I like desperate attempts to escape the dungeon.
 

Hi everyone, Jim.
Very few people are arguing for that, so I think it is likely no one will bother to answer your dramatic plea. I was not going to, but then I decided that I have a iron in this fire, so here goes...

Steve Jackson has said that he is thinking of putting a "spend fST to heal wounds" spell into the game. Let's say it heals two points of damage. That is 4 days of healing, or 96 hours. If you can rest 1.5 hours to regain the fST for the spell, then you have a 64 fold speed up in healing. For many situations in a dungeon, the players can spike themselves into a a room, regain fST and heal themselves up completely. For severe wounds (or an active, organized enemy in the dungeon), heading for home might still be the best option.

Note that there are no real limitation on this spell, you spend 3 fST and get 1 damage back. Repeat as often as you like. BANG. Healing in TFT is now easy.

Given that is what is likely coming down the line, people have been debating how effective the spell should be. I think David B. alone has suggested making the healing spell much more effective than that 64:1 ratio. (And making it available to parties with lower IQ spells.) He has been up front about why people might want to do this. If you want to know why he is suggesting this, you only have to read his posts.

To be fair to David, he started off saying that he thought that Steve J. healing spell was going about healing the wrong way. Then later, David said, if TFT is in fact going to this model (where player take damage in a fight, then quickly heal up so that they can get to the next fight), then embrace this model and do it right.

I've seen several TFT campaigns where GM's have added POWERFUL healing spells, so a number of people seem to like this style of play.

***

But I certainly have not been arguing for that style of healing. If you have read my spells, they speed up natural healing. Instead of taking a couple weeks, it takes a few days (for the low end spells). And if wounded PC's are down just a point or two, they can keep on adventuring and still heal. (You don't have to worry about that jumping over a log will tear open your stitches.)

People wounded in one of my dungeons, would certainly still want to escape. But then, I designed my spells to NOT kill the drama.

Warm regards, Rick.

Re: I like desperate attempts to escape the dungeon.
 

Rick, very few, if any of us, are interested in arguing.

While I was pleased to read your response, although I still don't understand why there is an aversion to simply retreating from the Labyrinth while still able to do so, versus adding a Healing Spell to the system - that is the question I am seeking clarity on.

As I stated, some of the greatest TFT dramas I have ever experienced came about while running for the safety of the surface; hoping to make it out alive, and not run into anything along the way - because we didn't have a wizard who could heal us further.

Even the Monty Python guys were good with "run away! run away!" ;-D

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

It's not fun for me. I like my heroes keep heroing, rather than conceding to the weaknesses of the flesh and walking away to heal up. Indiana Jones didn't take a week off after being dragged a few miles by the Nazi truck. He sucked it up and kept heroing.

Some folks enjoy a more realistic world, and some trade what they see as tedioum a for less realistic, but more appealing approach.

Folks roll different.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I think this is an important point. Some people want a more "realistic" world than others. TFT provides that within the framework of a "fantasy" system. It has an internal physical logic that makes sense. I appreciate that and it is what keeps me playing TFT and not other systems.

Re: I like desperate attempts to escape the dungeon.
 

Must...resist...urge to quote Monty Python skit...

Ngggaahhhh...partial fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvcnx6-0GhA

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I wonder what's changed your mind about this problem.

It's always been easy for GMs who want their players to be able to heal between battles to add in all kinds of magic items and house rules.

But for us old farts who imprinted on Death Test, it will be way harder to go the other way and take out healing spells once they have been officially added.

LOL to remember our gratitude at finding that "super charged" healing potion in Death Test -- 3 sips at 1 pt per sip, was that it???!?

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Now there is a good, honest answer with supporting rationale offering insight as to what and why, and something we can learn from - I respect that. Thanks TomC. Exactly Kirk, and Tom's reason serves to support my hypothesis that part of the special TFT Mojo is what I have said before, about how TFT uniquely holds up *by the rules*, and yet the vibe is custom fit to each person - like a good fitting pair of jeans, without breaking down.I too gave into Summon Monty Python back on the Prootwaddle thread. It happens. ;-DExactly! This is *always* the thing I should want to know from SJ, as well as each other; especially when we are taking about potentially introducing such a weighty change into the system. It is the revealing of the *rationale* behind making change to a thing, and the impetus of motivation, that allows us to learn and grow from it in our understanding of how best to serve TFT - and each other.

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

For my groups the problem was that there was no *adventure*. In you go, clear about three rooms near the entrance, then the survivors have to retire for a month or so of healing. Meanwhile, the baddies reoccupy the room, improve their defenses a bit (more creatures, or better armor, or better weapons, or maybe some booby traps), the group returns, re-clears the same three rooms, retires to the local ville for another month or so of healing, rinse, repeat. Literally no chance of actually penetrating to the heart of the dungeon...

So, at that point you have to start creating deus ex machina types of things (oh, look, a timely healing potion), ro paying the orcs extra stupid, or nerfing them so the group can proceed a bit further, etc., etc. -- all of which don't actually pass the common sense test in a dungeon you're trying to play "realistically" (that is, the way such a creation would be run by...well...you or me, were we in charge of it).

