want to make healing superior to healing magic

[mehrkat]

I'm trying to figure out how to make the healing power more useful than magical healing.

I don't want to outlaw magical healing completely but I do want to make the healers better than the mage.

I have a magical world I'm running a game in.

There are three types of magician types:
syntactic magic
biomagery -- powers based magic that has control of their physical form
psionics (with imbuements stapled to it as an option)

the biomages are supposed to be healers extraordinary and shape changers. The problem is that a mage who gets the magic word noun "body" and the magic word verb "heal". After you have bought the IQ and the magery this becomes a fairly cheap way to be a healer and outshine the healing power.

I'm considering just getting rid of some of the disadvantages of healing and want to figure out how game breaking it will be.

Considerations:
1. Add regrowth aspect for free and halve the skill minus to fix crippled/lost limbs. Allowing a healer to try again once per month to fix crippling damage.
2. change the cumulative minus to -1 per successful healing instead of -3
3. make xenohealing standard for (carbon based life)

strictly enforce the disadvantages for the "heal" verb.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by mehrkat

I'm trying to figure out how to make the healing power more useful than magical healing.

Make magical healing worse. Lots of spells are grossly overpowered for their cost, and are priced as they are mostly for genre reasons.

[mehrkat]

Anthony,

thanks for the suggestion I'm somewhat reluctant to do this as this affects an already completed character concept (the mage in question)

I have no problem altering the things a character can do prior to the game beginning I don't like to pull the rug out from under a character that already exists.

Its the reason I was looking at beefing the power instead of weakening the other guy.

[ULFGARD]

Make spell healing subject to the dispell magic spell, but not the healing power. It's a bit of extra book keeping, but it can make things pretty interesting, and make Dispell Magic into a combat spell.

[Purple Haze]

Originally Posted by mehrkat

Anthony,

thanks for the suggestion I'm somewhat reluctant to do this as this affects an already completed character concept (the mage in question)

I have no problem altering the things a character can do prior to the game beginning I don't like to pull the rug out from under a character that already exists.

Its the reason I was looking at beefing the power instead of weakening the other guy.

But you are pulling the rug out from under him anyway.

His concept was a mage who is a powerful healer. Nerfing his healing or buffing the healing of every other healer in the game is equivalent.

[lexington]

Originally Posted by Purple Haze

His concept was a mage who is a powerful healer. Nerfing his healing or buffing the healing of every other healer in the game is equivalent.

Only from the view of his specialness. It's far more to his benefit to have all the other healers buffed up.

[David Johnston2]

What kind of skill penalties are you using for the healing magic? Because skill penalties are the only way to keep syntactic magic in line.

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by mehrkat

Its the reason I was looking at beefing the power instead of weakening the other guy.

If you make the Healing power even more powerful than standard magical healing, the game world will tend towards silliness - or at least, it will be a very weird, videogame-like world where injuries have no meaning...

IIRC we always "banned" Major Healing and Great Healing from campaigns, the only exception being a Dungeon Fantasy game. For "serious" fantasy, Light Healing is more than enough...