Cure/Cause wounds w.r.t. extraplanar and undead (split topic)

[Angel]

18 hours ago, CamDawg said:

TA is certainly an option, but not the only one--I feel like IWDification may be a better fit, especially since it already does half of this. I'm going to ping @Angel as well since he's doing a lot of PnP stuff for his MiH series.

Mm, I have not actually looked into this particular issue yet.  How positive/negative energy affects various beings is a bit of a mess in 2e; in 2e mummies are supposedly powered by positive energy.  Although I am certain this was actually a mistake, Van Richten's Guide to the Ancient Dead takes it as a fact.

The design philosophy I use for MiH is "use PnP where it makes sense to do so", I'm not shy of deviating from PnP when I think that not adhering to it makes for a better game or more enjoyable challenge (the prime example would be my Revised Spiders component, which makes spiders a lot tougher than their PnP versions).

Personally I am wary of meddling with healing spells.  Not being able to heal is a huge PITA, as SCS's changes to clay golems proves.  So that is something I would not take away lightly.  But my interest is piqued now, so I will try to find a satisfying answer in the core material.

[Andrea C.]

What’s MiH?

[mickabouille]

You can see there

 

[subtledoctor]

4 hours ago, Angel said:

Personally I am wary of meddling with healing spells.  Not being able to heal is a huge PITA, as SCS's changes to clay golems proves.  So that is something I would not take away lightly.  But my interest is piqued now, so I will try to find a satisfying answer in the core material.

There is certainly a good case to be made that certain classes of beings should not be healed by the same method that cures a human's wound. I'm thinking undead, beings with no physical body (which are often undead but maybe not always?), golems, and illusionary creatures. Probably elementals too. Basically certain classes of summons - not playable characters. (You could include extraplanar beings too but, to me, they have bodies that are alive so why not let them heal?)

But yeah this should be in a tweak mod, not this Fixpack. (Heck, it should be easy enough, maybe I'll write it up myself.)

[CamDawg]

I don't think this advances the case one way or another, but I thought I'd include this for thoroughness. Bolt of Glory needs some work, which we can take up in another thread.

Bolt of Glory does different damage depending on the target, per its description (oBG2) :

Quote

By casting this spell, the priest channels a bolt of divine energy against the target. No attack roll is needed. Creatures struck suffer varying damage, depending on their plane of origin:

Creature Type                       Damage
 Prime Material Plane            6d6
 Elemental                             3d4
 Undead                                8d6
 Demon                                 10d6

 

In oBG2, this was done very loosely (and I'll need to revisit in BG2FP) : "prime material" was any general: humanoid, undead was general: undead, and fiend/elemental were done via single race checks. There was also no crosschecking, so in theory a humanoid elemental could take 6d6+3d4 damage, while something like a bear (general: animal) took no damage at all. 

The EEs refined this quite a bit: to begin with the spell is set up so that only one eff can be applied for damage to any given target, with some changes to the description:

Quote

By casting this spell, the priest channels a bolt of divine energy against the target. No attack roll is needed. Creatures struck suffer varying damage depending on their nature:

– Prime: 6d6
– Elemental: 3d4
– Undead: 8d6
– Fiend: 10d6

"Demon" is now "Fiend", and damage is by "their nature" and not "their plane of origin".

• Solars, planetars, and aasimars (by race) are immune. (IWDEE has no aasimar race entry, but is otherwise identical.)
• Undead damage (8d6) is applied to general: undead.
• Elemental damage (3d4) is applied by race to elementals, genie, githyanki, salamanders, and tieflings.
• Fiend damage (10d6) is applied by race to demons, imps, antisolars, and dark planetars.
• Anything not listed to this point is given prime (6d6) damage.

Tieflings (and githyanki) are not from the elemental plane, but I suspect they were put there to distinguish them from primes.

Similarly, antisolars and dark planetars aren't fiends, but seem to be placed to take max damage from a divine bolt. I'm actually not a fan of this, as it implies Bolt of Glory is inherently a good-aligned spell, despite having no such restrictions on who can use the spell.

[DavidW]

If I wanted to be provocative, I could argue that (a) fallen planetars are pretty much an invention of BG2 (with no presence in AD&D PnP lore so far as I can tell), so that it's up for grabs whether they are (or have become) fiends; (b) the very fact that Bolt of Glory injures them is evidence that the developers intended them to be fiends.

[Bartimaeus]

I wonder if the idea is rooted in popular Judeo-Christian apocrypha wherein fallen angels were said to become demons - it definitely doesn't seem in line with P&P and how fallen angels are handled there. While I have a preference for symmetry as well, Baldur's Gate is not P&P and this should probably be more looked at as more of an artifact of the creature becoming fiendish in nature rather than any deliberate intent to make the spell inherently good-oriented.

Edited July 19, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Graion Dilach]

I'd drop it in that 5e introduced an example of fallen solars turning into archdevils outright (looking at you, Zariel), so the modern expectation is in line with game behaviour.

