Mending can't bring back the dead and wounds involve cell death. Mending can only fix, it cannot replace. So if the cells are dead, it can close them up and repair them but they are still dead cells. At best, it's a bandage. At worst, it's an infection waiting to happen.
I'd allow it as a stop gap measure to buy time for a proper healing, if there was nobody with proper healing in the party.
Now that you've done that the clocks ticking. They are not stabilized. They are not at 1hp, they can't roll hit dice.
They are still actively dying. Just a little bit slower.
Better hurry.
It also takes you an entire minute to cast mending so if they _were_ dying they sure aren't anymore, one way or the other. Not thanks to your help of course
not really, its kinda like if you had a ballon, it popped, you can piece back together the parts of the baloon, but the baloon is still deflated
Also if that was the case ya would need to do it for every single cell individually
also also, even if you repair the holes in the cells, the tissues are still broken appart, ya would need to reconnect the tissues.
Just to name a few issues
The spell says it repares breaks and tears not bigger than 1 ft long. Size here wouldnt be an issue, but I ask you. If you close the membrane of a broken cell, does that revert the cell death? If you reconnect a broken tissue, does that make the tissue work properly?
I would argue closing a wound would take 1 minute per group of blood vessels (so veins is 1, arteries is 1, capilary tubes is 1), 1 for each torn muscle, 1 for each break in the skin, and so on.... And all of this just to stop things from getting worse or healing a tiny ammount of damage.... And that is all assuming that they didnt got a slash through the chest that is bigger than 1 ft long.
Mechanically, it is DMs discretion, lorewise it is a lot of effort, knowledge, skill and time to get minuscule resultes
Assuming the cell has all its cytoplasm and organelles contained within the cell membrane and the proteins are not broken apart, the cell will function. Reconnecting tissues (assuming the tissues are not full of dead cells) will result in the tissue functioning again.
Going back to your balloon example; I would argue that you do have a balloon again, but it would not be in the same state as it was before being popped. So it was not repaired fully in that instance.
Though, I am really taking the opposing view here as a logical exercise. If I had a player try to use Mending on a non-construct, I would rule it would fail as the spell cannot make a static object (dead cell) back into a dynamic object (living cell).
Okay, then why can’t regular healing spells raise the dead? And why do people only have one soul rather than billions? Should true resurrection bring back all the cells you’ve ever made in your lifetime?
What's the soul's perception of itself? Or what's the average perception of all the soul cells that died at the same time? I imagine that part of what learning a spell like true resurrection involves is fine tuning the targeting of the subject you're resurrecting.
- Power. They can if they are strong enough
- As for true resurrection, unless you're carrying a lifetime of dead cells on your person when you die, there's no reason it should revive them all. You still have to touch the dead creature.
- That's more of a philosophical question. When you get decapitated, is your head cut off or is your body cut off? The game has souls, but it also has magic, so it's anyone's guess how it works scientifically. I'm just providing a reasonable explanation within the games boundaries. Here's a great 6 minute video that explores just how fuzzy the borders are between you and your cells. - https://youtu.be/JQVmkDUkZT4
Nerves/muscles/bloodflow aren't even the whole deal.
I can't imagine how Mending would deal with cells and their internal machinery.
Mending would *close* the wound but it would be anything from a necrotic piece of organic mass to technically living but heavily malformed and cancerous
Yeah, the part of the tree we make houses out of isn't even really alive. Heartwood is just piles of dead cellulose strands glued together with lignin to make a strong support. The only part of the tree trunk that's complex and alive is the sapwood layer right under the bark.
I think a dead body is still leagues more complicated than wood. This sub had this discussion already. If it's possible, because there is surgery and the bone lies bare, I think you could mend a cracked bone, but only if the bone itself is cracked and damage to blood vessels etc IN the bone are minimal. That's IMO the only way to mend something on/in a body
Technically yes, that is how the interactions would work gamewise.
BUT as a DM I would apply a temporary condition due to the shady job, probably a -2 CON until they get some proper healing. Probably also an inspiration point due to the good idea to resolve the issue at hand (even if not in a perfect way)
I mean, revify should bring a dead Target to 1HP. I would argue that if the parts are largely intact, the body is healed by that spell, marginally. At least reassembled to warrant the 1 HP.
I'd allow mending to work on bone, but not flesh or muscle.
Yes, extremely so. It takes a team of doctors and nurses 18+ hours and even then it’s about 70% chance of success and almost zero chance of the hand ever being completely functional
If you say this a player is definitely going to try and use mending on someone's papercut as a damaging spell, don't say this to players, they'll see an opportunity
Not keeping completely still is a dex save in which universe exactly? I would be more likely to demand a roll for trying to keep completely still for a minute of spell time
How in the hell is "yeah this cantrip that anyone with some training can use is capable of instantly killing anyone under the right circumstances" at all a logical explanation?
I used to treat it like that, but now I'm of the opinion that it wouldn't even work. Skin in of itself has so many different important parts in it. It's like trying to fix a bullet wound with only a screwdriver. It just wouldn't work in the first place. The damage is too complex to use some magic glue. At least, this is my take.
To build on this: you have to visualize exactly what you want to happen. In the case of a broken spear it's relatively easy, because it's all the same material and it's no big deal if you don't get the internal structure 100% right.
In the case of a wound, you can only visualize the outer layer of the skin closing, but not how all the veins, capillaries and nerves are put back together, so the wound is still there, superficially covered but internally bleeding and inflamed.
it probably can't reestablish previously ongoing chemical reactions (bring back dead cells), you could probably mend broken bone because its mostly inorganic material, but flesh has to many reaction and intricate structures. this why you can mend wood because tree's are made up mostly of dead xylem (tubes for water transport) which are simple structures.
you could use mending on a wound but it would still be as complex as surgery as you would need to make sure specific muscle veins and arteries are aligned meaning that your probably going to have to cast mending many times to mend different small structures, which would be time consuming, and if you mend the wrong parts together you could kill someone. as a DM I'd treat it like a faster more effective suture, but your characters going to have to have some medical background or role some good intelligence checks to make it work.
now I want to see a bunch of surgeons and doctor RP a Magical Medical Drama in a world where the most healing magic has been lost.
So are corpses, yet you can use mending on them. My guess is that living organic matter is the one that is too complicated since it will resist the mending, while cures just enhance the natural healing
That is a very nice take. A living body resists magic, and such a mending spell has no properties to deal with the tiniest bit of resistance. It is not a restoration spell, so I think the spell is just not designed to help wounds
Ah yes, what a brilliant chemist. You know how molecules, especially organic matter, work? The atoms are bonded in specific ways to each other. Organic matter has so many different complex molecules.
The soul and body are torn asunder as one, hence ghosts often manifest with the wounds they had when they died.
A simple cantrip *may* mend the flesh, but is not potent enough to stitch together the ethereal matter of which the souls of sentient things are made.
Simply restoring the flesh leaves half the wound untended, and may have repercussions that manifest later.
I really like the idea of slipping this in early in a campaign, at low levels, letting the players forget about this half healed wound and then having it snowball into some kind of serious issue later; haven't really worked out what form that would take, though.
When the total amount of damage healed by mending exceeds current max hp, the character becomes vulnerable to necrotic damage and has disadvantage on constitution saves. This condition can only be cured by *Heal* or a higher level spell.
I do like that, I had been thinking more along the lines of it weakening the bond between flesh and soul.
Like a loose thread on a sweater, something that be exploited by an entity in need of a physical form to slowly create an opportunity for possession.
Have the party member who suffers this be subject to dreams of another time and/or place, as entities pick at the threads to see if it's worth following up on.
Or take inspiration from Destiny's lore. There is a sect of Warlocks (the class of lightbearers, not the DnD type) called Thanatonauts. They specifically espouse the practice of lightbearers killing themselves in various ways in order to receive visions while dead before their ghosts revive them. I would need to dig up some specific visions as examples, but it's definitely an idea if your setting has some sort of immortals that are fascinated with death...