You're sort of mixing apples and oranges here. Sure, at the operational or strategic level, you execute a conservation of force maneuver to engage the enemy, but not decisively. But at the tactical level (where TFT occurs) I have NEVER heard my platoon leader say that we're just gonna go in and hope for the best. We aALWAYS had a plan for infiltration, exfiltration, rally points, comms, and mutual support with the goal of everyone coming home alive WITHOUT going in expecting to overdo it and wind up in one of those "exciting situations" you just described. Again, reality is different from a game, but I always try to play the NPCs as if they actually cared about living to fight another day...

Did you ever notice that those *Escape* situations were invariably the result of bad planning, poor execution, and/or bad luck, and usually all three together? The bottom line is that if you show me someone who plans to fail, I'll show you a loser. People plan around the possibilities and deal with the unexpected (which still allows you plenty of opportunities for *excitement*). Adding a tool like a mild healing spell simply allows the players to plan a little more aggressively than if it's going to be a "one-two-three-punt" series of adventures because statistically half of them are going to be so severely injured in the first hour that they cannot continue the adventure and then will need weeks of time to heal.

In short, I prefer to set the pacing myself, rather than have the rules do it for me by forcing month-long pauses for injury recovery... Which is why I created the Talent MEDIC (heals one point immediately, and allows the Physicker to do his schtick later without prejudice) and a minor healing spell very much akin to the one Steve is proposing, in order to let the players play instead of calling the night's session after an hour of play so everyone can crawl back to the local healer's office and start the lengthy process of healing up again.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

JLV, I pretty much agree with all of that.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

If I were going to write a FRPG (or for that matter, an RPG for almost any genre), I'd have "cinematic" and "somewhat realistic" settings where appropriate. The difficulty, of course, is creating a system that will accommodate both approaches with as little mechanical difference as possible.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Realistic healing is fine for a game where fights are rare or where being injured in a fight is unlikely. For a game that is primarily about combat (which, if you look at the number of pages assigned to the topic relative to everything else, you would expect TFT to be), and where people want fights where the tension is "do we win" rather than "do we win with zero injuries", some degree of enhanced healing is called for.

If you want to limit self-sufficiency, you can always add a material component. There's a decent literary precedent for food -- say, a regeneration spell heals 1 point over an hour, during which time you also consume a day's worth of rations.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Excellent point. Advanced Melee comprises about 1/4 of the total TFT:ITL rules set. Advanced Wizard is another 1/4 and a goodly portion of Advanced Wizard deals with combat as well, say 1/3 at least.

That works out to something like 1/3 of the rules being related to combat. Therefore, as you suggest, it's logical for players of TFT to expect that lots of combat will occur. And to expect a healing system to support that.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

If adding a healing spell (and I feel one is needed, at least as an option), suggesting that it be limited to those with the priest or physicker talents sounds good. I see no issues with the spell as written fitting in, as it's not much use. It is slightly better than Drain St (which is 5:1, and the caster pays nothing).

The biggest issue is that it will need cleaned up Fatigue vs Damage rules.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

This is a very interesting notion you are suggesting. Something in my head is telling me you might be onto something significant Ak_Aramis; but I am not sure where this idea might go.

So, if I can throw the question on the table - without invoking a derailing fire-storm of cries in support of wizards getting the healing spell too - I would be interested in learning ideas for how we could limit the assignment of a healing spell to Priest-types only, and avoid having those characters reduced functionally in play to a mobile first-aid station *disguised* as a Priest?

In other words, is there a way we could do this honestly; and not end-up with players creating characters who are simply magical healers with the Priest talent added-on as an afterthought to make it legal.

Thoughts?

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Clearly there will always be people who think they want a healing spell in TFT. But TFT can and did work very well without one. Having to actually deal with the possibility of lasting wounds is central to the play and balance of all of the published TFT adventures - the Death Tests, Orb Quest, GrailQuest, Security Station, Master of the Amulets, and Tollenkar's Lair, all are balanced for no magic healing spells, and they're all challenging and interesting that way, and I think would lose a lot if healing up were fast & easy, and certainly everyone should be able to see that they'd need to be rebalanced and would play quite differently.

So, since adding a strong healing spell will change campaign play quite a bit, I'd say there ought to be a section about healing spells being an option a GM might want to consider whether to include or not, and what the considerations will be.

Also because, if you just add a healing spell and then let GMs start out campaigns, they're going to have a peculiar time when/if they and players start to discover the implications during play.

(BTW, I once had a similar discovery experience long ago playing a computer RPG (Phantasie III). My first sessions were something really different and interesting, as my party would start to do ok but then one of my characters would die or have an arm chopped off or a leg crushed, and I'd retire that character in a town and take on a replacement. I knew it was possible to heal them, but that it was hard. This seemed to be a really challenging and interesting game, and I thought it was awesome that I had several experienced veterans with crippling injuries scattered around the game world awaiting possible eventual healing. Then I realized that there were healing spells that could be used during combat, and that if you did that, you'd pretty much never get a lasting crippling injury at all. The destroyed limbs could be restored as easily as throwing a knife. Suddenly the game became a cake walk and the crippled veterans became irrelevant and the interesting game vanished in a puff of magic.)

