One of the 20+ HP fighters in DF Felltower now has the spell Steal Vitality.
It's a rarely-used spell in my games, and never before in 4e, with has rules for 20+ HP healing rates or for SM.
Plus it has some inherent weirdness. I don't yet know how I'll sort this out.
Steal Vitality and SM.
The issue here is the spell has no cost to the caster. So how does it interact with SM. How does it interact with HP healing multipliers?
Are those drained HP multiplied like other healing? Probably yes by a strict reading of the rules.
Are the HP lost multipled by HP 20, 30, etc.? Nothing in the rules would point to yes. But with a no, when a 20 HP PC drains a 30 HP foe, does that mean the PC can drain 30 HP and get 10 x 2 = 20 HP healed?
Should it take longer to drain a big target, perhaps, much as positive SM causes poisons to affect the SM+ target more slowly?
Dead at -1 HP?
The "foe dies at -1 HP" thing is a brutal limit, but also means you can kill something at -1 HP that wouldn't even normally die until at least -1 times HP. That's 9 HP less than usual for a normal HP. It can be as much as 49 less than usual for a DF Barbarian with max HP. Also, technically, a reading of this means you can't do this to a foe wounded past -1 HP. If they die at -1 HP, how do you drain HP from them if they are already at -1 HP?
I think this is just a bad effect of the spell, and should be removed. You could say "at -1xHP" but that allows for even more draining.
It's a tough call - either way, it means how we ran it this past session is flat-out against the rules - all of the foes were below -1 HP, and further below -1 x HP, so even a revised version wouldn't allow for it.
I'm really not sure how to deal with all of this. For now, listing the issues has to get the ball rolling.
I'm kinda surprised you allowed this spell, it's not in DFRPG Spells... probably for the very issues you're running into here (also it's not meant as a post-combat healing spell, not really).
ReplyDeleteMy impressions: Steal Vitality is a "vampirism" spell, it's meant to be in the 'bad guys' repertoire.
It should probably not intersect with SM or Very Rapid Healing at all since it's not really meant to be "healing", it's theft.
As for the "dies at -1", I've done this a couple of different ways (when i was aiming for the spell to replace 'regular' healing spells), I treated the "dies at -1" as a post-requisite, not a prerequisite. What I mean is, they cast the spell, if the victim is alive it begins draining HP, after 1 minute it drains 3 HP and I check where the victim is at.
Thus the spell is rarely completely useless after combat, but also it's rarely really good. It actually works better with Trolls who can use it and Share Vitality to spread some HP around (at a poor transfer rate) to get a few people mobile and then retreat further to spend a few hours finishing healing up...
The other way I've done it is to simply have it force a Death Check for every minute of draining once the victim is at -1 HP or below. This however can add a lot of extraneous rolls to your game, but it makes the spell more useful, especially on really tough to kill, but 'easy' to knock out and tie up foes.
It's a legacy spell - others had it, so it's grandfathered into the game. Like Zombie, sadly, which the same player will take, so I'll need to be ready to create a zombie-whatever token and stat sheet in Foundry on the fly.
DeleteI'll have to consider more what to do with this . . . but it's an odd spell in the first place, and it literally can't do what it's wanted for (post-fight healing) by the current writeup. But then the current writeup isn't a useful spell - you need to be healed, and have willing or helpless healthy victims. Great for guys with Unhealing, sure, but who else? I'll need to make it useful but not overpowered. I have an idea, which I'll try to get down on paper today or tomorrow.