Can a cleric cure spontaneous or acquired myopia (“nearsightedness”) with spells?
Which spell should she use if it’s possible?
dnd-3.5ehealingspells
Can a cleric cure spontaneous or acquired myopia (“nearsightedness”) with spells?
Which spell should she use if it’s possible?
If the campaign is a series of tombs of horrors, then that ring of cure light wounds is an item beyond price. If the party can't leave the dungeon to resupply and can't get down to one encounter per day (i.e. the so-called 15-minute workday) via spells1, that ring of cure light wounds is a literal lifesaver.
In other words, if the campaign is already on hard mode, the ring switches it not to easy mode, certainly, but to average mode. That's a legitimate concern for the DM. The DM's already decided the campaign's supposed to be difficult and the ring makes the campaign substantially less difficult. As the ring violates a central campaign tenet, the ring just shouldn't be available… or only available as a result of a heinous Gygaxian Faustian bargain.
The Dungeon Master's Guide would likely pick Erin's suggestion. If worry-free, constant healing is desired, everybody should pony up for rings of regeneration (DMG 232) (90,000 gp; 0 lbs.). Sure, each ring of regeneration costs as much as 120 wands of cure light wounds [conj] (PH 215–16) (1st-level spell at caster level 1) (15 gp/charge), but, y'know, the Dungeon Master's Guide says to "[u]se good sense when assigning prices, using the items in this book as examples" (282), and the ring of regeneration presents the example of the price of worry-free, constant healing, so that is the price of worry-free healing. In fact, an original magic item like a use-activated ring of cure light wounds—like a continuous item of true strike [div] (PH 296)—is such an anathema, I'm willing to bet were the year 2000 Dungeon Master's Guide a DM that it would laugh at the player who suggested a ring of cure light wounds and maybe have the next wandering monster attack him first just for asking.
Many current players feel that constantly reacquiring wands of cure light wounds to have their characters freshen up between encounters is, at worst, a mere inconvenience, like tracking how many arrows remain in a quiver. In the same way that being short on arrows creates tension at low levels, managing healing resources at low levels creates tension. Many players, though, feel that by the time a character's reached a reasonably high level—say, 9 or so—that the character should have more important things to worry about than how many arrows he has left, and he shouldn't worry that he's burning party resources because he fell down a 200-ft.-deep pit. A Ftr9's Wealth by Level (Dungeon Master's Guide (203) 135) says that a wand of cure light wounds—that is, an entire wand, fully charged—is only about 2% of the gear he's toting. Seriously, after splitting four ways the take from a lone level-appropriate encounter, a Ftr9 can buy a whole new fresh wand of cure light wounds and still have gp left over.
If a DM has players like Alice and Dave, a ring of cure light wounds makes the game more fun because it cuts down on tracking charges from wands of cure light wounds, and the DM should probably allow it—either at low levels at Alice's price or higher levels at Dave's price—unless the DM's vision of the game differs substantially from that of the players' vision.
As the sole item that grants continuous healing in core Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, the ring of regeneration is terrible and using it as an example of what continuous healing should cost is terrible. I'll explain.
Building as they were in 2000 from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition, the ring of regeneration included in the Dungeon Master's Guide for Dungeons and Dragons, Third Edition probably looked fine to the original core rules' authors. The changes made to the ring of regeneration were a much needed nerf to improvement over Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition's ring of regeneration, which, for the record,
restores 1 point of damage each turn [10 minutes] and eventually replaces lost limbs and organs. It will bring its wearer back from death…. Only total destruction of all living tissue by fire, acid, or similar means will prevent regeneration. Of course, the ring must be worn, and its removal stops the regeneration process.2 (Encyclopedia Magica, Vol. 3 993)
Such an item was highly coveted in both Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (where it functioned similarly) and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition, and for good reason. One's character could lose limbs and organs. ("Why, hello there, sword of sharpness!") Dying was really painful instead of the speed bump that it typically is in Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition. And healing was, itself, extremely valuable, the province of classes that often weren't much fun to play and rarely advanced beyond level 6 through actual play.3
So when the time came to include the highly-sought-after ring of regeneration in Dungeons and Dragons, Third Edition, the price was set very high because legacy yet the ring's actual functionality plummeted. Creatures no longer lost limbs except under extremely rare circumstances. Creatures now healed their levels or HD in hp per 8 hours rest instead of just 1 point per day of rest. And gone was the jazz about the ring bringing the wearer back from the dead. The only improvement Dungeons and Dragons, Third Edition made to the ring was proportionate healing (that is, Third Edition's heals a creature's level in hp)… and then Third Edition multiplied the ring's healing increment by 6.
