This isn't a new idea, but it's a fun one I haven't worked out the details of myself.
Healing Costs the Healed. Healing spells - specifically Minor Healing, Major Healing, and Great Healing work as written. As is normally the case with beneficial spells, the target must be willing (or unconscious, which here is assumed to be tacit willingness.) However, the caster pays no energy cost. Instead, the target of the healing spell pays any FP cost and is healed any HP. The caster chooses the level of healing, but if such healing takes the target below -FP the spell fails automatically. Reduced cost for high skill is applied before any cost to the target.
On a failed casting, the caster still pays 1 FP if the spell would have cost anything to the target.
For example, Reverend Al Murik casts Major Healing on his wounded buddy Vryce. Vryce has 15 FP, 30 HP, and has suffered 23 HP of injury and has lost 4 FP due to combat and movement; he's currently at 11 FP and 7 HP. Al wants to heal him fully and specifies the casting at 4 energy. He has skill 16 and thus the spell is -1 cost, for a final cost of 3 FP to Vryce. The spell heals 8 HP x 3 = 24 HP of injury, bringing Vryce to his full 30 HP and dropping his current FP by 3. He's fully healed, but much more tired - he's at 8 FP and 30 HP. Al's FP are unchanged.
Alternative: Both Pay. Alternatively, the caster always pays 1 FP for any spell that would otherwise cost points (in other words, if the net cost to the caster would be 1+, after energy cost reductions). This is in addition to the cost to the beneficiary of the healing spell.
You could probably do this with a lot of buff spells - Great Haste already does this to an extent, since it charges both the caster and the subject 5 FP. If all buffs cost the caster and the subject, you'd see a much more cautious approach to buffing.
Hmm. I like the feel of this, though I'd have to think about how much faster it makes healing, since it spreads the FP expenditure out over everyone involved. Under many circumstances, the healer can heal up a lot of people at no cost to himself, and if the targets of the healing are, as frequently happens, front-line fighters, they'll have FP to burn and advantages like Fit to get them back quickly. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it's different.
ReplyDeleteAnother alternative might be to split the cost (rounding up, probably), so the targets of the healing have to contribute, but there's still a brake on how many spells the healer can get off in a short period of time.
I could see that, but with Lend HT I already see lots and lots of FP being fed into casters. Fit wouldn't matter, because the loss is supernatural, so that wouldn't speed up recovery.
DeleteAnd you'd still want to enforce the -3 for multiple castings in a 24-hour period. That is the real, true brake on healing in my games anyway, not FP.
I like the feel of this, and it would be even cooler if you use The Last Gasp for extended FP recovery times. The price of using the target's FP to power his own healing is hours or even days of being down in FP, which incurs penalties to attribute rolls.
DeleteLesser, Greater, Uber healing might be a multiplier that translates FP into HP at different exchange rates, costing the caster more mana to provide the boost.
Yeah. Instead of healing flattening the casters, it could flatten everyone - which means carrying a wound might be preferable to being tired if the latter costs more ability in the short term.
DeleteI was toying around with something similar for my B/XWoD I've been tinkering with. My current level of thought is that the hit points have to come from *somewhere*. (A sacrifice? The caster's own hp?)
ReplyDeleteWhat makes it tricky for B/X is that in GURPS, spells are a way to convert FP into some kind of effect, which in this case is replenishing lost HP. In B/X, spell levels are used to memorize spells, which are then converted into an effect. So the spell already has its cost.
DeleteWhat might work is if healing is de-coupled from spells, and instead becomes a "I give you some of my HP" effect usable by healers. Or take the wounds onto the healers and then let the healers heal themselves. Rolemaster had healers like this - they'd absorb your wounds and then heal themselves.
It's an interesting idea to use the "both pay" method instead of that stacking -3 penalty, though I don't know how that would run in the long term. Because the way it's written now that stacking -3 feels too gamey even for a gamist like myself.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of the -3 would mean, basically, unlimited healing. One guy with Minor Healing-15 could heal 1 HP per second on a 15 or less, for free, with no upper limit. There would be literally no rest impact for healing.
DeleteCombined with "both pay," you'd want at least Major Healing-15 to cut down on the FP cost to the healed, and then use Lend Energy to even out the FP costs by transferring from casters to the healed. You'd end up with basically very cheap healing, and people would either heal a little at a time ("I heal him 1 FP's worth, wait 10 minutes for his FP to come back, and repeat") or everything combined with a somewhat longer single rest.
That -3 is really a critical balance to keep healing from being effectively unlimited.
I understand why the -3 is there, I just think the way it's handled now just feels like exactly what it is (a penalty there to keep healing from being unlimited) and not like something that feels logical or natural, even in terms of magical logic, within the game world. If it were tied only to the subject (penalty based on how many HP have been healed that day or how many times magical healing has been received) or only to the caster (spell always takes a penalty for being cast more than once in a day) it would feel a lot more natural to me, but as it is now it's a penalty in a bizarrely arbitrary modifier (-3) attached to the specific combination of *this* caster using *this* spell on *this* subject.
DeleteI would always combine something like this with forbidding high-skill energy reduction to bring spell prices down to zero, but then that's another houserule I would always use with magic anyway.
Aside from that -3 for repeated castings Minor and Major Healing basically function exactly like the healing spells from the game that got me into RPGs, though in that game the equivalent of FPs only recovered from sleep and so they didn't need something like this. Looking for ways to remove or replace that -3 is almost like a mini-hobby for me within my GURPS experience, I guess.
I could see that. It's just that removing it removes a big brake on magical healing being "win the fight, no consequences after." I could give you logic for it being caster/spell/target based, but it's no more or less of a justification than any other. And if you don't like the idea of caster/spell/target combo based, you wouldn't accept the logic anyway. It's got to fit your world view. FWIW we used to limit the healing to spell/target - it wasn't per caster, but per target and spell.
DeleteIt's probably easier to make all healing one spell, and then find ways to limit that, if you want to keep healing from basically being totally free (or effectively free given a short amount of rest) using the underlying logic of the GURPS Magic system.