Scavion wrote:
Xenrac, The bolded portion of the quote however could be used to simply state that the remains of a disintegrate spell *always* count as a small portion of its body through its lack of the phrase "For this effect." This is how I view it.
This is fine. Just deliberately being obtuse to common sense to create advantageous ambiguity. Because, surprise surprise, the rules aren't perfect.
Scavion wrote:
I also adhere to the fact you must first be able to target a creature in order to affect it with a spell. Some people have stated that the dust is not a valid target for Breath of Life. Breath of Life has the same targeting wording as resurrection.
The whole part of "The condition of the remains..." is an addendum on what raise dead can't do so that resurrection can do it.
Funny thing. Breath of Life and Resurrect DO have different targeting wording. Resurrect inherits Raise Dead's "Dead Creature Touched" (and modifies it so that you can even be holding the deceased's flesh stripped skull or a handful of dust that used to be them), and Breath of Life specifies "Creature Touched" (and modifies it so that it includes a creature that died less than one round ago).
Here's the thing. The General rule of Disintegrate is that you get turned into a pile of dust. A pile of dust is clearly no longer a creature, debates on WHAT precisely it is, can be neatly handled by Resurrect which modifies that and says that this dust is now a small part of a dead creature. And thus, Resurrect is happy now, because it only needs a small part of a dead creature.
Breath of Life on the other hand inherits the restrictions of other Cure spells, because it is explicitly a cure spell. And modifies its target range from whole, living creatures, to whole creatures that are either living or have died less than a round ago. It does not receive the same treatment where it blankets "parts of dead creatures". That's something only Resurrect gets. (Before you disagree, read on, the rest of this post is the real important part)
To illustrate that, let's take a Cleric, a victim, and us (the torturers). The Cleric and Victim are both tied up, several feet away from each other (and for whatever reason, the Cleric only has Resurrection, Cure Moderate Wounds and Breath of Life prepared and does not have his holy symbol at hand). As a method of psychological torture, we decide to cut the victim's finger off, and toss it to his Cleric (grandly gruesome torture is always fun), then, because we can't find any better place to put it, we stab our knife into the victim's shoulder.
Could the Cleric cast Cure Moderate Wounds on the finger to heal this Victim?
Could he do this with Breath of Life?
Could he do anything with Resurrection?
The answer is no.
Now, take the same situation, except have the stabbing happen first, and repeatedly. We get a little carried away with it, and the torture victim goes down to one above -Con, and passes out. We gleefully cut off his finger and toss it to the Cleric as a keepsake, and this "small" amount of damage kills our torture victim.
Could the Cleric cast Cure Moderate Wounds on this bloody keepsake to heal the victim?
Nope, same reason as before, we just have his finger, no way to heal him.
Could the Cleric give us a nasty surprise and Resurrect our victim ten feet away from his dead body?
YUP. We've got a part of his body. Doesn't matter that the body is across the room, we are totally reconstructing him.
Could the Cleric use Breath of Life to bring our victim back to life?
Nope. You clearly aren't touching his body, even though cutting off the finger killed him, and that finger was part of his body when he died, you aren't touching him, that finger is no longer part of him.
And that's just the on topic stuff. If you have the blinders on so hard that you believe that Breath of Life and Resurrection "have the same targeting conditions" then I've got a good list of simple, straight RAW cases where they clearly work and target differently.
