Does Affliction with Immunity (Disease) cure disease?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Long Arms, for a 2 armed species. Oy. We've cut the cost in half, removed the damage adjustment, and added a note to buy some Arm ST if it seems appropriate.

That damage adjustment never made sense to me. You now have arms the length of Base SM+1, but you do more damage with them than an overall SM+1 character with the same strength. Wah?

Your idea makes my Harvestman (Daddy Longlegs) Superhero slightly cheaper. Kind of a MysteryMen version of spiderman.

[Anthony]

Extra limbs in general are a mess. I would probably make them vastly cheaper (on a par with Extra Legs), and then force people to split the same total strength between however many limbs they have.

[wellspring]

OK so if you were writing this up as a brand new advantage from scratch, how would you do it? "Remove Condition", with a convenient list of conditions such as sleep, stun, intoxicated, and then diseases and poisons?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

I get that you're not supposed to be able to run around the oncology ward, playfully poking people in the ribs and curing their cancer for only 24 CP, but it's comparatively easy to make really serious and life-threatening injuries go poof! with just a few FP.

Of course you can do that for 4 FP with the Cure Disease spell. I think the fundamental problem with Healing and disease is the scale is broken. Setting anything at -15 was probably a mistake, and certainly the choice of examples is quite bad. I mean both common colds and AIDS are incurable viral infections. There are probably more effective treatments for AIDS, and between the two at any given moment the cold virus is probably reproducing faster and doing more damage, and it more likely to kill you in the immediate future. What am I using to decide the modifiers again? How afraid of the disease people were in 1990?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Of course you can do that for 4 FP with the Cure Disease spell. I think the fundamental problem with Healing and disease is the scale is broken. Setting anything at -15 was probably a mistake, and certainly the choice of examples is quite bad. I mean both common colds and AIDS are incurable viral infections. There are probably more effective treatments for AIDS, and between the two at any given moment the cold virus is probably reproducing faster and doing more damage, and it more likely to kill you in the immediate future. What am I using to decide the modifiers again? How afraid of the disease people were in 1990?

What you're using to decide the modifiers is "Can the patient recover from the condition naturally". When people get the common cold they generally recover it from fairly quickly. But yes the scale should go to -10 not -15.

[Desthro]

Originally Posted by Kromm

If a player came to me with this, I'd probably rule as follows: "The pathogen is gone, ending future fatigue, injury, and symptoms, but there would be no effect on existing fatigue, injury, and symptoms."

To me, Immunity to Disease for a living organism suggests an immune system capable of stopping pathogens cold. If someone suddenly gained that amazing capability, I'd be fine with letting it work in minutes. Unrealistic? Being totally immune isn't realistic, so we have no idea how such an immune system would work. A weird ability that makes somebody totally immune is if anything less realistic, and might well be explained as "summoning a perfect immune response at the site of each and every hostile microbe in their body."

Affliction 1 (HT; Advantage, Immunity to Disease, +100%) [20] costs only a bit more and evades the huge penalties and costs, but I wouldn't let it do anything about symptoms – the sick person would still be sick, just not diseased. You'd still need something like Healing (Cure Affliction, +60%) [48] or Healing (Affliction Only, -40%) [18] to clean up after it.

See, and that doesn't make complete sense either. If the pathogen(s) or other biological agent(s) are GONE, they aren't producing the biological toxins or continuing to cause abberations in the body that produce the symptoms. If that is the case, then the disease is effectively cured even if the symptoms don't abate immediately. The physical symptoms should go away on their own as the body is now capable of normal recovery. Lost FP should recover within hours (per the recovery rules,) lost HP within days (per the recovery rules,) and anything else non-permanent should be naturally restored over the course of as little as several days to a few weeks via the body's natural healing processes.

All healing would do is heal the lost FP, HP, and what not immediately.

Edit: Unless of course we are just talking about an immediate time frame here.

[CeeDub]

Originally Posted by Desthro

See, and that doesn't make complete sense either. If the pathogen(s) or other biological agent(s) are GONE, they aren't producing the biological toxins or continuing to cause abberations in the body that produce the symptoms. If that is the case, then the disease is effectively cured even if the symptoms don't abate immediately. The physical symptoms should go away on their own as the body is now capable of normal recovery. Lost FP should recover within hours (per the recovery rules,) lost HP within days (per the recovery rules,) and anything else non-permanent should be naturally restored over the course of as little as several days to a few weeks via the body's natural healing processes.

I think this is exactly what Kromm and I meant. The pathogens are gone and the immune system stands down. Neither the disease itself nor the body's own immune response cause further damage or symptoms and the patient can no longer infect others. However, what damage has been done, is done; but now the body can heal normally, like you said.

Unless you give it a push with a "regular" healing power, like Afflict: Regeneration, standard Healing for HP, a healing spell, potion, whatever.

[Kromm]

"No pathogen" isn't synonymous with "no symptoms" or "quick recovery." For example, botulinum toxin can kill you without live Clostridium botulinum living in you and creating more; in fact, that's how it usually kills. Staphylococcal enterotoxin B can make you sick without a Staphylococcus aureus infection. "You have no more pathogen in you" means only that whatever bacterium, parasite, prion, fungus, or virus harmed you (say, by poisoning you, destroying tissue, or causing genetic damage) is gone. You may well retain lasting or permanent injury, some of which might be beyond the body's capacity to repair . . . If you have holes in your brain, or your arm rots off, the fact that you're not getting more holes or rot doesn't mean you return to full capacity as soon as what caused the original holes or rot is out of the picture.