Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 6360472" data-attributes="member: 50304">Well, that explains everything. Medieval peasants are stinky as a matter of course. No healing for them! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />In all seriousness, though, NPC and PCs don't have to operate under the same rules at all. The player's handbook tells us how PCs work. PCs are assumed to be able to recover from any sort of typical adventuring hazard that doesn't kill them outright on the spot. When you stick something sharp into a peasant and he doesn't bleed out or lose a vital organ the odds are he'll get an infection of the blood or gangrene and die a slow, painful, lingering death. Maybe a rarely gifted healer whips up something with medicine / herbalism to give the poor fellow a fighting chance to shake it off. Perhaps a miracle-worker is able to convince his or her deity to intervene. Heck, even minor wound-healing magics that could fix mid-combat trauma aren't going to regrow limbs, save a woman dying in labor, or cure the maladies of old age - so unless the villagers are being peppered with arrows from orc raiders your average PC Cleric isn't exactly equipped to raise the local standard of living all that much.PCs don't get diseased or maimed unless the circumstances are exceptional, while these things are the leading cause of death and incapacity among everyday people in a given setting.I guess the bottom line is this: PCs are exceptional, not mundane. Don't take what PCs can and can't do and what does and does not happen to them as a measuring stick for some sort of universal physics that applies to everyone in a setting.- Marty Lund</blockquote>

Verification