HEAL spell?

[JLV]

Originally Posted by GlennDoren

I was about to suggest this, then read your comment.

It's pretty interesting reading through the heated debates re: healing spells. In the end, this is a game, and it should let people play the way they want to play. If no healing spells are desired, simply don't allow them. And if adventures/microquests are published, they can dictate whether healing spells are allowed (via some fictional/gameworld rationale, of course ;).

I think it's better that Steve offer official options, and then players/GMs can decide whether they play with the healing spell option. At least, for those that DO want healing spells, they have an official set of rules they can trust have been designed with balance/play in mind by the actual game designer (SJ).

Exactly. It seems a lot of people (me included) picked and chose what we wanted in our worlds -- I didn't use Prootwaddles, for example. Another person noted he didn't like scrying type magic (crystal balls and the like), and so on. Seems like a reasonable solution to the problem to me.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Kirk

I'm not a big fan of variantism. It causes problems when playing with other groups and vice versa, and when designing "balanced" adventures and programmed modules, etc.

If there is something in TFT that is official, it needs to have been playtested and vetted well, or the product is degraded, and ultimately will fail to some degree, or completely.

For now, for me, with my hard-earned retirement dollars in short supply, and maybe this applies to younger folks just trying to make the rent, reputation means a lot.

If SJ authors a Death Test III, I will probably buy it without too much research. But if that trust is lost with poorly conceived or ill play-tested ingredients, that trust is broken and brand loyalty diminishes.

The Microsoft model was, program it, sell it to the public, and let them test it for us, suckers. We'll address their concerns in version 2, and sell that to them, with new "features". That never-ending approach makes for a lot of bad blood in the end.

If Healing spells are put into TFT, they better be balanced and playtested, not just a whim of the author.

I don't believe anyone here has actually suggested that Steve just "slap something together." One of the going-in assumptions on this end of the keyboard is that Steve and company will continue to do the overall superb level of work that they always do...

[Skarg]

TFT was a game which offered adventuring with high risks, consequences, and gameplay about using tactics to survive despite those risks, in logical ways.

Weapons could generally kill, maim, or seriously injure people. Even experienced people (unlike pile-o-hitpoints games). There was little or no magic healing. Death was usually permanent; in the rare cases anyone was revived, they were seriously impaired by the process.

And this worked and provided fun interesting gameplay that isn't found when playing games that avoid these elements. There are tactical ways to greatly mitigate the risks of injury and to maneuver seemingly even odds into your favor. When that doesn't work and you get seriously hurt but not killed, that creates a new and more dangerous situation that you are also faced with.

All of the existing published TFT adventures are balanced to be challenging in interesting ways, and a large part of their balance and challenge is from this situation of needing to manage risk and cope with likely accumulating injuries through many encounters where healing either is not an option, or involves meaningful setback and consequence.

And that's quite different from many/most adventure games, especially now after decades of D&D, computer games based on D&D, computer games where healing is so fast you can watch your health bar pop back to full in a few minutes, and with savescumming and static adventure designs, and newer D&D-like games designed for players used to savescumming & super-fast healing. In the current D&D,

Also unlike most D&D-like games, it's not true that in TFT the PCs are always going to get seriously hurt when they fight something. How well the players play, the situation, the PCs' abilities and luck can sometimes avoid and limit most injuries, and when serious wounds last and require days of rest to heal, that adds natural rewards and consequences and new types of challenges, based on what happened during combat.

Allowing physicking on each wound means that it takes a lot more to get someone really needing to convalesce. (It also makes the physicking limits make sense.)

It's also not true that once a PC does get seriously hurt, it means that the game needs to be considered slow or boring or frustrating or about healing. It does make you face the situation and choose what to do about it. To start, you could be glad the PC isn't dead. You can also involve multiple PCs per character, NPC allies or other characters players can play if the group leaves a PC to rest, including playing non-ally NPCs or adversaries. You can also enjoy solving the problem of figuring out how to run an adventuring party that can deal with wounded people - such as by having physickers, rationing healing potion, having a convalescent camp and/or wagon, leaving wounded people in safe places, and so on. Healing is also very simple and fast in play time in TFT if/when there is no risk. You can advance time if so much of the group is injured that it makes sense to rest & do other things. To me, all of that is very logical, welcome, and interesting and fun to have be a part of play.

