“Alcohol is a mild poison” has been a house rule within my extended roleplaying circles for a long time. It fits well into almost any setting or metaphysics, and allows you to do interesting things with intoxication.
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… it actually is though? its even defined as such in medical texts I’ve read.
Oh yes, although with roleplaying setting metaphysics, it’s probably good to define this to be true if you’re using it in your game. (To make sure it interacts with the rules correctly and has the right keywords etc etc.)
For example if you cast “detect poison” do you detect bottles of alcohol, or a hidden wine cellar, etc etc. If your DM has never considered whether or not alcohol is a poison it probably wouldn’t occur to them to mention it, but if they have then they might!
detects the Necromancer’s extra hidden, double-secret second laboratory where he cooks meth on the side
Konsi did once break the plot of an adventure wide open by having the right detection magic running, for entirely unrelated reasons. Just realized the plot-twist 10 sessions early…
You’ve got to give more details on this.
The villains in question were running a business at a street faire in Waterdeep. We had pegged their group as suspicious in general, and figured this was some kind of cover to pass on covert messages or meet with other villains that we were tracking. Wanting to get an opportunity to get a good look at them, and stake them out to see who they were meeting, we showed up and spent some time hanging around keeping an eye on their activities. (They had not met us and we had no reason to think they would suspect us of foul play.)
After a couple of hours of not much happening, we started passing shifts around keeping an eye on them, and Konsi went on a walk around the stalls at the faire, where some gnomes from the temple of Gond were making candyfloss with some kind of contraption. Faelys has a massive sweet tooth, and Konsi (who was magically disguised as a gnome so as not to cause concern in the streets of Waterdeep) figured it’d be really cool to learn to make candyfloss, so she asked the gnomes how the machine worked. They refused to tell her, but she was determined to figure it out, so she watched them operate the machine for a while to try and learn what she could about it.
As a part of this investigation, she cast detect magic, to see if the machine was in any way magical (it wasn’t, it was purely mechanical) - so, a little despondant, she returned to the group staking out the villains, only to discover that all of them had magical illusion auras - as they were all wearing magical disguise amulets.
Hmmm. It’s often said that the difference between medicine and poison is a matter of dosage.
Which means that you could potentially use lesser restoration to kill someone who is receiving mundane treatments for a lethal disease.
Or, heck, consumed in sufficiently large doses, even water can be toxic.
That relationship is why in every edition but fifth, healing is necromancy, and why Heal and Harm are identical in 3rd/pf, because they’re the same fundamentally, you just had to tweak the settings on one to get the other.
I think I’d go for intent mattering for detect spells, but having it still work with healing.
I like that kind of thing in a lot of settings, especially more philosophical or metaphorical settings.
DnD always feels to me like it’s a world where the metaphysics are defined by the players having an hour long argument at the table about “what RAW says”, while people look up rules in books. Back in my 3.5 days, someone would manage to find a ruling in an obscure 3rd party book, in 4th edition, you’d find some hard definition in the source material. In 5th edition, someone will find a tweet from Crawford, and the table will agree it’s stupid and decide the opposite is always true.
For my experiences in D&D, the question of “whether x counts as y” is a definition that sticks to the universe itself - there aren’t many examples of metaphysics in D&D where the answer varies by intent. (I’m sure there are some though!)
Caveat: As with everything I say about D&D rules and definitions, this is not advice, just how I think of things, and the objective correct answer is always “whatever works at your table.”
Perhaps it needs to be 190 proof like ever clear to count as a poison.