There is no reason to assume prions exist in this universe. I'm going to assume you are talking about the dangers of cannibalism?
So then, the question is entirely dependent on what effect the DM decides will apply after a character engages in cannibalism of dangerous flesh. Firstly, perhaps there might be a Medicine check to avoid danger. If dangerous flesh is consumed then a Constitution saving throw would probably be appropriate. Then if the DM decides that the result of failing that save involves either Poison damage or the Poisoned condition, a Dwarf will have advantage. If the effect on a fail is Disease, other damage (necrotic?) or some kind of curse or something, then a Dwarf will not get advantage. Personally I would lean away from poison towards disease/curse.
There is no reason to assume prions exist in this universe. I'm going to assume you are talking about the dangers of cannibalism?
This may or may not be me looking at various pathogens for a modern homebrew, and I may or may not be using a terrorist group that could just use necromancy/transmutation to just taint already packaged (and thus already treated) meat with the Mad Cow Disease if their demands are not met as an antagonist...
Prions being proteins that folded poorly and not microorganisms made me think "poison", but admittedly I'm not an expert in epidemiology...
And again, the Urban Arcana settings already has gems as a magic paint job for cars that is the tacky flame patterned paint that can effectively cast a fireball spell centered on the car (though the car and it's passengers/cargo is unhurt), an EMP spell, sending spells through email that target the first person opening the email, and so on...
The conditions caused by prions in the real world are diseases.
I second this.
in game, most poisons are finite and/or temporary, as in they do a certain amount of damage, or last for a certain amount of time, then they stop. Prion effects are permanent, and don’t resolve on their own, so in game they would work more like diseases which also don’t resolve on their own.
I think of poisons as substances where all the detrimental effects come from the initial exposure quantity (less exposure = less effect), whereas a disease is caused by an agent where the dose (above some critical threshold) isn't important (less exposure = same effect).
Poisons and Diseases are two sections that are side by side in Basic Rules Chapter 15. Other than the fact that some samples are provided for each, mechanically they are pretty much identical: (1) you're exposed to something, (2) you make a Constitution save to avoid an effect, (3) if you fail you suffer an effect for a duration (which could be instant, an amount of time, or until you pass another save(s) ). From the perspective of Chapter 15, it really doesn't matter what you call it, Poison and Disease are essentially the same thing. The only difference of significance that I can see is that all poisons that have a non-instant duration also impose the Poisoned condition, while none of the sample Diseases do the same (although, an Otyugh's disease does hand out the Poisoned condition so that isn't a rule or anything).
Stepping out of Chapter 15, there's still not much difference. Lesser Restoration and Detect Poison and Disease works for both to the same extent. Petrified interacts with both the same way. Periapt of Health and Periapt of Proof Against Poison are different items, but are so niche that they probably don't need to be. Monks become immune to both Poison and Disease at the same time. Dwarven Resilience being limited to saves vs. poison and not disease is about the only feature I can find anywhere where your choice of term actually could impact something mechanically.
TLDR: I think condensing Poison and Disease into a single Poison/Disease concept would be a nice idea, if only to avoid debates like this, or a player investing resources in preventing one only to feel totally screwed when you arbitrarily call something the other.
Even the idiomatic English definitions are not clear and obvious on this one, which is likely why the rules don't make a huge distinction. If you go read some definitions of "disease" that aren't specifically for "infectious disease" you might say they sound a lot like poisons. Along those lines, alcoholism is a disease, but alcohol is a poison, so poisons can cause disease. I think the quickest/simplest way to distinguish them in game is what I stated above: if the (real world) level of effect is commensurate with the level of exposure then it is probably considered a poison rather than a disease.
There are a few spells (protection from poison comes to mind) that work on one and not the other. Also, there are a large number of creatures that have poison damage immunity/resistance or condition immunity without any mention of disease immunity.
Also, you pointed it out in your own post, Chicken_Champ: poisoned is a condition (see lesser restoration) whereas diseased is not a specific condition.