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Or a game where people get seriously hurt, but usually only in the boss fight that ends the adventure, and there's expected to be a pause for healing after that.

Strongly agree with this.

Problem here is that this makes healing an economic affair: either you're making enough per raid that you can afford to regard the healing as a cost of doing business, in which case injury is just a fine, or you aren't making enough and you still have all the problems you have without healing. The game shouldn't be just economics.

Re: I like desperate attempts to escape the dungeon.
 

If the effect of healing was that everybody recovered immediately when a fight was over, so that wounds were relevant only to the extent they caused a risk of death during the game, would that be a good thing? Perhaps it would. Maybe that's the paradigm we want, at least for a lot of games.

This is the point I care about. I think the basic healing spell should be easier, and any higher IQ versions should have nice features, e.g. can be used in combat. I see healing in combat as an optional extra: we don't need it but it might be interesting to force people to choose between prosecuting the fight and protecting their friend.

It's more the game design philosophy that bothered me. It's best to know what you're trying to achieve before writing the rule, and Steve just gave us a rule without a reason. I've decided I'm happy with Steve's rule, because it fits the reason I eventually picked. And quite likely he had a perfectly good reason, even if he didn't tell us what it was and I have no idea if it's the same as mine.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Caveat: I'm against this plan, because it's too derivative of Christianity and D&D. But if 'tis done, when 'tis done, methinks 'twould be well it had these properties:

• Expensive: If it's cheap it can be attached on the side of a character that's actually something else. If you want it to be a defining feature of a character then it has to cost, or it has to impose inconvenient handicaps, or something of the kind.
• Useful: If it's going to be expensive then it has to do things that aren't just healing. Useful things that players will value.
• Fun: Implementing the powers of a priest must be an interesting and fun thing to do. Not just routinely and industrially fixing problems but difficult tasks that might succeed or fail and it matters which.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Since Christianity is one of the common faiths on Cidri - and one of the major faiths in human history (and the largest currently) - I have no problem with TFT replicating parts of Christianity, any more than I do it replicating parts of feudalism.

I’m a bit more ambivalent about adapting too much of AD&D’s specific approach. Although I’ve made some suggestions about how a cleric might be added, it was rather different than AD&D and really more of a thought experiment.

And I really don’t see any particular reason for healing spells to be restricted to a new magic using class.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Yes, exactly. <golf clap> Well said sir.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Just for the record, I am neither for, nor against the idea myself David; however, I am fascinated enough by the inherent parameters informed by Ak_Aramis' post, to see if we could collectively *solve* the design-problem and the challenge of coming up with a satisfying solution, which would meet the parameters he laid out, and - more importantly - inhibit players from by-passing that same engineered solution by their potential employment less-than-honest motivations in character creation; IF such thing were adopted - as Ty pointed out:In other words, if it *had* to be done, and we had to provide the solution, how could we make it work?

Working directly from your thoughts: Why could we not have this special character-type, pay the cost of invoking the healing spell, not with ST, as per normal, but with EP instead?

Think about this: if we focus on your point about *useful*, Priests should gain EP for "doing priestly things"; therefore, the more priestly things they do, the more EP that character earns, and then the more healing they can do, AND it stops a priest-character from just being a low-combat value tag-along, waiting to heal people in the Adventure Party.

Now that Priest character has proper motivation to run-around trying to collect converts, perform sacrifices, distribute charity, save people from themselves, or bay at the moon, etc. or whatever it is their Mystery Deity-of-Choice demands of them - because that is how they gain EP, which in turn in builds up the *fuel supply* which they expend to power their priestly magics with, as opposed to using ST - and makes these healing priests distinctly different from where and how the standard TFT wizard powers his spells - as an internal logic bonus.

Thoughts?

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

So what I'm getting out of this, barring the "priestly healing" part of the discussion, is that some people don't want magical healing, and some people do.

Here's an idea -- let Steve add whatever healing spell seems best to him for his game system and then either use it in your game, or don't, as you prefer.

Personally, I'll use it. Because as tomc pointed out, I like my heroes to keep on heroing too. This is a fantasy game, not Dr. Welby, MD.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Not really, rations are pretty cheap. The limitation is that they're reasonably heavy and not available in the middle of nowhere.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

This is definitely one of those things where the best a designer can hope for is to satisfy the most prominent plurality (or, better, his/her self!), and let everyone else house rule as they see fit.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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).

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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.

Boo Hiss to variantism.
 

Hi Kirk, everyone.
I totally agree. 99% of the new players will use the game as written, and most of the rest of us will use this healing spell. People creating dungeons will assume that it exists and plan for it.

Steve Jackson's spell is well written, (it covers all the cases, no unanswered questions). But it is one of the less interesting healing spell variations I've seen. I wish that something more interesting was preposed.