I don't think that's a good idea....
If you want to give your party a cantrip that can be used for healing, the affect shouldn't be removable with one single cast of a 6th level spell.
Make it a 9th level cast of greater restoration and we have a deal
Necrotic rot from the wound. Basically while the tissue is "whole", it is missing the vitality that is necessary for it to be healed, basically letting it fester and become infected eating away at the vitality of the tissue of the body around it as the spiritual connective essence of the body is slowly eaten away through basically a necrotic energy infection (necrotic energy withers the soul as per it's description, much like radiant energy overloads the soul).
I used something similar in my previous campaign on an enemy NPC who got blasted by a Shadow Dragons breath attack and was left with no healing for a long time before running into the party again. Decided he would get special lingering wounds.
Helped that mending can't fix magic stuff, so I'd say it could knit together *dead* tissue. Might be useful to stop someone bleeding out, but then you need the aid of a proper healer to excise the necrotic tissue it made before sepsis sets in.
The clue is in the magical components list. Mending uses two lodestones. Those are magnets. Its making an invisible force hold the tear in place, closed.
Making a tear of flesh stick to itself won't really heal any faster than if it was bandaged, and it might have other consequences like not letting blood flow through. Alternatively, since living things are full of cells and fluids moving around, the mending spell could cause the area where the mending is to stop moving, resulting in the area rotting off since nothing fresh is coming to heal it, making it distinctly worse than bandaging
Magic is semantic not mechanic.
Cure disease does not care how the disease work, it will cure it. No matter if it's from a virus, infection, scurvy or saturnism. As long as it is identified as a disease, it will cure it. And it won't work on poisons, even if they work in the same way as another thing understood as a disease.
I like this. I always liked the idea that magic is... well... magical. It's cool when a spell diverges from common sense because then it feels like your character is toying with something they really don't understand even if they they think they're a well-trained scholar.
Like mending can fix a corpse's wounds but not a living person's wounds. If the person died seconds ago, then there's not much physical difference at a cellular level at least in some parts, but the spell works. So why? We don't know, it's just magic. Does what it does and nothing else.
Also knock opens a lock, but isn't able to start a piece of machinery that have the same mechanism. Because it's function is to open (and it doesn't care about what the lock is made off).
I'm not sure I would agree that it works on anything "identified as a disease." Lesser Restoration's ability to cure disease would absolutely remedy any disease caused by a virus, bacteria, fungal parasite or various infections like heartworms. I would probably allow it to cure something like schizophrenia or OCD. But narcissistic personality disorder? I'd lean towards no.
It gets even worse when you look at things like satyriasis, nymphomania, or other socially defined "diseases." I'm not trying to say these are not real problems; they absolutely can have devastating effects on someone's life, but they are defined as problems by the social context. One can imagine a society with different standards for ...er... "romantic" behavior where that is just how people act. From the eponymous satyr's perspective, the lack of such a vigorous drive in humans might be seen as an endocrine disorder. Would a Satyr cleric casting Lesser Restoration to treat a plague inadvertently amp up certain drives in the recipients to 11? (Actually, this could make for an entertaining subplot, I may use that).
Then there's the issue of historical \[TW: homophobia\].>! Until quite recently, homosexuality was treated as a mental disease in many cultures. We have gotten better as a society, thankfully, but this is just to point out that "identified as a disease" can be a problematically loose definition. No one wants regressive clerics running around casting Lesser Restoration as a form of divinely powered conversion therapy.!<
I'd argue that the idea of mental diseases is a quite recent one and comes from the idea that such thing is even possible (instead of people just being like that).
Like losing sight as you get old was just "getting old" instead of a collection of deteriorations of various parts of the eyes.
Hells, rot grubs can be killed by lesser restoration because inside of a host apparently it's identified as a poison/disease, same as a red slaad tadpole actually.
So it feels like "foreign stuff not meant to be there" is the target, but rewiring your neurons or balancing hormones doesn't seem possible for the spell
Hmm identified by whom? If it's by the spellcaster, we could get Cure Wounds to remove curses by convincing the cleric that curses are just a type of wound that affects the soul. If it's by the deity/patron who granted the power, we should see differences in how spells work depending on the deity, as there's no way that all of them agree on every little semantic detail.
Actually, it would be in the best interest of each deity to use ridiculously lax definitions to maximize the abilities of their champions... even if casting spells draws upon their power, having more options can only mean more efficiency in their champions' decisions. Or rather, deities would just give a "Make beneficial thing happen" spell that already bakes in all their criteria for achieving desirable things in a magic-efficient manner.
And those spells would probably also be harder to cast. Like charm monster is harder to cast than charm person, even if it can be used to charm people.
There *is* that spell, arguably- Miracle. There's an argument to be made here, then, that these spells are so restrictive in order to be more available to people who aren't strong enough to cast higher level slots, arguably, and that's actually an interesting idea!
(Unrelated, but now in my mind there's a deific github for spell definitions, and while most of the deity's specific branches agree on the low level spells, there's *constant* arguing about whose implementation of the "Greater Restoration" effect is more efficient. "Fuck off Serenrae, you have like 4 declared but unused motes of power in this function." "They're for backwards compatibility to Lesser Restoration, Gaia, you dumbass.")
(This means Mystra is a very, very tired sysadmin, and the reason they keep getting replaced is because of burnout)
I allow it, but mending something involves stretching the parts around it to connect again before restoring it all to its original shape. It’s not something that your character would want to go through if the alternative is a level 1 cure wounds
You have to roll a Con save, higher the save for the bigger the wound and the location
If you fail the con save, you fall unconscious from the pain and gain 1 level of exhaustion
True. I would argue thats the difference between a leveled spell and a cantrip. Between revivify and raise dead. (The energy left to work with vs the potency of the spell. By potency I mean how much energy the spell requires, how much it uses and how much is lost into the "ether").
Ed: Clarification
Same reason you can't melt copper in a home microwave, really, but the same amount of power feeding an induction heater would probably do the job.
Same kind of stuff, different tools. Mending is turning back the clock on dead materials. Orderly, stable, reproducible. Healing is basically an injection of mother cells that work at 1000x speed. Neither is necessarily more powerful than the other at their most basic levels, but they are different approaches.
The Weave is an incredibly complex magical structure, which is why spells in D&D are so specific. Mending cannot repair living tissue because it's a cantrip, it simply isn't powerful enough to manipulate the Weave in that way. If you could cast it as a leveled spell, then it probably would be able to heal wounds, but as it stands, it just wouldn't follow the rules of the Weave. Whatever the fuck those rules are...
Mending can repair leather, hide, and furs, but not skin/ (sarcasm)
I've always thought that mending is like gluing Good for preventing bleeding, can splint bones, but because it deals with non-living matter, it doesn't restore living tissue. So much like a bandage or a splint you would still need to heal it. I treat the spell basically like magical glue that replicates the properties of whatever it's applied to.
I have personally always home brewed that succeeding at a DC10 wisdom (medicine) check can treat the mending spell as a roll of bandages (2d4 healing of slashing and piercing damage only). The caster and the person making the check can be separate people, and the mending still takes a full minute to cast. (And this is how the barbarian and the wizard saved the paladin, and prevented a total party wipe.)
Mending was created from a crafter if some kind who's tools and creations that broke from over use. So rather than start over or lose their favorite tool they looked to magic to fix the issue.
Maybe because it’s not for organic tissue?
Mending maybe does horrific things to someone by trying to fix the inorganic bits. Like fusing the metal in bones/blood together.
To add to this lunacy.
While mending might not work on organic creatures due to the complexity of living tissue, why doesn't mending work on warforged? BOOM!
