Quote:
Originally Posted by maximara
The classic version was saner: "Eliminates all disease, plague, or infection microorganisms of one chosen type from the body of the subject. (...) If no organism is responsible, the spell has no effect!"
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This isn't much better than the 4e wording, since "plague" can represent a host of ailments and "organism" can represent the subject. Thus, you could count arthritis as a "plague" caused by an "organism" (misguided immune system cells) produced by the subject.
The 4E wording allows for the possibility of curing magically-induced disease, which a magical Cure Disease spell should definitely be able to do.
Given that the odds of an important NPC, much less a PC, in a fantasy game will be stricken by a dietary deficiency are almost nil, it's a trivial increase in spell power to allow Cure Disease to heal such ailments.
It's slightly more unbalancing if the GM allows Cure Disease to cure chronic or terminal conditions, since that makes it a cheap version of Wish or Resurrection.
The quick house rule to fix this problem is to narrow the definition of "disease." The slightly more complex way to handle the problem is to import the mechanics from the Healing advantage, which give a penalty to cure really nasty problems.
Making the point cost of Cure Disease variable would also be a nice bit of play balance. It should cost less energy to cure a 24-hour virus which causes the sniffles than Stage 4 metastatic bone cancer.