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Id be willing to say that swarms of things that can be effected by weapon damage could be healed, but probably not for something like centipedes or roaches.
Is there an official position on this? Id imagine its a 'yes they can be healed', but mechanically, that doesnt really seem to make much sense to me, as the swarm being 'healed' would likely just mean more members of the same species (centipedes, roaches, monkeys, whatever) show up and join with the rest.
So, yea. Whatcha think?
It gets a bit tricky but I might allow them to be healed with a burst...
I think it would be death prevention, like in Magic the Gathering. One round or it's too late. Animal growth would also add hit dice of swarms.
So long as the healing is not a single target effect, then I think you are good to go.
A swarm of ameobas is a definte multi-celled organism.
If you agree that other swarms are the same, then yes.
Otherwise, no.
I say yes, as long as it's no more than a round later.
To me it depends on what you are using. Anything that targets a specific number of creatures is going to fail, just like any inflict spell would fail. Any area effect, like channel energy, is going to function like any other area effect, which is to say the the swarm would only feel half the effect. I'll admit the logic behind how you can heal swarms when damage is killing off individual members is fuzzy, but with the introduction of channel energy, there does seem to be a corner case where mechanically it can be done. You end up having to make a ruling that is, fluff wise, at odds with itself regardless of how you do it.
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The swarm is immune to single target spells (except mind-affecting spells, in some cases), so yeah, cure wounds definitely falls in that category.
Swarm rules are pretty dodgy, 'though.
If you wanted to allow it, I'd be inclined to allow many single target spells, such as scorching ray, to inflict at least *some* damage to a swarm. Maybe minimum damage in all cases, so scorching rays would do 4 hp damage, and magic missiles 2 hp each, and cure / inflict light wounds wounds 1+CL? Scorching ray, in particular, sounds pretty devastating, and it's hard for me to picture these 4d6 blasts of deadly heat striking into a swarm of tightly packed creatures without actually hitting more than one of them...
Swarms are immune to targeted spells, but not area of effect.
Mechanically speaking:
Touch spells are a no-go. Burst spells or effects (clerical burst healing, fireball,etc) work just fine.
Yes there is a logical gap because HP damage to a swarm means little creatures die. However, its magic. You'll have to suspend your disbelief just a bit when talking about burst healing.
Here's an example of why swarm rules are so dodgy,
70. Human Swarm
As you move through the room, a man in rags springs out of hiding and rushes towards you screaming incoherently at the top of his lungs. He slams into the person nearest him, and falls over dead, dealing one point of damage. He is just above average height, with brown hair and eyes, and is dressed in rags. He has no discernable treasure about him.
This swarm of humans does not follow many of the traditional swarm rules. It is encountered one person at a time until all one hundred human swarm members are defeated. They all look exactly the same, but attack in slightly different fashion. Whether falling out of a tree onto one of the party, or rushing through a crowd screaming, only the party ever notices the swarm, and the swarm never attempts to harm anyone put the PC's.
I think this is not a swarm. Maybe it's a swarm that has already broken up. If I ever manage to playtest The Cleaves, this may be the worst part.
My point is that a swarm is an organism in any way not specificly prohibited. If the members do not stick close, it breaks up.
The ruling I use, while imperfect, stays pretty close to the description for swarms. Any spell or ability that requires you to select specific targets is not going to work against a swarm. Anything else is an area effect, and the swarm will feel half of any healing/damage. Unless a specific exception is called out, like it is for gust of wind, I don't like making exceptions when rai doesn't make any more logical sense than raw does. If I am going to handwave the fluff portion anyway, there is no sense in giving myself extra work.
It depends where you draw the line. Spillable spells like scorching ray would affect nearby swarm members. Magic missle would not. Consider what spells could be fired into a grapple. I'll give up on the touch, cure spells.
It's an valid question, and one that deserves a full discussion. I made my ruling the way I did to save time and keep things moving, but that does not preclude a proper discussion here. I am enjoying seeing how others judge it. Channel energy is a difficult corner case that is likely to get multiple judgments and reasoning.
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Yes there is a logical gap because HP damage to a swarm means little creatures die. However, its magic. You'll have to suspend your disbelief just a bit when talking about burst healing.
I'll fall on the other side of the argument. My position is that the game rules allow us to simulate a fictional experience; they don't define that experience. The game rules allow a channel energy (positive for living things, negative for undead swarms) to heal damage, but that doesn't make sense here.
So long as we don't use GURPS with all the optional grognard bells-and-whistles, there's always going to be doofy rules in any game system that don't line up to the underlying 'reality'. My answer is to apply common sense and follow the narrative. Until we decide that positive energy can bring things back from the dead, it can't heal swarms.
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Anything else is an area effect, and the swarm will feel half of any healing/damage.
So, instead of taking +50% extra damage from AoE damaging effects, you rule that swarms only take half damage from AoE? That's pretty rough.
I've found that, especially at low-level, swarms are a little too deadly, for their CR, since a party that doesn't have something like burning hands (the *only* 1st level AoE damage spell in core) prepared at 1st level is pretty much TPK'd.
I may have misread the rules, if I did, its because I've had a ticking real life time bomb on my mind that just exploded in my face. I may have to go back and reread them when I have a clearer head.
Anything else is an area effect, and the swarm will feel half of any healing/damage.So, instead of taking +50% extra damage from AoE damaging effects, you rule that swarms only take half damage from AoE? That's pretty rough.
I've found that, especially at low-level, swarms are a little too deadly, for their CR, since a party that doesn't have something like burning hands (the *only* 1st level AoE damage spell in core) prepared at 1st level is pretty much TPK'd.
In my experience, people tend to overlook the + next to the 50%. They actually take 150% damage, so that 10 fire damage from a spell is actually 15 fire damage to a swarm.
