Rules wise those things are not present in the game, so the rules don't address them.
If you had some sort of class feature, drawback etc. (for example the oracles lame curse) that gave you penalties that you figure were some sort of genetic disease then no, a spell isn't going to remove those penalties or negate that drawback.
Otherwise, if the GM decides to introduce something like this into their world, they will also have to decide how, and if, it interacts with magic, but this is not part of the rules.
To determine whether Remove Disease can cure diseases like that, you need to be able to determine what the DC for those diseases are.
Take, for example, the Wasting oracle curse. Your body is rotting away, and on a fluff standpoint it is easy to say you are very much diseased, sickened, or otherwise impure. But because it's part of a class feature, and not an actual disease, there is no DC that you can beat with a caster level check.
Cancer might have a pretty high DC... or maybe just a low DC but an insane number of consecutive saves required.
Agreed with everyone else.
Those disease don't exist in the game, and there is no mechanics to interact with them.
If they did exist, I would expect that for the most part they would have been wiped out long ago if remove disease changed your fundamental DNA so that you no longer had the disease.
Certainly a spell like Wish could do it if remove disease couldn't, but now we're talking much higher level magic.
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Would Cure Disease correct microencaphaly? Or would that require a Regenerate?First off... it's called remove disease these days... (your 1st edition is showing!).
It would certainly remove the disease and prevent it from doing more damage, but just as the spell doesn't fix ability score damage, it would not fix any physical damage the disease has caused. For that you would indeed need something like restoration or heal or greater restoration or regenerate.
If the problem is a genetic defect it can be cured with remove disease/heal/restoration/regeneration? or it will require a miracle or wish?
As I see it the healing and restoration spells will return the subject to perfect health for his genetic make-up and cure accrued damage from diseases causing progressive damage (like Huntington's chorea), but it will not change you genetic make-up, so a genetic malady will start damaging you again after the spell has "cured" you.
Wish like magic, or some other effect that can change you in a permanent way, will be needed to cure the target permanently.It seem more appropriate for storytelling too, creating some disease that is very hard to cure. A god example could be haemophilia, were the patient can be kept alive and in relatively good shape if he has constant access to healing spells but can't be permanently cured by them alone.
If the genetic defect is causing constant damage, then yes, remove disease should fix it. Although the DC will probably be VERY high. (Remember, if you want a disease that's hard to heal in Pathfinder... just give it a high save DC—remove disease isn't automatic.)
Nothing has changed, I think.
The best cure for a genetic disease is to die and be reincarnated.
The best cure for a genetic disease is to die and be reincarnated.
Weird, that's also the best cure for my love life.
I must admit I have used things like non-curable genetic conditions as plot devices in my games and my players have generally been fine with it.
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In most cases, where cancer would be considered a disease, then remove disease would stop it. What would the DC be? Probably pretty high since we can't stem it very well even with advanced medicines. However, as a disease it would be subject to the spell, theoretically.
Don't compare our modern science to magic, it's just silly.
Magic spells can literally violate the laws of the universe by making matter out of nothing. The fact that our medicine has difficulty treating cancer has no real bearing on how difficult it should be to do with magic.
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Pizza, you cited remove disease in your post, not the heal skill, so your whole reply to Claxon is really off, especially the initial part. You are the one belittling him for a very reasonable answer to what you wrote.
Maybe what you wrote isn't what you did meant to write, but his reply is to your post, not your thoughts.
Modern medicine has a hard time curing deafness. That require implants for reduced hearing, and for some form of deafness there is no cure.
Magic require a 3rd level spell, and success is 100%.
BTW. restoration cure cancer damage. Cancer damage generally is a form of ability drain, so it is cured by spells that heal ability drain.
Another example where magic work way better than current technology.
Removing Radiation Effects: All radiation damage is a poison effect, and as such it can be removed with any effect that neutralizes poison. Ability damage and drain caused by radiation damage can be healed normally.
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The response to that was that the concept of a tenacious disease requiring a check at all is silly, even though it's plainly not silly, it's how it works. Apparently spurred by the fact that it disagreed with Claxon's view that remove disease alters genetics and would prevent people from having that disease.
False:
In most cases, where cancer would be considered a disease, then remove disease would stop it. What would the DC be? Probably pretty high since we can't stem it very well even with advanced medicines. However, as a disease it would be subject to the spell, theoretically.Don't compare our modern science to magic, it's just silly.
Magic spells can literally violate the laws of the universe by making matter out of nothing. The fact that our medicine has difficulty treating cancer has no real bearing on how difficult it should be to do with magic.
You read that as "giving a DC is silly", while he said that "comparing modern medicine to magic is silly".
Modern medicine can treat radiation poisoning? Not really. It can try to remove the radioactive material from the body, but that isn't granted.
