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

[Staffan]

None. Gods do not act in the world except through agents wielding divine magic, and the fighter is not one of those.

 

[Voadam]

I would generally go with a quote I read from an issue of The Savage Sword of Conan comic.

"The Gods answer all prayers. The answer is often no."

In my game it is a mystery whether gods even exist. Clerics are spellcasting traditions that tap divine magical power that might come from the Astral Sea, even though many clerical traditions claim their power comes directly from an interventionist god. A god might just be a dragon or giant or dead person with no independent power of their own to give beyond the persuasive power of their myth.

 

[Thommy H-H]

There is a way a PC in my games could have the devotion, the self-belief, the absolute burning faith in themself and the power of their deity that their spoken prayers could channel the power of that deity and heal their dying comrade. That method is called "being a cleric or paladin and casting the appropriate spell or using the appropriate ability". If a random fighter tries it, the DC is irrelevant: it's an automatic failure with no roll. That's just not something anyone without the requisite powers can do. "Praying to a god for healing" is casting a spell, so you'd need to have access to that spell by some means. Likewise, you can pray all you like for the goblins running towards you to be incinerated in a spontaneous 20-foot-radius blast of fiery death, but that's not something I'm going to have happen on a decent roll of any kind. You need to know fireball.

I suspect the purpose of this thread was actually just to highlight potential absurdities in the 20-always-succeeds paradigm of 1D&D though, ignoring the guidelines both in the playtest document and the existing 5E rules we've all been using for the last decade.

 

[CleverNickName]

The rules as written: No amount of prayer will let a fighter heal their ally.
The rule of cool: Any amount of prayer will let a fighter heal their ally, but at a cost.

Situations like this are a friggin' gift for the DM! There are many ways to do this, but this is how I would do it at my table:

The fighter leans over his dying friend, and begs the gods for help...but the gods are silent and uncaring. Instead, an archangel hears his prayer and answers. The archangel* offers to heal their dying friend--and asks what the fighter would give in return.

Then I'd break the 4th wall, and tell the player that this is an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with a warlock patron. If the player is interested in multiclassing with Warlock, his fighter can offer his soul as payment. Then on his next level-up, he will gain a level of Warlock instead of Fighter, and we're off to the races. But if the player isn't interested in becoming a warlock, his fighter can offer his services as payment...the archangel will save his friend, and then send him on a quest to slay a powerful succubus that has enthralled the mayor of a nearby town.

*I wrote "archangel" here, and make references to the Celestial pact for warlocks...but it could be any warlock patron and any pact that fits. A powerful demon for Pact of the Fiend, a cunning djinn for Pact of the Genie, a mischievous archfey for Pact of the Archfey, whatever works best for the campaign and the player.

 

[Eric V]

"Praying to a god for healing" is casting a spell, so you'd need to have access to that spell by some means.

Wait, in your world there are no laypeople of great faith that pray to the god of healing?

 

[Thommy H-H]

Wait, in your world there are no laypeople of great faith that pray to the god of healing?

I mean, they can pray, certainly - but they're unlikely to have that prayer answered unless they fulfill some condition or other that gives them access to cure wounds or similar magic. That's literally what having that spell means (for a divine caster of whatever stripe): when you speak the holy words of your god or whatever, they work through you to perform a miracle. Or maybe it's your own faith that does it. Either way, it's not something any person can have happen at random, in the same way that hurling an exploding ball of fire or teleporting isn't something they can do just by wishing really hard.

 

[Manbearcat]

Pulled from An RPG Lexicon

Tactical Infinity: The freedom of the Player Characters to attempt any tactic to solve a problem, subject to the adjudication of the Game Master. Tactical Infinity is unique to games with a trad-style GM, and so is present in both Visible-Leaning and Invisible Leaning trad games, as well as D&D games, OSR games, and systemless games. It is not present in storygames (which replace it with directorial/authorial modes of play), and is typically irrelevant to theatrical forms.

So I think this thread is a good indicator of just how veto-sensitive and adjudication-sensitive the concept of "Tactical Infinity" is. You can trivially veto or adjudicate the realization of it (as a governing ethos and "feel" of play) right out of existence!

I look at this action declaration in the scope of the 5e rules engine and my brain goes immediately to the following:

* Utter nothingburger in terms of mechanical implication.

* Lets resolve it with a level of mechanical stakes (its difficult to do this in 5e because the levers/teeth just aren't there...I think the "eat x HD worth of HP restored soley upon a Long Rest prayer of thanks" is a decent lever...Exhaustion might be another...a troublesome Flaw is interesting but doesn't do enough work) and let a thematically interesting thing occur (perhaps this moment of divine intervention fundamentally changes the PC who either layed their hands on their friend and prayed or on the party who was "healed"). Maybe one of the two players become a Paladin or Cleric downstream of this miraculous event?


Yet, it seems the overwhelming majority of respondents think of this exercise in terms of "artifact of PC build meets GM conception of setting (which gates and binds permissible action declarations pretty significantly)." It just feels like "the ability to attempt any tactic to solve a problem" with that level of veto-and/or-adjudication sensitivity is going to significantly contract the actual move-space available to players across a large distribution of tables. Therefore, on the continuum of BRUTALLY FINITE <-------------------> TACTICALLY INFINITY, play is going to hew a hell of a lot closer to the left than if a GM or system were inherently more permissive (assuming neither the actual play loop or the through line of play doesn't buckle under the weight of the influence of the action declared-and-resolved).

It just feels all cost no benefit here to shut this move down (and injure the actual realization of the concept of Tactical Infinity within the process of play) and turns Tactical Infinity into branding rather than a concept that the participants feel actually governs play.

Again, if it injured actual play (rather than rendering it more dynamic and interesting)...then sure, increase the stakes considerably or shut it down if you must...otherwise, resolve and play on.

 

[Umbran]

The fighter's friend is hurt, even dying. The fighter prays to the gods to heal their friend. How is this action resolved? If it's a Religion or similar sort of check, what's the DC?

This is not so much a rules-question as a settings metaphysics question.

In most of my D&D worlds, the gods work almost entirely through their chosen servants - generally people who have the ability to case divine spells. Overt action beyond that is under the one-in-a-million mark, so no DC is relevant.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I like it as a philosophical gaming question because it reminds us that class acquisition, and the abilities granted by class, aren't generally diegetic even though we'd like think to they are.

Very few DMs are going to allow someone trained in the Arcana skill to cast magic missile with an Arcana check. But rationally, what's the difference in the fiction between someone trained in Arcana practicing to cast a spell and someone else multiclassing in wizard to gain that ability (and several others)? Most 5e DMs would allow the latter, but certainly not the former.

Well, I think I have an entire other thread devoted to this issue. It's what happens when you get to the intersection of "rules" and "not rules." How a table handles that ... can vary. This issue (which I called context switching paralysis when it is a problem) tends to be most acute in games, like 5e, that both have a lot of clearly defined and enumerated rules as well as a lot of space that allows for rulings.

But looking at your question, this issue doesn't pop up in (say) an FKR game because there isn't a presumption that there is some kind of spell/skill difference, because there aren't rules that have one thing exclude the other. On the other hand, a game that is more rule-based (such as 3e, for example) might also have an answer- if there isn't a rule, it's not do-able.

5e, by having both codified rules as well as an allowance for playing to the fiction, also has to deal with the fact that it doesn't have a single solution to this issue. And that's fine.

 

[Umbran]

So I think this thread is a good indicator of just how veto-sensitive and adjudication-sensitive the concept of "Tactical Infinity" is.

Tactical infinity must bow to the fact that, without some basic ground rules, narratives become incoherent.