Warm regards, Rick.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Completely agreed. As said, I expect anything Steve adds/modifies for TFT v2 will be done with care and properly vetted/tested. It's clear in this forum there are those adamantly FOR Healing spells, as well as those adamantly AGAINST. My hunch: the average gamer will prefer to have good options (i.e. healing spells) to avoid "multi-month healing time" in-between adventures. Having to explain why your group can't continue an adventure for weeks/months due to healing just doesn't make for fun gaming for "the average gamer" (my opinion of course). Which is why I suggest: if your particular group doesn't want the "fallback" of healing magic, you have the option to forbid its use.

I do understand the desire for "more interesting" healing spells. I'm all for the multi-level spells available at multiple IQ levels. And if these spells have other side effects from their use, cool.

As far as the MSFT analogy: I get that (especially after having been a developer at MSFT for 8 years). However, SJG doesnt have the same deep pockets (nor userbase) of a MSFT ;) So yes, it should be vetted/tested--but it will likely require more of a "judgement" call on SJG's part, as opposed to strenuous user-testing. And I say that based upon the sense I get re: this upcoming release not being a major V2 overhaul--rather, a faster "reprint" to test the market. And yes, that also implies changes like this new Healing Spell could be risky without proper testing. I suspect that's why SJ is keeping the change relatively simple right now.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

That is the *key* right there. As one who is neither for, nor against, my overriding concern is not upsetting the fine mojo imbued into this very special game; regardless of which way it ultimately goes. That's why I feel it is critical at this time, that we run down *all* the submitted options, collectively as a group working together - be it for or against - and leave our raw findings for SJ's perusal and digestion, as he sees fit. As no one person in the history of the world has ever had a monopoly on all the great ideas and unique perspectives. It takes a strong team up-front - and I believe we have that here in spades - and then, leave him to come to his own decision in his own time, in his own way.

That's all we really can do to help.

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Agreed. This discussion is great for helping get all the options/issues out on the table, and then Steve can make a judgement call.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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...

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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).

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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'.

Re: HEAL spell? --> Healing potions.
 

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

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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:
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.


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.


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...

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

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? ;)

Re: HEAL spell?
 

"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

Re: HEAL spell? --> Healing potions.
 

Not if they're found in the dungeon the way they were in the programmed adventures!

Re: HEAL spell?
 

It seems to me that TFT generally did a good job of having both those scales of things going on, and that the lack of healing means that tactical results impact the strategic level and vice versa in interesting and logical ways. If there's quick & easy healing, that removes that interesting interaction, which is one of the (many) reasons I don't want quick & easy healing. If the healing is strong enough, it also removes much of the feedback, deterrence and caution from players escalating to the point of getting themselves killed. And it adds another reason to kill off opponents rather than let anyone be merely nearly dead.

For example, if the players end up defeating but not quite killing a powerful and interesting opponent who isn't necessarily their mortal enemy, that opponent might beg for his life, or they might actually be humane and let him live because he's so injured he won't be a threat to them for quite a while because he'll need to heal. Perhaps the situation in changeable and he may not even be a foe two weeks in the future. But if there's a common healing spell and they can assume an influential person like that can get access to a healer and several people with Aid, they can expect that that person might be fully healed as soon as a healing team can be brought to him. That gives them a major reason to kill him off. And if the tables were turned and the PCs were the ones begging for their lives, it would give the NPCs a reason to just kill them off, too.


"Can't be had for money" is generally considered more valuable than if they're for sale, not less, unless they're very common (which IIRC they weren't).

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Usually, lack of healing means 'you should avoid any combat that might be interesting'.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Or, as Sun Tzu stated in 'The Art of War':

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior ... If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles." - Sun Tzu 545 BC - 470 BC

Where else can a guy quote Sun Tzu *and* Lewis Carroll in the same thread... but when talking about The Fantasy Trip.

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Here's a thought - at base (IQ14) it is 4:1 - particularly uninspiring.
At IQ17, Healing II becomes available - 3:1
At IQ20, Healing III becomes available 2:1

Which makes it useful to forget healing I at IQ 17 and replace it with Healing II, and similar for II → III at IQ 20.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Ak_Aramis, do you see that as paid for as Fatigue, Damage, or Fatigue *and* Damage?

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

EXACTLY! We should have a "+1" button (or a thumbs up) for statements like this! ;-)

A very clever solution!

Re: HEAL spell?
 

One option I haven't seen listed here (but maybe I just missed it) is the one I use in my priest system: priest's healing just modifies physicker (+1 for beginning priests, +5 for max-priests). Priests can use it once per appointed time and it shares physicker's limitations except that priests don't need a physicker's kit and it works on a group (takes about 15 minutes). Working on a group evens out because of 1) physicker's limitations and 2) priests can only perform one ceremony per appointed time.

My reason for making priest's healing into an "improved physicker" talent was that physicker has already been play tested. Why not just add an optional, slight modification (preserving Physicker) instead of introducing a whole new variable?

In my system, Priest requires First Aid (heals 1 ST, same as another writeup I saw earlier in this thread), Theologian requires Physicker (which now costs 1 but requires First Aid), and Theologian 3 requires Master Physicker. This ties Priest to Physicker (but not vice versa) and makes it attractive to combine them because now you can (optionally) make a Physicker with some interesting options to go with all those points you spent on healing talents.

