4e Cure Disease badly worded/overpowered

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by maximara

An interesting book is Plagues and Peoples (1976) by William H. McNeill which goes into how diseases change over time ...

And not even just in ancient times. Right up to the very end of the patent medicine era in the early 20th, funky names attached to this ailment or that were common.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The Spells predate the Advantage and some of us have never been that impressed with the mechanics of the Advantage.

Which is why GURPS 4E Magic should have integrated Healing College spells with the Healing advantage and related traits like Regrowth and Regeneration. It's just one of a number of places where the book retains separate rule mechanics left over from GURPS 2E or 3E instead of using GURPS 4E advantages.

A number of spells could have been reworded along the lines of "Temporarily gives the subject X advantage with the Magic Power Limitation."

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Which is why GURPS 4E Magic should have integrated Healing College spells with the Healing advantage and related traits like Regrowth and Regeneration. ."

Nope, I've never liked the Healing Advantage and am happy to see the Healing College Spells separate rules-wise. Nobody would actually want a Regrowth Spell that worked as slowly as the base Regrowth advantage and a Spell that gave you Slow Regeneration might be worse.

Multiple individual entries in the Powers system need fixing before they're made universal. Do you want the Invisibility Spell to work like the Invisibility Advantage? The Powers system is filled with a different bunch of leftovers some going back to Gurps 1e.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Nope, I've never liked the Healing Advantage and am happy to see the Healing College Spells separate rules-wise.

Fair enough, there are plenty of screwy things about that trait, but the Healing advantage does have some good points vs. Cure Disease. Energy cost & skill penalties are based on disease severity and you can make multiple attempts to cure the same disease, albeit with a cumulative penalty.

Those mechanics might not be appropriate for all magical campaigns, but they're suitable for some, and should be available as a spell option.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Multiple individual entries in the Powers system need fixing before they're made universal. Do you want the Invisibility Spell to work like the Invisibility Advantage? The Powers system is filled with a different bunch of leftovers some going back to Gurps 1e.

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

If the game mechanics for a spell work better than those for an advantage, the advantage should be reworked, and vice-versa.

At the very least, harmonizing spells vs. advantages would make designing Sorcery powers easier.

[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.