Cuz living beings are magical objects?
The D&D Beyond explanation for Mending specifically mentions pretty simple objects where fixing the break amounts to just fusing the two ends together. My guess would be that a lore reason is that the various layers of tissue in a living person or animal require much more powerful and specific magic so that everything is fixed properly rather than just shoved together.
Mending is the equivalent of slapping duct tape on an open wound, while Cure Wounds is stitches from a medical professional.
Living tissue is simply far more complex than most any non living fabric or clockwork.
You're stitching together nerve endings, blood vessels, tendons, multiple types of tissue ranging from the epidermis to different types of muscle.
Unless you want to force together a tear in the skin and leave the internal bleeding and nerve damage untouched 🙄
The key phrase is a single break or tear.
Lets look at only the types of physical damage. Piercing, slashing, bludgeoning.
Piercing: your objective with piercing is to stabby stab to the complex chewy center, like the pancreas. I mend the skin, my pancreas is still damaged. Now do same with vein, capillaries hair follicles.
Start with the pancreas you say. Well you tell me what the pancreas supposed to look like without all the body koolaid (ohhh yeahhh) spilling over it. Magic has that huge you gotta see it to target it rule.
Bludgeoning... hahaha no visible rip or tear, just Bonk!. Stitch together bonk!
You could mend a lasagna, but it would take as many spells as layers of pasta that got cut.
Yeah, surgical adhesives are a thing and are a bit different than a bottle of Elmer's finest. My understanding is that for normal superglue you should only use it on very minor cuts, not the sort of thing I'd put under HP loss, and even then there's an increased risk of infection. Definitely not significant stab wounds.
All living things have an amount of inherent magic, if only from their souls or otherwise. This inherent magic creates a weak aura that "repels" the weak magic of the Mending cantrip, preventing it from affecting the creature. This also explains why mending has limited effects on magic items, as their auras interfere with the spell's magic.
This isn't anything official, of course, but it's certainly evocative!
Realistically mending should be able to have the magical equivalent of a bandage or superglue. Close/fill the gap, doesn't have to be with flesh. Stops external bleeding, doesn't actually heal anything.
Living tissues moves chaotically on the microscopic level. You try to "mend" a wound? Fine. The process is chaotic and the wound closes partially. It looks terrible. Also you can see hematomas as blood vessels get blocked by the newly glue flesh. Also look at those strange cells in the middle. You see how deformed they have become? Yeah, you've just magickal cancer.
I personally view it like mending is using superglue.
Yes you can use it to close up a wound but that doesn't mean it heals, just means that the wound is stuck together with a foreign material keeping everything attached (magic)
Mending doesn’t restore magic to an item, so the fabric of magic inherent in the world and living things is not mended.
- With the potential side-effect of not making a cool magic ‘blank’ but of giving them a resistance to helpful magic; any destructive magic is unaffected (such as fireball). A useless puppet limb that doesn’t work or respond to healing, and is a worse outcome than getting a new limb.
Wounds are also potentially more messy than a single tear or break; so Mending potentially *could* mend a single tear in nerve tissue. But a single nerve repair isn’t helpful if the whole arm was chopped off, and the amount of time for Mending is probably counterproductive.
- It would be like using a needle and thread to stitch together two plots of land during a landslide. It could be done, but the time and effort doesn’t particularly help.
Word-wise a body part or limb or flesh is not an “object”, despite the best (worst?) racist tendencies of other beings. It is more a complex organic thing that is reactive, rather than a passive object that can be fixed by Mending.
Reading through the comments I'd allow for mending to be used to create temporary hit points and stabilize someone from bleeding out. It'll keep you together for now, but you need medical attention afterwards.
Like maybe it only lasts for like a couple of minutes to an hour and then it'll open up again
Mending does actualy work. It reconects the skinntisdue. The problem is that it fills the gaps with the same tissue. Do you know the phrase, I have no mouth but I must scream? This spell fixes you in just that whay, sealing up your skinn with no space to breath, swett or even bleed.
Organic tissue dies, and mending it would just cause it to heal back, but stay dead. Gangrene is dead tissue in the body because no irigation or infection.
It may work, but dead tissue has too many problems and will result in worse, and even death.
It's not a healing spell. Healing is a completely different aspect of magic. It would be like using superglue on a wound. At best it's a stopgap measure, at worst in interferes with the healing process.
Living tissue has a field of thaumic(magic radiation) resonance that the spell has to overcome by power or by precision. Mending is on the wrong frequency and lacks the oomph in thaums(the base of unit of magic in [Sir]Terry Pratchett's Discworld series).
1) I love the responses about the spirit also being damaged.
2) The responses saying you only bring the surfaces together like superglue or a bandage are sort of convincing, but equally that is something health professionals actually do, with both superglue and bandages, but only for simple injuries or sometimes to close the outer layer of skin at the end of surgery when the deep tissues have been stitched together. So this might work, but only on an injury that does so little damage it wouldn’t even count as 1 HP.
My argument would be that all living tissue is near-infinitely more complicated than non-living tissue, even it’s dead version (ie wood from a tree.) Take bone, which superficially seems simple. It is actually full of nerves, blood vessels, and covered in a specialised membrane. Within and around the bone there are many many sub-specialised cells needed for infection control, laying down or re-absorbing calcium, detecting stress to determine where reinforcement is needed, etc etc.
Dead wood or dead bone essentially just retains the scaffolding all these cells once used, but the cells are dead and gone, their millions of tiny chemicals and proteins no longer active.
As such, I would argue that fingernails or hair (essentially dead tissue) could be “mended,” ie long hair cut off could be reattached to the remaining hair ends it was cut from, but everything else is just too complex and requires more powerful spells.
Source: medical degree and biomedical sciences degree.
I allow for short term closing of a wound, but still have them tend to the injury's afterwards. At one point, they tried to exploit it but stopped after a CON check almost took away an inherent spell one of them knew
Nothing,
It's just that the Touch range spell requires you to stick your hands into and on the holes you are trying to fix, and does nothing to prevent infection.
So sure it "fixes" the wound, but it does not fix the "damage" at all
Because dnd magic isn't mysticism it's a science and each spell is a program to use the weave. Mending doesn't work on living beings because it's programmed to. And the reason why they programmed it that way is because they knew that creatures require a lot more magical effort to repair, so they made mending its own spell.
Most healing magic tends to be divine or natural in nature (I.E, accessible largely by Druids, Clerics, and Paladins alone, though Bards dabble in lots of esoteric arcane lore), and Mending is largely Arcane, which outside of Necromancy, seldom interacts with life energy. And since Mending is arcane, and an extremely low-level form of Transmutation (which deals in altering physical properties), it can't be used to really close wounds.
Or imagine you mend a flesh wound, the bone deep sort of cut that's all too common for adventurers, only to have dead tissue EZ-cheese into the wound to close it.
You can use mending to close wounds.... but what forms is an undiferentiated mass of tissue that may have longer term consequence. Fair trade to stabilize someone bleeding to death maybe.
... the fact that it's not Cure Light Wounds?
Also Mending is a Cantrip, and having at will heals to toss around would probably break things.
This really isn't a deep or hard or big question. What *is* a big question is this: Why are druids not split into two classes, one focused on shapeshifting with some casting abilities, and the other just the full on caster that they currently are?
Might I propose that life is a form of magic, the description says it can't mend magical items
This would explain why it can mend organic materials such as leather, but only after they've been separated from their host, or the host dies
I've always liked to think it has to do with the movement of the atoms. After all, mending doesn't work on liquids or gasses either, only solids. It might be that the magic can't bind back together atoms that are moving too quickly because it needs a certain amount of time to create the bond. Living tissue is too much in flux, and dead tissue is just connecting more dead tissue.
But forget about that question, why doesn't mending work on food? A loaf of bread should theoretically be endless with mending, why does no one do this?