Note: based on the discussions here about whether physicker applies to one combat or one wound, I'd allow people to use all the points they are healed in a ceremony, potentially spreading them across several wounds, since the priest only gets one ceremony per appointed time.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Um? I wrote "lack of healing" but I meant to refer to the lack of instant healing that mostly removes lasting injury from play. In any case, I'm not sure what you were meaning to suggest?

Re: HEAL spell?
 

One idea I toyed with was to assume that 1/2 of a character’s ST (round down; call it “body”) represents actual physical damage, while the rest of his ST (“skill”) represents, skill, luck, etc. After a combat, the skill points are recovered.

Normal figures and rabble have no skill points. This agreeably makes them easy to kill.

A tweak I considered was to allow surprise attacks (and possibly a critical hit) to bypass skill and hit ST directly.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Skarg - I can't speak for Anthony, but here's my rephrase of what he might have meant:

Let us divide all possible fights into two categories: those where the PCs know they will win without anyone they care about being seriously hurt, and the rest. In the absence of convenient healing the first category is the only kind of fight it's wise to seek, but the second category is the only kind of fight that's interesting. Therefore in the absence of convenient healing it's usually wise to avoid any fight that might be interesting.

I would add that this is undesirable from a role-playing point of view, and therefore convenient healing is, for most campaigns, a good thing.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Let's try a concrete example. You could argue with these numbers but I think they're vaguely typical. A party of five has had a tough fight and has suffered 4+6+8=18 points of damage, plus the wizard is down 6 fatigue from casting spells. After Physicker they have 2+4+6 damage. They could keep moving but it's a bit of a risk given that worst damaged character only has ST 12.

If they don't have healing they might rest for 8 days, after which one character would be down 2 hits and everyone else is fine. Or 12 days and then everyone is 100%.

If they have Healing I then they need to recover 6+4*(2+4+6) fatigue which would be 14 hours (7 if someone knew Aid, more if they miss some rolls). If they have Healing II then they need 11 hours. If they have Healing III it's 8 hours.

Now the Healing II and Healing III improvements are useful I guess, but the effect is pretty modest by comparison with that huge jump from none to I. So this rule isn't bad as far as I see, but neither is it terribly significant. It's icing on the cake.

My idea was that Healing I allowed healing between battles, and Healing II allowed healing between battles or during a battle. What Healing III did I don't know.

Re: Levels of HEAL spells?
 

Hi everyone, David, ak_aramis.
First, I like having a few levels for a spell. It encourages a wizard to GET that IQ 22, and that makes the wizard more different from other characters, than if he got IQ 15, then dumped his other attributes into DX.

Second, the wizard would not forget the earlier spells. In TFT, spells usually INCLUDE earlier spells in a related series, for no memory (mIQ) cost. Where as talent, usually REQUIRE you to take both, paying mIQ for each. (Which is another reason why experienced heroes are unpowered compared to experienced wizards. So if your spells list worked like most, then the wizard would get all of the healing spells for the same price.

Third, a party with a wizard good enough to have Heal 2 or Heal 3, is likely to be an experienced party. An experienced party is more likely to have ST batteries, Power Stones, a character who has picked up Aid spell, To have hired a torch bearer / apprentice, etc. So the more experienced party is more likely to be able to take advantage of the fST cost savings of the better spells.

Fourth, I am not troubled by there being a point of diminishing returns. Is the utility of powerful spells, a bit less than the early ones? Shrug. That is the way it often works. Consider the effort to learn how to swim. It is not hard to learn a basic competency, a small amount of effort gives you a life long skill. But consider the amount of effort it takes to be become and maintain an olympic level of skill.

Warm regards, Rick.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Ok... but does that really match other people's experience of what happens during play?

What I'd tend to say about that instead is: if you're confident that no one important will die if you fight some weaker foes, but there's still a chance some of you will take some moderate injury that will take time to heal or else make tougher fights more dangerous in future, then that makes the lesser fights into interesting calculated risks where the way you manage risk is still possibly going to make a big difference. (This, it seems to me, is one of the main elements of play in all of the MicroQuests.) But if healing is fast and trivial, then that consideration is removed, making both the easy fights and the harder fights, as well as the combined experience, less interesting.

Moreover, it seems to me that hopefully players cannot predict danger level too accurately, or they (or I, anyway) will stop being interested in general. For us, after 4 or so years of steady play, TFT did reach a point where we started to be able to predict the danger level of the outcomes as long as we were right about how capable the opponents were. And that was about the point we stopped wanting to play (and started re-designing instead, until we found GURPS).

As far as what's "wise", it may not be "wise" (more accurately, not "safe") from in the sense that it's dangerous, but it seems to me that is the point where a game becomes more interesting - that is, where the situation requires unsafe choices, or at least where there is temptation to do not entirely safe things. And easy healing tends to make everything safer.

It also seems to me that it's not really an accurate summary anyway, because if there's risk of death, there's risk of death regardless of healing (as long as it's not healing during combat and easy revival). The thing easy healing removes from play is lasting injury.

