From: Paul Reilly (paul@phyast.pitt.edu)
Date: Thu 26 Aug 1993 - 20:40:47 EEST
Paul Reilly here.
One point I'd like to make is that healing in RQ 2 didn't seem too
excessive; it was expensive to learn (I think Heal 6 cost 10,500 Lunars to
learn, had to be learned in six stages, and plate armor was in the hundreds.)
No POW spirits either, you had to fight a real ghost to get a bound spirit,
and only bound into special animals or Godtime crystals.
We have tried various versions over the years. One was that for severely
wounded locations (into negative hit points) you had to first succeed in a
First Aid to line up the tissues properly, otherwise the spell would heal
tissues into the wrong positions leading to partial loss of function and
necessitating surgery from a real healer later.
Another one we tried was only the best Heal applies to a wound, but we found
this slightly cumbersome because wounds aren't actually recorded separately
and you had to keep a scratch pad. In combats with armor, there are often
several small wounds to the same hit location.
Another approach we have used is for the 'common people' to have ritual
Healing magic but no instant Heals. This allows for the highly survivable
PCs that people have come to enjoy but you avoid the phenomenon of
every peasant family having amazing magical healing. This approach actually
works surprisingly well. It works best with the RQ 2 distinction
between lay members and Initiates, with the 'normal' healing spell widely
available and the 'instant' spell available to Initiates of appropriate
gods.
A totally different approach was used in one of our low magic campaigns,
set on an alternate Earth. There was very little ostensible 'magic' but we
used the magic rules to account for certain phenomena. Warriors who
wanted to attack fanatically used Fanaticism without thinking of it as
a spell, just an effort of will. Similarly with Bladesharp, you were
just trying extra hard. Healing in this system consisted of getting knocked
down with a wound that the CHARACTER thinks is pretty bad, but after checking
he discovers that it is just a flesh wound or that he only had the wind knocked
out of him. The Heal spell was totally hidden from the character - his
player decided when to use it, however. Think of it as a kind of 'luck' that
can run out when the character is out of MPs. Of course in this system
there were no spells like Darkwall or Light available to the average character.
Well, more another time,
Paul
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