It can heal the long term damage done by radioactivity? Not really.
In game magic? It can do both, and as you can repeat the check as many times as you can cast the spell, removing severe radiation damage can be done with a caster level of 10, delay poison will work on it, heal will cure it without the need for a check.
In most cases, where cancer would be considered a disease, then remove disease would stop it. What would the DC be? Probably pretty high since we can't stem it very well even with advanced medicines. However, as a disease it would be subject to the spell, theoretically.Don't compare our modern science to magic, it's just silly.
Magic spells can literally violate the laws of the universe by making matter out of nothing. The fact that our medicine has difficulty treating cancer has no real bearing on how difficult it should be to do with magic.
Even in a fantasy world, water flows downhill. Using our modern understanding of diseases as a guideline for establishing their DC's as a homebrew is perfectly reasonable. You need a starting point for putting a stake in the ground. The second-highest DC in the Core rulebook is the real-world disease Bubonic Plague (DC17) mapped very roughly to game mechanics. So it's not like there isn't a precedent.
If a high DC offends you for some reason, then make it a disease with a special Cure entry, specifying that only spells (or specific spells, if you like) can cure it.
Calling someone's idea "silly" is generally counterproductive, as we can see from the previous run of posts.
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IMO Remove Disease would only be effective on anything spread/caused by a vector. You can't catch cancer or diabetes so the spell is useless.
Restoration would counter the effects (stats damage) but that is all.
Regeneration might work, depending on what it is effecting.
Heal/Wish would remove the condition.
-from the perspective of a person with a degree in medical microbiology who specialized in vaccine/antibiotic manufacture-
I suppose one question that can be asked is whether the disorder in question is an inherent part of the character's genetics that is unchangeable short of a fundamental rebuilding of the character's body from scratch or whether the hereditary part is simply a predisposition to suffering from a given problem that can potentially be suppressed.
In the former case, Remove Disease should not work at all -- he simply lacks the genetic code to define his non-diseased condition.
In the latter case, you would need to invent a DC for removing the latest expression of the disorder, but even then the character would remain vulnerable to the condition recurring if the proper conditions are met.
I don't really have the time to respond to Pizza Lord's, what I assume from the initial tone, scathing response.
My only real point with my post is that I disliked your comparison to modern medicine as a reason to set the DC.
I don't necessarily disagree that the DC should be relatively high since ostensibly things like cancer are "more difficult" and "more harmful" than other diseases.
I just thought your justification for doing so by comparing to medical science just didn't make sense.
Edit: Upon reading a little further seems like you were trying to make some comparison to the heal skill which I absolutely didn't get from the post I originally quoted.
I think you're upset with me because I responded to what you wrote literally instead of what you intended to write and I didn't perceive your meaning. I think you also assumed a lot of stuff on my part that I never said.
I think you mentioned something about me thinking there shouldn't be a DC, but I never said anything to that effect. I'm not even sure what DC (for what) you are referring to.
Diseases don't have to be contagious to be a disease.
Diseases don't have to be contagious to be a disease.
I suspect that the game's focus is on contagious diseases because the rules (and the overall game design) are more concerned with things that happen to a player as a result of something: an encounter, a scenario, a trap, a spell, etc. Mundane illnesses and disease enter into the realm of modeling day-to-day life.
Still, it is an interesting thought exercise to apply the rules to model real-world illnesses. As others point out above, there's genetics, disposition, environmental factors, and so on that all contribute.
One could, for instance, reasonably say that the genetics of your physiological structure aren't diseases. If you have a birth defect or some other deformity, then that's "you". If you have a deformed arm and it gets severed, the Regenerate spell will regenerate your deformed arm. Similarly, Remove Disease won't do anything for your congenital heart defect.
Things that we understand people to be predisposed to because of genetics, such as cancer, are diseases and illnesses because you aren't born with them as a condition. But, they can develop during your life. Those can be removed with Remove Disease, but they don't eliminate the predisposition. Meaning, it can come back. In the case of cancer, you're not cured, but in remission. You're no longer diabetic, but you're pre-diabetic and might want to consider changing your diet. And so on.
Diseases don't have to be contagious to be a disease.I suspect that the game's focus is on contagious diseases because the rules (and the overall game design) are more concerned with things that happen to a player as a result of something: an encounter, a scenario, a trap, a spell, etc. Mundane illnesses and disease enter into the realm of modeling day-to-day life.
Still, it is an interesting thought exercise to apply the rules to model real-world illnesses. As others point out above, there's genetics, disposition, environmental factors, and so on that all contribute.
