You’ve really gotta feel for Oracle. She goes out of her way to run this clinic, but nobody listens. Despite her hours of prep time, the other participants are more interested in dicking around than having a carefully curated experience. It’s almost as if her supposed authority is an illusion, and her players med students are just chaos gremlins out to do their own thing.
ಠ_ಠ
Any dang way, since we already talked about feeding potions to your buddies, what do you say we take a step back and ponder our gaming philosophy? As food for thought, consider the at-the-table version of today’s comic.
“Can I use a consumable item to heal my buddy?”
“Sure! There are rules for trickling a potion down a creature’s throat.”
“Well sure. But can I use goodberries to do the same thing?”
“Ummm….”
And within that “um” lies our dilemma. The same “um” pops up whenever player creativity smacks face first into blank spots in the rules. We’ve seen this biz with hurling your friends, creative lumberjacking, and using the help action, just to name a few. And to my way of thinking, there are a few key ways GMs tend to approach these decision.
- Respect Game World— GMs with this mindset have a clear vision of what’s happening in the fiction. In the present example, dribbling drink down an unconscious creature’s gizzard makes narrative sense. Clogging their windpipe with a berry does not. In order to preserve the fiction, we deny the action.
- Facilitate Gameplay — GMs coming from this perspective have an eye on the numbers. That means we can skip past the fluff and head into the mechanical effects. One berry equals one hp. Simple enough. We can always come up with a post-hoc rationalization aynway. Maybe you crush the berry and dribble the juice? Whatever. In order to preserve the flow of play, we handwaive the question of fictional justifications.
- Ad Hoc Rulings — GMs of this persuasion will recognize the altered circumstances and try to reflect that shift mechanically. The original 3.X rule of taking a full-round action rather than a standard to administer a potion is a good example of the style. The goal is to more accurately reflect the unique situation.
As with so many elements of this hobby, all approaches can be useful. The important thing is understanding the effect rather than the philosophy. After all, a consistent game world, balanced game play, and niche rulings all have their place. So for today’s discussion, what do you say we swap tales of each approach from our own games? When have you rejected an action as nonsensical, given an action a pass in the name of expediency, and come up with you own one-off ruling for a weird situation? And if you have another philosophy to add to the pile, feel free to tell us your tale down in the comments!
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I chew the berries and feed him like a mama bird!
Goodberry is already a very good spell. It doesn’t need to be made better by letting it do extra things that its text doesn’t say that it can do, and what its text says it does is “A creature can use its action to eat one berry.” I see no reason to allow it to be fed to incapacitated creatures any more than I would allow a character to eat multiple berries in a single action, and no matter how much a player mimes eating a handful of blueberries, I wouldn’t allow that either.
I do try to maintain a flow of events and activities that make sense, but not when “common sense” or “rule of cool” makes certain characters more powerful than they need to be. Spellcasters certainly don’t need any help in 5E D&D.
I tend to lean more towards real life first aid, having been trained at those regularry since I was 7. Nothing solid in mouth of an unconcious person. Yes it is fantasy but some basic rules of logic should still aply. Pouring magic healing potions to the wound should work as I don’t remember those having been specified to be exclusively oral. I may have threatened a NPC to spill the information or have the requested healing potion administered from the other end of the body, we didn’t have anyone able to cast healing spells at the time so Barbarian diplomacy had to take place… and I may have mentioned this in the past but it was the barbarian who was most charismatic one of the team, no one else had any negotiation skills and all but one another had CHA score under 10.
I like justifying balance decisions with game world logic when I can. In this case, no, you can’t use a *1st level spell* to bring a downed ally back 10 times THROUGHOUT THE DAY. The spell is already very good, it doesn’t need to be even better. So I wouldn’t allow it, and here I have the convenient excuse of “you can’t administer a berry to someone inconscious” that allows me to preserve verisimilitude alongside game balance.
Though if I can’t have both I’ll pick the game balance. The game is easy enough to break as is, without “logic” and “realism” getting in the way.
to be fair, with a feat, you can do that 10 times for only 5 gold, theoretically infinitely if you have enough gold.
As a DM, one I ruled in the players’ favor:
One character leapt up to hang from the second-floor walkway inside of a barn, while another cast a small AOE on the ground floor. I pointed out that ordinarily, the first character would be subject to the AOE, with their feet clearly hanging into its radius… but that since they were a halfling, all was good.
As a player, one that was ruled in my favor:
Was inside of an antimagic effect, currently protecting me from a persistent fiery AOE. I threw my axe at a target out of the antimagic zone. Now, this axe was part of a pair; while holding one, you can call the other to its location (catching it if that location is you). I asked if I could stick just the other axe out of the antimagic zone to call its partner back without exposing my fleshy bits to the raging inferno, and was told “yeah, that makes sense to me”.
I played a (effectively) swarm that walks comprised of many kinds of ants, and whose goodberry spell instead created honeypot ants.
My character would command the ants to crawl down their unconscious allies’ throats… some were less appreciative than others.
The best part of all of this is I was playing a reskinned Plasmoid Swarmkeeper Ranger, and the solitary mechanical alteration was swapping the Plasmoid from ooze to monstrosity. Everything else worked perfectly.
