[Magic] Different ways to limit Healing

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by malloyd

One wonders about booby trapping the wounded by casting a "Trivial Healing" spell, capable of curing no more than 0.001 points of damage on them a couple times before abandoning the field to the other side's medic corps and watching the critical failures from a safe distance.
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Since I count different healing spells separately that wouldn't work in my settings.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by primanator

I charge an additional 1 FP/HP healed, of the Healed, not the Healer. This represents the body's stress of quick healing.

I like this idea; it also seems like a good way to replace the -1 to skill per missing HP when a mage casts a healing spell on himself, since it means he has to pay double FP to heal himself (or triple if Major Healing is the spell in question).

It's simple enough that I think I'll go with this over the other option I was mulling over.

[Sense of Duty (Kittens)]

You could require progressively longer casting times as a hedge against overuse.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Sense of Duty (Kittens)

You could require progressively longer casting times as a hedge against overuse.

That sounds even harder to keep track of than cumulative skill penalties. I think being required to rest for ten minutes per HP healed will be a pretty big deterrent.

Does anyone think I should also apply fatigue for being cured of disease or neutralized of poison, and if so how much?

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by safisher

I like that idea. You could redefine healing based on margin success divisors.
Thus a light healing might heal HP = MOS/2, while a major does HP = MOS. Successive castings on a wound must exceed the previous MOS to heal additional HP damage. So a skilled healer could still be useful as he could more likely than not add some points to a lesser casting.

Hey, that one's pretty good!

[Bruno]

RISE MY SON! RISE!

Originally Posted by Kenneth Latrans

An idea I've been mulling over is to simply cap the amount of healing a person can receive in in a day, without regards to its source. A character would have a Healing Tally, and while the magic spells, healing potions, and Healing advantage could all grant recovery without penalty, once a person has been healed a certain amount nothing more you pump into him will make a difference.

If he had no Healing Tally left at the end of the day, he would not get his roll to recover HP; first aid would stop bleeding, but would not recover HP at this point.

You linked back here from another thread, and I apparently totally didn't think about this the first time:

D&D 4th edition has a healing tally mechanic (one of the points where it differs significantly from 3rd). Each character gets a number of "Healing surges", which refresh each day (or rather, after they sleep for at least 6 hrs). In this game, each character also has a "Surge Value" equal to 1/4 their hitpoints. Surges are one of those daily resources that D&D resource management is all about.

Almost every source of healing in the game requires the subject to mark off one Healing Surge for being healed.

The amount healed by (almost) every source is based on the characters Surge Value (plus some bonuses depending on how awesome the healer and the healing source is) - this is basically equivalent to GURPS' rule about scaling Healing for high HP values.

D&D 4e goes a step further and gives everyone limited "self healing" - they can spend one healing surge once per combat to regain one surge value of hitpoints (no bonuses) and while resting you can spend multiple surges to regain multiple surge values of hitpoints. - The goal here is to have each fight start in roughly the same place, hitpoint wise (to make encounter design easier for the GM), but still have damage taken deplete resources, and require the usual resource management minigame at the heart of D&D.

4e gives so many sources of healing (and self healing) and so many surges, that I'd call surges your "real" hit points, and "hit points" to be like "stun points" or the like. Recovering all your surges (or tally) every night makes this particularly acute.

The "Surge" system definitely shows a tally-based system is workable, but it adds a little paperwork. It controls leaning on "in combat" healing better than GURPS' -3 per individual spell per spell caster per source does, but IME GURPS already has a good control on in-combat healing due to range penalties being on just about everything. It definitely turns healing over the course of a day on a single subject into a separate resource from a healers overall healing output, which at times forces interesting tactics ("OK, Joe the barbarian is out of surges. Joe, you have GOT to stop charging into combat, even though you're our heaviest hitter. Stand at the back and throw things or something, OK?")

Comparing it to the suggested "Subject suffers FP = Healing received", a tally system lets you heal someone mid-combat for very large amounts without knocking them out of the fight - Burning 5 energy on Major Healing into the 3/15HP plate-head taking all the damage would top him off to 13/15 HP, which is great... but would knock 10 FP right off him. If he's spent any FP on extra effort, or was down three FP for having marched to the fight in Medium encumbrance, that's going to take him from 1/3 HP to 1/3 FP (or less).

[bcd]

Originally Posted by primanator

I charge an additional 1 FP/HP healed, of the Healed, not the Healer. This represents the body's stress of quick healing.

How do you handle subjects with 20+ HP?

Also, if a subject with HP stat of 10 was at -30 HP and had a Great Healing cast on him, would he be smacked with 40 points of fatigue?

[benz72]

If I were going to charge FP I'd probaby count it as either starvation or sleep deprivation fatigue... that way sitting down for 45 minutes wouldn't make it all go away. This also gives the spell a grittier feel. Not sure it would be 1 to 1 though, perhaps a different ratio.

I like the MOS idea... consider it stolen. This plays well into critical successes too. e.g. a crit on minor healing acts as major for MOS calcs.

The thing that keeps bothering me though is the greater healing on the HP 10 guy at -49 HP... perhaps the skill penalty ought to be based on the original severity of the wound, though this seems to invite a lot of bookkeeping.