4e Cure Disease badly worded/overpowered

[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.

[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.

[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.