Of course, if despite all those ideas, you really just want magic healing, by all means figure out what form you want and play with it! For the computer-game version, have healing potion in the moss, the water, and/or the air. Or invent a healing spell or two. I like the sorts Rick came up with, where you get to heal while being active, and the healing rate can be increased somewhat, but it doesn't remove serious injuries and the need to recover for days.

If the original healing spell suggestion is used, eventually people will notice the issues I wrote about in various places above but that no one commented on. Because it has no limit other than fatigue, it shifts the rate of healing to a fraction of the fatigue recovery rate, AND allows Aid (or to a lesser degree, Drain ST) to multiply that by the number of ST donors to the healing wizard. That allows some very fast (in fact, nearly-instant) healing if some fairly fiddly/gamey techniques are used, effectively removing serious injury as a condition for people who can get that treatment. And conversely, anyone who doesn't do that still has to heal much more slowly. Which means parties (and NPC opponents) that can pull it off will have a massive healing advantage, and it should be a known and common thing for any organized intelligent group who has that healing spell and can teach people the Aid spell.

Seems to me there needs to be some advice section about this and perhaps some other magic that GMs might want not to have (We mostly stopped using and/or pretended never existed several spells such as Charms, Curses, Trance, Crystal Ball, and attribute boosters).

[JLV]

I seem to recall healing potions making a certain number of appearances in the various programmed adventures. Seems to me that's even more of a deus ex machina than a healing spell is... At least with a healing spell, the Wizard still has to "manage resources" by considering what the ST costs of casting are and just how much he can spare before he needs to rest (and what spells he may not be able to cast in a combat situation if he uses the healing spell now), but with a healing potion it's just a total gimme. Just sayin'.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by JLV

I seem to recall healing potions making a certain number of appearances in the various programmed adventures. Seems to me that's even more of a deus ex machina than a healing spell is... At least with a healing spell, the Wizard still has to "manage resources" by considering what the ST costs of casting are and just how much he can spare before he needs to rest (and what spells he may not be able to cast in a combat situation if he uses the healing spell now), but with a healing potion it's just a total gimme. Just sayin'.

Hi JLV, Skarg, everyone.
Skarg, I totally agree.

JLV, I agree with most everything you said above.

When I first suggested my healing spells on the Brainiac TFT forums, there was huge resistance to the idea. "You can't bring in healing spells!!! It will introduce the kill-heal cycle from D&D!!! It will reduce the dangerousness of combat!!!"

I pointed out my spells did little to effect the dangerousness of combat, and that my healing spells had less of an effect on the dangerousness of the world than healing potions, but that argument gained little traction.

I disagree with your argument above tho, in one respect. Healing potions cost a fair bit of money, and the party likely has a limited number of them. But a wizard with a healing spell can do it again and again FOREVER. This would make Steve's new healing spell have a far greater impact of the dynamics of the game than the healing potions did.

It wouldn't hurt my feelings if the healing potions were nerfed a bit. (Say there had to be an hour's delay between when you could drink another potion. If you drank them too close tother, the later one was wasted.) Right now they cause problems if a person is rich enough to afford lots of them. (I'm not comfortable with the rich nobility basically being immune to sickness as one example.)

Warm regards, Rick

[Jim Kane]

Originally Posted by JLV

I seem to recall healing potions making a certain number of appearances in the various programmed adventures. Seems to me that's even more of a deus ex machina than a healing spell is... , but with a healing potion it's just a total gimme. Just sayin'.

This is quite true JLV. One small but significant difference to play is that the Healing Potions are primarily, GM controlled, whereas a Healing Spell(s) moves that control into the realm of the Player control - And as you know, that's where the trouble *can* begin brewing, and get out-of-hand.

JK

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by JLV

I seem to recall healing potions making a certain number of appearances in the various programmed adventures. Seems to me that's even more of a deus ex machina than a healing spell is... At least with a healing spell, the Wizard still has to "manage resources" by considering what the ST costs of casting are and just how much he can spare before he needs to rest (and what spells he may not be able to cast in a combat situation if he uses the healing spell now), but with a healing potion it's just a total gimme. Just sayin'.

