Alignment: Healing as an Evil act

[weckar]

Hi Playground!

For a while now, I've been toying with the idea of a (for now theoretical) atheistic campaign setting. For a game like D&D that raises a lot of issues in terms of alignment and divine powers, but I've at the same time decided to take an extreme reflection of the real world such that a strong enough belief by enough people can make something at least partially real. The direct consequence of this is that views on specific types of magic and how they should affect alignment can vastly differ in isolated communities.

Now, one of my friends came up with the concept of a tribe that's really into ancestor worship, and see death as a honorable and necessary rite of passage to truely begin a worthy life serving the tribe. While not opposed to rough and basic practices of medicine involving skill, work and knowledge, they might not be so happy about artificially changing the lifespan of a creature by magically healing it. Of course, dying early because of Inflict spells would similarly be 'cheating', but possibly for a more righteous reason.
In other words, they would see magical Healing as an Evil act, and due how to religion is set up this widespread belief would make it so.

My question is, how would this affect a game in which the characters still intend to be good, yet also still want to get their D&D-standard quota of combat in?

[Gwazi Magnum]

If they're coming from that religion/culture I can see it being an issue.
Because essentially they're constantly cheating death by using standard d&d mechanics to heal and therefore insulting their religion.

But at the same time you could follow the religion and simply just not believe in this part of it, having your own views where it comes to healing magic.

If this is just a culture in the world though that the PCs don't follow, I don't see it as evil. It would be the same as me being branded evil by a religion I don't follow because I eat pork. Yea it might be a bad thing for them to do, but I don't follow that belief so me eating pork shouldn't reflect on me badly.

Alternatives to healing though could smart use with medicene and just being careful to not get hit or hurt much. If you play races with the fast healing ability you could just use that to heal and claim your bodies are just doing their natural healing process.

If you want to enter a little more into bull**** territory your characters could try to claim they're healing is simply speeding up their recovery process rather than allowing them to escape death.

[Matticussama]

If the tribe is all NPCs then it would prove a unique oddity to PCs from other cultures; in a world with dragons and wizards, magical healing of some kind seems pretty necessary. Your average peasant won't need it, of course, but your higher level military folks who fight off ogres and trolls to keep the village safe would be hardpressed to survive without magical healing. Of course, a DM can just handwaive that if they want it for the fluff of a unique experience for the players.

If your players were to hold that sort of ideology, however, that pretty much makes D&D unplayable for a long term campaign unless the DM drastically reduces the challenge of fights. Combat is designed around some form of magical healing being used at some point; it doesn't have to be in-combat healing, but going through multiple encounters without any healing in-between (Wand of Cure Light Wounds, etc) is just asking for death.

There are plenty of other systems that handle combat without any form of magical healing, but D&D isn't one of them.

[ArcturusV]

I like when people point out subjective stuff myself. It's why I have things like the Ice Cultures who worship fire rather than Ice. Or the Jungle culture who sees the Rains as a curse from the Gods, etc.

So good to see it.

I suppose you could just have them leveling up slower ICily. Let them naturally heal. It does mean they probably aren't going to be doing several fights per day. It would lead to a wholly different sort of campaign. But not an invalid one.

Other options? You could have more "mundane" things. Like allow people with the Heal Skill (Possibly with the addition of appropriate Knowledges) fashion Potions, Poultices, and Salves that speed healing. "Here, smear this troll blood balm on your wound, it will close up quickly." Not divine magical medling, but medicine which I think would be okay.

[Gwazi Magnum]

Other options? You could have more "mundane" things. Like allow people with the Heal Skill (Possibly with the addition of appropriate Knowledges) fashion Potions, Poultices, and Salves that speed healing. "Here, smear this troll blood balm on your wound, it will close up quickly." Not divine magical medling, but medicine which I think would be okay.

^ This idea get's my vote.

[Jeff the Green]

Another option would be fast healing.

[Psyren]

My question is, how would this affect a game in which the characters still intend to be good, yet also still want to get their D&D-standard quota of combat in?

I don't see a society or setting that opposes medicine as lasting very long. Healing is a pretty universal pursuit when people gather together in numbers, if only to deal with things like childbirth. All this will do is push the practitioners underground rather than eradicate them entirely.

Also, just because a given mindset is widespread doesn't mean the PCs have to go along with it. For instance, the PCs in much of the Dragonlance novels had the only cleric in the world for awhile. Similarly, in Dragon Age, the Grey Warden's party had the only mages on the continent that were allowed to walk around freely.

[awa]

During the early modern period European medicine was often as dangerous to the patient as the wounds they received dramatically inferior to earlier healing techniques often worse than doing nothing at all. They managed not only to survive but conquer most of the known world.

Now I would suggest if you do this in a d&d game to include something like reserve points or healing surges so pcs can catch a second wind and do more than 1 encounter in a day. Alternatively a game that is more about puzzles investigation or political intrigue could function with a lot less combat encounters.

