So I decided to play with the numbers on this disease just to see what I'd end up with and I thought others might be interested in the conclusions.
OK first thing I did was go back and look at the DMG to see what kind of healing from the people with class levels would be available. Interestingly I noted that with 19000 people Korvosa City has roughly 950 Adepts - but their all 1st level. They can purify food and drink like nobodies business but the DMG presumes that there is 1 higher level adept in a city but makes no mention that there are any other Adepts with levels except for a single high level one and a huge number of 1st level adepts. Rather odd but there it is.
I noticed that there should be the ability to heal roughly 140 odd people a day - but that the vast majority of this healing is coming from very few people. Basically 3 higher level clerics and 3 higher level druids take care of about a third of this healing - presuming their using their higher level slots to take the 3rd level cure disease spell.
Its interesting to consider this - it would seem that clerics and druids can easily and quickly stop a plague if its caught early and halted immediately. They can pretty much just magic it away at its initial stages but plagues that break out among a lot of people are - as James noted in the introduction to this AP, beyond the ability of magic to halt once the numbers start to get up there. I was also a little surprised to notice that the Paladins are virtually worthless at halting a plague. Their cure disease abilities are once or twice per week and are great for an adventuring party but can't help large numbers of sick.
I ran the numbers through a spread sheet to see what the mortality of this plague is and, presuming your a first level commoner with 10 in either Con or Chr you have about a 1/3 chance of recovering - that is at some point managing to make the DC 16 save twice in a row. Its fractionally less then a 1/3 - I have 319 people recovering per 1000 exposed but I think thats close enough to 1/3 for DMs to just use 1/3 as a rule of thumb should it come up.
The adventure is not really clear on how long the plague lasts but I'd think that its about ~2 weeks from the time that its really out of control until the time when its gotten small enough that magic can be used to eradicate it. Thats a bit of a compressed time scale but its almost needed since there is the problem that if only 300 people have the disease on a given day then thats something that magic should be able to actually handle.
So I played around with this in a spread sheet and realized that we could get numbers that are roughly reflective of what the module is telling us pretty easily.
I presumed that on day one 800 people where infected by the coins. Every day every two infected people would infect 1 new person (I tried a formula that was more infectious but had trouble making it work). On day 2 magic will start to be employed to combat the disease, cures 50 people on day 2, 100 on day 3 and 150 from day 4 through 7, after that its back down to 100 as resources get harder to come by.
Using these numbers almost 3800 people will die of the disease, about 900 will have gotten it and fought it off, another 1400 will have gotten the disease and were cured by magic.
The disease will reach its apex on day 6 with about 1500 sick, on day 11 people will be confident that the worst is over as only 1000 people will be sick and this number drops rapidly over the next few days until everything is under control by day 14.
The single biggest factor knocking the number of sick down - the dead, after day 7 many people start to die and once dead they can't infect new people (presumably). Magic essentially takes a bite out of this disease and eradicates it when the number of sick get small enough but mainly this plague (presuming the numbers I'm using here) burns itself out.
Obviously most of us will be more or less hand waving this but heres some basic numbers that are roughly in line with the adventure should you want them.
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Very nice! That's some impressive data crunching there. I think it would be interesting too to apply actual epidemiological algorithms to calculate the actual infection rate (or something like that... heh).
Hmm, actually, one of my players created a simulation program for use in epidemiology for her final year Computer Science dissertation, I may have to find out if she still has the code knocking about and see what I can throw together...
I think it is even worst though because of the queens doctor and his helpers spreading the disease instead of cureing it
I think it is even worst though because of the queens doctor and his helpers spreading the disease instead of cureing it
Well I'd not have much trouble getting things to be worse but their set at the numbers I've chosen in order to get the total body count between 3600 and 4000 which seems to be what the adventure indicates will be the number of dead.
One factor that might be considered when contemplating the effect of the evil doctor etc. is that the infection rate I've used - one new infected person per two currently sick, would presumably drop as the plague carries on via quarantines etc. Since I've kept it constant its already sort of factored in that as time carries on there is deliberate introduction of the plague.
