take more stabbing to hurt them, their meat is more magically strong thanks to soul-magic(levels)

>>96065230
Muscles and mass are denser due to becoming more buff from the constant exercise, so it requires a lot more emergency meat and nutrients to fill in after all the stabbings

>>96043277 (OP)
wizards can already get access to cure wounds through mystic theurge?

>>96043277 (OP)
no combat wheelchairs

>>96068400
You need Regenerate for that. Cure Wounds only affects hit point damage.

>>96064234
There is literally nothing in the system that points to hp being physical wounds, if he is physical wounds how do non-tangible creatures like ghosts have hp?

>>96068647
>ghosts can't have wounds
Huh?

>>96043543
>>96043592
>>96043633
>Those clerics are canonically Good clerics of Good gods, and Cure Wounds/Cure Light Wounds in OD&D, AD&D 1e, and 5e is a free spell with no material components (not even negligible-cost material components). There is no point setting up shop in a village of 1-200 people if you are not going to heal them. You might prioritize (or milk) a rich fellow who comes by, but there aren't that many of those guys, and you get new casts every day.
You do only get a few casts per day, though it's rare you need more than 1 HP to stop bleeding for the average accident in town.

You either ration by price or ration by someothing else. And charging for healing lets them use those funds to acquire medicines that cure other things. Or just to stockpile healing potions.

>>96068852
Yes anon an ethereal being isn't going to die of blood loss or head trauma

>>96069747
Anon, D&D ghosts are just outsiders on the ethereal plane. They absolutely have organs, blood, bones, etc.

>>96043277 (OP)
Well, it kinda depends. If we're assuming DnD/FR as the setting, I'm not sure exactly how limited those kinds of spells are in fluff, because obviously shit like "your character has tuberculosis/cancer" isn't mechanically represented.

I would assume, however, that working off of the logic that low-level healing spells have limited ability to actually heal, they'd be more of middling significance. A lot of the minor infections and minor-moderate injuries that would have been deadly due to poor sanitation and medical knowledge are no longer deadly, but at the same time, more serious injuries or illnesses are still very much fatal.

Even if we assume, like in DnD, that minor healing spells partially heal injuries/diseases beyond their ability to fully cure, the caster would still be very limited in the number of times per day they can cast.

Remember also that the caster themselves has no feedback on whether their healing spell worked or not; if someone feeling a little ill actually has cancer and is dying, not much will have been done, and if the caster wastes his cast(s) of healing on that individual, not only will he not know that, but anyone else with a problem is SOL, possibly leading to their injuries becoming fatal or worsening such that they'll need more care to properly heal.

For important people like kings, though, even severe illnesses like cancer would probably be pretty trivial, since they'd have access to more powerful casters who they can employ solely to heal them (and maybe their family) and nobody else.

>>96043277 (OP)
>What would be the consequences of widespread access to magical healing in a fantasy setting?
You'll need to go deeper on what it means.
a) Near instant wounds healing
b) Regenerating limbs
c) Healing virus that are technically another form of life (IMO I'd argue healing strengthen them)
d) Healing "genetic curse" which mean the ability to change the body, including rejuvenation
e) Resurrection and "soul"

>only (a)
So long as there's "healer" around, a king would have no scruple making peasant work to near death.
Especially if magic healing also remove fatigue.
Battles would involve a lot more of making sure your opponent is truly dead.
You also open the question of obtaining infinite meat source. One way to close it would be to imply that it somehow bring back all the atoms, meaning whoever ate part of you is weaker unless it keep you dead.

>up to (b) regeneration
The above tenfold,
TORTURE will also involve untold amount of fucked up guro amputee. So long as the prisoner cannot regenerate limb himself. I'm monstrous enough to imagine regenerating a prisoner limb inside a restraint never meant to be removed.

>Involving (d)
Virus killing mean either improving your Immunity or killing the virus itself after somehow identifying it.
That level of healing also involves body modification because who decide your body is no longer defined by your parent genetic?
It may take many generations but you could imagine that if you have humanoids with horn it's because their civilization gradually added the horn to the point it became part of their genetics.
On the plus side, it let you have most people be so beautiful no one care about it anymore
It opens the question of infinite life.

