Quote:
Originally Posted by maximara
But for many people it was a single disease — Black Death. Does knowing more about the Black Death make Cure Disease less effective?!
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That's largely wrong. All of these are caused by the same organism, the gram negative coccobacillus Yersinia pestis, just infecting different parts of your body. Cases can morph from one to the other as different tissues get infected (and in fact usually has to in order to kill you, the rare infection that stays confined to the lymph nodes, the classical bubonic form, is rarely fatal)
Still it does get at the difference between the spells indirectly. A spell designed to cure a "disease" with a particular set of symptoms - i.e. a subset of the 4th edition spell, would presumably only work on only one of them, but might work on similar diseases that happened to have the same symptoms (pneumonic plague for example has pretty much identical symptoms to a dozen other kinds of pneumonias). while one that was a subset of the 3rd edition version, that targeted a particular organism, would work on any of them, but not touch an identical appearing disease that actually [was] caused by heathens poisoning the wells.