I had a character get a healing potion poured down their unconscious gullet and promptly throw half of it back up all over the one pouring it.
I can personally confirm that when performing CPR or even attempting to move a passed out inebriated individual, the chances of that happening are very, very high. This is why we use ventilating bags and good quality CPR pocket masks have one-way valves to breathe through…they don’t do as much good as you’d think but they do keep you from getting that first mouthful.
Not my story, but I saw a case where a lizardfolk druid decided to revive a fallen ally using goodberries. Like the good paternal croc-monster he was, he realized stuffing a fist full of strawberries into someone’s esophagus was a choking hazard, so he did what any loving parent would do: pre-chew the berries and “mama-birded” their fallen friend. It worked, but said ally apparently would rather die than be revived next time.
our table in the group I am currently a part of approaches the idea of potions (and goodberries) in a pretty sensible way (in our table opinion).
firstly, a potion is meant to act fast and be drunk quickly. We imagine potions being in little tiny bottles like in The Witcher or one of those 5 Hour Energy type bottles, so drinking a potion for ourselves is a bonus action (or whatever rules equivalent fast type action one can do during combat)
second, when using a potion on another player, you can bonus action to give them the potion for them to use on themselves at their next available opportunity, or you can choke them on it as a full action!
BUT potions don’t work on the unconscious, so if they have already fallen in battle and are performing death saves, you need real magic to get them up before you can do any potion giving.
Which also essentially resolves the goodberry paradox as well.
however, our DM will allow for a potion to be used on a downed player followed by a heal to get them up with retroactive HP applied from the potion on their revival… IF it happens in the same round.
I personally would recommend that medicine checks need to be made in order to apply a potion/goodberry to a downed adventurer. If the table isn’t too uptight, players can flavor it as being administered mouth-to-mouth or suppository style to autopass the check. Similarly, a healer’s kit will allow a “take 10” on said check (or use two charges to get advantage on a medicine check if the take 10 wouldn’t pass)
In druid’s defense, the chocolate coating makes it go down easier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AemKK4BaSI
As DM, I’d allow the goodberry option if they had a reasonable way to force it down the unconscious character’s throat (pea-shooter, bellows, coat it in castor oil and rub their adam’s apple), but such an involved solution would probably take a minimum of a full round and maybe the cost of an Action Point as well.
As player, I once had a DM encourage me to develop a PC who baked healing cookies and such. Neither of us considered the dilemma of trying to force-feed a cookie to an unconscious person. (The campaign was squashed by COVID before we had to find a solution.)
I once heard of a party who hired a sausage maker to fill small sausage casings with single doses of Keoghtom’s Ointment which (in dire situations) they could keep in their cheeks or between lip and gum. They successfully argued to their DM that on any hit that would drop them, the PCs could reflexively bite down on the ampoule in pain to receive the healing.
I really love comics like today, because the comment section generates so many neat fringe case ideas that I can use to proactively inform my own rulings. I had never considered it before, but Keoghtom’s ointment was clearly worded with the intent to make it usable even on unconscious characters, which supports the idea that the game designers always had the intent for potions to not be safely usable on unconscious characters.
That said, as a DM, I would insist that A) each “sausage” used a full dose, B) once they put it in their mouth, the casing would be compromised from the saliva and rupture in 24 hours, C) it also would be completely ineffective if they had an instant death effect, so basically it would be like a nerfed death ward, and D) they’d still need a sausage maker skilled enough to do it, and because it’s an ointment and not MEAT, he wouldn’t be able to use his normal equipment so at least one dose would be wasted in the process, and no way he’d do it for free.
Once you include those caveats, it actually feels pretty balanced.
“…And if you have another philosophy to add to the pile…”
As with all things for me it’e Genre Dependant.
Is it a “super gritty realistic” campaign? Gonna lean towards the “realism” answers. Is it “hard core rules”, not gonna care about realism, we lean into “rules following” (in this case Goodberry usually says “can be eaten”, so that implies an action ont he part of a user, not on the part of someone else). Is it “beer and pretzels/orc and pie” play? Then make that goodberry mash and apply directly to forehead! Rub it into the wound, squeeze the juice into their ear, //do not care// as long as it’s fun and the game keeps moving.
What is with Oracle teaching but not checking what her students are doing? Are you blind or what? 😀
Also out of curiosity, that guy was already green? Or is another problem from the berries? 😛
For this specific situation, I’m tempted to go for the Pokémon solution of “the berries may do the same thing as the potion, but that does not imply that they can be used the same way”.
Player: Can I give a good berry to my unconscious ally?
Me, the GM: Only if you Mama Bird it.
I had a character with Goodberry once who ran into this dilemma. The GM didn’t want me going around shoving berries down my companions’ throats to instantly revive them every battle, so we did a little compromise;
It is possible to feed a Goodberry to a downed ally, BUT it takes 1 minute of careful administration rather than an action. That way it can’t be used in battle, and is more of a pick-me-up after the fact.
Good news! It’s a suppository…
“I cram the Goodberry down his throat, then cast Blade Barrier inside to make it a smoothie.”