4e Cure Disease badly worded/overpowered

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Agreed, but ideally game mechanics for advantages & spells should be harmonized. Why have two sets of rules for the same basic concept?

You could say the same for Thaumatology and all the variant magic systems. Why have multiple sets of rules when it's all magic all the same?

For my part, I'm neither confused nor bewildered by the Healing advantage, except in so far as I'm confused at folks not being able to wrap their heads around it, or unwilling to just houserule it if they can't stand it having different mechanics than the magic system. It works just fine. Only one player in my campaign has taken it in recent years -- she wound up slapping a 30-second + ritual components on it to buy down the cost (not seeing herself as a combat healer), and then established paying Perk points to buy down the penalties for curing diseases.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

For my part, I'm neither confused nor bewildered by the Healing advantage, .

Me neither. It's just that when wearing my player "hat" I say things like "_That_ many FP?" and "_That_ big a minus?". Setting things at a -15 is creating rules that will never get used and why do that?

I'd never take the Healing Advantage over standard Magic Spells and if playing in a campaign where the Ad was the only extraordinary healing I'd probably make a Barbarian with lots of HP and Very Rapid Healing. Or at least a "mundane" doctor with a very good First Aid Skill.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Setting things at a -15 is creating rules that will never get used and why do that?

Because it's much better to say "The odds are prohibitive against you being able to do that" than to say "Meh, you just can't do that, because, well, you just can't, is all."

Beyond which, that sort of thing is common throughout the system. There are dice rolls for a sheer fall of a thousand feet, instead of "Hah, you just die." A 42-lb cannonball does 6dx5 pi++, instead of "Hah, you just got hit with a 42-lber, what's left of you is scattered across an area four hexes wide."

[edk926]

The rolls fit because very occasionally someone will miraculously survive something that would kill 99.999% of people a hundred times over. Like once a woman survived a fall without a parachute from an airplane that exploded while over 30,000 feet in the air.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by edk926

The rolls fit because very occasionally someone will miraculously survive something that would kill 99.999% of people a hundred times over. Like once a woman survived a fall without a parachute from an airplane that exploded while over 30,000 feet in the air.

Also GURPS is meant to be a Universal system; a terminal velocity fall isn't going to instantly kill (or even significantly harm) a character based off of Alex Mercer from Prototype, while a typical Kaiju is just going to shrug off a 42-lb cannonball.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Because it's much better to say "The odds are prohibitive against you being able to do that" than to say "Meh, you just can't do that, because, well, you just can't, is all."

I think I was asking more why the penalty was set that high. If you don't want a Power to do a certain thing set the price higher for a version that does.

It's also not as if "diseases" (going back to the origin of this thread) had an objective scale of what was harder to cure than what. Some bacterial diseases that are probably harder for an average immune system to resist are relatively easy to cure with common antibiotics. Other things don't even have known scientific treatments.

So we've got this subjective list of "This _should_ be harder to cure than that" in somebody's opinion and before Gurps Powers and its' expansion of the Reliable Enhancement (or perhaps PU:Talents with the possibility of more than 4 levels of talent) there wasn't even a way to make the Healing Advantage powerful enough to deal with certain things reliably.

[Inky]

Healing doesn't even say what the criteria are - it only says "from +1 for the common cold to -15 for AIDS".
That seems like it's not based purely on how difficult they are to cure by modern methods, since both the examples are virus diseases and difficult-though-not-impossible to make any difference to with modern medicine (it's just that with colds it doesn't matter). It could be based on severity (although there are plenty of things that, untreated, will kill you faster than AIDS), or on some vague combination of severity and how hard it would theoretically be to cure if you were in a TL8 world and close to medical supplies which you may not be, or it could just be an invitation to the GM to make it as easy or as difficult as would be useful to the plot.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Inky

Healing doesn't even say what the criteria are - it only says "from +1 for the common cold to -15 for AIDS".

While this just goes back to the "How many extra pages are you folks willing to pay for so they can shoehorn all the detailed explanations in?" thing, yeah. I wound up having some chalktalks with some of my medical profession friends to get a notion where they thought the difficulty levels should be.


And for my part, the scale is crocked. The reason the "common cold" is so difficult to defeat is that it's a basket of viruses; there are any number of bacterial infections which should be far easier to fix. The disease component of the Healing advantage shouldn't be linked to how onerous or obvious the symptoms are.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

You could say the same for Thaumatology and all the variant magic systems. Why have multiple sets of rules when it's all magic all the same?

The issue isn't the magic system being used, it's the core mechanics for supernatural healing.

For example, the Healing advantage and all the "X Healing" spells in the Healing College carry a -3 cumulative penalty per previous successful attempt to treat the same patient within the same day. That's good consistency. Simple, easy to remember, reasonably fair to characters with modest skill or IQ levels.

As it stands, Cure Disease is crippled by the fact that it's a "One Try Only" spell, which makes it far less effective than it should be. Sure, you only spend 4 FP to try cure anything from the sniffles to late stage Ebola (vs. 30 FP and a -15 penalty to skill if you're trying to use Healing!), but your patient is screwed if you muff your one skill roll.

So, why not port over the slightly more flexible mechanics from the Healing advantage or at least allow them as an optional rule?

Likewise, because many aspects of the Healing advantage suck, why not make it a bit more like the Cure Disease spell? In particular, serious diseases shouldn't be so hard and expensive (in FP costs) to cure that it's effectively impossible to treat them.