Anyway, the current ring of regeneration seriously sucks as useful measure by which to gauge unlimited healing.
1 By, after the first encounter, hiding in, for example, the space created by the 2nd-level Sor/Wiz spell rope trick [trans] (Player's Handbook 273), the 5th-level initiate of Gruumsh (CR 24) spell pocket cave [conj] (Champions of Ruin 33), or the 7th-level Sor/Wiz spell Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion [conj] (PH 256).
2 Okay, a similar means to fire is heat. Sure. I get that. That's a thing. But what's a similar means to acid except, like, better acid? I hope whoever wrote that spent his $0.10 from those words wisely.
3 I find the experience level chart for the cleric or priest, respectively, in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition—when compared to classes' experience level charts—hilarious.
Yes that is correct.
Disciple of Life
Also starting at 1st level, your healing spells are more effective. Whenever you use a spell of 1st level or higher to restore hit points to a creature, the creature regains additional hit points equal to 2 + the spell's level.
So if you cast cure wounds at 1st level you will regain 1d8 + Wis Mod (+3) + 2 + Spell Level (1) = 1d8 + 6
This makes Life Clerics very potent healers.
Note: that if you cast a spell at a higher level the spell level will also increase, e.g. casting with a 2nd level slot it will heal 2d8+7 and with a 3rd level slot 3d8+8.
Best Answer
Myopia is not a defined condition in D&D 3.5e: as a result, nothing in the rules causes it, and nothing in the rules fixes it. It just is not a part of the game. If you are playing by the rules, you are apparently playing in a game world where it simply does not exist. If you want to add it, you have to come up with rules for it yourself, and that includes both how you get it and how you fix it alongside what it actually does.
But a 5th-level cleric can cast the remove blindness/deafness 3rd-level spell which can cure the blind (regardless of how that creature came to be blind, so long as they actually still have eyes,1 and regardless of whether that blindness was permanent or temporary). So myopia should be handled, if by nothing else, by that. And since myopia involves far less damage to the eyes, as well as far less atrophy of the ocular centers of the brain, it probably should be curable by some lower-level spell—but since myopia isn’t defined, neither is that spell.
So the question becomes, what level should a hypothetical remove myopia be? Without knowing what game effects can cause myopia and what game effects myopia really has, that’s really hard to get right—spell level is generally influenced by balance more than anything else—but we can look at what various spell levels offer. Since 3rd-level spells include remove blindness/deafness, we know we have to be talking about a 0th-level, 1st-level, or 2nd-level spell.
The closest we get in 0th-level spells (aka orisons) are mending, which fixes a broken object, and purify food & drink, which makes things safe to ingest. Neither fixes a damaged body, which is more complicated than an object, so it seems that orisons are not up to this challenge. There is also cure minor wounds, which heals 1 hp, but hit points are a nebulous abstraction that are difficult to turn into narrative terms, so that doesn’t help us.
In the 1st-level spells, the only condition-healing spell is remove fear. Fear is a transitory, emotional experience, not an injury, so probably easier to fix than myopia—but then, remove fear also covers supernatural fear, so it’s hard to say.
With 2nd-level spells, we get remove paralysis, which again heals paralysis from any cause, regardless of how long that paralysis would otherwise last. Healing a mangled spinal column is massively more complicated than healing myopia, I would think.
So since remove paralysis seems far more powerful than remove myopia, but mending seems weaker, that leaves remove myopia sitting pretty comfortably in the 1st level of spells. That means that any cleric, of any level, is capable of curing myopia. Hiring a cleric to do so costs 10 gp, under the rules.
Notably, though, there is also the adept class, which intended for minor NPCs and which is what you’re probably more likely to find in a small town or village than a full-fledged cleric. And adepts do not receive remove paralysis or remove blindness/deafness as spells, so they might not receive remove myopia either. So someone might have to travel into a bigger town or city to find a cleric to actually cast remove myopia. So if, say, a farmer doesn’t feel terribly inconvenienced by myopia, and doesn’t want to leave their fields to take that trip, and/or doesn’t want to spend the 10 gp tithe a cleric will likely charge for the spell, they might just live with it.
But an adventurer is going to be traveling anyway, myopia could seriously threaten their survival, and 10 gp is chump change for them even at low levels, and that’s assuming they aren’t already adventuring with a cleric who can do it free. An adventurer would basically never have myopia.