My old dm had a good solution. They’d have you roll 1d6+1 diseases off of the disease table if you didn’t clean the excrement-coated clothes properly. Prestidigitation offered advantage and cut cleaning time down severely, but you still had to get it properly clean or risk a mysterious rash sometime down the road.

You could get diseases after Prestigitation? Damn.

The way he perceived prestidigitation was that it removed the overwhelming majority of solid and liquid mess, but the mess and microbiome can remain in small part. It isn’t a fourth dimensional biological sieve, it’s a bulk remover. You still have to kill or remove the remaining spores and whatnot.

Phrased another way, would you be comfortable touching your eye after wiping? You used toilet paper. You can see neither feculence nor pathogens on your hand. It should be safe, right?

And that’s when old Charlie Brown said fuck it and became a gopnik.

Mustache vs stubble.

For me it was the opposite. I somehow immediately understood what happened, but was just confused why tf anyone would do that. Then i saw the RPG.

I avoid anachronistic concepts like germ theory in my games. Evil spirits, curses, divine justice, all valid. I do everything I can to jolt the players out of modern-think and ito fantasy and magic.

Out of curiosity, do you have myconids in your setting? I imagine you would have hated his portrayal of them.

I never had before, but not for any specific reason. Just lack of need or function. Too many monsters to have all of them.

That’s fair, the monster manual is t h i c k