[Powers] Healing Attack concept

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Otaku

This is probably my ignorance showing, but can someone explain to me why healing needs to be significantly more expensive/difficult than harming? Other than, in the real world (and many settings), the capacity to create (or heal) rather than destroy is far easier to come by?

I think the primary reason why there's an inclination to limit healing abilities is due to how it can be used outside of combat. The combat use is fine - you're giving up your turn to heal your side rather than to take out the enemies. The issue is that even an ability that restores 1 HP makes it so that any HP damage your party takes - due to combat, traps, hazards, accidents, etc - is likely to be gone within minutes or even seconds if the ability functions like Innate Attack - just touch them on an unarmored portion (even with someone wearing full body armor they can probably remove/shift their visor, helmet, gauntlet, etc) and heal them at 1 HP/second by spamming the attack.

Of course, that's not necessarily a bad thing! It does mean that things like Regeneration may be overpriced if Healing Innate Attacks are available, but a campaign where the characters can be expected to be uninjured for every encounter is certainly a playable one (I know at least with That Other Game a lot of parties will keep everyone in tip-top shape and just stop delving and hunker down - or even return to Town if that's an option - if the Cleric runs out of healing spells; meanwhile, in a lot of JRPG's once I have healing magic I'll tend to keep my party's HP full and then go back to an inn if my healer runs out of MP). But that's quite different from the typical GURPS default. Arguably, a bigger issue is what this implies for the world as a whole if there are people with such capabilities; in the thread I linked earlier I mentioned the idea of making it so the healing was only guaranteed to work within a short time after suffering the Injury, and after that most people would have a low chance (a bit under 5%) of the healing working. That prevents a lot of the world-shaking effects.