4e Cure Disease badly worded/overpowered

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by malloyd

My take on something chronic is Cure Disease might work fine now, but it's a temporary solution. Nothing after all stops you from being reinfected with even an infectious disease you've been cured of.

This is fun from a world-building perspective, too. A healer can’t just cure everybody in town and move on. They have regulars who come in for repeat treatments for chronic illnesses.

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by malloyd

My take on something chronic is Cure Disease might work fine now, but it's a temporary solution. Nothing after all stops you from being reinfected with even an infectious disease you've been cured of. With the causative factor still being there your lack of ease it comes back in the usual time it takes for that agent to make you uncomfortable. I might even consider letting you Cure Disease to hold your breath another interval or not die of dehydration today.

My take is that Cure Disease would not work.

A Restoration or a Regeneration targeting the Pancreas on the other hand would.

However it would be a GM's call as to whether or not any desperate healer in the dim and distant past tried something like that, and if it then got passed down via his apprentices or The Lancet (local edition).

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Me being firmly in the "magic has rules, it's not just a handwave" camp, I've given a good bit of thought to the spell.

I'm in a similar camp, but I also firmly support Kromm's ruling that "Cure Disease cures whatever ailments the GM allows it to cure."

In a relatively light-hearted DF campaign, Cure Disease should be a one-stop cure for just about any nasty bug one acquires while adventuring. In a grimdark Low Fantasy setting, where life is nasty, brutish, and typically ends with a wheezing death rattle, it should be useless against really vicious plagues.

As written, the two big play balance features of the spell are its one-shot nature and its long casting time.

The easiest way to play balance it by campaign is to borrow the rules from the Healing advantage (which inexplicably is never referenced for any of the Healing College spells), basing casting cost and skill penalty on the severity of the disease to be cured.

If the GM wants curing chronic ailments like diabetes or AIDS to be the stuff of miracles, just assign a -15 skill penalty and a 30 FP energy cost.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

I'

The easiest way to play balance it by campaign is to borrow the rules from the Healing advantage (which inexplicably is never referenced for any of the Healing College spells), .

The Spells predate the Advantage and some of us have never been that impressed with the mechanics of the Advantage.

Then of course, this whole thread started with Maxiamra noting what he thought was an undesirable change in 4e rules.

[Kromm]

Nitpickers should note that "disease" and "infection" are terms of art in GURPS. Disease is a big heading covering pp. B442-444, and Infection is another one on p. B444. They have specific meanings in the game. The super-category that encompasses these and more is found on p. B442: Illness. The spell isn't called "Cure Illness."

All of which said, I detest nitpicking. Cure Disease should cure whatever the setting's experts in disease believe a spell for curing disease should cure. The wizards among those experts are the ones who came up with the spell, after all!

If the experts are TL0 shamans, then the spell cures any malaise caused by an evil spirit or pestilent object. If they're TL2, change the belief to humors and miasmas. If they're TL12 techno-mages, then it cures anything that endpoint medical science has conclusively attributed to bacteria, fungi, parasites, prions, viroids, viruses, or any new class of infectious agent discovered (I'd propose "wet nanomachines," since the difference from the previous list is one of origin, not mechanism of action) . . . which will include a lot of things that we TL8 types don't believe are caused by infection, because as has been pointed out, more and more things are reattributed to infectious agents each year. At any TL, if there's magic to cure disease, then there's probably magic to cause it, so whatever that relies on – spirits, warped mana, etc. – Cure Disease should work on that as well.

"Believe" is fair here because Cure Disease is not Cure Disease/TL. It isn't meant to have hard technological or scientific criteria. It's classic folk magic – the sort that precedes the scientific method by four or five TLs. While "magic is a science" is a way to see things, it's probably the wrong way to see things prior to TL5 . . . which is uncoincidentally when widespread belief in magic started to wane rapidly. The GURPS magic system has been fairly random, with risk of summoning demons and many things that work a certain way by fiat, since Steve designed it in the mid-1980s; it has never been scientific.

[ravenfish]

On the other hand, a disease or two that is especially scary because it is not affected by Cure Disease could make a nice campaign detail.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

On the other hand, a disease or two that is especially scary because it is not affected by Cure Disease could make a nice campaign detail.

I find it fun to give some diseases modifiers to Cure Disease . . . The minor sniffles might get +5, while the plague devastating the land is doing so because it gives -10. For added fun, have certain rare ingredients reduce or eliminate a disease's penalties. That plague might give -20 and be functionally incurable without true love's tears flowers from Dragon Mountain, but be cured at full skill if the recipient is strewn with petals, consumed in the casting. (Or, if you're evil, the petals absorb the plague and become pestilent and dangerous!)

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Kromm

I find it fun to give some diseases modifiers to Cure Disease . . . The minor sniffles might get +5, while the plague devastating the land is doing so because it gives -10. For added fun, have certain rare ingredients reduce or eliminate a disease's penalties. That plague might give -20 and be functionally incurable without true love's tears flowers from Dragon Mountain, but be cured at full skill if the recipient is strewn with petals, consumed in the casting. (Or, if you're evil, the petals absorb the plague and become pestilent and dangerous!)

One thought I had for the Fantasy House MD model (or vaguely similar games) combines that with 'the more you know about what you're curing, the better able you are to adjust the spell, and thus the lower the default penalty becomes.' This might also be combined with Spell Techniques for particular diseases or categories of disease ('Healer Chuck specializes in clearing out all sorts of Nausea Demons').

EDIT: In any case, if you don't have the diagnosis right, you might cast the spell casually and get a critical failure due to a level of penalty that you were in no way prepared for.

[corwyn]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

On the other hand, a disease or two that is especially scary because it is not affected by Cure Disease could make a nice campaign detail.

I ran a game in Ravenloft where I made Lycantropy immune to Cure Disease/Curse and ran a side quest to cure it.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Nitpickers should note that "disease" and "infection" are terms of art in GURPS.

Not exactly errata, but putting a pointer to the relevant Basic Set page in the spell text would be a simple and helpful clarification.

Originally Posted by Kromm

Cure Disease should cure whatever the setting's experts in disease believe a spell for curing disease should cure. The wizards among those experts are the ones who came up with the spell, after all!

Which explains the 4E wording.