Jermey i think these numbers are great im just saying that it could get even worst then how bad you have
which is really bad for the people of Korvaso
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But that's assuming that the magic weilders can get to everyone that they can cure... If the whole city population stays on a field and everyone helps move the sick to the curing casters then the growth MIGHT slow.
But really, even in fantasy land, the casters will not be able to get to the everyone that they should be able to heal.
I hope that makes sense.... :|
Good work on the number crunching Jermey.
But that's assuming that the magic weilders can get to everyone that they can cure... If the whole city population stays on a field and everyone helps move the sick to the curing casters then the growth MIGHT slow.
But really, even in fantasy land, the casters will not be able to get to the everyone that they should be able to heal.I hope that makes sense.... :|
Good work on the number crunching Jermey.
Well technically by RAW this is not really a problem - until one of their stats hits zero they can walk to the caster unless their is a quarantine or something.
In any case if there are lots of sick some will have money or be able to borrow or call in a favour and be able to transport themselves to a priest and those will be the ones that are healed.
The more interesting question is what happens with small numbers of contagious sick people. The adventure indicates that many of the church's only cure for pay. Thats a pretty standard assumption in D&D after all the DMG lists prices for getting spells cast. However its a very short sighted response. Essentially its refusing to allow people to use water from 'your' lake to put out a fire even when its clear that the fire will burn your cottage down as well as your neighbours.
Essentially speaking magic is such a cheap resource (you get the spells back the next day) that it makes little sense for the priests to allow people with contagious diseases to remain sick and wandering around when they can so easily magic the problem away before it grows into something that they don't have enough magic to deal with.
Essentially this is one of those areas where, really, we should be considering how the existence of magic, in this case, would create a society that is not really identical to the historical medieval society. Here I think we'd get behaviour thats much closer to what we see in the modern world when dealing with a plague because magic has equipped this society with the ability to deal with plagues in a manner thats closer to the present then it is to Black Death infested Europe.
In lands without state-subsidized health care, it's often exceedingly difficult to find the sick before the problem becomes acute, as we know in America. The sick can't afford to get sick, so they live in hope that it's going to all work out and fear that it won't. So we wait until we have to act, at which point it may be too late or vastly more expensive. At the time period where the high-level healers would be most effective, they are least likely to be able to get to the right place to heal the right people. (And, of course, using mid-level divination magic to find these people itself drains Cure Disease resources.)
Also, while you cite modern disease intervention, there was a huge time delay on the level of years when it came to the modern plague cited in the Pathfinder adventure: AIDS. In addition, if we really cared about pandemic prevention, there are a number of interventions that are cheap (mosquito nets, basic sanitation infrastructure) that have not been taken in the modern era.
Ideology is a powerful force in itself.
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The more interesting question is what happens with small numbers of contagious sick people. The adventure indicates that many of the church's only cure for pay. Thats a pretty standard assumption in D&D after all the DMG lists prices for getting spells cast. However its a very short sighted response. Essentially its refusing to allow people to use water from 'your' lake to put out a fire even when its clear that the fire will burn your cottage down as well as your neighbours.
Essentially speaking magic is such a cheap resource (you get the spells back the next day) that it makes little sense for the priests to allow people with contagious diseases to remain sick and wandering around when they can so easily magic the problem away before it grows into something that they don't have enough magic to deal with.
The question then leads two what are the people paying for? they arn't just paying for a spell to be cast on them, they are paying for a valuable priest to put himself in harms way of being infected. If this priest gets infected, than the entire temple could be infected by said priest. Also note that the priests will cure their own before the general populace, and that will happen more than once during the case of the pandemic
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The question then leads two what are the people paying for? they arn't just paying for a spell to be cast on them, they are paying for a valuable priest to put himself in harms way of being infected. If this priest gets infected, than the entire temple could be infected by said priest. Also note that the priests will cure their own before the general populace, and that will happen more than once during the case of the pandemic
I think this could well be the deciding issue in the AP's situation, the infected coins in the church of Abadar meant that in those first few days, when ideally they should be dealing with the sick outside and containing the plague, instead they were distracted by healing their own.
