Mandatory Medical Coverage
There are adventurers out there who will tell you with a straight face that, because they’re out doing good and saving the world, they deserve free stuff from good-aligned temples. While this may be an especially suspect claim in Fighter’s case, chances are it’s a bunch of munchkinly jiggery pokery no matter who’s saying it.
“But we were injured fighting the duckbunnies that have been eating your parishioners!”
Bully for you. You’ve still go to pay.
“I would never have been cursed with early onset male pattern baldness if I weren’t trying to drive off that evil hag.”
Sorry, Cueball. If it bothers you, then pay.
Let me put it this way. Can you imagine an off duty cop waltzing into your local church and plundering the collection plate because, “We both fight evil, and you’re obligated to help me?” How about an EMT walking off with the Salvation Army change bucket because, “I’ve got a more pressing need?” These may be charities we’re talking about, but your average goodly temple has a lot of overhead, what with all that feeding the homeless and healing the afflicted. You on the other hand are a bunch of jacked up murder hobos. You’re going to tell me that you’ve got weapons worth more than the temple itself, but somehow you can’t afford to shell out for your Band-Aids?
I mean sure, if the village is under attack right now and you’re the last line of defense between a bunch of cowering refugees and certain doom, then feel free to pay Sister Mary Tightwad with a punch to the wimple if she doesn’t cough up some heals. If on the other hand the army of darkness is not on the doorstep and you’re just trolling for free swag, then you’re robbing from church. That’ll be 20 Hail Sarenraes and no loot for you.
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I’ve never seen a good aligned group try to get goods from a church. Free healing spells because the party showed up to town for the local festival and wound up saving it from raiding goblins seems pretty fair though. The clerics would have a lot more or a LOT fewer people to heal if it weren’t for the party and seriously someone that cleric is related to just had their life saved. If word gets around you don’t give out free heals for necessary help that involves risking of lives, next time something attacks your town the adventurers just walk away and come back an hour later to loot whatever’s left. So it’s not just rude to be stingy with the healing, but it’s also seriously bad planning (especially for people with divination spells).
OK. So the goblins attack some hypothetical settlement (cough Sandpoint cough) and set most of the town and most of the townspeople on fire. The church comes through for everyone and doles out the heals. Fine. Good. Peachy. Just stand next to the other walking wounded and enjoy your channel positive energy. What you should not do, however, is come back from your boar hunt or haunted house excursion later on and expect the same treatment, plus restoration expenses. Spellcasting services cost money. You’ve got to put some coin in the donation box.
Well that’s just wrong. Spellcasting services cost money because they are a service, and in any economy, you can exchange money to receive a service. If you’re lucky and in need, though, an organization might give you a service, or even goods, for free – that’s charity. And charity is Good. Good organizations like churches of Good gods don’t heal Good adventurers in need because they’re on the same side, or for money – they do it because they’re Good, and exist to promote Good, and the adventurers are In Need. They’d heal Neutral adventurers if there wasn’t a reason to think that they’d cause destruction if they were healed – maybe even Evil adventurers, if they surrendered. They’d heal random Joe Peasant for free, too, if he needed it.
A Neutral church would charge you the market rate, sure, while an Evil church might milk you for as much money as they can, refuse and laugh, or both in that order. Because greed and cruelty are Evil, and charity is Good. If there was some cost to the church, the church might ask you to cover it, if it was an inefficient use of the church’s limited resources, or if you just plain could afford it. But in no edition of the game that I’ve read do regular healing spells have material or XP costs.
“Now see here, my capital G Good cleric. You’ve got no duties more important than healing me. That’s charity after all. And charity is good. And you’re good too, aren’t you? Good. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’ll be needing twelves staves of resurrection, a few periapts of health….”
There are a lot of reasons for a Good cleric to not give out free spells to Good adventurers.
1) They don’t know you, and they don’t see why they should waste spells determining if you are good and telling the truth.
1a) And demanding magic for free already points to you not being good.
2) Good churches have expenses and projects also, and the sell of spells allows them to fund those without begging from the parishioners. And bear in mind that religion is a LOT more competitive game in a D&D world. There a lot of higher beings endowing mortals with magic power to compete for your followers. Every copper is counted and used in this competitive market for souls.
3) Good churches have loyal parishioners that count on magical aid from their religious leaders. A spell used on an adventurer, a spell not available to them, and that creates an opportunity for an upstart church to steal them away.
4) Good churches have enemies also. A spell used to help an adventurer, is a spell not available for when that Evil church or organization comes to kill its competitors.
