So it is an old convention that cure spells harm the undead and inflict spells heal them. Does anyone do anything different with this?

Something which has always bothered me about this convention is that it conflicts with the convention that many undead attack the living to feed on their warmth/life force/etc. I could understand if this was the result of a holy/unholy distinction (since the entries on demons/devils claim lemures/manes are used to create undead), light banishing darkness (or darkness consuming light, or degrees thereof, etc), draining life and sharing it with the undead, strangling a fire by creating a second fire, or overloading a healing spell to become toxic, but not as some antithetical life/unlife distinction.

The idea of negative energy pooling in places of great loss and empowering undead creatures (a la Warcraft III's undead blight, or the shadow plane) is a really neat image, but I always found it easier to imagine as a parasite on positive energy rather than an antithesis. The two energies make more sense to me as a collection of loosely related concepts, such as positive including separate vitality (healing) and raw energy (blasting) while negative including separate darkness and destruction.

I generally hew to the tract that good or lawful clerics tend to have the power of curing and of repelling the fell undead, and occasionally using their cure spells to damage said undead, while evil or chaotic clerics tend to have the power of inflict spells, controlling undead, and occasionally using their inflict spells to heal up their zombie minions, and stop trying to overthink it.
Trying to treat this stuff like energies or real-world physics forces and one being positive and the other negative like protons and electrons or the like is outside of scope. On the other hand, I also tend to have a very prime-material-centric game and things like the planes and celestials/demons/undead exist to serve the plots that exist on the prime material, not make up any grand energy theory for the D&D universe.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1028932The two energies make more sense to me as a collection of loosely related concepts, such as positive including separate vitality (healing) and raw energy (blasting) while negative including separate darkness and destruction.

Modern D&D seems to have that--you can deal radiant (or necrotic) damage, which a given creature might be resilient, immune, or vulnerable to, but no one would ever heal from being hit by it.

We've generally divorced damage from meat points so healing is also separate from the positive/negative divide (one spell even ties regaining hit points to a psychic effect that boosts morale. To the exent positive energy is used to regain hit points it is because the spell is bolstering the subject's spirit, not repairing physical damage. Repairing actual meat-based injuries falls under the transmutation school of magic.

It also needs to be noted that we treat negative energy not as the opposite of positive energy but as its absence (just as cold is not the opposite of heat, bit its absence). Negative energy creatures aren't actually made of negative energy, they are sponges that can only sustain themselves by feeding off the positive energy/souls of others.

There's also a much stronger link between positive energy and sunlight in our games such that direct sunlight inflicts damage to all undead the same as it does to vampires. This is because its basically like drinking from a firehose. Living creatures are ideal because there's only so much life in them (like warming your hands by a fire), whereas the sun is basically an infinite bath of positive energy that burns them to a crisp (like jumping into a fire).

Conversely, creatures of pure spirit like angels, archons and the like suffer additional damage from 'negative energy' attacks because they don't have the protection of a mortal body to shield them from the draining affects.

When I design a setting, I almost never choose to have healing clerics or evil undead (and often don't have a supernatural Christianesque good-vs-evil thing going on).

My original orientation to undead comes from The Fantasy Trip, where zombies and skeletons are created by a certain magic spell that puts power into it from the wizard, and it's only immoral to people in cultures who make it immoral. There are no healing spells and no smite undead spells, so it's a non-issue. There are some other dark and undead and ghostly things, but no specific spells to deal with them unless a GM invents something for them.

When I play or GM with settings that do, I do think it seems a bit odd for healing to destroy undead (I'd think undead would just not work as a subject for a healing spell unless maybe it were a revival or resurrection). And it seems even more weird for a holy Inflict spell to heal undead, because that doesn't seem to make much sense to me except in what feels to me like a weird binary collapse of (AFAIK - I may be wrong) unclear thinking that seemed clever to someone who wasn't thinking as I do and stuck as a convention (which also tends to be like my perspective on many things in D&D).

It seems to me like:

* the physical intactness of a body is one situation that goes from intact to ground to bits, and damage always operates in one direction on that, so repair/healing almost certainly should too - an intact corpse would reanimate into an intact zombie, and hamburger would reanimate into a meat slime at best, not a super-intact zombie.