I've mostly played without easy healing for serious wounds, and quite appreciated having lasting wounds as an interesting situation created by what exactly happened in combat, and I didn't notice it blocking interesting play.

I've sometimes played with easy healing, and while it can enable "unstoppable buzzsaw" mode, which can be fun for a bit, I mainly notice that it removes the middle-ground between dead and no effect, from the list of possible consequences to consider. What I've noticed fast/easy healing doing to the gameplay experience, is trivializing major injuries, having players take combat threats/injuries less seriously, removing the meta-level effect on the situation where a specific fight led to wounds that has the party needing to deal with the injuries, a removal of serious lasting injuries to powerful people as a situation, reduction or removal of recovery as an element in struggles between groups, and also a tendency of players to just keep attacking more and more powerful opponents until they get killed.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

My experience is that fights that amount to "we're going to give them a beat-down, and the only interesting question is how many resources we consume" are things a lot of players find boring and will happily convert to "roll for wandering damage" instead of playing out the fight at all.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

A lot of times the players do not know what the fight will be, or how tough it is.

They are wandering along, and a screaming horde of hasted, giant, rabid whatsits burst out of the undergrowth and charge at the party.

A significant amount of the combat in my game is more like this, than the players knowing in advance what they are fighting and how tough it is.

Warm regards, Rick.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

That sort of doesn't matter. If you're presenting your players with fights, either you balance almost all of them into one-sided beatdowns that can be converted to 'roll for wandering damage', or you just discard those fights completely and only run the fights that the PCs might lose.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

This is actually two concepts: choices the players cannot intelligently make due to lack of information, and choices the players are denied by unilateral decision of the enemy.

Yes, there are fights the players don't choose, but Anthony's statement as I understood it was discussing fights they do choose. Which is an important subject, in most games.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I guess there's more than two scenarios for healing:

1. When you need healing, you can't have it. The PCs start uninjured, gradually accumulate wounds and hope to make the finish line before they (all) die. Fights are severe enough to make this challenging, which means that no individual fight has much chance to defeat the players, unless they are already badly injured near the end of the quest. Problem with this is that the PCs might do badly early on, take a lot of wounds and be doomed, but not know it. The GM can fudge it by providing healing potions in the treasure, assuming there is a GM and the system includes healing potions. Also the fights are never severe enough there's a risk of losing, which takes a good deal of the tension out of them.
2. You can get healed by stopping and doing nothing for a long time. The fights might be tough enough to be threatening, in which case there are lots of wounds and the campaign becomes very slow in game time. Or they are easy enough people don't get seriously hurt, in which case there's not much tension.
3. You can get healed easily, after every fight, with a short pause. The fights are tough enough to be threatening. Injuries become a short-term problem. I don't see a problem here, but some people are offended, maybe by failure of suspension of disbelief?
4. You can get healed easily, either after a fight or during if the healer can keep up. Fights are even tougher, to be challenging. I don't see a problem here.

TFT as originally published is 2, except some MicroQuests might be 1. TFT with the proposed healing spell would be something between 2 and 3 (lots of resting). D&D is a hybrid of something between 2 and 3 (clerics take a night to get their spells back) and 4.

The key point is that as healing gets better it becomes practical to make the monsters more powerful, so simplistic ideas like "healing makes the players better off" don't apply.

I don't find bottom line concerns ("Am I kiling things fast enough to keep up with the healing bill?") An interesting way to play. It seems more of a wargaming thing and less a role-playing thing.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

The point where fighting competent people is trivial and best ignored, seems to me like more importantly also the point where the combat system has broken down in an important way. To us, that started to happen eventually when the player parties got too strong. The chance that PCs might actually get hurt but not killed was vanishing, and it seems like the opposite of what we'd want would be to make even that event trivial by adding fast cheap magic healing.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I think there are more than four possible healing schemes, too.

I don't quite follow your description of #1, and I don't think it quite describes the MicroQuests such as the Death Tests. In the Death Tests, you have little or no healing and need to survive several unknown combats and other threats in a row. Several of them are supposed to be potentially deadly by themselves. I certainly wouldn't agree that "the fights are never severe enough there's a risk of losing". However there's almost always some hope as long as you're alive. I don't see the uncertainty of what your odds are as a problem - that seems like part of what makes it interesting and exciting. Death Test does not hand out mercy healing potions because the party is injured (which I think is a good thing), but there is a small chance that if some PCs die, an NPC will join them. I think that if you play the original MicroQuests as written, with weak enough characters, they're quite exciting and adding easy healing would throw off the balance and make them less tense and interesting. I also think it would tend to remove one of the most interesting things about them: instead of being just a series of arena combats, what happens in each fight is relevant to the rest of the fights because there is little or no opportunity to heal between them.