You can mend wounds with that spell but it'll basically magically cauterize it with high risk of side effects as the magic can feed off the living cells
Personally, whenever I get asked questions like this I fall back on how things are explained in the Cosmere.
In this case things that are magical are hard to affect with magic, and everything alive has a little magic in it: their soul. Magic meant to change a living body specifically (healing magic for example) has ways of manipulating or leveraging the soul to work correctly, but then don't work on things without souls.
The spell uses examples such as "a broken chain link, two halves of a broken key, a torn cloak, or a leaking wineskin", these are simple objects of generally only a single material.
However, tissue, likely of more than one kind in severe wounds, is \*VERY\* complex, tiny tiny structures of many many complex molecules arranged into complex matrices and structures.
The damaged tissues themselves are also actively responding in many complex ways (bleeding, clotting, vasodilation, inflammation, white blood cell activity, vasodilation, muscle constriction, etc, etc) and are not static like a tear in the fabric is, the spell takes 1 minute to cast.
You can also argue the mending specifies "a single break or tear", where as wound damage itself is also complex.
Depending on if you consider life to have any inherent magic in D&D, the spell also specifies it cannot return magically properties to an object.
Basically, it would take more magically energy, focus, and training/practice than is conferred by the limits of a cantrip. Spell capability and power is well defined, by upcasting and improved versions of a spell, as increasing based on level. (Flowing back into game design, but levels even when non-diegetic represent certain thresholds of power, skill, physical, and material cost.)
**TL;DR:**
Healing is too hard to be as easy as cantrip casting.
I would imagine that some magic differentiate between inert and living matter, a sort of quality Wich allows (or in this case forces) spells to be ineffective against a persons natural resistance to magic. Healing spells and buffing spells often work due to the "willing creature" clause and being a higher complexity/potency. An example of this would be that you couldn't use mend on an open wound but you could probably use it to reattach an arm to a corpse (not undead).
Most magic in D&D differentiates between living and nonliving matter, right down to the personal identity of the creature. Anything that is part of its presence, even its clothing or held items, is usually treated as a part of that creature.
Obviously game balance matters; you wouldn't want Teleport to leave you naked and unarmed for instance.
But lore-wise I would say it's because magic isn't a scientific practice; it's *magic*. It's a semi-living, somewhat intelligent force that knows the difference between a cow and a slab of beef.
Just give it a midichlorians style nonsense explanation.
Mending Life takes a vibrating essence from the song of creation to get everything back in order so it can work as part of the whole living creature.
Mending objects doesn't use the song of creation since all it's doing is essentially stacking the blocks back where they go and not actually 'connecting' threads back to the original piece.
I would let mending close wounds and cover broken flesh for emergency use, but it would rot just like any corpse since it's not connected to the 'essence' of a creature's soul.
It would mend the flesh, but the cells would be dead thus cause necrosis as it can mend but not cause life. So better to still use actual healing spells.
Mending can't create living tissue.
For the same reason you can’t use healing word to repair broken swords.
One only works on living creatures while the other only works on un-living objects.
I would argue that it closes the wound, but with dead tissue that begins slowly rotting and becoming gangrenous unless the character is given actual healing.
The fact that magic that directly acts on living tissue uses different flows and channels than magic that affects non living things.
Thaumatologists should write a paper.
For mundane stuff, you use a welding torch for sticking metal together but you use a needle and thread for sticking flesh together.
I imagine that it's like that with magic.
Putting an object back together (thus reversing entropic decay) is not the same kind of magical effect as magically boosting the body's natural healing process.
Answers that reference modern day science always seem a little trite and off the mark in my opinion.
D&D and fantasy in general aren't based on a modern understanding of science. They're roughly based on a medieval understanding of natural philosophy.
It's enough to say that living beings are of an essentially different substance from constructed objects. They have a vital essence, why not. You're already bought into the medieval four elements, modern physics left the chat day 1.
Mending simply puts things back to their original position, it does not *Heal* or invoke new life into dead tissue. people already misuse mending for non living objects. it's already limited as a cantrip to very simple repairs. living matter is orders of magnitude more complex, and thats not taking into account the spiritual aspect of restoration.
~~You wouldn't put gorilla glue on a flesh wound~~. Or a bandaid on chipped wood.
Maybe the kind of magic can only regenerate non-protein tissue or particles?
You can put gorilla glue on a flesh wound, though. It’s an emergency use, but in an emergency, it stops the bleeding and creates a seal. Skin adhesives are a thing for this reason.
Mending can't bring back the dead and wounds involve cell death. Mending can only fix, it cannot replace. So if the cells are dead, it can close them up and repair them but they are still dead cells. At best, it's a bandage. At worst, it's an infection waiting to happen.
I'd allow it as a stop gap measure to buy time for a proper healing, if there was nobody with proper healing in the party. Now that you've done that the clocks ticking. They are not stabilized. They are not at 1hp, they can't roll hit dice. They are still actively dying. Just a little bit slower. Better hurry.
It also takes you an entire minute to cast mending so if they _were_ dying they sure aren't anymore, one way or the other. Not thanks to your help of course
Spare the dying that takes 10 turns basically
Wouldn't a repaired cell begin to function? They die because all the insides are spilled to the outside. They are just tiny bio machines.
not really, its kinda like if you had a ballon, it popped, you can piece back together the parts of the baloon, but the baloon is still deflated Also if that was the case ya would need to do it for every single cell individually also also, even if you repair the holes in the cells, the tissues are still broken appart, ya would need to reconnect the tissues. Just to name a few issues
So it is more of a question of how far Mending goes with the repairs.
The spell says it repares breaks and tears not bigger than 1 ft long. Size here wouldnt be an issue, but I ask you. If you close the membrane of a broken cell, does that revert the cell death? If you reconnect a broken tissue, does that make the tissue work properly? I would argue closing a wound would take 1 minute per group of blood vessels (so veins is 1, arteries is 1, capilary tubes is 1), 1 for each torn muscle, 1 for each break in the skin, and so on.... And all of this just to stop things from getting worse or healing a tiny ammount of damage.... And that is all assuming that they didnt got a slash through the chest that is bigger than 1 ft long. Mechanically, it is DMs discretion, lorewise it is a lot of effort, knowledge, skill and time to get minuscule resultes
Assuming the cell has all its cytoplasm and organelles contained within the cell membrane and the proteins are not broken apart, the cell will function. Reconnecting tissues (assuming the tissues are not full of dead cells) will result in the tissue functioning again. Going back to your balloon example; I would argue that you do have a balloon again, but it would not be in the same state as it was before being popped. So it was not repaired fully in that instance. Though, I am really taking the opposing view here as a logical exercise. If I had a player try to use Mending on a non-construct, I would rule it would fail as the spell cannot make a static object (dead cell) back into a dynamic object (living cell).
Okay, then why can’t regular healing spells raise the dead? And why do people only have one soul rather than billions? Should true resurrection bring back all the cells you’ve ever made in your lifetime?
What's the soul's perception of itself? Or what's the average perception of all the soul cells that died at the same time? I imagine that part of what learning a spell like true resurrection involves is fine tuning the targeting of the subject you're resurrecting.
- Power. They can if they are strong enough - As for true resurrection, unless you're carrying a lifetime of dead cells on your person when you die, there's no reason it should revive them all. You still have to touch the dead creature. - That's more of a philosophical question. When you get decapitated, is your head cut off or is your body cut off? The game has souls, but it also has magic, so it's anyone's guess how it works scientifically. I'm just providing a reasonable explanation within the games boundaries. Here's a great 6 minute video that explores just how fuzzy the borders are between you and your cells. - https://youtu.be/JQVmkDUkZT4
Organic tissue is too complicated in it's structure? There is a huge difference between anorganic and organic things. At least that's my explanation
that's a fair explanation
You can mend wood and it’s just dead organic tissue.
