D&D 5E Healing, Resurrection, and the "N" Word

[DEFCON 1]

Healing I do not believe will ever go back to being Necromancy. Because quite frankly... necromancy is about corpses and the dead. That's what 'nekros' in Greek means. Raise Dead? Sure, that can remain necromancy. But healing? That really should fall under a completely NEW "school" that deals with life and life-giving properties. Necromancy makes just as little sense as a spell school for healing as conjuration does.

So if we really needed to see all healing spells get placed into a "school"... you really should do one of two things: either ADD a new school that deals with positive energy, radiance, and life and life-giving and call it Biomancy. Or two, if you really want curative spells and infliction spells to fall under the same school and not split them up... you need to RENAME the school from 'necromancy' to something else that applies to both life and death.

Because like it or not... in the fluff of D&D, the term 'necromancy' has EVERYTHING to do with manipulating the dead and nothing to do with healing injuries. If you're a Necromancer... you animate corpses, you don't cure living people of their wounds.

 

[Nikosandros]

Healing I do not believe will ever go back to being Necromancy. Because quite frankly... necromancy is about corpses and the dead. That's what 'nekros' in Greek means. Raise Dead? Sure, that can remain necromancy. But healing? That really should fall under a completely NEW "school" that deals with life and life-giving properties. Necromancy makes just as little sense as a spell school for healing as conjuration does.

So if we really needed to see all healing spells get placed into a "school"... you really should do one of two things: either ADD a new school that deals with positive energy, radiance, and life and life-giving and call it Biomancy. Or two, if you really want curative spells and infliction spells to fall under the same school and not split them up... you need to RENAME the school from 'necromancy' to something else that applies to both life and death.

Because like it or not... in the fluff of D&D, the term 'necromancy' has EVERYTHING to do with manipulating the dead and nothing to do with healing injuries. If you're a Necromancer... you animate corpses, you don't cure living people of their wounds.

Indeed. Having healing spells in the necromancy school never sat well with me in AD&D and as a conjuration sub-school it isn't much better. In 3.x, conjuration appears to be a general umbrella under which they placed everything that didn't quite fit elsewhere. Teleportation and healing certainly are very different effects...

 

[ferratus]

Or healing spells could belong to a "healing" sphere, rather than a school. Wizards don't cast healing spells anyway.

I might also be inclined to make some healing with necromancy, by draining the life energy from living things and transferring them over, ala vampiric touch. An evil cleric doesn't so much heal people through the blessing of his diety as extract it from the weak to give to the strong.

Bringing back spheres would also allow for customization of a cleric through their spell list, and encourage many paths to the same place.

Clerics of the God of War for example, has spells that "heal" simply by people not minding that they are hurt and giving them berserk strength. Clerics with the nature sphere have spells that allow them to plant roots into the ground from their feet and replenish hp round to round along with their barkskin.

I wouldn't mind clerics having healing effects joined up with a lot of traditional spells where it makes sense. Divine Power, Hallowed Ground, Holy Word, Daylight etc. etc.

 

[Stormonu]

Devil's Advocate:

Conjuration/(Summoning) fits healing spells better as you are drawing energy from the positive material plane to fix the wound. Cause wounds spells are drawing from the Negative material plane.

Raise dead is Conjuration(/Summoning) because you are bringing the original spirit back from the beyond to reinhabit the body.

Necromancy animates, but does not repair the body. It also moves life energy from one vessel to another, but cannot restore health or close wounds.

Animated undead are controlled by the animus of the body, but lack the soul, which has moved on. Note that a reanimated zombie's wounds do not close, and in making skeletons, the flesh may actually dessicate from the bones. Energy Drain doesn't attack the body like Cause Wounds, it strikes at the soul, seeking to seperate it from the body. Even False Life doesn't fix damage one has suffer, but instead creates a buffer of residual life energy.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Can't XP you, [MENTION=52734]Stormonu[/MENTION], so I'll just say: Right on, mang.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Personally, one of the things I loved about HARP's College of Magic-- HARP not having spell schools per se-- was the Vivamancy Arcane Circle. All the magic about controlling and manipulating life: healing, enhancing, and mind control, all set up as the opposite number of Necromancy.

I'd rather see something like 2nd Edition's Cleric Spheres, where a spell might fall into multiple spell lists instead of being strictly classified by school and then confined to one or more classes.