Does regeneration regrow hair?

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How does regeneration decide what to regenerate and when to stop? Does it grow back hair and know where to stop? If it does grow back hair why don't things regenerating have all long hairs? What about getting a hair cut? Will it instantly regrow that hair?
Why can non-trolls regenerate from fire and acid? Kinda racist isn't it. Lol.
Just something odd that came to mind while trying to fall asleep last night.

 

Regeneration restores living tissue. Hair, nails, and other non-living parts of the body are not regenerated, but they do regrow normally.

Regeneration is almost always vulnerable to some form of attack. A notable exception is the tarrasque, which can regenerate any type of damage.

If the regeneration or fast healing abilities were supernatural (as opposed to extraordinary), I suppose it would be possible for it to "regenerate" all parts of the body. That's usually called rejuvenation however, as is the case with liches, whose bodies are supernaturally rebuilt after their destruction (assuming you don't destroy their phylactery as well).

 

Did you every have the pleasure of playing the old DOS based games for the Darksun? The 2nd one was called the Wake of the Ravager where you fought the Tarrasque at the end. Took up 2 screens to view the whole thing. Was really cool!
I didn't know what a Tarrasque was at the time but when I later found out that it was the big daddy of every other critter I said "Hey! I killed that thing. That's not supposed to be possible. Well at least not as easy as it was anyway." Lol.
Those old DOS games were fun!

 

How does innate regeneration know what to regen/when to stop ? :

Like keneth said, an argument could be made for regeneration not to restore non-living tissue - on the other hand, there's no real reason why it couldn't one could simply make an argument that the regenerating power also stimulates the creation of cells and keratin, resulting in nails/hair being regenerated as well.

Personally, i think it makes sense for fire and acid to be the damage types to counter regeneration, you can imagine fire burning flesh away or acid melting away tissue faster then a creature can regenerate.
Then again, one could simply say that creatures able to regenerate even from acid or fire damage have a better resistance to these damage types or simply a better 'healing factor' (borrowing x-men terminology )
If i recall correctly in 4e you could kill a troll by simply bringing it to negative hit points even without using fire/acid damage - whereas in 5e the MM clearly states that it will only die if it starts it's turn with 0 hp and does not regenerate - fire and acid being the only ways to counter it's regeneration. (though this all depends on your DM/houserules, your mileage may vary.)

 

How does your body? (Not counting stuff like tumorous growth, etc.)

Anyway, the ability to heal wounds has little to do one's ability to grow hair and nails.

The better question is what happens when regenerating creatures are dismembered. In D&D (at least modern editions), it's usually considered that any body parts no longer attached to the head wither away. There is plenty of fiction, however, which advocates that each body part can regrow into a full creature. Now that's a pretty scary prospect.

 

Well, in 5th edition D&D, there's actually troll variants that get the loathsome limbs trait.
If this troll takes more then 15 slashing damage you roll a d20 to decide what happens, with a chance to decapitate one of it's limbs. (arm/leg/head)
It's arms are still able to move 5 feet each turn and use their claw attack, the head - while not able to move, is also still able to use it's bite attack if you move into it's space.

The monster manual also notes that the troll's regenerative powers makes them succeptible to mutation, growing 2 heads back after one is decapitated for example.


(click for larger version)

 

Yay for confusing rules. I never did delve that deep into 5th edition ruleset and that's one of the reasons why.

 

Eh, it doesn't seem all that confusing to me ? troll has to take fire/acid damage before it's next turn or it regenerates 10 HP. if you manage to get it down to 0hp, just apply a source of fire/acid damage to make it die - i personally like the tactic of breaking out a torch if my party isn't caster heavy or doesn't have any other items/spells to apply it with.
Sure, having dismembered limbs act on their own with separate AC /movement speed (as well as changing the troll's move speed/number of attacks when limbs get dismembered) might be a bit of a hassle - on the other hand they only have 10 hit points, and if anything you could always decide to forego giving any trolls the trait as a DM.

I'd personally count the whole mutation thing more as flavor text - though you could use it to spice up a battle by having the party encounter a 2-headed troll (with double the bite attacks)

 

I wasn't saying it was complicated and hard to understand rules-wise. The system just doesn't make any effort to explain the rules logically. Where does a troll's regeneration stem from? It's not the brain, they can obviously regrow heads. Is it some sort of gland inside its body? It's clearly not on a cellular level since the dismembered limbs don't regrow any other parts. And why do body parts die off when they are regrown on the main body? Do they have some kind of psychic connection? If you bifurcate a troll, which half is the main half?

D&D has always been full of these rules that don't hold up under scrutiny, but newer editions even more so. Its inelegant design is why I've recently given up on it entirely (including Pathfinder).

 

What does that have to do with D&D? Regenerating Monsters have existed as far back as greek myths long before D&D ever existed. And even back then noone cared to explain why the Hydra´s heads regrow double when chopped off and don´t when Herakles burns the stump.

For a game "Magic" or "Fantasy" should suffice - an explanation like "they have amoeba DNA that grows and splits to regrow lost bodyparts" or "clonogenic stemcells!" would turn me off in a fantasy game.

 

It has everything to do with D&D because D&D is known for its in-depth rules which mostly made sense, at least up until 4th edition when the system started to get more abstract in all the wrong places. Fifth edition was supposed to bring back some of the complexity, but they failed to lay down a proper groundwork. There's a big gap between abstract rule systems, like the Cypher system, where it's up to the GM to arbitrate the in-setting details of how things function and why, and concrete rule systems such as D&D that establish explicit detailed rules and you shouldn't need to justify them on your own. "Magic" is not a good enough excuse in the latter. In 3rd edition, if you cast a fireball, you know exactly how far you can fling it, how large the explosion is going to be, how much damage it will deal to creatures, how much damage it will deal to objects, how much damage it takes to destroy a wall with it, what happens to creatures on the other side of the wall if you do, etc. Yes, it's magic, but you know exactly how it works and there are virtually no ifs and buts because the rules are clearly established, with most things accounted for, and it usually makes sense (unless there's a conflict between RAW, RAI, and RACSD). What you see in 5th ed. is just a half-arsed solution in the middle where you're given a bunch of rules but they're neither detailed and thought out enough for them to make any real sense, nor abstract enough to give you the freedom to explain them on your own without changing the RAW.

Also, this is primarily a D&D question on a D&D subforum on a site dealing with D&D games, so whether ancient Greek mythology conforms to any logical set of rules or not is largely irrelevant.