[OOC] Heart of Darkness (Part II)

[Mindsiege]

Originally Posted by secretID

To pick him the darkling up, can one be in row 60?

I'll say yes in this case.

[secretID]

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

Boanagh is standing next to the torch. He would like to put it out because he is unprotected.

Unprotected from...? Do you mean that he would just prefer to be in the dark?

[Mindsiege]

Originally Posted by secretID

Unprotected from...? Do you mean that he would just prefer to be in the dark?

Yes. While the mechanical implications aren't that bad, the light still eats up his life force.

[Mindsiege]

Soo... there's something that has occurred to me for the first time. Looking at the spell Goodberry once more, there's nothing really suggesting to me that the magical berries have any sort of healing properties. Mostly, the berries are supposed to have a nourishing and strengthening effect. So while they do restore hp and can get a PC back from the brink of death, they're not the sort of healing magic that will easily mend severe injuries. I'm willing to say that they do help the body quickly coagulate some blood for the sake of stopping heavy bleeding and helping with surface-level wounds, but for the sake of treating severe injury, they're not the right kind of magic. Luckily it doesn't matter for this scenario because Jimmy beat the DC 20 anyways, and the Goodberry is at least going to ensure that there'll be no bleeding out. You'll still want to make a Medicine check eventually though, to make sure that the darkling hasn't suffered internal injuries that will become a problem later. For now he's good to give Jimmy his report though, which I will do in my next update.

PS: Don't worry that I'll do this whole spiel too often. For the sake of this scene, the fallout of the belated surrender was a complication that I envisioned as a challenge to overcome for your party, but usually that sort of trouble doesn't come up as your typical adventuring challenge and for the sake of the WM I'll regularly spare the PCs having to deal with the actual health of characters. It just goes to show though that not handwaving health makes keeping things alive a whole lot more difficult than killing them. Too bad that Alysha got sick.

[secretID]

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

there's nothing really suggesting to me that the magical berries have any sort of healing properties. Mostly, the berries are supposed to have a nourishing and strengthening effect.

"Eating a berry restores 1 hit point, and the berry provides enough nourishment to sustain a creature for one day." I don't know what you mean by "strengthening" here, or what "healing" is independent of hp. I know Raise Dead doesn't restore missing limbs or organs, so I would assume the same with CW and the berries, but otherwise I don't understand.

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

they're not the sort of healing magic that will easily mend severe injuries. I'm willing to say that they do help the body quickly coagulate some blood for the sake of stopping heavy bleeding and helping with surface-level wounds, but for the sake of treating severe injury, they're not the right kind of magic.

I have no idea what that means in 5e rules terms. With the darkling crawling and whatnot, I figured that you were doing something outside 5e rules for dramatic effect b/c this is an NPC and not immediately relevant to combat, but "severe injuries," "coagulate," etc., independent of hp, don't mean anything to me unless you explain them, because they're not in the rules anywhere. (Or are they? - are these DMG options or something? I can't find anything about it.)

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

Goodberry is at least going to ensure that there'll be no bleeding out. You'll still want to make a Medicine check eventually though, to make sure that the darkling hasn't suffered internal injuries that will become a problem later.

So...if Jimmy gave him berries, potions, whatever to max his hp, that still might not do it? I assume that's just for NPCs - yes?

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

PS: Don't worry that I'll do this whole spiel too often.

Glad to hear it.

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

for the sake of the WM I'll regularly spare the PCs having to deal with the actual health of characters. It just goes to show though that not handwaving health makes keeping things alive a whole lot more difficult than killing them.

I'm really just mystified. If 5e has a concept of "actual health" independent of hp and the various specific listed conditions, and it's generally handwaved in WM, that's all news to me.

[Mindsiege]

Originally Posted by secretID

"Eating a berry restores 1 hit point, and the berry provides enough nourishment to sustain a creature for one day." I don't know what you mean by "strengthening" here, or what "healing" is independent of hp. I know Raise Dead doesn't restore missing limbs or organs, so I would assume the same with CW and the berries, but otherwise I don't understand.

