Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7851342" data-attributes="member: 7006">To make Medicine actually useful on a scale that would be along the lines of things like Persuasion, Arcana, or Insight (I won't even attempt to equal it out to Perception or Stealth because that won't ever happen)... you would need to use it for actions that will occur throughout a normal adventuring day apart from very specific plotlines you have set up for the characters that would demand its use.Yes, if you have an adventure that involves a murder mystery the use of Medicine will get a full use through the day.  But what about the adventure through a typical dungeon delve for example?  If none of the list would ever come up then (and it'd be important to really ask yourself "Will PCs actually inquire about what happened to this dead Hook Horror they found, or will they just move on down the passage")... nor come up with any other standard prototypical adventuring activities... then your list is insufficient to make Medicine a worthwhile skill.  Yes, that one time in 30 it'll be gravely useful, but the other 29 times the players are going to be happy to have taken Perception, Survival, Athletics, and Stealth instead.So if you want Medicine to have a place in the game where PCs will actually use it, there's really only one way to do it-- any healing and recovery in the game requires Medicine checks, even if it is magically given.  Some examples:- Anyone who drops to 0 HP and falls unconscious does not wake up when they regain HP (through magical healing or a potion or whatever.)  They can only wake up when the HP gain is coupled with a person using an action to make an additional Medicine check to wake them (via smelling salts or whatever other narrative device you use to explain it.)  The check would be say DC 21, minus the current HP count of the unconscious character-- that way if you healed them a large amount they could wake up easier, but if you only gave them a single hit point it would take a DC 20 Medicine check to wake them.  This would also cut down on the up-and-down nature of healing because it would now require two actions to get a PC back in the fight-- one for the healing, and one for the Medicine check.  You're less likely to let your fellow PCs drop to 0 HP if its going to require two actions to get them back up and into the fight.- If someone casts Cure Wounds, don't make the hit points be just randomly generated with the dice as normal, but instead use Medicine checks to determine how many hit points get recovered.  The person using healing magic still needs a knowledge in anatomy and health to get the most out of their magic when they heal somebody.- Use Medicine checks to allow PCs to recover an Exhaustion level on a short rest so long as the person making the check uses their short rest to attend to the exhausted party (so the nurse does not gain any benefits from the short rest, their hour is spent purely helping someone else.)  Likewise if a nurse spends a long rest attending to another PC, that PC can regain 2 levels of exhaustion (with the nurse gaining no benefits from the rest.)Now if you were hoping to avoid house rules, then obviously these will not help you.  But I don't think the game as it stands will make Medicine an at-all-useful-or-meaningful skill without house rules.  The game is just not set up to do so, no matter how many weird and esoteric body analysis ideas you try and add to your list.  Those things just don't ever get used in the game with any significance except in the very specific incidences where you as the DM have set up the adventure specifically to use them.</blockquote>

Verification