Comments on: Thief 7

By: Lurklen

Lurklen — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 02:27:00 +0000

Firstly, good DMing, that’s a crackerjack kind of problem, and it’s not one that the PC’s can just shake a sword or a staff at and then ride off to the tavern. With the right solution in mind that can be a real quest and a half to solve, and a good opportunity for some serious role play.
I was going to add though, disease in the real world isn’t much different. It’s not that hard to treat a single person, particularly if you catch them early enough and have the right tools at your disposal (knowledge being one of the most useful tools), but treating all the people that one person may have infected? Then treating the people those people may have infected, and so on, that’s where pandemic levels of disease are so terrifying. The truth is a bunch of super healthy people with access to extremely good medical care (PC’s) can do pretty well in an infectious environment, but the infrastructure around them, and the sheer weight of need and illness will often bring them down in the end as well.

I have a plague in my game, that is making it’s way to the big city the PC’s are in. And worse, it’s their fault. It’s from an OSR adventure, can’t remember the name, but it mutates people and turns them into gribbly monsters as it progresses, making them into drones basically. The worst part is though spells can remove the disease, they can fix the changes wrought upon the body as the disease progresses. The Pc’s were looking for a map, and it had been stolen from their contact, who happened to be a cultist of a Goddess of disease, and the thieves had stolen an idol which was in fact a container for the mutating illness. Needless to say, in pursuit of the map, the PC’s let the infected escape. This is in addition to the undead army they accidentally released. They are not very good at their jobs.

By: TachyonCode

TachyonCode — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 12:43:20 +0000

Yeah, kinda figured that it’s another YMMV type of issue. They didn’t exactly design computer monitors with webcomics in mind, did they?

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 08:43:26 +0000

No, see, having text at both the top and bottom so that I have to scroll up and down multiple times is what I dread. I was grateful it wasn’t in this one — though I had to scroll down once just to double-check!

By: Michael Haneline

Michael Haneline — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 03:05:55 +0000

Disease is never a real threat to D&D players above the lowest levels. They are too likely to resist catching it with their heroic Fortitudes, the effects are slow, and unless it’s a homebrew magic-resistant disease, curing it in a single person is easy.
HOWEVER, I have used disease to great effect in a campaign, though I’ve been hesitant to do so again because of how powerless and unhappy it made the healer’s player feel. It was a low magic setting and the main campaign city caught Cackle Fever right out of the DMG. By the time the party was aware of it, thousands of people had it and it was spreading quickly. Remove Disease was a 3rd level spell, and the healer could cast up to 5 of those per day. This could be increased by brewing potions, scribing scrolls, crafting wands, etc, but even if she could perform 100 Remove Diseases a day the disease would spread faster than she could treat it. There were 10 other healers in this large city (the 3rd largest on the continent) that could cast the spell, still not enough. Other healers were sent for, but it still wasn’t enough. Beyond spellcasting, the disease had to be treated with the Heal skill, which allow you to treat up to 6 people with Cackle Fever per day regardless of your skill rank, but you can’t heal it with one success, you need two in a row, at a DC 18 check which is easy for experienced adventurers but not such a sure thing in the hands of the many NPC’s you’d need working at healing such a fast-spreading plague.
Basically, the threat of disease in D&D can still be great, but it’s more of an indirect threat. The PCs probably aren’t going to die of a non-magical disease, but they are far more powerless to protect a city from it than they are from an army of orcs.

By: Sahara

Sahara — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:40:47 +0000

That is one reason two of my favorite books were The Doomsday Book, and Pastwatch. Doomsday Book, it’s got an interesting juxtaposition of one person who travels back in time and ends up in Europe during the Black Plague, and the rest of their group who are in the present time and a cold (flu?) is going around. The flu is often in somewhat comical scenes, and it’s a really stark contrast. In Pastwatch (huh another time travel book), one thing that is specifically addressed is providing immunity to the diseases that the Spanish conquistadores bring across the ocean when they discover the Americas.