Poisoned is a condition but not all poisons inflict Poisoned. And not all creatures that have immunity to Poisoned necessarily have immunity to poison damage, or vice versa. I think that the point stands: there really wasn't much point in describing the concept of "Poisons" as separate from "Diseases," and I struggle to imagine the archetype of a character that should be resistant/magically protected against one that shouldn't also be protected against the other.
And I think my point stands: they did make the distinction, just like they make a distinction between any number of mechanically similar but flavorfully different concepts (battleaxe and longsword or wand and orb, for example). The difference is on the page, so that is what we have in the game. Since they are distinct we might need to be able to tell them apart. I gave one quick test to distinguish one from the other for sources not described in the rules. The only other way to deal with what we have for the game (besides using our own rule) is to say that poisons and diseases are only the things that the game calls such.
I guess I agree that there are relatively few things that you could do to make your character significantly better at avoiding one as compared to the other, but a few game options do specifically call out poison (protection from poison and antitoxin) separately.
There is no reason to assume prions exist in this universe. I'm going to assume you are talking about the dangers of cannibalism?
This may or may not be me looking at various pathogens for a modern homebrew, and I may or may not be using a terrorist group that could just use necromancy/transmutation to just taint already packaged (and thus already treated) meat with the Mad Cow Disease if their demands are not met as an antagonist...
Prions being proteins that folded poorly and not microorganisms made me think "poison", but admittedly I'm not an expert in epidemiology...
Seems like a really slow way of killing people, though I guess you could have the symptoms appear much faster than in the real world. I guess people would assume that the meat is making people insane.
Non-magical diseases always strike me as of limited impact in D&D worlds. If it gets bad enough, the rulers calls in clerics to cast cure-disease. Magical diseases on the other hand, are much harder to deal with in game.
There is no reason to assume prions exist in this universe. I'm going to assume you are talking about the dangers of cannibalism?
This may or may not be me looking at various pathogens for a modern homebrew, and I may or may not be using a terrorist group that could just use necromancy/transmutation to just taint already packaged (and thus already treated) meat with the Mad Cow Disease if their demands are not met as an antagonist...
Prions being proteins that folded poorly and not microorganisms made me think "poison", but admittedly I'm not an expert in epidemiology...
Seems like a really slow way of killing people, though I guess you could have the symptoms appear much faster than in the real world. I guess people would assume that the meat is making people insane.
Non-magical diseases always strike me as of limited impact in D&D worlds. If it gets bad enough, the rulers calls in clerics to cast cure-disease. Magical diseases on the other hand, are much harder to deal with in game.
1) The point in this specific situation is not to end the world Plague Inc style. The point is to cause a panic. Prions showing up in tested and secured and cleaned packaged food through impossible to explain means would cause a panic. An actual contagious disease runs the risk of accidentally creating a Plague Inc scenario.
2) Curing a pandemic in D&D is simple enough if you can effectively quarantine the patients. Clerics's abilities to cure people are limited by their spell slots, so unless you are able to effectively quarantine the sick, a level 7 cleric could maybe cure 20 people a day. So unless you can quarantine the sickness (which gets much harder if there is an evil organization that is spreading the plague on purpose, but is otherwise possible as long as the transmission vectors are known), you would need 1 level 7 cleric for 20 people. Yeah, that's not going to happen.
3) The number of Aware people in Urban Arcana is limited. (The vast majority of people will deny (in the psychological sense) any magic they witness, even if caught on camera, and see it as the closest thing they can. A Charm Person is remembered as the caster slipping a Mickey to their target, a fireball becomes an incendiary explosive, a Cure Wounds spell makes people convinced that they just assumed they were shot in that gunfight, but they got lucky enough that they were in fact missed and just got splashed with blood from someone who was actually shot; and really extreme effects like a werewolf transforming are stress/injury induced hallucinations.) Most people simply will not believe a spell/ritual can transmute prions in packaged food, only select non-state actors and No Such Agencies will be able to do something about it.
Prion disease is not contagious by definition and symptoms of the main form in humans, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), takes 20 years or so to manifest.
