D&D General Souls and Spirits - are they necessary in order to exist?

[Lanefan]

I know you said edition agnostic but, looking at the spell Magic Jar through the multiple editions: Your body becomes comatose when your soul leaves it. If the spell ends and your soul is too far away to return to your body, your body dies.

So, by that reading:
The spell allows you to stay alive even when you have no soul but you are a vegetable.

If there is no spell to preserve your body, you die. Therefore, without a soul, your body dies.

Magic Jar, however, is doing more than just removing your spirit, it's trying to give that spirit the means to jump to someone else and take that body over, shunting that body's own spirit to one side in the process. It's a very elaborate trap, in effect.

Having your original body become useless during this process seems like a suitable drawback for that specific spell to counteract the benefit of being able to take over someone else against their will, but I don't want to extrapolate from that.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

To add to my previous post
Magic Jar 2e calls it "Life Force" and not a "soul". Interestingly, it doesn't say what happens to your body while your "life force" is in the gem.
Magic Jar 3.5 calls it a soul but it says the spell leaves your body "lifeless"
Magic Jar 5e says your body is left in a "catatonic state"

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Magic Jar, however, is doing more than just removing your spirit, it's trying to give that spirit the means to jump to someone else and take that body over, shunting that body's own spirit to one side in the process. It's a very elaborate trap, in effect.

Having your original body become useless during this process seems like a suitable drawback for that specific spell to counteract the benefit of being able to take over someone else against their will, but I don't want to extrapolate from that.

The fact remains that, when the spell ends, if your soul can't return to your body, you are dead.

certainly, it wouldn't or doesn't have to be the only outcome to losing a soul. It just so happens that that is the only example that I can find regarding souls in the various editions.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Magic Jar, however, is doing more than just removing your spirit, it's trying to give that spirit the means to jump to someone else and take that body over, shunting that body's own spirit to one side in the process. It's a very elaborate trap, in effect.

Having your original body become useless during this process seems like a suitable drawback for that specific spell to counteract the benefit of being able to take over someone else against their will, but I don't want to extrapolate from that.

Double posting your quote as I had another thought regarding Magic Jar:

When you use your soul to take someone's body, you retain your CHA, INT and WIS. Which implies that those characteristics either travel with your soul or ARE your soul. So, this would support some of the posts that say, without a soul, you are an empty husk.

Also, when a stat goes to 0, are you not immobilized/unconscious/catatonic? Which would be why a person's body is 'lifeless' when using Magic Jar.

 

[Lanefan]

Double posting your quote as I had another thought regarding Magic Jar:

When you use your soul to take someone's body, you retain your CHA, INT and WIS. Which implies that those characteristics either travel with your soul or ARE your soul. So, this would support some of the posts that say, without a soul, you are an empty husk.

Also, when a stat goes to 0, are you not immobilized/unconscious/catatonic? Which would be why a person's body is 'lifeless' when using Magic Jar.

Is it in 3e that if any stat goes to 0 you die? Or is that 2e?

The way do it: if your Str or Con go to 0 you die, if your Dex goes to 0 you're unable to move in a co-ordinated manner (but can still thrash around at significant danger to yourself and might die anyway via choking on your own tongue or similar), if your Int or Wis goes to 0 you're a vegetable, and if your Cha goes to 0 you're fine provided you don't try to interact with any other intelligent lifeform.

For what it's worth, Magic Jar is a spell I'm very close to ditching outright. I've never seen the purpose of it, and it's inconsistent with established precedent in my game (though one can argue the spell has its own way of doing things, and that's fine too). The way I interpret it now, it's a side effect of the spell itself that makes you a vegetable while your soul's out wandering, which doesn't set precedent for any other situation where body and soul might get separated.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Is it in 3e that if any stat goes to 0 you die? Or is that 2e?