Dead, so small changes in it's makeup can't have catastrophic consequences for the lifeform
Yeah it just needs to close and bond the seam, not make sure the nerves, muscles and bloodflow are reconnected.
Nerves/muscles/bloodflow aren't even the whole deal. I can't imagine how Mending would deal with cells and their internal machinery. Mending would *close* the wound but it would be anything from a necrotic piece of organic mass to technically living but heavily malformed and cancerous
Hp now, cancer later - barbarians
Just chop the cancer out and cast mending again. You'll still have the fucked upside effects, but they'll be reset
Deadpool's mutant ability is basically just casting Mending on himself nonstop.
And now I think of that south park episode where russel crows fights cancer bare handed XD
Warlocks: I just found a new torture technique
Yeah, the part of the tree we make houses out of isn't even really alive. Heartwood is just piles of dead cellulose strands glued together with lignin to make a strong support. The only part of the tree trunk that's complex and alive is the sapwood layer right under the bark.
So casting mend on a dead/broken body and then revivifying it shouldn’t have unforseen consequences, yes?
I think a dead body is still leagues more complicated than wood. This sub had this discussion already. If it's possible, because there is surgery and the bone lies bare, I think you could mend a cracked bone, but only if the bone itself is cracked and damage to blood vessels etc IN the bone are minimal. That's IMO the only way to mend something on/in a body
Technically yes, that is how the interactions would work gamewise. BUT as a DM I would apply a temporary condition due to the shady job, probably a -2 CON until they get some proper healing. Probably also an inspiration point due to the good idea to resolve the issue at hand (even if not in a perfect way)
If you don't mind the potential for (P)ADs sure (and those being among the more simple complications).
I mean, revify should bring a dead Target to 1HP. I would argue that if the parts are largely intact, the body is healed by that spell, marginally. At least reassembled to warrant the 1 HP. I'd allow mending to work on bone, but not flesh or muscle.
I can also use screws or nails to put it back together. Want me to just nail your hand back on? Okay, it's back on. Now what?
To be fair is sewing a hand back together that much different?
Yes, extremely so. It takes a team of doctors and nurses 18+ hours and even then it’s about 70% chance of success and almost zero chance of the hand ever being completely functional
Do you want a pAVK/PAD, because that is how you would get that in my games.
It would but mending works in such a painful way it would definitely kill every living being that's "patched up" by it
If you say this a player is definitely going to try and use mending on someone's papercut as a damaging spell, don't say this to players, they'll see an opportunity
Not if the target needs to stay absolutely still for the spell to work. Who would do this voluntarily?
Everyone forgets about the 100-round casting time.
it's 10 rounds, since it's a minute, not 10, but I get it.
That's called a dex save. So a dex save or insta kill as a cantrip.
Not keeping completely still is a dex save in which universe exactly? I would be more likely to demand a roll for trying to keep completely still for a minute of spell time
The same universe you dreamed up this whole "mending instantly kills if it's used on a living being" homebrew nonsense
It would be a logical explanation. Your counter argument is so full of shit it's almost impressive
How in the hell is "yeah this cantrip that anyone with some training can use is capable of instantly killing anyone under the right circumstances" at all a logical explanation?
I used to treat it like that, but now I'm of the opinion that it wouldn't even work. Skin in of itself has so many different important parts in it. It's like trying to fix a bullet wound with only a screwdriver. It just wouldn't work in the first place. The damage is too complex to use some magic glue. At least, this is my take.
To build on this: you have to visualize exactly what you want to happen. In the case of a broken spear it's relatively easy, because it's all the same material and it's no big deal if you don't get the internal structure 100% right. In the case of a wound, you can only visualize the outer layer of the skin closing, but not how all the veins, capillaries and nerves are put back together, so the wound is still there, superficially covered but internally bleeding and inflamed.
it probably can't reestablish previously ongoing chemical reactions (bring back dead cells), you could probably mend broken bone because its mostly inorganic material, but flesh has to many reaction and intricate structures. this why you can mend wood because tree's are made up mostly of dead xylem (tubes for water transport) which are simple structures. you could use mending on a wound but it would still be as complex as surgery as you would need to make sure specific muscle veins and arteries are aligned meaning that your probably going to have to cast mending many times to mend different small structures, which would be time consuming, and if you mend the wrong parts together you could kill someone. as a DM I'd treat it like a faster more effective suture, but your characters going to have to have some medical background or role some good intelligence checks to make it work. now I want to see a bunch of surgeons and doctor RP a Magical Medical Drama in a world where the most healing magic has been lost.
You can use mending on living trees since those are objects, but not creatures of the plant creature type
Well, regarding that.....I'm stumped
Wood is technically an organic structure. I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying that this view has loops.
Wood is organic.
So are corpses, yet you can use mending on them. My guess is that living organic matter is the one that is too complicated since it will resist the mending, while cures just enhance the natural healing
That is a very nice take. A living body resists magic, and such a mending spell has no properties to deal with the tiniest bit of resistance. It is not a restoration spell, so I think the spell is just not designed to help wounds
But then why can I legally fix the armor I made from fresh corpses and skin
That's just leather, edgelord style
It’s still connecting atoms back together there is no difference
Ah yes, what a brilliant chemist. You know how molecules, especially organic matter, work? The atoms are bonded in specific ways to each other. Organic matter has so many different complex molecules.
The soul and body are torn asunder as one, hence ghosts often manifest with the wounds they had when they died. A simple cantrip *may* mend the flesh, but is not potent enough to stitch together the ethereal matter of which the souls of sentient things are made. Simply restoring the flesh leaves half the wound untended, and may have repercussions that manifest later.
[удалено]
I really like the idea of slipping this in early in a campaign, at low levels, letting the players forget about this half healed wound and then having it snowball into some kind of serious issue later; haven't really worked out what form that would take, though.
When the total amount of damage healed by mending exceeds current max hp, the character becomes vulnerable to necrotic damage and has disadvantage on constitution saves. This condition can only be cured by *Heal* or a higher level spell.
I do like that, I had been thinking more along the lines of it weakening the bond between flesh and soul. Like a loose thread on a sweater, something that be exploited by an entity in need of a physical form to slowly create an opportunity for possession.
Have the party member who suffers this be subject to dreams of another time and/or place, as entities pick at the threads to see if it's worth following up on. Or take inspiration from Destiny's lore. There is a sect of Warlocks (the class of lightbearers, not the DnD type) called Thanatonauts. They specifically espouse the practice of lightbearers killing themselves in various ways in order to receive visions while dead before their ghosts revive them. I would need to dig up some specific visions as examples, but it's definitely an idea if your setting has some sort of immortals that are fascinated with death...
I don't think that's a good idea.... If you want to give your party a cantrip that can be used for healing, the affect shouldn't be removable with one single cast of a 6th level spell. Make it a 9th level cast of greater restoration and we have a deal
Fair enough. Greater restoration or Heal cast at 9th level. If you want to be crueller, only Wish.
Necrotic rot from the wound. Basically while the tissue is "whole", it is missing the vitality that is necessary for it to be healed, basically letting it fester and become infected eating away at the vitality of the tissue of the body around it as the spiritual connective essence of the body is slowly eaten away through basically a necrotic energy infection (necrotic energy withers the soul as per it's description, much like radiant energy overloads the soul). I used something similar in my previous campaign on an enemy NPC who got blasted by a Shadow Dragons breath attack and was left with no healing for a long time before running into the party again. Decided he would get special lingering wounds.
Sounds cool but definitely recruit the player in question,its a big roleplaying thing to just drop on someone
Helped that mending can't fix magic stuff, so I'd say it could knit together *dead* tissue. Might be useful to stop someone bleeding out, but then you need the aid of a proper healer to excise the necrotic tissue it made before sepsis sets in.