Restoring hp isn't synonymous to healing. In the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure for example there's an item that's basically a cool dwarven brew that heals 1 hp per sip. I'm not comfortable ruling that drinking alcohol is going to restore any injuries, and in various other instances restoration of hp doesn't really translate well into healing either.

Originally Posted by secretID

I have no idea what that means in 5e rules terms. With the darkling crawling and whatnot, I figured that you were doing something outside 5e rules for dramatic effect b/c this is an NPC and not immediately relevant to combat, but "severe injuries," "coagulate," etc., independent of hp, don't mean anything to me unless you explain them, because they're not in the rules anywhere. (Or are they? - are these DMG options or something? I can't find anything about it.)

It's basically from the optional Injury rules in the DMG page 272, but heavily improvised to suit the current scene for the sake of dramatic effect. The internal injury for example reads that it can only be cleared with magical healing, but I think Goodberry shouldn't apply because nothing inside its rules declares it to be magical healing and I couldn't find any rules that determine all hp restoration to be counted as healing. Coagulate is just a medical term I'm using for flavour to describe the game mechanics.

Originally Posted by secretID

So...if Jimmy gave him berries, potions, whatever to max his hp, that still might not do it? I assume that's just for NPCs - yes?

Don't worry about it. It's not going to make a difference in this adventure and I've already lost my motivation to pursue it further. I purposefully don't list the Injury rules as rules that I commonly support because they rarely make for an interesting addition to the adventure.

Originally Posted by secretID

I'm really just mystified. If 5e has a concept of "actual health" independent of hp and the various specific listed conditions, and it's generally handwaved in WM, that's all news to me.

I realize that the idea of health as a concept in a game of DnD isn't fully outlined by the rules. That said, both injuries and diseases exist as concepts in the game, as well as Medicine checks. Handwaving the existence of injuries and diseases and reducing the purpose of Medicine checks to stabilizing unconscious characters is pretty standard fair in most DnD games. I really don't find the inverse all that mystifying though. Obviously there's a whole lot more that can be done to introduce these mechanics as meaningful challenges that an adventurer might face. I've seen other GMs do it well and I'm still finding my groove how I want to handle these in my own games.

The whole topic of hit points vs. health is pretty broad. There's lots to be said about it, but I don't think you'll be interested in my theories and you won't need to hear them in order to succeed in my games. The idea is to step away from the abstraction of hit points and making a character's health relevant to the story without making it obtrusive. Given how you've reacted to the darkling though, I'll refrain from bringing it up again. I'm sure the game is a lot easier when killing and attacking creatures doesn't come with injuring and traumatizing them, but I like to support in my games that actions have consequences. In the example of the current scene they are narrative consequences, rather than consequences in the shape of resource expenditure or hp loss.

@edit:
To repeat, in this case you're fully correct that I used the injury rules rather liberally for the sake of dramatic effect. Now that we've got an injured darkling I'm sticking with it until he has received proper treatment. And I figured that giving him a single Goodberry isn't cutting it. Healing Word, Cure Wounds, or a health potion would all solve the whole mundane treatment hurdle in a blink though.

[secretID]

I think the only reason we got into this at all is that you started with talk about the rules:

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

Looking at the spell Goodberry once more, there's nothing really suggesting to me that the magical berries have any sort of healing properties.

After that, you seemed to be telling me something that I needed to understand related to a Medicine check, but in fact I didn't understand.

If you just said IC that the berry had no benefit, I wouldn't have had a question - no rules-related question, anyway.

[Mindsiege]

I'm happy to have explained as much as I have. Was I able to shed light on the points that weren't clear to you?

By the way, I've slept over it and I'll have to do a bit more research in regards to what counts as magical healing and what not. I'll want to make sure where Goodberry lands, because I don't want to rule that it doesn't help with injuries when it might have been intended to do so. It seems like that application is outside of the spell's intended utility, but I'll try to check again if there's something concrete about that in the rules. I'll get back to you with a final ruling once I've done a bit more research.

[secretID]

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

I'm happy to have explained as much as I have.

