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.
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.”
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.
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.