* the energy available to a body is a different situation from physical intactness, and again it seems to me like it would operate on a scale from having lots to having none, and not cross over to negative and turn into energy for the operate live/undead state. In fact, it seems to me this is how spells I'm familiar with (in the few D&D-esque settings I've played much with) work, such as life-drains and soul vortexes and so on, taking energy from someone and giving some of it to the magic user (and it doesn't necessarily matter if either is undead or not, and/or it can't target undead).

* the goodness versus evil is a third separate situation, and unlike the other sort of does have two polar opposites, so would seem to me more appropriate for a spell that would have opposite effects on someone on the other side of neutral, and might logically have side-effects on health and energy, so that could maybe be used to rationalize why religious/moral spells that hurt/heal undead vs evil might do the opposite to the opposite target type.

* the aliveness / undeadness is another separate thing from all three of the above (unless the game's morality forces all undead to be evil) and might also be conceived in such a way that one could rationalize a reason for hurt/heal spells to have backwards effects on living versus dead things, but I tend not to think that way about undead... maybe in a more voodoo-like zombie context?

Quote from: Skarg;1028949(unless the game's morality forces all undead to be evil)

In D&D, the undead are explicitly evil.

I never use that.

I don't like positive vs. negative energy, feels to science for fantasy. I prefer life vs. death energy, thus aligned with the domains of gods.

Holy and Unholy.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1028968In D&D, the undead are explicitly evil.

Wrong.

Quote from: Omega;1030325Wrong.

Explain.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1030328Explain.

Example 1

Quote from: Motorskills;1030343Example 1

And holy water harms fiends and undead. Undead are clearly unholy.

Adding something like 3e's deathless (non-evil undead) would require giving them a unique trait which specifies they are not affected by effects which include only fiends/undead (because they aren't unholy) and may be affected by effects which specifically exclude only constructs/undead (because they are more alive?). Or typing them as celestials or constructs. Or adding a new deathless type or something.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1030400And holy water harms fiends and undead. Undead are clearly unholy.

Well "unholy" doesn't automatically equate to "evil". Explains Lawful Good ghosts well enough.

Beyond that, 5e's vocabulary is all over the place anyway. My paladin has to contend with Detect Evil and Good, Divine Sense, Protection From Evil and Good, Dispel Evil, Turn the Unholy, mostly doing different things.

My paladin's (eventual) Holy Nimbus will harm another Lawful Good creature that has pissed me off.

Okay so

There's this gulf between the beautiful, revolutionary rules of D&D as crafted and refined by edge-case accidental geniuses, and the "lore" that has accreted (congealed?) around that original nugget of genius.

When you take the broader elements of western religious myth and make a vampire-hunter class out of that (cleric) that's pretty cool. When you yoink necromancers and skeletons from the pulpy pages of early-century mythmakers, that's great! But like, when you're all "Well the POSITIVE ENERGY DEMIPLANE has to oppose the NEGATIVE ENERGY DEMIPLANE and nercomantic magic draws ANTI-ENERGY and clerics draw on POSITIVE energy and that's why they can turn the undead, because they're using SCIENCE MAGIC"... You can fuck off.

Maybe skeletons are the product of dark magic and the mysterious power of your benevolent god gives you a magical fucking ability to repel them? Isn't that more mythic and fascinating than some faffing about using make-believe science?

Of course it is!

In my home games, turning undead works because the "lawful gods" are actually just mortals that cheated the system and and became pretender gods; so it's a cosmological loophole. In a previous campaign, it was because an all-good god hated that which he termed abominable, including creatures summoned or created by magic of any sort (and clerics had a bigger list of things they could turn).

There's absolutely no reason to wed stupid setting elements to the chassis of D&D, so don't. The positive/negative energy axis is stupid; you can throw it right out and invent a much better justification for the exact same mechanics in about two minutes. Do that instead.

Quote from: Motorskills;1030404Well "unholy" doesn't automatically equate to "evil". Explains Lawful Good ghosts well enough.

Beyond that, 5e's vocabulary is all over the place anyway. My paladin has to contend with Detect Evil and Good, Divine Sense, Protection From Evil and Good, Dispel Evil, Turn the Unholy, mostly doing different things.

My paladin's (eventual) Holy Nimbus will harm another Lawful Good creature that has pissed me off.

Holy and unholy originate from good and evil gods, respectively. That raises the question of why undead are inherently unholy in the first place, even if there is the rare non-evil ghost.