OK. I thought you were annoyed.

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

Was I able to shed light on the points that weren't clear to you?

Not in any usable way. I.e., I don't have any clearer idea about how hp and injuries will interact. However, I don't think I need to know, because I'm fine just responding IC, in non-rules terms, to NPC issues, and it sounds like you don't intend to make this a PC issue anytime soon. If at some point PC injuries independent of hp will be an issue, I'd like to know because that may affect my decisions, including character build and shopping.

[Mindsiege]

Originally Posted by secretID

Not in any usable way. I.e., I don't have any clearer idea about how hp and injuries will interact.

So, I've made sure to check the PHB and DMG once again, and here are the relevant points:

Hit Points
"Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck." For my own emphasis, hit points are not a representation of the creature's health, nor how wounded it is.

Describing the effects of damage
"DMs describe hit points loss in different ways. When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum, you typically show no signs of injury. When you drop below half your hit point maximum, you show signs of wear, such as cuts and bruises. An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious." For the most part, this is how I think about light injuries occurring. However, these are for the most part flavour and usually not a mechanical impediment. It's assumed that for anything less than severe, adventurers have the general skills to treat light wounds without letting them accumulate into a detrimental health condition. That said, depending on your environment even light wounds might raise how susceptible a character is to disease or have other implications, for example how well your character can be tracked by smell. These aren't any strict mechanical interactions, but situationally light wounds may influence whether a character is eligible for a particularly related check, and they might influence the DC of such a check at times. Usually I handwave the treatment of light wounds, and if I won't, then I expect myself to remind my players and consider what sort of treatment has occurred or was possible at the time with a certain amount of leniency.

Injuries
"Damage normally leaves no lingering effects. This option introduces the potential for long-term injuries. It's up to the GM to decide when to check for a lingering injury." The DMG further suggests examples of circumstances in which lingering injuries may occur and provides a table to roll lingering injuries for your typical humanoid, but they're not that important. The relevant part is, some of those options introduce that particular mali are introduced to movement, holding items, sight, taking the Dash action, taking actions, reductions to the hit point maximum over time, or scars that are either cosmetic or even a disadvantage/advantage for certain social checks. Some options declare that they can only be restored through "magical healing", "restoration of limbs with Regenerate", "resting for prolonged periods of time", "magical healing of a particular spell level", or "multiple successful Medicine checks over a period of time". I don't feature lingering injuries a whole lot, and if I do I usually improvise something to suit the present narrative.

Originally Posted by secretID

However, I don't think I need to know, because I'm fine just responding IC, in non-rules terms, to NPC issues, and it sounds like you don't intend to make this a PC issue anytime soon. If at some point PC injuries independent of hp will be an issue, I'd like to know because that may affect my decisions, including character build and shopping.

I personally think that the possibility of scaring and injury enriches any story about adventuring, but I also think that making your PCs deal with injuries all the damn time is too gritty and doesn't make for that great of a story. For that reason, you don't have to expect me to bring lingering injuries up in regard to PCs, at least not in the WM where they'd be taking away from the storytelling rather than adding to it.

Now, in terms of the current scene where I'm considering how you're able to help that darkling NPC, I have to figure out whether Goodberry counts as the sort of magical healing that is eligible for mending lingering injuries. Unfortunately, the PHB's section about Healing (p. 197) doesn't make any sort of distinction besides mentioning that some magical sources remove damage instantaneously. I'm inclined to say that Goodberries aren't suitable to restore a character's lingering injuries, yet by the definition of the term they are magical healing and there is nothing in the rules that differentiates them from a Cure Wounds.

I'll sleep one more night before I make a final ruling on Goodberry. In the meantime, do you have any sort of opinion on it? What if you were to introduce an NPC with a broken arm? Would you allow a PC to mend their bone with a Goodberry?

[secretID]

I'm having a hard time with the broken arm example because I've never considered something like that, but I can't think of a situation in which I would treat Goodberry healing differently than CW healing, so if CW would heal the arm, then Goodberry would for me..

