[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Rapid Healing, Recovery, Regeneration and Regrowth

[JulianLW]

The problem for me is that VR Healing gets demoted by DFRPG and Monster Hunters. Here's exactly how:

Rather than natural healing rolls giving healing of 2 HP rather than 1 HP, as stated in Basic (which should, again, according to a very plain-text reading of Basic in "High HP and Healing," have a multiplier effect on natural healing, i.e. you can heal 4 HP per day at HP 20+) the change in DFRPG turns VR Healing into +1 healing - for ALL healing.

What this means is that, instead of 2 HP instead of 1 HP, applied to any healing, VR Healing becomes +10 HP (Only for healing -50%). This is, by my lights, a HUGE nerf, especially compared to the relative value of those 10 CP for ANY CHARACTER TO WHICH THIS MIGHT APPLY, i.e. a character that has already spent 20 or more CP for extra HP. Now that character who has invested in high HP actually starts to heal MORE SLOWLY because he's invested in more HP than a totally average character with VR Healing. And it gets progressively worse the more the character invests in HP, so that a supers character, let's say, with 50 or more HP AND VR Healing actually heals at about the same rate (relative to HP total) as a character without VR Healing! What?! That's NOT Very Rapid!

The more a character invests in HP, the less valuable those 10 points spent on VR Healing become, to the point at which they would be far better spent on 5 more HP, which at least increase crippling rates and decrease the rate for death checks, etc.

Okay, but let's incorporate magic, for DFRPG and Monster Hunters. Now we have a situation where that extra 2 for 1 HP SHOULD, I ARGUE be a multiplier for all healing, rather than simply a +1. The argument that it should be only a +1 because of balance issues doesn't stand up, in my opinion. Why? Because for 30 points, you can buy the Healing advantage. For 25 points, you can buy Regular Regeneration. The more you spend on high HP to capitalize on a multiplier, the more unbalanced the healing alternatives become, and any game where a PC might have 20, 30, or more HP is likely a game where these kinds of alternatives might be available: i.e. supers, psionic, or magical settings.

Again, the character who spends 80 points on HP 50 and 15 points on VR Healing has spent 95 points to turn 1 HP healed into EITHER 6 HP healed (by DFRPG rules) or 10 HP (by my reading of how VR Healing should work) - that's per day, with only natural healing, by the way. By comparison, the character who has spent only 5 more points to get fast Regeneration [100] heals 1 HP per second (i.e. 86 thousand per day), and he doesn't need anybody to cast a healing spell on him. He regenerates that in the middle of combat, whatever.

So the idea that VR Healing is demoted from 2, not 1 HP, to +1 HP due to point balance issues just doesn't seem logical to me at all. And I don't think my wanting VR Healing to be a multiplier rather than a +1 addition is munchkinny or rules-lawyering, either.

I think my reading was the most plain-text reading possible given the write-up in Basic.