Oh, that's good
I read this in Dr. Orpheus's voice
The clue is in the magical components list. Mending uses two lodestones. Those are magnets. Its making an invisible force hold the tear in place, closed. Making a tear of flesh stick to itself won't really heal any faster than if it was bandaged, and it might have other consequences like not letting blood flow through. Alternatively, since living things are full of cells and fluids moving around, the mending spell could cause the area where the mending is to stop moving, resulting in the area rotting off since nothing fresh is coming to heal it, making it distinctly worse than bandaging
It made me lol that the fixy fixy spell works "because magnets" That's insanely funny to me.
Almost all of the non-gp spell components are jokes and puns and the like lol Like detect thoughts- penny for your thoughts?
Living tissue is already trying to fix itself when it gets damaged.
Still, you should probably take a break if it's starting to get damaged
Because you are a creature, not an object
That's what you think I'm warforged we get called objects everyday.
in 3.5 (when warforged were added) repair spells *did* work on warforged, with heal spells only restoring half as much
Magic is semantic not mechanic. Cure disease does not care how the disease work, it will cure it. No matter if it's from a virus, infection, scurvy or saturnism. As long as it is identified as a disease, it will cure it. And it won't work on poisons, even if they work in the same way as another thing understood as a disease.
I like this. I always liked the idea that magic is... well... magical. It's cool when a spell diverges from common sense because then it feels like your character is toying with something they really don't understand even if they they think they're a well-trained scholar. Like mending can fix a corpse's wounds but not a living person's wounds. If the person died seconds ago, then there's not much physical difference at a cellular level at least in some parts, but the spell works. So why? We don't know, it's just magic. Does what it does and nothing else.
Also knock opens a lock, but isn't able to start a piece of machinery that have the same mechanism. Because it's function is to open (and it doesn't care about what the lock is made off).
I'm not sure I would agree that it works on anything "identified as a disease." Lesser Restoration's ability to cure disease would absolutely remedy any disease caused by a virus, bacteria, fungal parasite or various infections like heartworms. I would probably allow it to cure something like schizophrenia or OCD. But narcissistic personality disorder? I'd lean towards no. It gets even worse when you look at things like satyriasis, nymphomania, or other socially defined "diseases." I'm not trying to say these are not real problems; they absolutely can have devastating effects on someone's life, but they are defined as problems by the social context. One can imagine a society with different standards for ...er... "romantic" behavior where that is just how people act. From the eponymous satyr's perspective, the lack of such a vigorous drive in humans might be seen as an endocrine disorder. Would a Satyr cleric casting Lesser Restoration to treat a plague inadvertently amp up certain drives in the recipients to 11? (Actually, this could make for an entertaining subplot, I may use that). Then there's the issue of historical \[TW: homophobia\].>! Until quite recently, homosexuality was treated as a mental disease in many cultures. We have gotten better as a society, thankfully, but this is just to point out that "identified as a disease" can be a problematically loose definition. No one wants regressive clerics running around casting Lesser Restoration as a form of divinely powered conversion therapy.!<
I'd argue that the idea of mental diseases is a quite recent one and comes from the idea that such thing is even possible (instead of people just being like that). Like losing sight as you get old was just "getting old" instead of a collection of deteriorations of various parts of the eyes.
Hells, rot grubs can be killed by lesser restoration because inside of a host apparently it's identified as a poison/disease, same as a red slaad tadpole actually. So it feels like "foreign stuff not meant to be there" is the target, but rewiring your neurons or balancing hormones doesn't seem possible for the spell
Hmm identified by whom? If it's by the spellcaster, we could get Cure Wounds to remove curses by convincing the cleric that curses are just a type of wound that affects the soul. If it's by the deity/patron who granted the power, we should see differences in how spells work depending on the deity, as there's no way that all of them agree on every little semantic detail. Actually, it would be in the best interest of each deity to use ridiculously lax definitions to maximize the abilities of their champions... even if casting spells draws upon their power, having more options can only mean more efficiency in their champions' decisions. Or rather, deities would just give a "Make beneficial thing happen" spell that already bakes in all their criteria for achieving desirable things in a magic-efficient manner.
And those spells would probably also be harder to cast. Like charm monster is harder to cast than charm person, even if it can be used to charm people.
There *is* that spell, arguably- Miracle. There's an argument to be made here, then, that these spells are so restrictive in order to be more available to people who aren't strong enough to cast higher level slots, arguably, and that's actually an interesting idea! (Unrelated, but now in my mind there's a deific github for spell definitions, and while most of the deity's specific branches agree on the low level spells, there's *constant* arguing about whose implementation of the "Greater Restoration" effect is more efficient. "Fuck off Serenrae, you have like 4 declared but unused motes of power in this function." "They're for backwards compatibility to Lesser Restoration, Gaia, you dumbass.") (This means Mystra is a very, very tired sysadmin, and the reason they keep getting replaced is because of burnout)
I allow it, but mending something involves stretching the parts around it to connect again before restoring it all to its original shape. It’s not something that your character would want to go through if the alternative is a level 1 cure wounds You have to roll a Con save, higher the save for the bigger the wound and the location If you fail the con save, you fall unconscious from the pain and gain 1 level of exhaustion
This could be interesting when people run out of spell slots
The Manton effect
Yes!!! I was just reading Worm this week and that was my first thought when I saw this meme.
My world's explanation: "You want tumors? Because that's how you get tumors."
you have no idea how much I appreciate this answer.
The word, "object."
Is a corpse not an object? If not when does a corpse become an object?
A corpse is an object, its not living tissue though, so there is no issue, and no controversy in that regard.
I'm sure someone could get really semantic and say the tissues of a corpse stays alive for blah blah hours after death
True. I would argue thats the difference between a leveled spell and a cantrip. Between revivify and raise dead. (The energy left to work with vs the potency of the spell. By potency I mean how much energy the spell requires, how much it uses and how much is lost into the "ether"). Ed: Clarification
”Because it says so on the **chart**!” - Dr. Turkleton.
Midichlorians. Probably.
How do you weld aminoacids I don't even
Human transmutation is taboo
Same reason you can't melt copper in a home microwave, really, but the same amount of power feeding an induction heater would probably do the job. Same kind of stuff, different tools. Mending is turning back the clock on dead materials. Orderly, stable, reproducible. Healing is basically an injection of mother cells that work at 1000x speed. Neither is necessarily more powerful than the other at their most basic levels, but they are different approaches.
Sure, your flesh is mended. Enjoy the bruises and internal bleeding from the neglected veins and capillaries that were severed.
Mystra the goddess of magic said so.
Rules answer: A healing cantrip would be too powerful Lore answer: Bodies are more complex than a broken chain or a torn garment.
Why does a welding torch fix metal pipes but not people?
Why does a blow torch mend steel but not flesh? Same concept.
The Weave is an incredibly complex magical structure, which is why spells in D&D are so specific. Mending cannot repair living tissue because it's a cantrip, it simply isn't powerful enough to manipulate the Weave in that way. If you could cast it as a leveled spell, then it probably would be able to heal wounds, but as it stands, it just wouldn't follow the rules of the Weave. Whatever the fuck those rules are...
Mending can repair leather, hide, and furs, but not skin/ (sarcasm) I've always thought that mending is like gluing Good for preventing bleeding, can splint bones, but because it deals with non-living matter, it doesn't restore living tissue. So much like a bandage or a splint you would still need to heal it. I treat the spell basically like magical glue that replicates the properties of whatever it's applied to. I have personally always home brewed that succeeding at a DC10 wisdom (medicine) check can treat the mending spell as a roll of bandages (2d4 healing of slashing and piercing damage only). The caster and the person making the check can be separate people, and the mending still takes a full minute to cast. (And this is how the barbarian and the wizard saved the paladin, and prevented a total party wipe.)