One could, for instance, reasonably say that the genetics of your physiological structure aren't diseases. If you have a birth defect or some other deformity, then that's "you". If you have a deformed arm and it gets severed, the Regenerate spell will regenerate your deformed arm. Similarly, Remove Disease won't do anything for your congenital heart defect.
Things that we understand people to be predisposed to because of genetics, such as cancer, are diseases and illnesses because you aren't born with them as a condition. But, they can develop during your life. Those can be removed with Remove Disease, but they don't eliminate the predisposition. Meaning, it can come back. In the case of cancer, you're not cured, but in remission. You're no longer diabetic, but you're pre-diabetic and might want to consider changing your diet. And so on.
We can come up with logical arguments like you have all day. In the end thought I think that since it does not specify in the rules what a disease is or is not(well not as specific for our modern understanding) then I'd offer that anything that is a disease will be cured by remove disease. At least that's how I'd run it in my games. Others might run it differently. :)
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IMO Remove Disease would only be effective on anything spread/caused by a vector. You can't catch cancer or diabetes so the spell is useless.
Restoration would counter the effects (stats damage) but that is all.
Regeneration might work, depending on what it is effecting.
Heal/Wish would remove the condition.
-from the perspective of a person with a degree in medical microbiology who specialized in vaccine/antibiotic manufacture-
Not what the spell say.
It can try to cure everything defined as disease in the common language, plus parasites, and some hazard.A pork tapeworm or a tick aren't diseases as defined by a medical manual, but they can be removed (i.e destroyed) by a remove disease spell.
BTW, some form of cancer are potential consequences of virus infections, like papillomavirus and cervical cancer.
The spell isn't based on our knowledge of medical science, it is based on magic.
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Diseases don't have to be contagious to be a disease.I suspect that the game's focus is on contagious diseases because the rules (and the overall game design) are more concerned with things that happen to a player as a result of something: an encounter, a scenario, a trap, a spell, etc. Mundane illnesses and disease enter into the realm of modeling day-to-day life.
Still, it is an interesting thought exercise to apply the rules to model real-world illnesses. As others point out above, there's genetics, disposition, environmental factors, and so on that all contribute.
One could, for instance, reasonably say that the genetics of your physiological structure aren't diseases. If you have a birth defect or some other deformity, then that's "you". If you have a deformed arm and it gets severed, the Regenerate spell will regenerate your deformed arm. Similarly, Remove Disease won't do anything for your congenital heart defect.
Things that we understand people to be predisposed to because of genetics, such as cancer, are diseases and illnesses because you aren't born with them as a condition. But, they can develop during your life. Those can be removed with Remove Disease, but they don't eliminate the predisposition. Meaning, it can come back. In the case of cancer, you're not cured, but in remission. You're no longer diabetic, but you're pre-diabetic and might want to consider changing your diet. And so on.
More or less this, but for cancer you are cured of that cancer. The spell, if successful, remove all the cancer cells from your body, it don't miss some of them.
If you have a predisposition for that kind of cancer and you are exposed again to the a triggering event you can get a new cancer.If you have inhaled asbestos it is still in your body and it is still causing problems (you need a successful remove poison to remove it).
Remove disease don't heal the damage done to your body, and at least part of the damage from a cancer is stat drain, not simply stat damage. To heal that you need at least a restoration spell, but that is a separate thing from the cancer being in remission or it being cured.
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I'm not even sure what DC (for what) you are referring to.
Well, that's the problem - the root of the miscommunication.
There is only one DC for a disease. That DC determines the difficulty of:
1) recovering from the disease without treatment
2) treating the disease with mundane means
3) treating the disease with magical means
Pizza Lord's argument was that because we know that (1) and (2) are difficult for cancer in real life, it should have a high DC, which would incidentally make (3) difficult as well.
Now, there's no reason that (2) and (3) should be the same in Pathfinder, any more than (1) and (2) are actually true in real life - there are plenty of diseases that are fatal if untreated but easy to treat. But for simplicity, the rules assign the same DC to all three tasks.
This is in contrast to deafness, severed limbs, and DEATH which have special mechanics for dealing with them magically, allowing magic to easily deal with things that modern medicine can't.
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The big question is how the PC acquired the disease/condition...
For most modern conditions, like mental health issues, with actual game mechanics, those are considered "Drawbacks" in the character trait system. As far as I know, those cannot be cured.
Beyond that, there are a few physical conditions covered by the Oracle Curses. Oracle curses cannot be cured, but they can, technically, be retained away as part of retraining your oracle levels for another class.
Some diseases do have actual rules, though most of the pathfinder ones are ficticious. I'd strongly suggest avoiding the use of real conditions in RPGs. The issue is that people without those conditions will often use it to satire the condition, or those aflicted, in the name of roleplaying. It is often counter-productive and can result in hostile situations.