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 (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Ghost#content)
Quote from: Motorskills;1030343Example 1 (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Ghost#content)
And holy water (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Holy%20Water#content) 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 (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Holy%20Water#content) 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.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1030328Explain.
Theyve never been explicitly evil. Especially in BX D&D. Theres modules where the PCs can meet friendly undead and 5e even notes that sometimes skeletons rise from the grave to protect family. And in one of the modules the PCs can encounter non-evil lich and other undead. Some types have been stated as evil. but fluff text tends to get ignored right out the gate even then. And its changed sometimes from edition to edition.
Quote from: Omega;1030520Theyve never been explicitly evil. Especially in BX D&D. Theres modules where the PCs can meet friendly undead and 5e even notes that sometimes skeletons rise from the grave to protect family. And in one of the modules the PCs can encounter non-evil lich and other undead. Some types have been stated as evil. but fluff text tends to get ignored right out the gate even then. And its changed sometimes from edition to edition.
Couldn't you be evil but still defending something important to you or doing good through evil means? I can see that as a way to square the circle. Evil because of your essence, but not will.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1028932So it is an old convention that cure spells harm the undead and inflict spells heal them. Does anyone do anything different with this?
I ditch said concept altogether, precisely for the reasons you stated. Does that count as "different":D?
This is why "good" and "evil" are not great alignments. A Ghost can be Chaotic and Cursed and not necessarily 'evil', but still dangerous and wrong.
"good" and "evil" seem fine to me as alignments. Which is to say, if people treated them as what team you were on and/or what you could expect of said creatures to do in the world, rather than some genuine moral or cosmic judgment schema.
Steal or disrupt? Chaotic. Kill or terrorize? Evil. Give to or protect the needy and helpless (motivations irrelevant)? Good. Uphold society? Lawful. Huge number of edge cases and 'where does this fit' scenarios? Sure, what's the problem?
Quote from: RPGPundit;1030868This is why "good" and "evil" are not great alignments. A Ghost can be Chaotic and Cursed and not necessarily 'evil', but still dangerous and wrong.
I totally agree:).
Quote from: Willie the Duck;1030884"good" and "evil" seem fine to me as alignments. Which is to say, if people treated them as what team you were on and/or what you could expect of said creatures to do in the world, rather than some genuine moral or cosmic judgment schema.
Steal or disrupt? Chaotic. Kill or terrorize? Evil. Give to or protect the needy and helpless (motivations irrelevant)? Good. Uphold society? Lawful. Huge number of edge cases and 'where does this fit' scenarios? Sure, what's the problem?
Problems? How many do you want:D?
Well, going by the first part I bolded, the first problem would be "if your ruler is Lawful Good, why are all his soldiers Chaotic Evil"? (Because medieval armies didn't follow the 20th+ century laws of war, that's why. They are going to steal, kill, disrupt and terrorize, it's in the job's description. Even today's soldiers disrupt the functioning of other societies and kill people in them, it's just the stealing and terrorizing that are supposed to be absent).
Then we get to your "give to or protect the needy and helpless(motivations irrelevant)=Good". By your metric, my mafia boss who used to finance an orphanage is Good. Of course, he also sells drugs, which is where the money came from, but he seldom needed to kill or terrorize, preferring to bribe officials.
So he's Good...despite the fact that he did it for the PR, and actually used it as recruiting grounds for people with no other attachments except to his organisation:p? Oh, and he also upholds the traditional values. Like "code of honour", "men keeping their words", and the authority of the Church, thus becoming Lawful as well.
I'd say that any metric which makes my mafia boss Lawful Good is flawed;).
So, using alignments to predict the behaviour of people, and not their allegiance to cosmic forces, is a daft idea. And of the two parts of contemporary alignment (as opposed to the single-axis "lawful-chaotic" of the days of yore), "good, neutral, evil" is the less reliable metric. Because it's open to more interpretation.
I remember this was one of the things I ignored while GMing my level 1-25 3.x campaign, back in the day. I'm a holy/unholy guy, if it has to come up at all. That way i can have 'holy' undead if I need them (and I have them in my campaign as a PC race, the Living Dead). Now there are parts of the idea (and a heap of the 3rd ed monsters) I'd use if I was running some sort of D&D space fantasy, but these days that ground is covered by Stars Without Number, so it remains a hypothetical.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1030527Couldn't you be evil but still defending something important to you or doing good through evil means? I can see that as a way to square the circle. Evil because of your essence, but not will.
No. Some were explicitly stated to be non evil aligned. One 5e example being Diderius the Mummy Lord. Because he was neutral alighned he carried that over as a mummy and his domain aura lacks the dark magic effects. There is also a friendly ghost.
Personally, i rather see undead as reacting like humans that are affected with a fatal sickness:
They heal from healing, and is hurt by damage.
However, if they are healed enough, they stop being undead and/or slowly starts losing their "undead" abilities.
This also means that a character that gets massively wounded might also get controlled my necromancers.
Do that sound like a new idea to you?
Quote from: AsenRG;1030984I'd say that any metric which makes my mafia boss Lawful Good is flawed;).
If the only purpose we are ascribing to the alignment tab is to predict future actions or which 'team' he's going to be on, how is it flawed?
Quote from: Gorilla_Zod;1031053I remember this was one of the things I ignored while GMing my level 1-25 3.x campaign, back in the day. I'm a holy/unholy guy, if it has to come up at all. That way i can have 'holy' undead if I need them (and I have them in my campaign as a PC race, the Living Dead). Now there are parts of the idea (and a heap of the 3rd ed monsters) I'd use if I was running some sort of D&D space fantasy, but these days that ground is covered by Stars Without Number, so it remains a hypothetical.
