Sage Advice 3/21/16 Exploding druids and antimagic field vs zombies and cure wounds

The answer to the druid and metal armor is excellent. Not so much the ruling itself, but the clear way it explains that classes have both story and game elements, and some classes have more story elements than others.

 

[delericho]

Always amused that Druids in D&D were averse to wearing metal armor and using metal shields....but have no problem at all with metal weapons.

For a very long time, druids were restricted to a very particular set of weapons - those made from natural materials and those that were actually farming implements (or close derivatives thereof). Those restrictions have gradually weakened with time. I wouldn't be surprised to see the armour restriction disappear with the next revision, too.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

"Spells—they’re what dispel magic is about."

So why didn't they just call it "Dispel" and be done with it?

Too bad it wasn't Dis Spell and Dat Spell......

 

[procproc]

From my perspective, if paladin codes don't exist/aren't enforced then there is no reason to play a paladin.

If I had a player who wanted to use the mechanics of a paladin class to play a member of an order of mage-knights or something similar, I'd be pretty okay with it.

I mean, I get what you're saying -- the term "paladin" has a lot of baggage/tradition associated with it, and hand-waving that away is going to sit really poorly with a lot of people. But from Crawford's response, it seems like they focused more on making the classes mechanically balanced in the absence of story elements, then overlaid the story elements on top.

Personally, I love that. I end up re-flavoring/re-purposing classes all the time. (It turns out a "warlock" can also be a dwarven rifleman, a warforged artillery piece, and a half-gorgon archer. Who knew?) I'd be equally okay having a "paladin" that's mechanically just a fighter with story elements tacked on, but YMMV.

 

[AverageCitizen]

They're going through some pretty complex logic acrobatics to prevent you from destroying undead with dispel magic, when they had a better explanation in the same column: it's not a spell. If skeletons aren't held together with magic, the what the crap is holding them together?

 

[brehobit]

One question: by my reading of the rules/color text, studded leather would be a metal armor. Allowing studded, as indicated by his answer, is a very helpful upgrade.

What do you all do with druids and studded?

(As a side note, I really hate the druid armor thing as it is so different than any other armor restriction (just proficiency) and gives so little guidance about what to do with it (multi-classing etc.))

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

I like the flavour myself, and totally 'get' the fluff as to why they dislike metal armour. I'm an Ad&d boy at heart so my Druid weapons of choice are always staves, sickles, and scimitars-which-are-really-farming-implements.

If I was min maxing I'd be upset, but then I also enjoyed the whole alignment thing, and having Druids be true neutral.

In terms of Mearls' answer and multi-classing, it's pretty clear: it's a philosophical/ethical/religious thing. MC away, but to retain Druid abilities you still need to abide by the same moral code - be a Druid/Fighter by all means, just only wear nonmetal armour.

The weapon thing may be trickier but I rationalise it as not wanting to encase oneself in metal and insulate oneself therefore from nature in its rawest possible state. (Hide is better anyway). But that can open up an argument form a long ago thread that was a (nonmetal) can of worms.

Ultimately, logic and a game with magic from at least four different sources are going to uneasy bedfellows. You just have to ignore the snores.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If skeletons aren't held together with magic, the what the crap is holding them together?

The same thing that lets a dragon breathe fire. D&D worlds, in addition to being loaded with actual magic, have wonky physics that don't really make sense and enable a bunch of weird things to happen.

How do undead normally keep together, in any other setting that doesn't have magic? I would think that a typical zombie apocalypse would be over in less than a year, with all of the zombies having burned their muscle mass just to keep walking, but even that can only work for so long.

 

[AverageCitizen]

The same thing that lets a dragon breathe fire. D&D worlds, in addition to being loaded with actual magic, have wonky physics that don't really make sense and enable a bunch of weird things to happen.

How do undead normally keep together, in any other setting that doesn't have magic? I would think that a typical zombie apocalypse would be over in less than a year, with all of the zombies having burned their muscle mass just to keep walking, but even that can only work for so long.

Magic. Magic is how dragons breathe fire. "Wonky physics" is called magic.

Walking dead should have been over less than a year after it started because it uses science instead of magic.

 

[TwoSix]

Magic. Magic is how dragons breathe fire. "Wonky physics" is called magic.

Walking dead should have been over less than a year after it started because it uses science instead of magic.

The column is a bit wordy because there's a couple different points they're trying to address.

1) All spells are magic, but not all magic is spells. Dispel "magic" is really dispel spells without the awkward name.

2) Spells can be dispelled as long as they're active, but their effects cannot be. You can't dispel the healing from a cure light wounds, or the damage inflicted by a fireball.

3) As a subset of issue 2, even some effects that are obviously supernatural from our perspective are not dispellable simply because they were generated by a spell. The division line to indicate those effects is the spell duration. Animate dead is an important example because it feels like something that could easily be narrated as a sustained magical effects, but the instantaneous duration is our indicator that this is not the case.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Magic. Magic is how dragons breathe fire. "Wonky physics" is called magic.

Walking dead should have been over less than a year after it started because it uses science instead of magic.

"Magic" in the D&D sense is only a subset of the wonky physics in D&D. E.g. AD&D has binary gravity, which doesn't suddenly stop working nor suddenly become proportional to mass just because it's in an antimagic field.

It's questionable whether D&D characters have cell differentiation or are even made out of atoms. You can have a perfectly fun campaign where the Aristotelian theory of elements is real (earth/air/fire/water), matter is infinitely divisible (no atoms), and human beings are made out of mix of the substances flesh/bone/sinew/blood instead of out of carbon/nitrogen/hydrogen/etc. atoms.

The best part of science fiction is exploring alternate ways to build a universe, and the implications thereof. D&D works just fine in that mode.