In lands without state-subsidized health care, it's often exceedingly difficult to find the sick before the problem becomes acute, as we know in America. The sick can't afford to get sick, so they live in hope that it's going to all work out and fear that it won't. So we wait until we have to act, at which point it may be too late or vastly more expensive. At the time period where the high-level healers would be most effective, they are least likely to be able to get to the right place to heal the right people. (And, of course, using mid-level divination magic to find these people itself drains Cure Disease resources.)
Also, while you cite modern disease intervention, there was a huge time delay on the level of years when it came to the modern plague cited in the Pathfinder adventure: AIDS. In addition, if we really cared about pandemic prevention, there are a number of interventions that are cheap (mosquito nets, basic sanitation infrastructure) that have not been taken in the modern era.
Ideology is a powerful force in itself.
I agree with you in a general extent but note that I'm not talking about plagues in far away places that will kill millions of nameless people we don't really care about.
I'm talking about an American docter walking into a poor tenement in Miami - seeing a patient with Ebola, asking about health insurance and deciding to do nothing at all when it becomes clear that the patient has no money.
Its completely the wrong answer - if one decides that no money = no treatment then the patient needs to be isolated or eliminated as a threat to everyone else. After all the doctor faces a problem if Ebola breaks out in Miami - he can either stay and risk dieing himself or he can flee and of course everything in his expensive Miami home will probably be taken by looters. Whatever the correct answer is - its not walk away saying 'good luck'.
With SDttG I only found this as an issue in the initial encounter with the girl. Essentially there the priests behaviour ceases to make much sense. There is also the rather confusing aspect of what happens near the end of the plague. I mean the city has already lost 4000 people and there are 25 people left with Blood Veil - but their poor and can't pay. So does the priesthood resign itself to the plague soon spreading far beyond what they can control? or do they cure the disease gratis? Seems obvious they must cure it gratis or the plague will just come back.
The question then leads two what are the people paying for? they arn't just paying for a spell to be cast on them, they are paying for a valuable priest to put himself in harms way of being infected. If this priest gets infected, than the entire temple could be infected by said priest. Also note that the priests will cure their own before the general populace, and that will happen more than once during the case of the pandemic
The priests can't die from this - they'll just magic the problem away the next day.
Now in this case the priests are tapped out for the first few days because of the vector (the coins) and I assumed no magic for the first few days as the priests take care of their own first.
Something else you may want to consider is that the incubation period of a disease, the time during a person is infectious, and the appearance of its symptons are not the same. Very often, a victim is infectious before symptons of the disease appears.
Therefore, by the time the first person (Brienna Soldado) shows symptons, the disease could have affected hundreds if not thousands. As the clerics and healers belatedly begin to control the outbreak of the disease, they don't realize much of the city is already infected.
Now, this doesn't square with the disease rules in the PHB, which assumes symptons appear by the next day. At the same time, the PHB rules operates under the assumption of "monster diseases" that you get from monsters. Nothing says "standard diseases" must operate the same way.
Here is an article that talkes briefly about this, but the money quote is this:
“It seems that the plague’s latent period was 10-12 days”, says Chris Duncan, “while the infectious period prior to the appearance of symptoms lasted 20-22 days, giving a total incubation period of about 32 days. This is exceptionally long and it explains why the plague could jump very long distances even in the days of primitive transport: for three weeks, people didn’t realise they had been infected. People generally died five days after the first symptoms appeared, so the average time from infection to death was about 37 days. This is an interesting finding, because European health authorities had quickly determined on 40 days as a safe quarantine period for the plague.”
If Blood Veil is similar, then perhaps a month occurs from the appearance of the plague ship before Brienna Soldado and the other first victims show symptons. That would give about 20 days for the disease to spread before anyone knows it has even arrived.
Imagine this, the disease starts in Old Korvosa, and clerics begin to deal with the threat. Then all of a sudden, symptons begin to appear all over the city, including the noble districts. Paranoid and hypochondriac aristocrats demand the clerics spend their time healing them, including those that do not show symptons (and who may or may not be infected). That would cause issues with dealing with the disease.
You could even have the plague ship arrive during the events of Edge of Anarchy, and have the plague spread while they are during some of the last adventures there. Then a few days in character after they complete the module, BAM they hear about Brienna.