Well, yes, there were a (very few) healing potions in the programmed adventures. And yes, it is more of a deus ex machina if the GM just has you find potions when you need them (not so much if the GM doesn't do that and there is almost always a very limited amount available and you have to buy them in advance and keep track of them and keep them from breaking). And yes, the fatigue of spellcasting does add another resource aspect that in one way has more of an impact than using a potion that is otherwise useless. But as Rick points out:

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

I disagree with your argument above tho, in one respect. Healing potions cost a fair bit of money, and the party likely has a limited number of them. But a wizard with a healing spell can do it again and again FOREVER. This would make Steve's new healing spell have a far greater impact of the dynamics of the game than the healing potions did.

And it's not just the wizard's ST, but the ST of anyone with the Aid spell, and those people can rest independently, multiplying the healing rate of a party beyond what one wizard can do. Which makes the healing rate hugely dependent on how many people have Aid and can rest. Which is a logical but kind of fiddly and gamey-seeming to me. With my players, it would become a standard practice for any party with wounds to be thinking all the time about how much fatigue they are able to channel into healing spells. And I'd have to think about it for NPC groups too - all the competent forces who had a healing wizard would have me tracking casting success and resting and fatigue use rates for all their folks with aid spells, there would be various random people getting trained in the Aid spell and brought around just for this purpose, etc. It was fairly common already in our campaigns to have low-grade wizard assistants who just knew Aid and often weren't even wizards. This healing spell would make it something that would make sense to train serfs and hobgoblins to learn just to be healing multipliers... which could be interesting and amusing for a bit but (even ignoring that I don't want something that makes lasting injuries go away) on the whole seems more weird and fiddly than I'd like.

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

I pointed out my spells did little to dangerousness of combat, and that my healing spells had less of an effect on the dangerousness of the world than healing potions, but that argument gained little traction.

Well I liked them rather well, because they really aren't all that fast and powerful. The main tweak I'd do to yours is keep more of an effect of resting, so that it's still a useful and interesting decision to rest - you just don't need to if you've got that spell going.

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

It wouldn't hurt my feelings if the healing potions were nerfed a bit. (Say there had to be an hour's delay between when you could drink another potion. If you drank them too close tother, the later one was wasted.) Right now they cause problems if a person is rich enough to afford lots of them. (I'm not comfortable with the rich nobility basically being immune to sickness as one example.)

I agree. I don't like healing during combat, and don't like how fast a bunch of healing potion can be used to make someone "poof, you're healed", and it would make it less of a super-fast effect if there was still some time involved as you suggest, and possibly other tweaks. One TFT GM I played with started to introduce some possible side-effects of over-use of healing potion...

[Anthony]

A fundamental problem for dungeon crawling games is that they include both a tactical element (the actual fights) and a strategic element (healing, resource management, picking your fights, etc), and from a design standpoint these are in opposition, because tactically interesting fights usually only occur when someone made a strategic mistake -- to get a large number of tactically interesting fights, you probably have to trivialize the strategic game. Conversely, a strategically interesting game will involve a whole bunch of uninteresting beatdowns (basically farming in MMO terms). Either one can be viable, but you do have to decide which one you're going to do.

Most RPGs have chosen to focus on the tactical game. This is not essential, but a game that chooses to focus on the strategic should usually vastly simplify the tactical rules.

[Kirk]

Healing potions often were the possessions of NPCs, wherever they were, whether in a town, the woods, dungeon, programmed module. You had to take the field to get access to them.

Additionally, as Jim pointed out, potions are more under GM control, even their availability based on the ingredients' ease of acquisition and production capability or possible cost (not cheap).

You have just found a vial of whitish potion hidden in a thief's bag that you managed to best when he ambushed you in a side alley, though you are heavily wounded, perhaps mortally, if no one finds and helps you by morning. Your companions are probably asleep or drunk or otherwise engaged to probably notice your tardiness.

Do you drink it, or come up with another plan while you can still think well?

With a healing spell, there is no guessing as to what it does. When I GM, there absolutely is, and a few self-poisoning or curse potions ingested makes for much more hesitant PCs when it comes to drinking strange things.

Remember Alice? ;)

[Jim Kane]

Originally Posted by Kirk

...With a healing spell, there is no guessing as to what it does. When I GM, there absolutely is, and a few self-poisoning or curse potions ingested makes for much more hesitant PCs when it comes to drinking strange things.

Remember Alice? ;)

"There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it - 'which certainly was not here before,' said Alice - and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words: DRINK ME, beautifully printed on it in large letters. " - Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 1832-1898

It would appear that the literary great, Lewis Carroll, would heartily agree with our good brother Kirk's handling of Potions.

JK