"Fixers" are fucking annoying in any roleplay experience, I don't know what drives them to it but they never seem to get that it's not like, it's not like actually being crippled.
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.
What an awful DM. I can't find any TTRPGs that have a "heal wounds" spell, and I definitely can't find any that have a player roll a d20 to see how effective their healing is. I'd be pissed if my character had some medical condition as part of their story, and another player just rolled a nat 20 to get rid of it
The problem is that newbies see this shit and think it's normal. One in every 20 rolls is a nat 20. It just means that what you tried went as well as it possibly could have. It doesn't make possible anything that wasn't already
Y’all concern trolling about how a meme is gonna ruin your (insert thing here) is getting kinda old man.
Shit, someone might not understand an obvious joke and then you might have to explain to a noob how the game actually works? That must be so hard for you as a master storyteller and fantasy roleplayer.
Their group should be setting realistic expectations for newcomers then and if they wanna do a throwaway fun session with relaxed rules they can another time.
And if people that don't partake think a session is this wacky wild shit, who cares? They aren't playing.
… 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.
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.
You're assuming there are enough >2nd level casters around to cast Lesser Restoration (or whatever the equivalent is in your campaign). As far as I'm concerned, magic should be extraordinarily rare. Does every preacher get cleric powers? Does everyone with draconic ancestry get sorcerer powers? Can anyone with an instrument kill a commoner with an insult?
In my campaigns, very few NPCs are even 1st level in a class. Maybe one in every 20 villages has a 1st level cleric in their church. It takes a 130 IQ to even start learning to be a wizard. Basically everyone can trace some line back to a dragon in their family tree, but maybe 0.001% ever get strong enough powers to even cast a Light cantrip
I have had players make persuasion checks against me before when they want to do something that's explicitly outside the rules but I think it would be cool. Depending on how cool I think it would be, the DC can be anywhere from 10 to 20, and the player doesn't have proficiency
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.
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/starbuck@lemmy.world'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
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.
It's explicitly within the capabilities of a Lesser Restoration, but also I would not allow a player to cast that spell on another player if that other player didn't want it
Edit: also as another person said, the adult who has never used their legs before never learned how to walk, so even if they had functioning legs, it would not help
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"
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.
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?
Wheelchairs only work because of modern paving and asphalt. Cobblestone and dirt roads would never accommodate a wheelchair. Magic carpets are right there.
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.