[polytope]

23 hours ago, CamDawg said:

Similarly, antisolars and dark planetars aren't fiends, but seem to be placed to take max damage from a divine bolt. I'm actually not a fan of this, as it implies Bolt of Glory is inherently a good-aligned spell, despite having no such restrictions on who can use the spell.

FWIW it actually was in the FR sourcebooks, it's supposed to be restricted to priests of Torm (or maybe Tyr, I can't be bothered to check). Of course it's way too late now, since evil AI controlled enemy clerics assume they can use it. It's the same with Sunray, which was supposed to originally be a druid rather than cleric spell... and would be a lot more useful to them since they can't just turn undead.

Although it's not too hard to reconcile the concept, rather than smiting evil, BoG could be thought of as more something that's harmless to the uncorrupted - and I guess everyone in the physical world partially fits the target, just not to the same extent as the undead and lower planar creatures who take extra damage.

[subtledoctor]

23 hours ago, CamDawg said:

Tieflings (and githyanki) are not from the elemental plane, but I suspect they were put there to distinguish them from primes.

I still say tielfings should be considered the same as primes. They were introduced as player characters in the Planescape setting but since then they have shown up as residents of Toril. You could have one cambion ancestor and 63 human ancestors, and all of your ancestors save the cambion could have spent their entire lives, from birth to death, on the prime material plane. Having a few racial stat discrepancies is one thing, but as far as what kind of creature you are, I would call you very much a prime and not an "outer-planar being."

Failing that, I would treat tieflings like fiends, for purposes of Bolt of Glory anyway. Treating them like inner-planar beings makes no sense for a spell that seems to distinguish between the nature or energy of the target's planar origin/essence.

On 7/18/2022 at 10:53 AM, CamDawg said:

Similarly, antisolars and dark planetars aren't fiends, but seem to be placed to take max damage from a divine bolt. I'm actually not a fan of this, as it implies Bolt of Glory is inherently a good-aligned spell, despite having no such restrictions on who can use the spell.

Agree. It's quite weird that the spell distinguishes among inner/prime/outer planes but then says "wait, only certain outer planes!" I suppose it is supposed to be channeling some kind of celestial energy or attack - though it's weird that priests of e.g. Shar or Cyric can theoretically cast it. (Of course this can be addressed by mods. As can the question of why/whether "fallen planetars" should even exist in the game.)

However I do think fallen celestials should be affected like fiends by Bolt of Glory, since basically all of the extant 2E/Planescape lore suggests that when a celestial falls to evil it affects not just their mind and decisions but also their form and general nature. They may not instantly become a cornugon or something, but they will definitely change and no longer be a celestial. So a spell that spares celestials should not spare fallen celestials. But 2) why not just let Bolt of Glory affect good-aligned celestials? Make it a neutral blast of energy that inflicts damage according to whether the target is inner-planar, prime, outer-planar, or undead. End of story. Keep It Simple.

[DavidW]

Leaving aside what the spell should do and considering developer intent, I think it's clear that the various changes were intentional - you can't accidentally include a tiefling- or githyanki-specific effect.

I suggest this is a rare case where the description text should be edited to match what the spell does, i.e. something like

 

Fiend - 10d6

Other extraplanar creature (including tiefling) - 3d4

Undead - 8d6

Prime Material Plane - 6d6

 

[subtledoctor]

That's super awkward though, and inaccurate - there are extraplanar creatures who are not included (celestials, at least). Frankly for purposes of the FP I would just leave it alone and let the tiefling thing be a weird undescribed idiosyncrasy. (I think games are allowed to have those even if they are fixpacked.) Put another way, I'm not convinced this spell is buggy.

[CamDawg]

Yeah, we need another thread to discuss BoG. I think the outcome is going to be a description update, but we should discuss it at least.

I mainly brought it up here as another point where BD, for better or worse, treated tieflings as non-primes.

[polytope]

21 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Frankly for purposes of the FP I would just leave it alone and let the tiefling thing be a weird undescribed idiosyncrasy. (I think games are allowed to have those even if they are fixpacked.) Put another way, I'm not convinced this spell is buggy.

It also has very little in game effect. How often do enemy clerics cast Bolt of Glory on the one recruitable tiefling you have in your party?

Similarly, how often are you tempted to deal with Aesgareth's friends using BoG? The other noteable encounters with tieflings are in the previous wild magic room (why would you cast any spells there!?), and in the planar prison (although they are not explicitly called tieflings).

Apart from edge cases like a cleric mage putting 3 X BoG in a Spell Trigger, I don't think players use this against non-demonic enemies because it takes an entire round to cast for a mediocre amount of damage against either prime or elemental creatures.

[jmerry]

And then there's stuff that just makes you go "huh?" - the Rilmani on the final seal level have race TIEFLING. Which I'm pretty sure doesn't fit the lore, but whatever. Though they're immune to magic damage, so it doesn't matter how much Bolt of Glory does to them.