Hello everybody!
I have a roleplaying question: what happens (in a visual way) to a target when a cleric casts Inflict Wounds spells on him? Does he simply feel bad? Or does he bleed with visible wounds?
Thank you
As Shfish said, the amount of effect can vary with the target's total HP, and you're free to GM this any way you want - for me, I describe it as "flesh tearing open as the victim's body erupts from within itself in a spray of blood that bursts from a wound, or many wounds, that wasn't there an instant ago." The amount of the damage (percentage of total HP) determines how much I describe it as a huge wound, or a lot of wounds, or rather just a small wound appears (much like I use similar size descriptions when a fighter hits a monster with a sword - if that hit takes most of its HP, I make it sound like a big wound, but if it only gets a tiny fraction of the monster's HP, I describe it as a small cut).
He laughs at you for expending a spell slot with such terrible inefficiency.
That said, it's negative energy, so I'd think of it as a sort of necrotizing energy. Rather than a wound, think of it more like a drain. Skin loses color, might get rotten, that kind of thing.
As given, it is a role-playing game. Its your call for flavour (and your table's, if it has some knock-on effect in a given scenario).
Personal aesthetics make me lean toward some visible or evident sense of harm occurring given that'd otherwise allow inflict to be thrown at enemies with them having reason to expect it's not a spell, they just got ill very quickly.
I personally prefer to see it as "Negative Healing".
I.e. Inflict Light Wounds will open up some of his more recent minor injuries. Bruises, bumps, small cuts and scratches, etc. all come back at the same time. Discomforting, but rarely deadly.
Going up higher, the further back it goes and the more serious it may become.
That Commoner may have never had an injury more severe than a broken arm, but if you open up every wound he's ever had with Inflict Serious it's gonna add up. That briar patch he walked through every few months picking blackberries when he was a kid may have seemed like a bare nuisance at the time, but if every scratch he ever took were to open up at the same time, his legs and hands/forearms would be cut to ribbons at the very least. He'd bleed to death from the Death of a Thousand Cuts.
Personally, I wonder this also, since the idea of a Dhampir getting ripped apart every time the Cleric heals him for 10 hitpoints, that's going to be a very ridiculous game.
Personally, I wonder this also, since the idea of a Dhampir getting ripped apart every time the Cleric heals him for 10 hitpoints, that's going to be a very ridiculous game.
I thought every game got ridiculous the moment at least one player pipes up, noticing something silly s/he can do. Though again, flavour is by choice. I'd personally quite like to play the Dhampir having to suffer every time the Cleric channels positive energy. Just for that silliness.
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Oh, I have no problem with him suffering the positive energy(mainly because I can't get rid of it, so might as well roll with it), just the visual of wounds opening up every time he supposedly gets 'healed', it's just one of those things that's hard to reconcile, visually. The above suggested visual of it just being necrotic energy, that's a little easier.
This is called a role playing game for a reason.....you decide within the limits of the damage to hp ratio of the creature....for a creature that has 200 hp 1d8+5 is likely small scratches or discomfort but with a 12 hp creature ham it up...
Pretty much this, yeah. You can put whatever visuals on it you want.
I always pictured it as a flash of negative energy that caused internal injury upon contact---with the tell-tale spitting up blood to show it worked.
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Personally I go with more of the Necrotizing thing with Negative Energy spells. The reasoning being that all living creatures are positive energy within them and is the energy they use to stay active. So if negative energy come into contact with something with positive energy, I imagine it like Matter and Anti-matter or Positive and negative charged magnitisim cancelling each other out. The Negative Energy "cancels out" the positive energy within the creature, draining some of its vitality and life force. This makes it self apparant through bruising, rot, and spontanious bleeding from orafices as their organs begin to fail from the destructive effects of the negative energy annihilating the positive energy (like what happens when matter and anti-matter interact with each other).
Now this also allows for the explaination of how undead and Dhampir get healed without erupting in spouts of blodo while getting "healed (harmed?)." Since the undead/dhampir are animated with pure negative or mostly negative energy to start with, it does not affect them the same way. There is no harmful "cancelation effect" when hit with negative energy since there is no (or very little) positive energy to cancel out. Granted, by the same token, positive energy does cause this cancellation effect, therefore causing them harm in the same way negative energy does to "normal" living things.