In my campaigns that is typically why Good Churches have a daily sermon in the evening, followed by “spell alms” before the cleric goes to sleep. Basically if you come during “spell alms” you are more likely to get a discount on your spells. And if you come to the sermon beforehand you get even more of a discount and showed genuine piety you will get even more of a discount. If a stranger shows up demanding spellcasting in the middle of the day, you can count on getting charged full.
I love it when mechanical weirdness like this leads to good worldbuilding. Well done that man!
Welll….. most cops DO have free medical in case they get injured on-duty, I’d say that’s a comparison that justifies free heals if the quest came from the church or any other good organization with the capability to heal. Especially since most healing costs nothing except for the opportunity cost, and perhaps not even that since it would be unreasonable to assume that your average non-adventurer cleric would deplete his entire reservoir of spell slots in any single day. Since it’s a spell slot that wouldn’t have been used anyway, it “costs” nothing.
Of course, this might just be me not knowing about how purchasing spell casting services works in 4th edition.
Interestingly, this becomes a point in the Paizo “Curse of the Crimson
Throne” adventure path. The clergy of the local god of cities, law, merchants, and wealth set about combating a plague, but they quickly burn through their spell slots. And that’s even considering that the rules impose a spell casting services cost of Caster level × spell level × 10 gp. There’s a moral dilemma for one of the priest NPCs about whether he should help a peasant girl with free heals, going against church doctrine. The PCs are expected to guilt him into doing so.
Economic questions are obnoxious in TRPGs, but in this case I think they’re necessary. Otherwise you’ve got a fictional world where the highly trained doctors and powerful religious organizations don’t get paid. That just don’t seem right to me.
This kinda strikes home with me, considering i was drafted by a DM buddy of mine whose party of merry misfits needed someone to keep their butts in line, and their health above “critical”. Enter Sutcher, my Bugbear Cleric, who could both inflict and cure wounds at the drop of a hat, but, as he said “the hurtin’s free.” Out of character, i charged the players via spellcasting service, and was better than any potion of healing they could’ve bought for twice the price ( this was in 3.5, mind you). in character, bugbears are sneaks and scoundrels, and “faith requires money”.
didn’t hurt that he donated half of what he got, after expenses and upgrades, back to the church as a sign of good faith, but it also kept the party from seeing me as a walking potion, too.
People don’t value free stuff. Too much free healing and you begin to feel the game parts of the game poking through into your reality. You aren’t just providing medical coverage. You’re preserving the integrity of the setting and keeping heals valuable. Well done you.
Also, GJ on the character name. “Sutcher” is rock freaking solid.
We had it the other way: our paladin donated loot to the church. Our loot that he stole from us. That was so ridiculous, that we never managed to catch him: the player confessed after the campaign was over.
And that’s why you trust paladins no more then you trust rogue or any evil character. They are assholes.
I’m not sure you get to keep your paladin powers when you do that mess. :/
But donating to church is a GOOD deed. And stealing from the group of murder-hobos is no different that stealing from the group they (you) just successfully murdered.
This comic, its comments and some current events have given me an interesting idea for a campaign – pandemic response! There’s a plague afoot, and only the PCs can stop it. But this isn’t one of those ordinary “go find a dungeon and fight some stuff so you can find the cure” plague campaigns. Oh, no, these PCs are an official Pandemic Response Task Force, assigned by the king to deal with the situation. But defeating this plague is not as simple as crafting a whole bunch of wands of remove disease and brewing some alchemical potions. Nope, you have limited financial resources, hundreds if not thousands of cases, a city about to tear itself apart and the mildly inconvenient fact that Remove Disease does not prevent re-infection. Also, politics. How will the PCs allocate their resources, and which populations are served first? How will they recruit, inspire and maintain the legion of public health workers needed to handle the outbreak? Can they convince different factions to work together and aid their mission instead of hording resources for themselves? Do they work with nefarious factions like black market smugglers and a LE church? Where should quarantines be declared, and for how long? What to do about the conspiracy theorist who insists to ever-growing crowds that the elves are behind this plague? What if the king’s advisors keep telling him to just let the plague burn itself out so the economy can restart? Are there disease-god-worshipping cultists? If not, how long before there are some, preaching to the forsaken that their god is the only path to survival? Etc, etc, all while the death ticks slowly upwards. I think it would be a very fun all-roleplay, zero-combat campaign, at least for a couple of sessions.
might be a little combat when somebody finds out “hey! those guys have all the cures! GET EM!!!”
No, I don’t think they’d have such a good rationale.
Sorry, the past few months have me feeling distinctly cynical about police.
It has for most of us. :/
I always liked the Church of Abadar over in Pathfinder for this issue. As clergy of a commerce god, it’s literally against their religion to hand out free heals. Always struck me as a good justification for the necessary-game-balance issue of “you have to pay your NPC cleric.”