I also disagree with your characterization of TFT as necessarily "The fights might be tough enough to be threatening, in which case there are lots of wounds and the campaign becomes very slow in game time." In my experience (though we did play with physickers healing each wound), it becomes significant whether you can not only defeat opponents, but do so without getting injured, and that is possible by using good tactics, at least some of the time. You can also develop good strategies for coping with when someone is seriously hurt, and managing that situation becomes an interesting part of play, that means that avoiding injury in combat is valuable and significant. And, a group that has good tactics and good methods for handling the wounded can still start to get in trouble from accumulated wounds or other developing situations, and THAT is really interesting. All of those things I like could/would be removed by strong/cheap/easy enough healing magic.

So those are some of the main reasons why I'm bothered by #3, and also as you say because of "failure of suspension of disbelief", and reduction of logical realistic consequences. I chose TFT over other games because it made more sense and seemed more like what ought to logically happen in a given situation.

As for your situation #4, there are SO many games like that (D&D, computer games, etc - well, maybe usually without the "Fights are even tougher, to be challenging" part), and my issue with it is the same as #3 but more severe. Lasting wounds are removed as a thing that happens, and an element of play to think about. I like those things, and the game starts to feel not very much like the situation it's supposedly about. The violence feels fake because no one gets hurt. Or, if at least it really is tough and challenging enough that PCs do die fairly often, well, that's actually harsher than many of my games without healing, and I've seen many players just get into a mode where they just push it till they kill everything, or get killed. It also means that both players and NPCs get a much added motivation to kill off all opponents, because everyone can be expected to come back at full strength after a short time. I've seen a lot of that style of gaming, and have rarely found it something more interesting than a game where people sometimes get seriously hurt but not killed and need a significant time to heal.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

If your fight against competent people is an autowin, the competent people run away.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I'm reading through all of this, and more and more, I find myself siding with David Bofinger on this. I like the cut of his jib.

The bottom line is that just about any fight can be interesting, if the GM runs the foes in a clever way. Having a lot of healing available (regardless of the mechanism used) just lets us get to the interesting parts faster.

Sitting around in town or camp and healing is booooring; fighting is fun. Anything that lets me do fun stuff is better than forcing me to do boring stuff.

That's really my bottom line here.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Skarg, Anthony is quite correct on this particular point. Here is the definitive documented evidence which supports his statement in full;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92gP2J0CUjc, and to which there is no defensible counter-point or reasonable argument.

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Except all the ones that are down in one attack before they get to do anything, and/or can't escape because of TFT Engagement rules.

But the point is that if combat has become trivial, predictable, and/or un-fun, then some limit of the system is starting to break down. That's a different and larger problem than whether or not there should be easy healing, but I think easy healing increases the tendency to get to that point sooner.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

The limit of the system is that combats must be trivial if you're going to have multiple of them, because after a combat that isn't trivial you're quite likely to be limping home, not continuing with the adventure.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Don't forget that as long as combat is serious, PCs should look for other ways to resolve conflicts.

This is where other talents, whether mimic, business sense, sex appeal, languages, etc. etc. all have their part to play.

If the party's response to every situation is to draw their swords and start shooting lightning bolts, that will end badly for everyone eventually, or become incredibly boring.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I don't understand how we can have both played the same game. I don't recognize that as a description of what mostly happened in play, at all.

Strong tactics, better ability and equipment, circumstances and good fortune, as well as physicking, can all lead to winning fights without little or sometimes no significant injury, but it's not a certain thing. The interesting part of playing the game to me, is doing all you can to try to succeed without getting killed or seriously injured, and it can be a very satisfying joy when you manage to do that. There's tension and excitement when there's some real risk you'll get killed OR significantly injured.

Also, smart parties bring more than the minimum number of people with them, so when someone is taken out, the party isn't doomed, and hopefully there are even enough people to protect the wounded, and the wagons or pack animals or porters or scholars or whoever else is along, not just for some spicy fight, but for the trip there and back again. There's a whole interesting game in dealing with the whole process of getting a group of people through an adventure of many days across various terrain and situations. One of the main things to manage about that is not just who's dead or not, but who's injured, how injured they are, and what you can do to get them healed.

Adding easy fast healing would reduce the significance of the danger and events in many combats, making more of them trivial, and would largely remove lasting injuries as a situation.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

The difference is that the fights you think would become uninteresting I think are already uninteresting.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

That's one difference, yes. I find injuries interesting mostly and not boring. And I find reducing the potential results of combat to you live with no significant wounds, or you die, to be less interesting than possibly having wounds to deal with.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

You'd have made a great Light Infantryman! Our goal in combat was frequently to shoot to wound the enemy rather than kill him. Why? Because the enemy has to DEAL with him if he's wounded (unless they just shoot him out of hand -- some enemies did do that sort of thing), whereas if he's dead, they just strip him of his weapons, ammunition and food, and move on. The standard figuring was that for every enemy you wounded badly enough to take out of the fight, you effectively subtracted two to three unwounded enemies from their strength for at least an hour or two while they helped their comrade. The same was true for us, of course...

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Are we really just arguing over two versions of Physicker, RAW and house-ruled?

1) As-written: a physicker can only heal up to 2 hits on any humanoid figure after any combat or accident

2) House-ruled: a physicker can heal up to 2 hits on any injury on any humanoid figure

Here's how it appears to me:

People who use RAW physickers would seek other sources of healing.