Prion disease is caused by eating the nervous tissue (brains, nerves) from another member of your own species. This can cause proteins in nervous tissue to become folded - a prion, which in turn can cause other proteints to become prions and cause degeneration over time.
Mad Cow's Disease or BSE was largely caused by feeding cattle the bonemeal of other cattle - which contained prions. This caused the cattle to have BSE. When that cattle is processed for human consumption if the nervous tissue is consumed (not the meat, you cannot get BSE from eating regular meat even if the cattle had BSE) then there is a very tiny chance those prions can alter the human proteins and cause a human version called vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease). However, beyond this a person with Prion Disease cannot infect another person unless that person ate their nerve tissue. It is therefore not contagious and cannot create a pandemic.
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1) The point in this specific situation is not to end the world Plague Inc style. The point is to cause a panic. Prions showing up in tested and secured and cleaned packaged food through impossible to explain means would cause a panic. An actual contagious disease runs the risk of accidentally creating a Plague Inc scenario.
Again, this is me explicitly explaining I picked prions specifically because they were not contagious yet could still create a panic without risking an end of the world scenario, even accidentally.
2) was a tangent that the previous poster underestimated contagious pandemics in D&D because fighting them effectively requires either effective quarantine, which becomes much harder the minute you have evil clerics worshiping a god of disease running around whom would have every reason to intentionally spread the plague, or a large portion of the population being divine casters with the ability to cure disease, which isn't high enough in D&D and is even lower in Urban Arcana, which actually ties back to the specific scenario I was talking about since it is about deliberate containment breaches by a non-state actor, thus 3).
3) was about how in the specific setting I used, a non-state actor using magic to taint food source with prions in a deliberate terror attack is a possibility, and the fact most people have full blown Sunnydale Syndrome type denial of magic and monsters creates a massive difficulty in containment and treatment of both prions and actual contagious diseases, because prepackaged food isn't warded against necromantic/transmutative tampering which makes it a decent vector for a non-state actor with decent(ish) knowledge of magic to use it for nefarious purposes.
So not only do I already know prions are not a contagious disease unless one ingests tainted food, it is irrelevant in this specific situation which is "in an urban fantasy situation involving prions, using D&D rules, what resistances/immunities apply, and what spells can be used to treat them?", and asking whether my hypothesis that "poison" covers chemical pathogens while "disease" covers pathogenic micro-organisms was supported under D&D rules, and whether prions fit under chemical pathogens or under pathogenic micro-organisms.
As far as magical healing and/or resistances and immunities go, would prions be disease, or poison?
Does a dwarf benefit from advantage on Constitution saving throws against prions, as dwarves are resistant to poison but not disease?
Does the Protection from Poison spell neutralize prions, and give advantage on saving throws against them?
Thanks!
Nothing, prions don't exist in fantasyland, nor do any other germs. The world runs on magic, not physics.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
There is no reason to assume prions exist in this universe. I'm going to assume you are talking about the dangers of cannibalism?
So then, the question is entirely dependent on what effect the DM decides will apply after a character engages in cannibalism of dangerous flesh. Firstly, perhaps there might be a Medicine check to avoid danger. If dangerous flesh is consumed then a Constitution saving throw would probably be appropriate. Then if the DM decides that the result of failing that save involves either Poison damage or the Poisoned condition, a Dwarf will have advantage. If the effect on a fail is Disease, other damage (necrotic?) or some kind of curse or something, then a Dwarf will not get advantage. Personally I would lean away from poison towards disease/curse.
Disease.
I'd go with disease.
Saying D&D words run on magic instead of physics and chemistry is like saying its trees are made of earth not wood.
This may or may not be me looking at various pathogens for a modern homebrew, and I may or may not be using a terrorist group that could just use necromancy/transmutation to just taint already packaged (and thus already treated) meat with the Mad Cow Disease if their demands are not met as an antagonist...
Prions being proteins that folded poorly and not microorganisms made me think "poison", but admittedly I'm not an expert in epidemiology...