FWIW, as you know Sage Advice actually says eating a berry is the same as having a spell cast on one, for purposes of the Life Cleric feature. I hate that ruling, but there it is.

[Mindsiege]

Originally Posted by secretID

I'm having a hard time with the broken arm example because I've never considered something like that, but I can't think of a situation in which I would treat Goodberry healing differently than CW healing, so if CW would heal the arm, then Goodberry would for me..

FWIW, as you know Sage Advice actually says eating a berry is the same as having a spell cast on one, for purposes of the Life Cleric feature. I hate that ruling, but there it is.

Yeah, I know the ruling about Life Clerics. It's been on my mind since I've been thinking about Goodberry for this case, but that feature in particular has a wording that doesn't rely on the definition of magical healing, which is the one I'm struggling with.

Considering the implications of healing magic during war times in a military hospital, I think it makes for a stupid interpretation that a single Goodberry spell could replace ten casts of Cure Wounds from clerical healers. But as you can already tell, that sort of reasoning isn't grounded anywhere near the rules.

I really would have liked to make it easy on myself and ruled that A) Goodberries are magical healing, and B) all magical healing can restore lasting injuries in a flash. But I also think if interpreting the rules like that makes rangers better field medics than clerics, then that interpretation of those particular rules is breaking the fiction of the world.

In terms of Goodberry, I'd say they are definitely magical, because an Antimagicfield would suppress the hp restoration feature of the berries for good. Leaving me with the question, are Goodberries "healing"?

The paragraph about healing in the PHB reads, "when a creature receives healing of any kind, hit points regained are added to its current hit points". Unfortunately, that only settles that "healing" causes "restoration of hit points", not whether they are the same as per definition. Going back to the example of dwarven brandy, while drinking it restores 1 hp, I'm disinclined to call that restoration of hp healing. I'm inclined to make a similar argument for the sake of Goodberry, to rule that it does count as restoration of health for the sake of bringing an unconscious creature back to consciousness, but not necessarily that it "heals" it.

But it bothers me that such a reading is basically finding a loophole in the ambiguous definition of healing while I'm clearly partial about how I imagine the magical healing of injuries should work. I really would have liked to make an impartial ruling instead.

I don't think that I'll reach any conclusion about this even after sleeping over it once. So for now, I'll simply say that giving the darkling a Goodberry puts him out of danger of his condition worsening, but otherwise, his lingering injury was of the kind that requires magical healing that restores more than 1 hp. I know that's an ugly rule's hack, but it's the best I can come up with for now. If you need that particular darkling to be healthy again I will take another look at figuring out the RAI about the interaction between Goodberry and lingering injuries, but until then I'm fine keeping the darkling's condition somewhat vague. (On another note, I'd probably be fine if you could heal the darkling's injuries by feeding him a whole 10 Goodberries because that would sort of restore the balance of the world, but I'm not sure if that's where we'd want to go with it.)

Is it fine for you if we proceed like this for now?

[secretID]

Again, I'm fine just hearing, not in rules terms, how the darkling responds. If he appears to have lingering issues after the berry, Jimmy will take it from there, or I suppose an NPC might say something if you want that.

[secretID]

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

By refusing to negotiate with Glynn, we're now officially out of initiative. Your party successfully navigated the encounter without suffering any harm. Well done!

Hm...I hope that is a good thing. Not thrilled about her cropping up later.

Originally Posted by Mindsiege

I want to apologize for faking the initiative table when Glynn lied about everybody being dead already

Not at all. I was deliberately ignoring it, as Jimmy didn't believe anything Glynn said. He was just much more willing to risk anonymous darklings than the party (and himself).

[Mindsiege]

Originally Posted by secretID

Hm...I hope that is a good thing. Not thrilled about her cropping up later.

If you manage to get rid of her now, you'll have no worries that she might pop up later. Over the course of HoD you might have noticed that most of your enemies are pretty keen on survival, and dying to random adventurers isn't usually a priority for them. For enemies like Mulkok or the Iron Shadow it will be quite difficult for them to get back at you. I wouldn't be able to tell you what course of action Glynn would take in response to this encounter.