[JusticeZero]

What is actually checking alignment in your setting? Do you have any outer planes? What spells care about alignment and why? Because in the setting I have where there are no active divine stuff, I have no reason to check alignment anyways and so I don't have anyone track it.

[Gildedragon]

And if something IS checking alignments, healing as understood in most of the cases (got mauled by a lionpidgeon and someone uses heal to fix that) is good; if perhaps sometimes impeding people from taking the full consequences of their actions. In the case of denying the just desserts: using healing would be chaotic, not evil.
A society that took a survival of the fittest approach to healing would be on its way to an E ideology.

As for healing being evil:Constantly providing a patient with either restorations or temp HP to see how a disease/poison progresses, instead of seeking to cure the affliction; as you are keeping them in in agony instead of letting death come to them.

Using healing to boost interrogation techniques; prevent death and nerve deadening by restoring their bodies to a pristine state.

Using healing to keep a prisoner alive, if their death is counter to your purposes (they get reincarnated, resurrected, get to tell a god on you, etc)). Magical healing can overcome careless and inhuman "care taking"

[NichG]

Well the OP is positing a Planescape-like setting where believe determines reality to some degree, so basically this tribe is locally determining what is Evil and Good based on that. How this interacts with the rest of the cosmos is a complexity for the DM to consider, but we don't know enough about the OP's game to posit.

I think there are interesting ways to do this. I played a Monk once who was a Doomguard and refused magical healing on the basis of ideology. He was fine using Wholeness of Body to heal himself though (since that was just , so it mostly worked out.

If you want healing to be seen as evil by the players, rather than just positing a culture that nonsensically (from player PoV) judges it to be so, put in a cost. For everything that is healed, three times as much injury is dealt to other beings in the world in some form or other. This could be Dark Sun/Carnivale style 'plants die in a 100ft radius when you cast Cure Light Wounds', or something more metagame like 'the reason for Critical Hits is a cosmic balance against magical healing; if no one used magical healing there would be no crits' or even just something like, for healer-type classes to retain their powers of magical healing they must perform a human sacrifice once a year. This could be particularly interesting if, for some reason, only the clerics of that tribe need to do this, but clerics elsewhere in the world get around the requirement somehow that the tribe has just never discovered (or the tribe has a particularly nasty deity granting spells).

[Coidzor]

Healers start to slowly become more and more evil around them until they slaughter the tribe in the local area and then once they leave they're evil anyway for being genocidal.

In the long run though, things even out because the culture goes extinct.

[Alefiend]

Games built from D&D usually have Good and Evil as objective truths. In other words, some thing doesn't become Evil just because everybody thinks it is—the multiverse is right and the people are wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean anything for your game, but it does mean you have no mechanical support if you try to implement your (very interesting) idea.

[Raven777]

I like annoying the party's Cleric of Pelor by licking my thumb and cleaning people's booboos (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/i/infernal-healing).

[Spuddles]

In terms of the actual alignment system, it's actually a chaos/law thing, but there's no reason a group of people couldnt treat it as a good/evil thing.

People confuse law/chaos IRL with good/evil all the time. There's no reason this wouldnt happen in dnd, too.

[MrNobody]

Now, one of my friends came up with the concept of a tribe that's really into ancestor worship, and see death as a honorable and necessary rite of passage to truely begin a worthy life serving the tribe. While not opposed to rough and basic practices of medicine involving skill, work and knowledge, they might not be so happy about artificially changing the lifespan of a creature by magically healing it. Of course, dying early because of Inflict spells would similarly be 'cheating', but possibly for a more righteous reason.
In other words, they would see magical Healing as an Evil act, and due how to religion is set up this widespread belief would make it so.

My question is, how would this affect a game in which the characters still intend to be good, yet also still want to get their D&D-standard quota of combat in?

I think this is an issue that involves not only good&evil but also chaos&law. If this is a "dogma" of the group, even in the form of "ancestor's tradition", it's a matter of law. If you oppose it, you are chaotic. That said, the perception from the other members of the tribe would be a matter of good&evil, in a way similar to modern society in which heavy drug-users (that, using drugs, are breaking the law) are often thought as really bad people.
So, if you use magic for healing you are chaotic for alignement, "evil" for other people view.

I also think you could mitigate this "law" by applying it only to near death circumstances: if a warrior has fought all day and managed to stay alive and almost safe during the battle it won't be a problem to heal him, letting him have some rest. But if he drops below 0 HP on the battlefield a cleric would say: "he is on his own now: the ancestors will decide if is the time to call his soul or leaving him to battle among the living". Even if the warrior manage to avoid death, a cleric would refuse to heal him until he has showed that ancestors want him to live, naturally healing to 1 HP.
One thing is cheating with Death, other thing is providing some comfort to the revered and mighty warriors of the tribe.