People who use the much more powerful house-ruled version would consider other sources of healing over powered.

Is that what's going on here?

Are there any people in favor of healing spells who also use that house-ruled physicker?

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I think that's likely a big part of it, but not all.

It's certainly true that we let physickers heal every wound regardless of "combats" (whatever that means), and that means often a lot more healing than if you don't do that. And playing that way, we didn't want a magic healing spell.

(And BTW letting EVERY wound heal every other day of rest (which we did not do) would also speed up healing.)

There are a few threads of more complicated discussion going on, with multiple positions, such as:

* Some people are saying SJ's new Healing spell looks fine, but many of them seem to think it means a wizard can heal about 3 points per day. No one has replied to me pointing out that the healing can be more like 35 points per day, plus about 35 more for every random IQ 9 person who knows the Aid spell.

* There are also a few threads about people suggesting slower (e.g. Rick's version, which I mostly like) healing spells, that let you heal without lying down all day, and/or increase the healing rate but not by a huge amount. Another limited healing spell was more like the physicker talent, perhaps healing 1 or 2 more points.

* There are also people who want to be able to have adventurers fight and get injured during combat but be able to heal quite quickly after each fight, so they can go through a dungeon with a huge number of rooms "like a buzzsaw" till they get killed.

Er, maybe that makes essentially four opinions:

A) TFT was good with no healing spell.
B) A new limited healing spell would be welcome. (Serious healing still takes several days.)
C) A strong healing spell is wanted. (An all-near death party could zap to full health in 1-3 days.)
D) Would like PCs to be able to heal completely after every fight so they can fight all day long.

The difference in using Physicker for each wound doesn't get you above level B.

Some (many?) people seem to think SJ's proposed spell is level B, but with rest (and especially the Aid spell) it's level C unless some limit is added.

The main people I keep speaking up to disagree with seem to want D, but I don't like playing at C, either.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

My feeling is with Skarg, in that this is the level which I personally feel is best suits TFT for a multitude of reasons. If a particular gaming-group desires a more on-demand healing for an "instant extended play" style of adventuring - where damage due to injury is not so serious - why not simply load up on healing potions before delving into the depths the labyrinth, rather than alter the core system across the board?

JK

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I'm pretty much with Skarg too, though I'm definitely more a "B" guy than an "A" guy. I think Steve was trying to go there too, though he may now be feeling "burned" over all the angst over his proposal.

I note that several of my comments have been taken out of context to imply I'm a "D" guy, though.

I believe that a good healing spell would speed the healing rate enough so that only two or three days of downtime are needed instead of potentially weeks for a serious injury. Why is that important to me? Because I don't like adventuring for two hours and then spending the next month healing injuries. I prefer to adventure for a few hours, rest for a few hours, adventure for a few more hours, rinse, repeat, until someone is seriously enough injured that we need to go someplace safe to heal up for a couple of days. And then get back to heroing. And if someone dies along the way, well, a new character can appear when we break for a couple of days so that Ragnar the Impetuous can heal that nasty looking gash he got in the dungeon.

I like Steve's Spell.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I guess to sum up my thoughts based on this multiple choice project, I'm an A or possibly a B, if the spell(s) are truly limited to avoid abuse.

IMO, walking wounded are part of the game and add to the tension. Even modern combat has enemies often seeking to wound rather than kill because they know this uses more enemy manpower that an outright kill.

Perhaps not allowing stacking of Physicker and magical healing would also keep it under better control.

Finally, time is under control of the GM. If a party is wounded, they may have to consider self-preservation and healing over some number of weeks. If they find a safe place to do it, the GM can keep it simple and turn the hands of the clock as fast as he wants. Poof! 3 weeks have passed without undue incident, you are XXX dollars poorer for food and housing, rock on.

Yet this still makes the party make hard choices, and may require them to travel again, etc. etc. instead of just mowing through a dungeon or town, healing all along the way.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

I think every GM has always done this. But it misses the point that three weeks have still elapsed. What's been going on in the dungeon during all that time, do you suppose?

Re: HEAL spell?
 

This is a rumor that will not die. Modern soldiers are trying to remove enemies. They are often indifferent about whether this is by wounding or killing, but that's not the same as actively seeking to wound.

In any case, even if this were an effective strategy, it would only make sense with recovery times much longer than TFT.

Re: HEAL spell?
 

By ¨modern¨, I mean non-sword wielding environments without dragons. There were various mechanisms, traps, bombs, etc. that were specifically designed to wound more than kill in conflicts since Fred Flintstone´s time period.

Wiki isn´t god, but sometimes has interesting info... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-personnel_mine

Re: HEAL spell?
 

Dungeon stuff? What do dungeon inhabitants do, anyway? Maybe they play TFT in their spare time?

Seriously, though, they can live their lives as they see fit, without judgment, as far as I am concerned. ;) Maybe they fix weak spots in their dungeon defenses, or maybe they become bored and just leave?

Is time in a TFT adventure costly? I'm not sure I understand why various rates of passing time are an issue.