Also, low level swarm fights are vicious if you require PCs to kill them to earn the XP. The Master of the Fallen Fortress module has a swarm fight or two in it and there is a suggestion as to how to deal with it if the PCs are ill-equipped for it.
Remember swarms don't die, they are broken up. For them, HPs are an abstraction quantifying their integrity as a multitude acting as one. Yea, attacks kill some of them off, but their numbers dimishinging is not what's relevant (that's why their stats don't decrease as they take damage). The damage works toward disbursing them.
Whereas a creature may be wounded, dying or dead (or be diminished in it's ability to reduce the severity of injuries, which is also what HPs are), a swarm is only either together or disbursed.
I believe the rules are silent on how exacly a swarm 'heals' their integrity.
So, seems it'd really be up to the DM to house rule. You could say that it's totally analigous to creatures - that it takes a given time of rest for a swarm to rebuild it's integrity, and that magical healing speeds that process in just the same way it heals creatures - but a DM could also say it's apples and oranges, like how healing works differenly for Undead, and rule a swarm recovers faster, slower, needs an infusion of new members, or anything else that makes sense for the story.
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It's an valid question, and one that deserves a full discussion. I made my ruling the way I did to save time and keep things moving, but that does not preclude a proper discussion here. I am enjoying seeing how others judge it. Channel energy is a difficult corner case that is likely to get multiple judgments and reasoning.
A swarm disperses at 0 hit points, my guess is that it's because lots of insects are dying... can you really cheese your way into saying that a 35 damage 10d6 fireball is NOT killing any of the insects in the swarm? if you can, you have significantly-sized cojones methinks...
Yes there is a logical gap because HP damage to a swarm means little creatures die. However, its magic. You'll have to suspend your disbelief just a bit when talking about burst healing.I'll fall on the other side of the argument. My position is that the game rules allow us to simulate a fictional experience; they don't define that experience. The game rules allow a channel energy (positive for living things, negative for undead swarms) to heal damage, but that doesn't make sense here.
So long as we don't use GURPS with all the optional grognard bells-and-whistles, there's always going to be doofy rules in any game system that don't line up to the underlying 'reality'. My answer is to apply common sense and follow the narrative. Until we decide that positive energy can bring things back from the dead, it can't heal swarms.
It's your world. It works however you want it to.
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Also, low level swarm fights are vicious if you require PCs to kill them to earn the XP. The Master of the Fallen Fortress module has a swarm fight or two in it and there is a suggestion as to how to deal with it if the PCs are ill-equipped for it.
Yeah, and other than rat swarms, any party with a halfling, gnome, dwarf or moderately encumbered / medium-armored warrior type in it isn't gonna be able to outrun any of them, either. (Well, the taller lighter armored sorts can abandon the stunties to die, but, in my experience, a party is more likely to stay and all die together than do that.)
Swarms, IMO, are the 3.5 versions of old classic 1st and 2nd edition monsters like oozes and golems and rakshasas, where, if you didn't have the *exact* thing you needed, you were dead.
I may have misread the rules, if I did, its because I've had a ticking real life time bomb on my mind that just exploded in my face. I may have to go back and reread them when I have a clearer head.
Sounds bad! Good luck with that real world thing!
I don't see any reason not to let the swarm heal 150% from channel energy.
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How would you imagine Selective Channelling to work on them? If you can exclude five creatures from your Channel, does a 10-by-10 swarm count as one, four (for four areas), or a whoooole bunch?
Related, but odder question: do you think that someone channelling negative energy, using the Rebuke Undead feat, could rebuke an undead swarm. I mean, a skeleton is mindless, but a swarm is really mindless.
I would rule in favor of the players on the grounds that swarms are difficult enough to deal with at the appropriate CR. They shouldn't be made more difficult by benefiting from channel energy.
However, if one felt the compulsion to heal that swarm for whatever reason, I would only allow it to heal a maximum number of hit points equal to its HD. It's not excessive, and it's not nothing.
A CR 1 spider swarm deals 1d6 damage per round plus poison... I mean... a party of four 1st level adventurers MIGHT have an alchemists fire on them. Just let the squishy caster get crept up on by that.
Lumusi the Crawling Horde thinks swarms should get to be healed. :)
The swarms are treated as a single entity for most game effects, with the exceptions to these effects being called out in their entry. There is nothing suggesting that they cannot be healed, other than being immune to single target spells. In the same way that a cleric channeling negative energy can harm a swarm, a cleric channeling positive energy should heal them. It's just simple logic and fairness.
Likewise, since the swarm is treated as a single entity, I'd say that effects like Selective Channeling work normally with it. It has a single HP pool, single set of saves, and so forth. If it doesn't call it out, I wouldn't change it.
Likewise, since the swarm is treated as a single entity, I'd say that effects like Selective Channeling work normally with it. It has a single HP pool, single set of saves, and so forth. If it doesn't call it out, I wouldn't change it.
I think it'd fall under "A swarm is immune to any spell or effect that targets a specific number of creatures" - so you can't selectively exempt the swarm from the channel, because that targets a specific number of creatures (rather, it UNtargets them, but the idea is the same).
Likewise, since the swarm is treated as a single entity, I'd say that effects like Selective Channeling work normally with it. It has a single HP pool, single set of saves, and so forth. If it doesn't call it out, I wouldn't change it.I think it'd fall under "A swarm is immune to any spell or effect that targets a specific number of creatures" - so you can't selectively exempt the swarm from the channel, because that targets a specific number of creatures (rather, it UNtargets them, but the idea is the same).
Fair enough. Ok, it's impossible to ignore a swarm, but healing them with AoE healing would work.