[Rq-rules] Re: Heal and xenoheal

[Nikk Effingham]

> Another approach is to give Heal a duration, rather than to make it an
> Instant spell. Make it last maybe 24 hours, or even 12, during which
> time it will hold everything together well enough to be used for battle
> and so forth, but when it wears off (or is dispelled!) the wounds open
> up again, although you could of course cast a new bunch of Heals five
> minutes before the last one expires. Natural healing only happens when
> it's actually damaged, though, so to properly recover, the spell would
> have to be maintained at less than the full injury. For example, if
> you've got a 4 point wound to the chest, you'd have three points of
> Heal cast on you every 12 hours for five days or so, and then two
> points for the next five days, and so on.

Y'see, I'm not certain how this is meant to work in practice. Within the space
of a few adventures, if each adventure has, let's say, a fight with four foes
in it eventually one of them is going to critical with a sword blow to the
chest, head or abdomen and do nine or ten points of damage to that location.
This is enough to take your average character down to minues negatives in that
location. If the Heal spell had a duration then every fifteen minutes (or what
have you) you'd have to apply the spell to prevent them from dying. Most
beginning groups won't have the magic points to do this! First aid could help,
but a beginning group might only have fourty or fifty percent in first aid at
best (unless, unlike me, you play that you can keep trying to first aid until
you make a successful skill roll). Even then the PC would be effectively
incapacitated for the rest of the session (it'd take a while to heal that kind
of damage). Whilst this rule would certainly discourage combat, I think you'd
have to be playing a very combat-lite game (which I could imagine, where there
are very few fights and all fights are, literally, a matter of life and death).
Even then you're going to routinely get shish-kebabed PC every now and again -
so adevntures would have to be plotted rather differently than I would plot
one. You'd have to have fights that the players could avoid, all of the time,
or quite quickly you'll end up with your beautifully crafted adventure ruined
as the group drag around a half-corpse with them. Especially if you meant for
the incapacitated PC to have a main role in the game!

So, I like the idea in principle, but you'd have to run a quite different type
of game than normal RQ. I'd suggest.

Oh, and I've updated my webpage

http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phl0nje/runequest/

Cheers,

Nikk