The Blood & Treasure Monster Tome included a good undead created from lawful/good clerics known as "holy bones." It worked pretty much like the deathless from 3e Book of Exalted Deeds and Eberron.
My campaign is set in a world called Rhûne.
Rhûne came into existence in 1983 when James "Jimmy" Benotti, who had just attended an Iron Maiden concert, stepped off a curb and into the path of an oncoming car. Jimmy was hospitalized in critical condition with severe head trauma. The doctors were able to save Jimmy's life, but he was left in a coma. His doctors determine his brain was still active, but could not offer any clues when he might wake. Rhûne is the struggle for Jimmy's life, playing out inside his head in the form of a complete and fully realized fantastic world consisting of multiple dimensions.
If these dimensions were mapped, they would form two cones adjoined at their bases. At the "top" of this structure is the Plane of Positive Energy, which is commonly known as "The Source," and at the other end is the Negative plane, which is commonly known as "Oblivion." Rhûne exists in the center of the plane formed where the two cones meet.
The space "above" Rhûne is a seemingly infinite number of "Heavens" populated by increasingly powerful beings, many of whom would qualify as "angels." Some of these beings, the Archangels, are essentially infinitely powerful (but also largely incapable of travelling to lower dimensions) and serve in a leadership role, directing the action of the vast legions of the Angelic Host. The space "below" Rhûne is a seemingly infinite number of "Hells" populated by increasingly powerful beings, many of whom would qualify as "devils." Some of these beings, the Archdukes of Hell, are essentially infinitely powerful (but also largely incapable of travelling to higher dimensions) and serve in a leadership role, directing the action of the vast legions of the Demonic Hordes. These two forces are engaged in a war. At stake in this war is the world of Rhûne itself, which represents Jimmy's fate. The Archangels seek to "raise" Rhûne up into Heavens, while the Archdukes correspondingly seek to drag Rhûne down into Hell. If the Angels succeed, Jimmy will wake up. If the Archdukes succeed, Jimmy will die.
Because I don't run D&D, but Fantasy HERO, I don't have "cure" and "inflict" spells. There are priests, and some priests do study and use magic (most do not), but they are not any different than any other kind of spell-caster. Their spells don't come to them through prayer, they're just skills and techniques they've studied and mastered. However there is an organization, the Holy Church of Simon Rex (which is very much an expy of the Catholic Church), which has access to a wide range of spells -- known collectively as "White Magic" -- that were taught to priests in ages past by various angels, and many priests study magic for the express purpose of communing with angelic powers and eliciting their aid in developing new spells, crafting magic items, etc. Many of these spells involve channeling positive energy directly from The Source (hence it's common name), and since the energy of the source is the energy of pure life, it can be used to heal, even to restore life, and can also be used to inflict massive amounts of damage on beings and creatures infused with negative energy.
The danger of using these kinds of magic is that they require a high degree of purity of mind, body and soul, so "good priests" must live highly ascetic, moral lives -- "sin" or "corruption" has an almost physical reality, like a toxin that builds up in the blood, and when positive energy comes into contact with these impurities, it burns them out. This is extremely painful, and can be fatal for the extremely corrupt. For example, a cultist who worships the dark powers and does their bidding will be heavy with "negative karma," and casting even low power white magic spells would likely kill them. A full-blown demon from the pits who tried to cast a simple healing spell would pretty much explode in a fireball.
True undead are always evil, as they are essentially "demons." The pits of Hell are filled to the brim with damned souls and dark spirits that can sometimes escape from Hell by "sliding" into a corpse and animating it. There are essentially three methods of achieving this: 1) they can be summoned into the corpse by a spell ("Animate Dead"), 2) they can spread by a form of contagion, or 3) they can form when the death is the result of a terrible and evil act, such as murder or suicide, though often there must be very specific circumstances surrounding the death.
Not all undead in Rhûne are true undead though. Some skeletons (and mummies, but those are just skeletons that have been prepared differently) are not undead at all, but actually animated objects that are not "alive" nor "undead," merely animated. This is as close as you get to "good undead." They're more or less mindless, generally programmed to kill anything that enters a certain area. There are three ancient cultures (none of which still exists) in my setting that often entombed a cadre of warriors who had been animated in this way with their fallen kings and nobles. In one of these cultures, the Sphinx Empire (they're the mummifiers), a king's personal guard would all drink poison and follow their liege into death, while in the other two cultures fallen warriors would be collected from the battlefield and prepared, often years in advance of the death of their lord, and it was considered a great honor to be chosen for this Eternal Watch. At least one Sphinx Empire tomb, built for an actual Sphinx princess, contained over 500 skeletal warriors. An entire legion defending a mummified corpse.
Wizards hoping to blast one of these eternal guardians with positive energy is in for a nasty surprise, since they're animated by a fairly neutral form of magic and not living in any sense, so positive energy is about as effective on them as it is one rocks (which is to say not effective at all).
Quote from: Catelf;1031189Personally, i rather see undead as reacting like humans that are affected with a fatal sickness:
They heal from healing, and is hurt by damage.
However, if they are healed enough, they stop being undead and/or slowly starts losing their "undead" abilities.
This also means that a character that gets massively wounded might also get controlled my necromancers.
Do that sound like a new idea to you?
Yes, that certainly sounds unorthodox. But it's creative.