D&D General What's the DC for a fighter to heal their ally with a prayer?

[Voadam]

To me it seems quite possible that a mysterious god would empower some faithful, because they are faithful, and empower some non-faithful, as a sign to the world of the god's power and presence.

I don't want to cross the boundary set by board rules, but what I describe in the above paragraph is not foreign to human thought about religion.

That would be the god powering the cleric, not the cleric's faith directly powering the cleric's magic. D&D has a pretty long tradition of faith or belief alone being the source of a cleric's power as a cosmological setup option.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Sure, but it does equal "is not possible" as far as I'm concerned.

More accurately "I wouldn't allow it"

It is entirely possible to play a Grung character. Some DMs may not allow it. That doesn't make it impossible, it just means they won't allow it. Semantics, but important when we are discussing things like whether or not it is possible in a DnD world for divine magic to be called by someone who does not usually call upon divine magic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I definitely appreciate the time you take in explaining your point of view. Thank you.
However, you are coming from a 4e POV, I'm coming from an 1e POV, on a 5e board.

With 1), nothing. Hit points are, have been, and always will be nebulous as to what they represent. Your comment that use of the Religion skill to sooth and calm in no way implies it is a direct path to healing, and in fact is explicitly a lore skill. It does unlock some abilities if your are trained in it, which are enumerated and specific.

With 3), vague alignment. They're not divine, but mundane, however. Let's actually look at your statements.

Gods don't answer mundane prayer/recitation/ceremony.

Of course they do. The numinous powers do as they will.

Mundane prayer/recitation/ceremony doesn't restore hit points (and its proxy or component part in 4e; flagging spirits, resolve, steadfastness).

It might, but then it's not divine. It's mundane, which isn't divine, or arcane, or primal, &c.


This is doublethink. Is it mundane, or is it divine? You want it both ways. If the divine is answering a prayer, it's divine action.

Does the fighter find a space of calm within and gather strength to him, boosting his resolve? Sure, no problem. It's not divine and there is no prayer answered. It's all internal, regardless of result.

Does the fighter make an earnest and passionate plea to the numinous, and find he or another benefits from some benevolence? Sure, no problem. The divine heard the call and responded. But, it's a divine action and not mundane.

This line of discussion is wholly orthogonal to the OP's question. Because, even with the mundane, yet divine, but really still mundane non-magical unconnected to the numinous Faith Healing daily you mentioned, the answer is still "the fighter doesn't need to make a Religion check". Because there aren't any rules for Divine Intervention in 4e as customarily defined in other editions. He just uses the power that the player had the foresight or theme to choose.

If it is supernatural action, then it's supernatural action. I can accept that warlords can inspire and motivate other to "ignore wounds" to complete the task at had. But that's not supernatural, it's mundane, by definition. (Well, "martial", which I don't think was ever defined much more than "action movie" logic.)

Here's the question, again:

How do you answer this in 5e? In 4e? In AD&D? There are no Daily powers left, the Encounter powers are consumed. No time for rests, Long or Short. Potions are broken, seeping into the cracks on the floor.

There is no defined answer except at the individual table level. Despite our disagreement on whether or not some powers are divine, mundane, or whatever in 4e, this situation is undefined. Why are we arguing about 4e? If you want it to be the player makes an earnest prayer and the character tries for a DC: 20 Religion check, with a success allowing the target to auto-stabilize / spend a healing surge / gain 1d3 hp, that's great! But, that's not in the book, it's a decision for and by the table.

Yeah, I don't think so. There's no 'magical vs mundane' divide in fantasy. In fact HISTORICALLY in older times people simply attributed all of what we call natural processes to what we would now call 'magic'. So, to say that there are these 2 different things, meh, No. I mean, you're obviously free to imagine things as you wish and make these sorts of distinctions, but I don't see any difference. There are two people, they each say the same prayers, carry out the same ritualized actions with the same intent, why should they get different results? I mean, sure we can certainly devise explanations for that. However, those are all really post-hoc. They are also thoroughly gamist! In terms of what actually makes sense, sure its fair to say that people who have lots of practice doing certain things, whatever those are, will accomplish them more easily. It may be that having the class 'cleric' signifies a deeper association with divine forces, one would assume this is so, generally. However, characters aren't classes, they are individuals, and they can certainly express a variety of traits. Gods can also, presumably, do as they will. So IMHO what would be odd is for someone to claim that there's some hard and fast reason why only certain characters can ever accomplish specific things. Go ahead and make it a serious dramatic point that perhaps reflects a real turning point, or a great cost, for the fighter, but it seems downright WEIRD to say that he cannot possibly ever achieve something similar to 'cure light wounds'.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wait what? 4e uses keywords to determine whether something originates from the divine power source. Do any of the skill powers you listed have that keyword (I honestly don't know but assume you would have pointed that out to strengthen your argument if they did)? if not they are not divine in origin...

But 4e has NO CONCEPT WHATSOEVER of 'mundane'. Every character has a power source, all of which are effectively 'magic'. Granted, presumably the powers of the gods manifest in the world in the form of their followers divine source powers. OTOH characters of every power source have access to some forms of healing in 4e. So, yeah, the most natural source is divine, but Warlords are martial, and they achieve what is effectively healing effects too. So, it seems pretty hard to justify on that basis the idea that only certain power sources can heal.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yeah, I don't think so. There's no 'magical vs mundane' divide in fantasy. In fact HISTORICALLY in older times people simply attributed all of what we call natural processes to what we would now call 'magic'. So, to say that there are these 2 different things, meh, No. I mean, you're obviously free to imagine things as you wish and make these sorts of distinctions, but I don't see any difference.