>(e) ressurection
This cannot be answered without answering the question of what is a soul and how both it and memory is maintained.
Going from the principle that regenerating a brain-dead person is pointless.
You also open the question of infinite meat source.

>>96070371
Might as well post comic about healing

>>96070403
I wouldn't trust faith based healing

>>96049019
Then the majority of "civilized countries" in the world are communist.

>>96070410
Lawful Evil paladins be like that. Most likely a lie, but would you risk it?

>>96070410
VERY cool idea. stealing it for an evil cult.

>>96043543
Doom of Daggerdale has a cleric but she's stuck in magical suspended animation until the final encounter and she's an evil cleric so I don't think she'll be selling you healing items or services.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have widespread access to a personal magic shield?

People walk around with clothes, not bandages.

>>96048291
Then what are they? Every other excuse I've seen makes no sense because they fail to consistently apply.

>>96066534
Doesn't really work when applied to wizards and such, though.

>>96065270
>>96066422
If you stab the wizard in the gut does the knife not go all the way to the hilt? Are all attacks more shallow, now?

Completely unrelated to OP's actual question, but...

Remember, Cure Wounds heals HP. That's hit points, not health. It doesn't heal meat points. In most cases, it's either a boost of magical or physical energy, and more rarely divine providence.

Cure Wounds is effectively a shot of caffeine, fluff-wise. So it might be like taking a bunch of coffee or taking a nice shower after a busy day, but otherwise, it's not like you're actually healing anything.

>>96084349
Ah, so that Level 5 Barbarian that just survived a thousand ft fall just needed a coffee to walk it off.

I mean, it's not really any more strange than how the game already works where the fighter can chug a bottle of poison then lounge about for an hour and be fine. Or just use Second Wind and shake it off immediately, which is closer to your invigoration explanation.

>>96084349
No, it objectively does stop bleeding and such. At low levels (And when close to death) hitpoints absolutely are meatpoints, they only get more abstract later on.

>>96084188
>Doesn't really work when applied to wizards and such, though.
Yes it does.

>>96043543
>Point out a D&D village in any TSR/WOTC supplement where there isn't a cleric.
supplements naturally are set in places conducive to adventures taking place, as opposed to places without the sort of conveniences that enable adventures to happen

>>96084349
If you REALLY want a workabout way to shit on free healers in a setting, just use magic illnesses, which are bound to appear since there don't seem to be any spells that boost our shitty immunity systems. Even if they were, a Plaguespreader villain is too much fun of an idea to not allow or toy with. Curses could work if you wanna cuck people out of their divine priviledges.

>>96066422
Remember some shitty progfantasy novel justifying meat points as adventurers gradually losing vital organs and body fluids with power progression until eventually they became meat golems puppeteered by their souls and powered by mana alone. And setting's equivalent of "hit dice" are effectively an innate source of life force/vitality that lets adventurers rapidly regenerate to a capped extent before needing to rest.

>>96085884
I remember some throwaway story justifying meat points as a semi-visible regenerating shield surrounding you that's in place to protect your vitals, essentially the halo shield system but for fantasy people. And this party's tank was being kicked out because supposedly his hitpoint shield kept popping early in combat, with the kicker reveal being that one of his teammates had a special skill that shaved off his hitpoint shield for stronger blows that the Tank's special skill was compensating for.

>>96085949
>I remember some throwaway story justifying meat points as a semi-visible regenerating shield surrounding you
IIRC that is actually what meat points are in some major setting or another which is why you don't actually start accumulating real injuries until your HP is 0. You aren't actually physically hurt until then.

>>96086893
I've also seen hp treated as your luck literally running out and you're actually narrowly avoiding damage until then, but that wasn't a tabletop game.

Honestly I wouldn't mind less ludonarrative dissonance with hp in games. Preferably without characters becoming gradually crippled as fights go on. I can think of one game where you're hp is split in 2, armor which you can lose without consequence, and health where your character gradually becomes worse off as you lose it, which I guess is almost what I'd want.