And again, the Urban Arcana settings already has gems as a magic paint job for cars that is the tacky flame patterned paint that can effectively cast a fireball spell centered on the car (though the car and it's passengers/cargo is unhurt), an EMP spell, sending spells through email that target the first person opening the email, and so on...
Disease is a broad term. Poisons can even cause diseases.
Poison is more specifically defined and specifies chemical interaction. Prions cause damage from physical interaction.
The conditions caused by prions in the real world are diseases.
I second this.
in game, most poisons are finite and/or temporary, as in they do a certain amount of damage, or last for a certain amount of time, then they stop. Prion effects are permanent, and don’t resolve on their own, so in game they would work more like diseases which also don’t resolve on their own.
I think of poisons as substances where all the detrimental effects come from the initial exposure quantity (less exposure = less effect), whereas a disease is caused by an agent where the dose (above some critical threshold) isn't important (less exposure = same effect).
Poisons and Diseases are two sections that are side by side in Basic Rules Chapter 15. Other than the fact that some samples are provided for each, mechanically they are pretty much identical: (1) you're exposed to something, (2) you make a Constitution save to avoid an effect, (3) if you fail you suffer an effect for a duration (which could be instant, an amount of time, or until you pass another save(s) ). From the perspective of Chapter 15, it really doesn't matter what you call it, Poison and Disease are essentially the same thing. The only difference of significance that I can see is that all poisons that have a non-instant duration also impose the Poisoned condition, while none of the sample Diseases do the same (although, an Otyugh's disease does hand out the Poisoned condition so that isn't a rule or anything).
Stepping out of Chapter 15, there's still not much difference. Lesser Restoration and Detect Poison and Disease works for both to the same extent. Petrified interacts with both the same way. Periapt of Health and Periapt of Proof Against Poison are different items, but are so niche that they probably don't need to be. Monks become immune to both Poison and Disease at the same time. Dwarven Resilience being limited to saves vs. poison and not disease is about the only feature I can find anywhere where your choice of term actually could impact something mechanically.
TLDR: I think condensing Poison and Disease into a single Poison/Disease concept would be a nice idea, if only to avoid debates like this, or a player investing resources in preventing one only to feel totally screwed when you arbitrarily call something the other.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Even the idiomatic English definitions are not clear and obvious on this one, which is likely why the rules don't make a huge distinction. If you go read some definitions of "disease" that aren't specifically for "infectious disease" you might say they sound a lot like poisons. Along those lines, alcoholism is a disease, but alcohol is a poison, so poisons can cause disease. I think the quickest/simplest way to distinguish them in game is what I stated above: if the (real world) level of effect is commensurate with the level of exposure then it is probably considered a poison rather than a disease.
There are a few spells (protection from poison comes to mind) that work on one and not the other. Also, there are a large number of creatures that have poison damage immunity/resistance or condition immunity without any mention of disease immunity.
Also, you pointed it out in your own post, Chicken_Champ: poisoned is a condition (see lesser restoration) whereas diseased is not a specific condition.
Poisoned is a condition but not all poisons inflict Poisoned. And not all creatures that have immunity to Poisoned necessarily have immunity to poison damage, or vice versa. I think that the point stands: there really wasn't much point in describing the concept of "Poisons" as separate from "Diseases," and I struggle to imagine the archetype of a character that should be resistant/magically protected against one that shouldn't also be protected against the other.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
And I think my point stands: they did make the distinction, just like they make a distinction between any number of mechanically similar but flavorfully different concepts (battleaxe and longsword or wand and orb, for example). The difference is on the page, so that is what we have in the game. Since they are distinct we might need to be able to tell them apart. I gave one quick test to distinguish one from the other for sources not described in the rules. The only other way to deal with what we have for the game (besides using our own rule) is to say that poisons and diseases are only the things that the game calls such.
I guess I agree that there are relatively few things that you could do to make your character significantly better at avoiding one as compared to the other, but a few game options do specifically call out poison (protection from poison and antitoxin) separately.
Seems like a really slow way of killing people, though I guess you could have the symptoms appear much faster than in the real world. I guess people would assume that the meat is making people insane.