This ^

It is the most frustrating thing to try and discuss myths and legends with people and then them dismissing certain acts because "they were magic". Basically every single tradition of "magic" came about either because

1) The people trained really, really, really hard
2) They learned a secret other people didn't know
3) They had a destiny or a Bloodline (which, before genetic testing was pretty hard to actually, you know, trace? So everyone who wanted to be important claimed a bloodline to someone important before them)

Magic was just "Something someone else can do that I can't, because reasons." Reading and writing was considered magic for hundreds of years if not longer.

 

[Vaalingrade]

But 4e has NO CONCEPT WHATSOEVER of 'mundane'. Every character has a power source, all of which are effectively 'magic'..

Nope.

The Martial power source is 'good at fighting with weapons'. No actual magic unless you consider properly written up and described abilities to be inherently magical.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right, 4e rituals are trained only magic of untyped power source that can do magical effects. They sometimes involve prayers and religion skill checks as part of the magical ritual that generates a magical effect.

So this trained only magic for magical effects that not everyone can do seems different in kind from just praying (which anyone can do) to get a magical effect.

Well, 4e doesn't really spell all this out in any detail. While rituals don't have keywords associating them to power sources, they DO seem to be associated with specific skills which usually identify them with a power source in a loose way. I mean, MOST rituals you could say "yeah, that's a Primal/Arcane/Divine ritual" and there are clearly power-source-associated ritual components as well.

But beyond that... what would be the problem with applying page 42 (improvised actions) to carrying out activities that are essentially rituals? Wouldn't the people in a campaign world call those 'rituals'? For instance, in my game once a Wizard wanted to poison a bunch of Jermlaine who infested the air ducts of an ancient dwarven city. So, she undertook a Skill Challenge in which she used Arcane ritual components to cast her Stinking Cloud daily in such a way that it filled the ducts with a poisonous fog which killed most of the Jermlaine. I'm entirely certain the other characters called it a 'ritual'. I agree that it was mechanically handled as an SC, but I think that's just a reflection of the fact that carrying it out, without a formula, was unusually difficult. While it never came up I would have probably let the character experiment with the technique for a while and produced a standardized ritual formula for it.

So, certainly if we are discussing 4e, questions of what is and isn't magic vs mundane or if something is a ritual or 'something else' are really pretty gamist. Narratively its all 'doing magicky stuff'.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Nope.

The Martial power source is 'good at fighting with weapons'. No actual magic unless you consider properly written up and described abilities to be inherently magical.

I disagree. It isn't that simple at all. For instance Basic Attacks and ED powers have NO power source at all. So you can be quite good at using weapons without using any Martial Power.

PHB P54 describes Martial powers as "us[ing] their own strength and willpower to vanquish enemies" and being accessed through "training and dedication". It does say that Martial powers are not "magic in the traditional sense", but they are definitely not a catchall for 'mundane stuff'. I would argue they are actually much closer to what far eastern fantasy would call 'qi' (and this is probably one reason why the Ki power source was dropped from the game before it was introduced, its just Martial power).

Nor do the actual powers and abilities attributed to the Martial power source allow us to take this position. Warlords produce healing effects just as potent as those of clerics. Heck, PHB152, Warlord Daily Exploit Defy Death, you literally snatch your ally from the very jaws of death and he gets to spend a healing surge. Its literally the codification of the situation that @pemerton's OP lays out, and its a Martial Exploit (granted its a level 29 Daily).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To me it seems quite possible that a mysterious god would empower some faithful, because they are faithful, and empower some non-faithful, as a sign to the world of the god's power and presence.

I don't want to cross the boundary set by board rules, but what I describe in the above paragraph is not foreign to human thought about religion.

Yeah, but I would take it a step further and imagine that there's no clear delimiters within the fictional fantasy world (I mean, such would not be apparent if we considered this point). That is, who is or is not 'faithful' is not determinable in any objective fashion. Nor is exactly what does or does not 'please the gods', nor are their rules, plans, ideas, and principles clearly understood in an unambiguous way. This is pretty often noted in most D&D setting material that deals with religion, where it is often pointed out that there could be various schisms and disagreements amongst those who consider themselves 'the faithful'. Nor are gods obliged to clarify such matters!

Now, combine that with the idea, again oft stated in various forms within the game material, that concepts like 'class' are simply GAME MECHANICAL CONSTRUCTS aimed at codifying the character generation/build choices of players, not objective canonical facts within the fiction. A character might be called a 'Paladin' fictionally, but that is not the same thing as being 'a PC who is a member of the Paladin class'. While most versions of D&D have allowed for classed NPCs (and the majority effectively assume they exist) it is also clear that this is also a mechanism of simplification and codification. Witness the existence in AD&D of such things as Witch Doctors, who are essentially a 'class' having certain typical traits, but are not constructed formally as such, and which lacks advancement rules and is not open to PCs. In other cases it is made clear that NPCs who have fighter levels are NOT the same as PCs, generally lack the ability to advance by XP accumulation, etc.

So, any arguments that certain 'powers' or abilities of whatever sort are definitively codified by the class rules, and that classes are some sort of 'physics of D&D' seem to be on extremely thin ice. I would instead posit that classes represent an easy way to pigeonhole and characterize a heterogeneous and continuous range of fantastical persons and beings. I would further state that such things as 'powers', 'spells', and all the various other shades of such codified particularly by 3.x, likewise are general representations of a continuous range of abilities that beings often manifest. This is convenient and useful, perhaps necessary, in order to construct a playable game, but it is a mistake to believe these codifications should be taken as GOVERNING the fictional world, they merely describe it so we can play our games more easily, nothing else.

 

[MGibster]

Generally speaking, I wouldn't allow a Fighter's prayer to have any chance of healing someone unless there was something in the game to establish that this might work. Unless someone recites a prayer similiar to the one below. That one will work every singe time.

Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That's what's important! Valor pleases you, Crom... so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!