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Originally Posted by JLV
There's something in what you say, but the sheer lethality of TFT combat means that either you go through a lot of characters, or you go into the dungeon, clear four or five rooms, return to town to heal up for several weeks, re-enter the dungeon, re-clear the same four or five rooms (which have since been reoccupied), return to town, heal up for several weeks, rinse, repeat...
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Well, it means it depends on what happens in the combat, which means you need to care and do your best and think of tactics that work (and all the more reason to want a defense mechanic that Melee doesn't have without a house rule), and be ready for unexpected sudden setbacks and disasters and to deal with the developing situation that comes out of that.
One alternative method involves making sure you have enough comrades and/or hirelings and wagon/animals to be able to have some people set up a resting camp that won't get wiped out by a few wolves, and do do more scouting and bringing along semi-disposable assistants and so on. To me, that's really interesting - much moreso than having healing wizards and having injury and healing much less of an issue (or even not really an issue - see GURPS Major Healing, or not an issue at all - see D&D 5e) but the replacement issue you get is there are fewer possible outcomes other than success or death (and if you toss in revival or resurrection, not even that, so the stakes raise to Total Party Kill or else no real effect), which is a very different dynamic more typical of other RPGs, less interesting to me and less like TFT (and skewing the balance of TFT adventures), so why it seems like a good thing to make optional if it's added.
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Though I agree, magical healing ought to be fairly expensive for minimal results -- only healing a couple of points of damage (1D/2 for example, for a similar ST cost for the spell), just so the characters don't become impervious tanks shrugging off the threat of damage. Also that level of cost means the Wizard character has to seriously consider just how much personal "damage" he is willing to take to heal a little bit of damage to another character! (Edited to add: Perhaps at that point the Wizard only does healing in order to "stabilize" a character so the team can get him/her back to town for proper healing.)
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Yes, it becomes important to compare what you're introducing and how it will be used. 1 damage per 2 days of full rest is slower than lying down (will your GM let you do it in a wagon while traveling?) for 1 fatigue per 15 minutes by a factor of about 128 to 192 (depending on how much unbroken sleep you need and what else your wizard might want to do in a day). In other words, there's a massive difference in something very important, especially if you're talking about healing powerful characters. Such an ability starts to make a combat team look incompetent if they aren't using healing magic as much as possible, and means the balance on power more or less requires it, etc. At which point the wizards may get slightly annoyed at how much healing everyone wants them to do, etc. It's a whole other dynamic, and worth thinking about before committing to one level of magic healing for a campaign.
One of the cool things I love about
Tollenkar's Lair is that it discusses the eventuality of needing to heal and replace losses for the adversary NPC groups as well. That would be quite different if the party (or adversary NPCs) has fast magical healing.
In GURPS, in the cases I don't just remove the healing spells, I tend to nerf them by adding expensive spell ingredients that get used up, and limiting the amount of healing they can do (e.g. 1 per wound, or an amount per character per time) and/or adding risks of mishap that are scary and get more and more likely the more frequently someone tries healing magic on the same person in a certain time frame.
In any case, I think it's about being conscious of what the healing rate you're creating is, and who has access to it, how much it costs, and what the limits are, so you can get a grasp of how it will affect both play and the expectations and practices of the competent people in the world.
Since I started with TFT and played it for years and got to really like having to deal with all the injuries and having healing potion be a rare, limited, fragile and expensive commodity, I grew to really like and appreciate that.