Non-magical diseases always strike me as of limited impact in D&D worlds. If it gets bad enough, the rulers calls in clerics to cast cure-disease. Magical diseases on the other hand, are much harder to deal with in game.
1) The point in this specific situation is not to end the world Plague Inc style. The point is to cause a panic. Prions showing up in tested and secured and cleaned packaged food through impossible to explain means would cause a panic. An actual contagious disease runs the risk of accidentally creating a Plague Inc scenario.
2) Curing a pandemic in D&D is simple enough if you can effectively quarantine the patients. Clerics's abilities to cure people are limited by their spell slots, so unless you are able to effectively quarantine the sick, a level 7 cleric could maybe cure 20 people a day. So unless you can quarantine the sickness (which gets much harder if there is an evil organization that is spreading the plague on purpose, but is otherwise possible as long as the transmission vectors are known), you would need 1 level 7 cleric for 20 people. Yeah, that's not going to happen.
3) The number of Aware people in Urban Arcana is limited. (The vast majority of people will deny (in the psychological sense) any magic they witness, even if caught on camera, and see it as the closest thing they can. A Charm Person is remembered as the caster slipping a Mickey to their target, a fireball becomes an incendiary explosive, a Cure Wounds spell makes people convinced that they just assumed they were shot in that gunfight, but they got lucky enough that they were in fact missed and just got splashed with blood from someone who was actually shot; and really extreme effects like a werewolf transforming are stress/injury induced hallucinations.) Most people simply will not believe a spell/ritual can transmute prions in packaged food, only select non-state actors and No Such Agencies will be able to do something about it.
Shaeliss,
Prion disease is not contagious by definition and symptoms of the main form in humans, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), takes 20 years or so to manifest.
Prion disease is caused by eating the nervous tissue (brains, nerves) from another member of your own species. This can cause proteins in nervous tissue to become folded - a prion, which in turn can cause other proteints to become prions and cause degeneration over time.
Mad Cow's Disease or BSE was largely caused by feeding cattle the bonemeal of other cattle - which contained prions. This caused the cattle to have BSE. When that cattle is processed for human consumption if the nervous tissue is consumed (not the meat, you cannot get BSE from eating regular meat even if the cattle had BSE) then there is a very tiny chance those prions can alter the human proteins and cause a human version called vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease). However, beyond this a person with Prion Disease cannot infect another person unless that person ate their nerve tissue. It is therefore not contagious and cannot create a pandemic.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
Again, this is me explicitly explaining I picked prions specifically because they were not contagious yet could still create a panic without risking an end of the world scenario, even accidentally.
2) was a tangent that the previous poster underestimated contagious pandemics in D&D because fighting them effectively requires either effective quarantine, which becomes much harder the minute you have evil clerics worshiping a god of disease running around whom would have every reason to intentionally spread the plague, or a large portion of the population being divine casters with the ability to cure disease, which isn't high enough in D&D and is even lower in Urban Arcana, which actually ties back to the specific scenario I was talking about since it is about deliberate containment breaches by a non-state actor, thus 3).
3) was about how in the specific setting I used, a non-state actor using magic to taint food source with prions in a deliberate terror attack is a possibility, and the fact most people have full blown Sunnydale Syndrome type denial of magic and monsters creates a massive difficulty in containment and treatment of both prions and actual contagious diseases, because prepackaged food isn't warded against necromantic/transmutative tampering which makes it a decent vector for a non-state actor with decent(ish) knowledge of magic to use it for nefarious purposes.
So not only do I already know prions are not a contagious disease unless one ingests tainted food, it is irrelevant in this specific situation which is "in an urban fantasy situation involving prions, using D&D rules, what resistances/immunities apply, and what spells can be used to treat them?", and asking whether my hypothesis that "poison" covers chemical pathogens while "disease" covers pathogenic micro-organisms was supported under D&D rules, and whether prions fit under chemical pathogens or under pathogenic micro-organisms.
Thank you.
D&D simplifies everything.
Prions are a poison.