Spells generally have very precise descriptions of what they do, precisely because of shitty players like David. Heal Wounds only restores hit points, it can’t cure a disability whether that disability is from birth or an injury or another magical spell.
Nat 20 doesn’t just let you do whatever. Cure wounds could easily be interpreted as returning the body to its natural state as the soul percieves it. If wanted his legs back more than anything so much that his soul held onto it like phantom pain, then I would say maybe a Greater Restoration could if he wanted that.
But if he’d grown accoustomed to his new life and his new legs and no longer sought to “restore” anything, having made peace with his injury, then no, greater restoration would just restore him to his own healthy self image. And a spell like cure wounds would do absolute dick.
I’d love to let this play out, narrate the lack of effect of this spell, and kick this asshole from the table.
Eric just needed a better backstory for his wheelchair-bound character. And really in most high fantasy settings the only way it makes sense to have a permanent disability like that would be from a curse.
Everyone’s correctly pointing out how healing doesn’t with that way, how about changing someone’s body against their will being totally evil and not good?
I have a character idea for a cleric that idolizes the god of pain.
They focus almost entirely on healing because you can’t keep suffering if you’re dead, if you’re alive you can grow stronger, and therefore, in their own twisted mind, if you’re suffering you’re growing stronger.
They don’t heal people right away unless not doing so would cause them to die and end their suffering. Instead, if the battle is over, they pull out a chart and start asking about how painful the wound is. This can be excruciating for the one who has to sit there and answer questions until they get healed.
The other portion of their build would focus on fighting the undead because they are abominations who cannot feel pain and cannot grow stronger because of it
The god goes along with it because their normal clerics may be into torture, which is great for pain, but they tend to get hunted down because of their extreme methods. This cleric causes pain indirectly by being surrounded by a bunch of murderhobos.
… Ranlar slowly rises from his wheelchair before collapsing under his own weight as his atrophied legs give out. Your party must now find a way to move him away from the orcs without using his newly healed legs, perhaps on a nearby chair with wheels.
Wheelchairs only work because of modern paving and asphalt. Cobblestone and dirt roads would never accommodate a wheelchair. Magic carpets are right there.
At that point just enchant your legs, or make warforged legs, or be a druid and attach roots to your legs like spider legs, or use the same thing but also provides other utility, A MAGIC CARPET.
Taking away someone’s intentional, roleplayed disability definitely falls under “infringing on someone’s fun”, though. If the player (not just the character) is also disabled and trying to represent themselves in the game, this goes beyond infringing on fun straight into lowkey offensive. I would never let this nat 20 work. Maybe it fixes the wheelchair or something.
Main issue is the wheelchair itself. No adventurer would ever use a wheelchair, the only reason we can use wheelchairs now are uniform roads and ada mandated ramps. Magic carpets exist and are cheap in game and don’t make you a liability.
I mean, have you considered a dwarven wheelchair made from the shields of the fallen, using their frames for wheels that grant comparable protection while gaining grip compared with a wooden spoke?
Or a druidic wheelchair of entire roots that bonded to the druid when they were mortally wounded on the forest, bonding them permanently?
Or a warlock who walks with an artificial leg of miasma and lurching tentacles that his patron restored him to in exchange for his soul debt?
Literally no reason and no way a wheelchair in game is more a liability than some geriatric old fucking wozard breaking his hip or your characters having a concussion and needing an EMT.
D&D is ultimately a set of rules to guide a group improv storytelling session. One of the first rules of improv is “yes and” so you go with it within the confines of the game rules as well as what people are comfortable with. This is where /u/[email protected]’s suggestion of “Ranlar slowly rises from his wheelchair before collapsing under his own weight as his atrophied legs give out. Your party must now find a way to move him away from the orcs without using his newly healed legs, perhaps on a nearby chair with wheels.” Fits so well. It "yes and"s the spell while remaining true to the other player’s wishes.
The DMs job is to maintain the fun for the players, and if one player is ruining others fun they need to be spoken with and kicked out if they aren’t able to be a team player. Personally, I treat a NAT20 (and critical failures) as an opportunity to do something comical that helps advance the story and improve the lore, because that creates the moments you tell to others when sharing fun stories about D&D
I enjoy that Godbound doesn’t even bother with any of the hairsplitting I’m reading in this thread. You’re a god of freaking Health, of course you can fix his legs. No dice rolling involved.
Even with regenerate, what exactly are you regenerating? If the necessary neural pathways for the legs to work never developed in the first place, they couldn’t be “regenerated”. If this was your goal I think you might need to true polymorph a guy into “the same guy but his legs work”
You couldn’t “restore” something to a state it’s never been in. Cutting off the legs and then casting regenerate would “regenerate” the lost pair of paralyzed legs.
“You touch a creature and stimulate its natural healing ability.”
If stem cells could solve the issue, it’s possible. Turn it into a surgery, high DC medicine check, or an insane arcana check and a DM would probably let it play.
I fuckin hate this notion in modern dnd (which is a misconception in the first place) that its just “let a d20 decide: the game”. That’s not how the game has ever been played. If you wanna have goofy mad-lib games with your friends where you just roll dice and laugh that’s fine but you’ve never, in 50 years, had to roll to see if you’re able to cast Cure Wounds or Heal.
That is a mechanic in some other games where spellcasting isn’t a guaranteed thing. But not in core Dungeons and Dragons.
I wish my DM would accept this. I was born with this power but I might fail to cast it? Why am I not rolling to see if I walk properly since that was a learned ability.
Shadowdark has d20 rolls for spellcasting and by all accounts it’s fantastic. If you succeed the roll you cast the spell and expend no resources. If you fail you can’t cast the spell for the rest of the day. I don’t believe for a second that it’s what the OP in this post was playing though.
didn’t dnd 2e have you roll a d20 if you cast while wearing armor? too low of a roll and the cast fails? No crit effects, just simple pass/fail, right?
Pathfinder has that too, so it presumably carried through 3.5e. It’s why wizards don’t wear armor, and only applies to arcane casters, and classes that are meant to wear some armor like bards get exemptions for the tiers of armor they’re meant to wear.
Casting an Arcane Spell in Armor: A character who casts an arcane spell while wearing armor must usually make an arcane spell failure check. The number in the Arcane Spell Failure Chance column on Table 6–6 is the percentage chance that the spell fails and is ruined. If the spell lacks a somatic component, however, it can be cast with no chance of arcane spell failure.