The way do it: if your Str or Con go to 0 you die, if your Dex goes to 0 you're unable to move in a co-ordinated manner (but can still thrash around at significant danger to yourself and might die anyway via choking on your own tongue or similar), if your Int or Wis goes to 0 you're a vegetable, and if your Cha goes to 0 you're fine provided you don't try to interact with any other intelligent lifeform.

For what it's worth, Magic Jar is a spell I'm very close to ditching outright. I've never seen the purpose of it, and it's inconsistent with established precedent in my game (though one can argue the spell has its own way of doing things, and that's fine too). The way I interpret it now, it's a side effect of the spell itself that makes you a vegetable while your soul's out wandering, which doesn't set precedent for any other situation where body and soul might get separated.

Yeah, con 0 and you’re dead. Everything else and you are paralyzed or comatose.

There’s one other spell I forgot where your soul wanders the ethereal plane, attached by a silver cord and your body is asleep. Or maybe it’s astral plane.

Edit: Astral Projection. It says if the cord between your body and soul are cut, your body dies.

As far as your actual game goes, I don’t see a problem with how you played it.

Was there any chance of the fighter ever getting his own soul back? And when he had no soul, what would have happened if he’d gotten possessed? Would you have played it the same as if he had a soul?

 

[billd91]

I think the Void card is generally intended to be catastrophic - the imprisonment of the soul to the degree it can't simply be wished back is one of the harsh penalties of tempting fate with that deck... not that it prevents me from putting it in campaigns and some of my players from drawing from it like rats hitting the 'stimulate pleasure center' button in a lab cage. So the way I'd run it is that body is effectively useless - it can breathe on its own, its bodily functions work, it will chew and swallow if you feed it something, and it can answer questions in a monotone. But it isn't doing a whole lot else. The player's free to create a new, substitute character and the players may all plan a rescue mission if they so choose. That's the price you pay for tempting fate.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So I don't think there is "correct" answer, it is fiction, so it can work however you want it to work.

However, personally I feel that if we postulate metaphysics with soul, then I rather feel that whether or not you have one should be a big deal! I dislike when souls are just something vaguely defined that do not seem to do much.

In my setting soul is the essence of a creature. It is the core around which their mind is build and it is the source of their will and animating force. One cannot exist without a soul, except perhaps as some sort of an automaton. Soul is which moves on to the Shadowlands when you die, perhaps to hang around with your ancestors, or perhaps just to be purified of memories and all sort of other unnecessary baggage so that you can reincarnate as an owlbear for your next life or something. Or if something goes seriously wrong, your soul might get stuck on the material world, and has to form an ectoplasmic fake body to exist as a ghost. I think this is roughly compatible with Magic Jar where soul seems to be the source of the creature's identity and required for living.

I'd also like to point out that how mind works in the real life is poorly understood. We know pretty well what brain bits do what, but we really have no clue how unified experience or indeed the consciousness itself is produced. We tend to assume that brain does it "somehow", but at least in fiction we can postulate that this "somehow" entails something metaphysical, without directly contradicting the neuroscience. Not that I really care about this level of scientific detail in D&D. Physics, biology etc are similar than in real world to the extent these medieval people can observe, but beyond that all bets are off. They don't have electron microscopes or MRI machines, so how stuff on such level of detail works simply is not something we need to contemplate; no one in the setting would know anyway.

 

[the Jester]

More to the point, is anyone's response thus far based on a specific edition, or are your responses universal no matter which version you're running?

Universal. It came up in 2e and my rulings (limited though they may be) are binding precedent for my campaign.

 

[the Jester]

For what it's worth, Magic Jar is a spell I'm very close to ditching outright. I've never seen the purpose of it, and it's inconsistent with established precedent in my game (though one can argue the spell has its own way of doing things, and that's fine too). The way I interpret it now, it's a side effect of the spell itself that makes you a vegetable while your soul's out wandering, which doesn't set precedent for any other situation where body and soul might get separated.

I think there's a really cool encounter with a shadow demon in Lost Temple of Tharizdun that relies on magic jar, so I'd keep it around for that reason alone.