Heal check and disease


3.5/d20/OGL


Assistance required please

Situation

PArty encounters creature that inflicts damage and disease upon touch, incubation period 1 day.

After the combat they decide to try use the heal chckto detrmine who has contracted the disease.

How is this possible? or am I havingthe wool pulled over my eyes again?

Tony


Use the save DC of the disease for the DC of the Heal check. I'm not sure if the RAW technically allows you to detect disease with the skill, but if not, I propose only because the game designers thought it would be self-evident who is and is not infected with a disease. It's all there under the Heal skill.

Why would this be pulling the wool over your eyes? The Heal skill is extremely weak (it can't be used to recover hit point damage, and I do believe everything else it does can be replicated more easily by a spell without spending the skill points); but this is one of the few things it is specifically designed for.


Anthony Ellis wrote:
After the combat they decide to try use the heal chckto detrmine who has contracted the disease.

While there is no official answer, I would say the DM could say you can't or make it much harder. After all, how many doctors can tell if you will get a disease until after you show some symptoms.

I would probably rule that a successful heal check lets you know that such a disease is a possibility but you would have to beat it by ten to know if they don't show symptoms (i.e. suffered damage yet).

Just another opinion

The Exchange

I don't see why you should make it harder; as Saern said, it's one of the few things the skill can actually do, so if one of your players sunk skill points into it by all means let him do it. Note, however, that it has to be when he makes the save, so if he failed the initial save against the disease (which makes him contract it) he cannot make his actual heal check until he has to make his next save, which would be the next day (?). I'm sure by that point, for such a quick disease, he would either start showing symptoms or at least tell the person with the heal skill that he's not feeling well.

Remember, it's the DM's job to make it fun, not arbitrarily harder. Unless they like arbitrarily hard things, then by all means go crazy.

But back to my point, I agree with Saern's method of finding the disease.

EDIT: Hell, if they knew the thing carried diseases, they would be safe to assume that everyone that touched it got it and treat themselves accordingly.


Detecting if someone has been infected with a disease is that kind of rules that you won't find easily so in my appreciation the DC in a Healing check should be disease's DC + infecter HDs and the DC must be beaten for at least 10 to determine correctly if someone is infected. Less than that would bring to the character to determine incorrectly if someone is infected or just a lower result simply is not enough to determine such a complicated thing. However everytime that 1/10 of the incubation period has passed the DC should be reduced -1 till the incubation time has finished and the disease shows all its symptoms. I recognize that using the disease's DC as a base could not be realistic in all the cases since powerful diseases not always have notorious symptoms and viceverse. But it is the only referent we have, taking or creating other numbers would comnplicate things and would bring us to create a whole set of rules to this kind of tasks.


3.5 fanman wrote:
Detecting if someone has been infected with a disease is that kind of rules that you won't find easily so in my appreciation the DC in a Healing check should be disease's DC + infecter HDs and the DC must be beaten for at least 10 to determine correctly if someone is infected. Less than that would bring to the character to determine incorrectly if someone is infected or just a lower result simply is not enough to determine such a complicated thing. However everytime that 1/10 of the incubation period has passed the DC should be reduced -1 till the incubation time has finished and the disease shows all its symptoms. I recognize that using the disease's DC as a base could not be realistic in all the cases since powerful diseases not always have notorious symptoms and viceverse. But it is the only referent we have, taking or creating other numbers would comnplicate things and would bring us to create a whole set of rules to this kind of tasks.

I really mean no offense, but that's pretty much what you're doing there. Why so much focus on keeping the person with the Heal skill from just rolling a check as normal to see if Bob is infected and Tom is not?

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