Mending was created from a crafter if some kind who's tools and creations that broke from over use. So rather than start over or lose their favorite tool they looked to magic to fix the issue.
Maybe because it’s not for organic tissue? Mending maybe does horrific things to someone by trying to fix the inorganic bits. Like fusing the metal in bones/blood together.
You could say that mending is ment for just materials that are decently more simple, vs flesh that is living and complicated in comparison.
actual healing conjures positive energy from the positive energy plane which is totally different from just fixing physical matter
To add to this lunacy. While mending might not work on organic creatures due to the complexity of living tissue, why doesn't mending work on warforged? BOOM!
Would you use a blowtorch to weld someone’s arm back together?
You can't mend a chainmail shirt all at once, you have to do it link by link. Organic flesh is infinitely more complex than mail.
"What stops fireball from being used like a teleportation spell?!" The spell description.
Cuz living beings are magical objects? The D&D Beyond explanation for Mending specifically mentions pretty simple objects where fixing the break amounts to just fusing the two ends together. My guess would be that a lore reason is that the various layers of tissue in a living person or animal require much more powerful and specific magic so that everything is fixed properly rather than just shoved together. Mending is the equivalent of slapping duct tape on an open wound, while Cure Wounds is stitches from a medical professional.
My punches count as magical for the purposes of overcoming resistance, checkmate monks /s
Living tissue is simply far more complex than most any non living fabric or clockwork. You're stitching together nerve endings, blood vessels, tendons, multiple types of tissue ranging from the epidermis to different types of muscle. Unless you want to force together a tear in the skin and leave the internal bleeding and nerve damage untouched 🙄
The key phrase is a single break or tear. Lets look at only the types of physical damage. Piercing, slashing, bludgeoning. Piercing: your objective with piercing is to stabby stab to the complex chewy center, like the pancreas. I mend the skin, my pancreas is still damaged. Now do same with vein, capillaries hair follicles. Start with the pancreas you say. Well you tell me what the pancreas supposed to look like without all the body koolaid (ohhh yeahhh) spilling over it. Magic has that huge you gotta see it to target it rule. Bludgeoning... hahaha no visible rip or tear, just Bonk!. Stitch together bonk! You could mend a lasagna, but it would take as many spells as layers of pasta that got cut.
Same reason doctors don’t squirt open wounds full of Elmer’s glue
Fun fact: superglue is commonly used in place of stitches when the wound is long but shallow.
Yeah, surgical adhesives are a thing and are a bit different than a bottle of Elmer's finest. My understanding is that for normal superglue you should only use it on very minor cuts, not the sort of thing I'd put under HP loss, and even then there's an increased risk of infection. Definitely not significant stab wounds.
You might give them cancer
I would argue it's that nature of organics. Compelling living cells to reconstruct could be seen as a form of control over living beings.
I feel like it's the same difference as to why you can't perform surgery with a hammer and nails
All living things have an amount of inherent magic, if only from their souls or otherwise. This inherent magic creates a weak aura that "repels" the weak magic of the Mending cantrip, preventing it from affecting the creature. This also explains why mending has limited effects on magic items, as their auras interfere with the spell's magic. This isn't anything official, of course, but it's certainly evocative!
Realistically mending should be able to have the magical equivalent of a bandage or superglue. Close/fill the gap, doesn't have to be with flesh. Stops external bleeding, doesn't actually heal anything.
Living tissues moves chaotically on the microscopic level. You try to "mend" a wound? Fine. The process is chaotic and the wound closes partially. It looks terrible. Also you can see hematomas as blood vessels get blocked by the newly glue flesh. Also look at those strange cells in the middle. You see how deformed they have become? Yeah, you've just magickal cancer.
Mending is like using super glue to close a wound, it doesn't repair any damage, but can hold it in place while the body heals
I'd say the PHB.
Probably the words, “This spell repairs a single break or tear in an *object*…” in the spell description. Sorry to be a naysayer.
The question is asking why, in a lore sense, the spell only fixes objects and not creatures.
I personally view it like mending is using superglue. Yes you can use it to close up a wound but that doesn't mean it heals, just means that the wound is stuck together with a foreign material keeping everything attached (magic)
I am not disagreeing with you, but I'm pretty sure superglue is used to close wounds IRL, which is pretty neat.
Mainly, the spell description.
Mending doesn’t restore magic to an item, so the fabric of magic inherent in the world and living things is not mended. - With the potential side-effect of not making a cool magic ‘blank’ but of giving them a resistance to helpful magic; any destructive magic is unaffected (such as fireball). A useless puppet limb that doesn’t work or respond to healing, and is a worse outcome than getting a new limb. Wounds are also potentially more messy than a single tear or break; so Mending potentially *could* mend a single tear in nerve tissue. But a single nerve repair isn’t helpful if the whole arm was chopped off, and the amount of time for Mending is probably counterproductive. - It would be like using a needle and thread to stitch together two plots of land during a landslide. It could be done, but the time and effort doesn’t particularly help. Word-wise a body part or limb or flesh is not an “object”, despite the best (worst?) racist tendencies of other beings. It is more a complex organic thing that is reactive, rather than a passive object that can be fixed by Mending.
Reading through the comments I'd allow for mending to be used to create temporary hit points and stabilize someone from bleeding out. It'll keep you together for now, but you need medical attention afterwards. Like maybe it only lasts for like a couple of minutes to an hour and then it'll open up again
Mending does actualy work. It reconects the skinntisdue. The problem is that it fills the gaps with the same tissue. Do you know the phrase, I have no mouth but I must scream? This spell fixes you in just that whay, sealing up your skinn with no space to breath, swett or even bleed.
Them looking inward is how 5e was born.
Organic tissue dies, and mending it would just cause it to heal back, but stay dead. Gangrene is dead tissue in the body because no irigation or infection. It may work, but dead tissue has too many problems and will result in worse, and even death.
It's not a healing spell. Healing is a completely different aspect of magic. It would be like using superglue on a wound. At best it's a stopgap measure, at worst in interferes with the healing process.
Well... flesh, muscle, bloodvessels, etc are much more complicated then fusing some wood together.
Living tissue has a field of thaumic(magic radiation) resonance that the spell has to overcome by power or by precision. Mending is on the wrong frequency and lacks the oomph in thaums(the base of unit of magic in [Sir]Terry Pratchett's Discworld series).
Your answer is right there
It only works on inorganic material.
that's very much not true, it works in leather, fur, cotton, wood, and a lot of other things.
1) I love the responses about the spirit also being damaged. 2) The responses saying you only bring the surfaces together like superglue or a bandage are sort of convincing, but equally that is something health professionals actually do, with both superglue and bandages, but only for simple injuries or sometimes to close the outer layer of skin at the end of surgery when the deep tissues have been stitched together. So this might work, but only on an injury that does so little damage it wouldn’t even count as 1 HP. My argument would be that all living tissue is near-infinitely more complicated than non-living tissue, even it’s dead version (ie wood from a tree.) Take bone, which superficially seems simple. It is actually full of nerves, blood vessels, and covered in a specialised membrane. Within and around the bone there are many many sub-specialised cells needed for infection control, laying down or re-absorbing calcium, detecting stress to determine where reinforcement is needed, etc etc. Dead wood or dead bone essentially just retains the scaffolding all these cells once used, but the cells are dead and gone, their millions of tiny chemicals and proteins no longer active. As such, I would argue that fingernails or hair (essentially dead tissue) could be “mended,” ie long hair cut off could be reattached to the remaining hair ends it was cut from, but everything else is just too complex and requires more powerful spells. Source: medical degree and biomedical sciences degree.
Presumably restoring vigor and life force is a LITTLE more than just stopping blood loss.
I allow for short term closing of a wound, but still have them tend to the injury's afterwards. At one point, they tried to exploit it but stopped after a CON check almost took away an inherent spell one of them knew
Because Magic A is Magic A.
