Source
r/DMAcademy•
Sebeck

Curses, diseases, etc, don't matter?

Offering Advice

Curses, diseases, exhaustion, death, there are spells to fix any of these. On one hand it makes sense that powerful magic would be able to conquer these conditions, on the other hand once the PCs have access to the correct spell, that condition basically disappears from the game.

I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, or what a proper fix would look like. But here's some ideas:

  • Curses to have specific "remove curse" conditions and be unaffected by Remove Curse spell. Maybe call them Major Curses. A spell such as identify or a proper knowledge check in a library could tell the PCs what the curse's weakness is. Examples : light from a sunrise in the west to hit the object(mirror); return the object to its rightful owner(might be a grave, or a descendant); Curse will last until you're 6 feet under in the ground(pretty easy loophole).

  • Diseases, magical ones at least, could require certain monster parts to cure and be immune to Restoration spells. Demonic fever might ask for an ice elemental's touch to cure. Blood worms might require you to eat a live Burrowing beetle to feed on the worms. All of these might call for CON saving throws to avoid certain effects, or to prevent the disease from becoming worse, and identifying the disease would require a medicine check at any location that has books on the matter (1 check allowed per location).

  • Maybe exhaustion can only be removed by spending a night or two in a safe location such as a town or a roadside inn? Nobody sleeps THAT well when they fear that they might be attacked during the night.

  • Death: any resurrect spell from revivify to true resurrection requires the use of a special reagent (besides the gold cost of other materials) that is extremely rare. Kings and some dukes usually have a few available, but they're too expensive to be found on the open market. Maybe they're fragments from a moon shard comet, maybe they're tears of joy from a devil, maybe they're crystallized fulfilled political campaign promises. Ofc there might exist some alternatives that have terrible side effects(hey, at least you're alive), or that will only work for a limited time, or that need to be maintained for the beneficiary to remain alive.

Just a few ideas I had, feel free to comment any ideas you might have on the matter.

Cheers

Posted Jan 2, 2022, 9:27 AM UTC

75
lifesapity•

From VRGtR

While more general curses can lifted by a remove curse spell, more specific or dramatic curses can’t be permanently lifted through spells. Magic can offer temporary respite, though. A remove curse spell cast on the victim of such a curse suppresses the burden for 1 hour. A greater restoration spell suppresses the burden until the victim finishes a long rest. Death usually ends a curse, but the curse returns in full force if the cursed character returns to life without resolving the curse.

9
werewolf_nr•

An Arcadia vol 5 article specifically handled some curses that couldn't just be removed by "Remove Curse". Some of them could be temporarily suppressed with the spell, but would come back.

3
HdeviantS•

I think the Devs had two things in mind when they designed the debuffs and the way to quickly get rid of them.

  1. removing a debuff with a spell is a cost of resources. Yes the spell slot will come back on a long rest (or short rest for some classes), but if you are going through a series of encounters in a short period then rationing those spell slots becomes a little important.

  2. everything about D&D 5e seems to scream that the devs wanted the players to feel powerful, though not as broken as some past editions were capable of. And sometimes nothing makes a player feel less powerful than getting debuffed. Though rare I have known some players who will request to make completely new characters if they discover their current one is particularly vulnerable to a condition or type of saving throw. And I knew one who just up and quit a campaign because his character got stuck with a cursed item and we were not in a position to remove the curse (none of us had the spell and we wouldn't be going anywhere that could remove it for a looooong time).

That being said I do like the idea of making curses and some conditions more difficult to remove so that the PCs aren't like "lets go to the local temple to get it removed".

3
grothesk•

If you have five players in a party and all five of them receive a curse, the person who has Remove Curse needs to use up five 3rd-level spell slots to remove all of those curses. That seems pretty hefty to me.

There is also a disconnect between the mechanical rules of an RPG for players to have fun in vs. the "reality" of a fantasy world. In a world of 3 million people perhaps 400-500 NPCs across the entire world can cast Remove Curse. That number goes down to 300-400 NPCs who can cast Revivify and probably to less than 70 who can cast other resurrection magic spells. And these NPCs aren't walking about using up all of their spell slots every day to get the most out of their resources because an NPC doesn't recognize that it has access to cast Revivify twice a day. to them, casting Revivify requires a ton of concentration and personal energy and the thought of even casting it once a week seems overwhelming.

I believe a solution to what you mention in your post is to have a setting of lower magic. Your players can cast many spells per day because that is a part of what makes DnD fun, but NPCs are much more scaled-back in how they view magic and spellcasting.

2
azelot7ui•

The issue is more with monster design in particular. There are too few encounters that apply anything other than poison. If you make the few that are left immune to removal effects, might as well take out the removal spells instead. In all my time playing DND, I've only ever had a curse once. I have never felt the need to have remove curse in my spell list to begin with.

1