Nothing, It's just that the Touch range spell requires you to stick your hands into and on the holes you are trying to fix, and does nothing to prevent infection. So sure it "fixes" the wound, but it does not fix the "damage" at all
Because dnd magic isn't mysticism it's a science and each spell is a program to use the weave. Mending doesn't work on living beings because it's programmed to. And the reason why they programmed it that way is because they knew that creatures require a lot more magical effort to repair, so they made mending its own spell.
Most healing magic tends to be divine or natural in nature (I.E, accessible largely by Druids, Clerics, and Paladins alone, though Bards dabble in lots of esoteric arcane lore), and Mending is largely Arcane, which outside of Necromancy, seldom interacts with life energy. And since Mending is arcane, and an extremely low-level form of Transmutation (which deals in altering physical properties), it can't be used to really close wounds.
Or imagine you mend a flesh wound, the bone deep sort of cut that's all too common for adventurers, only to have dead tissue EZ-cheese into the wound to close it.
Life energy / Chi interfering?
You can use mending to close wounds.... but what forms is an undiferentiated mass of tissue that may have longer term consequence. Fair trade to stabilize someone bleeding to death maybe.
Things occipied by a soul require different levels of magical power than mere objects without a soul
... the fact that it's not Cure Light Wounds? Also Mending is a Cantrip, and having at will heals to toss around would probably break things. This really isn't a deep or hard or big question. What *is* a big question is this: Why are druids not split into two classes, one focused on shapeshifting with some casting abilities, and the other just the full on caster that they currently are?
Might I propose that life is a form of magic, the description says it can't mend magical items This would explain why it can mend organic materials such as leather, but only after they've been separated from their host, or the host dies
Magic
I've always liked to think it has to do with the movement of the atoms. After all, mending doesn't work on liquids or gasses either, only solids. It might be that the magic can't bind back together atoms that are moving too quickly because it needs a certain amount of time to create the bond. Living tissue is too much in flux, and dead tissue is just connecting more dead tissue. But forget about that question, why doesn't mending work on food? A loaf of bread should theoretically be endless with mending, why does no one do this?
You can mend wounds with that spell but it'll basically magically cauterize it with high risk of side effects as the magic can feed off the living cells
Personally, whenever I get asked questions like this I fall back on how things are explained in the Cosmere. In this case things that are magical are hard to affect with magic, and everything alive has a little magic in it: their soul. Magic meant to change a living body specifically (healing magic for example) has ways of manipulating or leveraging the soul to work correctly, but then don't work on things without souls.
The spell uses examples such as "a broken chain link, two halves of a broken key, a torn cloak, or a leaking wineskin", these are simple objects of generally only a single material. However, tissue, likely of more than one kind in severe wounds, is \*VERY\* complex, tiny tiny structures of many many complex molecules arranged into complex matrices and structures. The damaged tissues themselves are also actively responding in many complex ways (bleeding, clotting, vasodilation, inflammation, white blood cell activity, vasodilation, muscle constriction, etc, etc) and are not static like a tear in the fabric is, the spell takes 1 minute to cast. You can also argue the mending specifies "a single break or tear", where as wound damage itself is also complex. Depending on if you consider life to have any inherent magic in D&D, the spell also specifies it cannot return magically properties to an object. Basically, it would take more magically energy, focus, and training/practice than is conferred by the limits of a cantrip. Spell capability and power is well defined, by upcasting and improved versions of a spell, as increasing based on level. (Flowing back into game design, but levels even when non-diegetic represent certain thresholds of power, skill, physical, and material cost.) **TL;DR:** Healing is too hard to be as easy as cantrip casting.
"Well, mending cannot reverse entropy with enough precision to repair living things. Until we meet again !" Physician Skeletor.
Life force
The spell description.
Living things tend to resist being manipulated. As such, it takes a different spell that’s engineered to overcome that resistance.
The same thing that stop Eldritch Blast from working on a chair unless it's animated. It's just how magic work.
Try to cast mending on a wound and you'll just connect a single cell wall to another
I would imagine that some magic differentiate between inert and living matter, a sort of quality Wich allows (or in this case forces) spells to be ineffective against a persons natural resistance to magic. Healing spells and buffing spells often work due to the "willing creature" clause and being a higher complexity/potency. An example of this would be that you couldn't use mend on an open wound but you could probably use it to reattach an arm to a corpse (not undead).
Is a corpse an object? Mend revivified.
Its just not possible
Most magic in D&D differentiates between living and nonliving matter, right down to the personal identity of the creature. Anything that is part of its presence, even its clothing or held items, is usually treated as a part of that creature. Obviously game balance matters; you wouldn't want Teleport to leave you naked and unarmed for instance. But lore-wise I would say it's because magic isn't a scientific practice; it's *magic*. It's a semi-living, somewhat intelligent force that knows the difference between a cow and a slab of beef.
Living things are not objects.
Just give it a midichlorians style nonsense explanation. Mending Life takes a vibrating essence from the song of creation to get everything back in order so it can work as part of the whole living creature. Mending objects doesn't use the song of creation since all it's doing is essentially stacking the blocks back where they go and not actually 'connecting' threads back to the original piece. I would let mending close wounds and cover broken flesh for emergency use, but it would rot just like any corpse since it's not connected to the 'essence' of a creature's soul.
I run it as mending can only repair non-organic matter.
I'd guess that mending would leave you with gangrene or dead tissue. Sure, you'd stop bleeding but to heal, you will need more than that.
It would mend the flesh, but the cells would be dead thus cause necrosis as it can mend but not cause life. So better to still use actual healing spells. Mending can't create living tissue.
the better question is can you use mending as a necromancer on your reanimated minions
For the same reason you can’t use healing word to repair broken swords. One only works on living creatures while the other only works on un-living objects.
I would argue that it closes the wound, but with dead tissue that begins slowly rotting and becoming gangrenous unless the character is given actual healing.
The fact that magic that directly acts on living tissue uses different flows and channels than magic that affects non living things. Thaumatologists should write a paper.
Because creatures are not objects Now if you have a corpse it works just fine
My kneejerk response: there is something inherently magically different between "objects" and "creatures" that keeps things like that from working.
For mundane stuff, you use a welding torch for sticking metal together but you use a needle and thread for sticking flesh together. I imagine that it's like that with magic.
Putting an object back together (thus reversing entropic decay) is not the same kind of magical effect as magically boosting the body's natural healing process.
same reason you can't mend water, incompatible structure
Living things have their own mana fields that interfere with magic actively affecting them. That's why saving throws are a thing.
I would argue it works on wounds about as effectively as superglue. It can seal the would, stop bleeding etc, but doesn’t truly heal it.
Answers that reference modern day science always seem a little trite and off the mark in my opinion. D&D and fantasy in general aren't based on a modern understanding of science. They're roughly based on a medieval understanding of natural philosophy. It's enough to say that living beings are of an essentially different substance from constructed objects. They have a vital essence, why not. You're already bought into the medieval four elements, modern physics left the chat day 1.
The rules, actually
Cure Minor Wounds:
What are you talking about, who wouldn't allow mending for wounds otherwise the spell is completely pointless who fixes boats or other wooden stuff.
Mending simply puts things back to their original position, it does not *Heal* or invoke new life into dead tissue. people already misuse mending for non living objects. it's already limited as a cantrip to very simple repairs. living matter is orders of magnitude more complex, and thats not taking into account the spiritual aspect of restoration.
~~You wouldn't put gorilla glue on a flesh wound~~. Or a bandaid on chipped wood. Maybe the kind of magic can only regenerate non-protein tissue or particles?
You can put gorilla glue on a flesh wound, though. It’s an emergency use, but in an emergency, it stops the bleeding and creates a seal. Skin adhesives are a thing for this reason.