Why I limit magical healing

Why I limit magical healing

In my opinion, supernatural (magical, psi, etc.) healing is a very important factor that affects your entire game both from the point of view of mechanics and roleplay. In this post, I will describe how and why I severely limit supernatural healing in my games.

Let's go back to D&D 3.5. Cure Wounds is an iconic cleric spell, but it is generally considered a very poor choice for a spell used in combat - you waste your turn recovering a little bit of HP to your ally when you could've done something better. HP can reach hundreds, while the spells do not scale that well, becoming less and less effective. Typically, the party just buys some wands of cure wounds to replenish their HP between fights. In D&D 5e, if I recall things correctly, you simply recover all lost hit points after resting. I always found this rest mechanic to be ridiculous. In D&D 3.5, you die once you reach -10 HP; this limit does not scale with level. From my small experience playing D&D 5e, one thing stuck out like a sore thumb to me - it's very hard to die at all.

GURPS works differently, of course. There are no levels, and no HP scaling, so your HP value will probably stay the same during your entire career. This makes every wound and every application of healing much more important. However, since there's such thing as active defense, getting hurt in combat is actually harder than to get healed with a spell. Also, since unconsciousness and death thresholds scale with HP, while it is relatively easy to get incapacitated, dying is an entirely different matter. GURPS is known for being deadly on the internet, but it's actually not that easy to die in GURPS.

Where am I going with this? I'm not sure yet, because this is just a stream of consciousness, I haven't planned out this post in advance. Healing is GURPS is usually done via the Healing advantage and abilities based on it, or, if you are using GURPS Magic, with the Healing spells, such as Minor Healing. Both of these options include mechanics that prevent you from using having unlimited healing - each successful healing imposes a cumulative -3 penalty on that subject until a day passes. Both options require a roll - an IQ roll or a casting roll. Healing being a quite expensive advantage (30 points), especially if you want to be able to affect non-humanoid beings, forces you to invest a lot of points to be an effective healer. GURPS Magic mages have an easier time.

I've played (actually, still playing) in a game where one of my party mates is a psi that specialized in Psychic Healing. He invested a lot of points into being a capable healer, and there have been multiple times where he brought the entire party back from the brink of death. Once that happened a couple of times, a dissonance appeared in my mind - as a player, I saw no point in being careful in combat anymore, but would the character actually do that? Would you, for example, get reckless and get yourself cut and impaled if you know that you'd get healed back up in no time after the fight is over? Shouldn't the instinct of self-preservation still be working? So, I felt that I should have been intentionally holding back in combat (but eventually I slipped and started going all-out again). It felt a bit off to me. As a player, I felt that there was basically no risk anymore, unless the enemy was so strong that he'd kill my character in one hit instead of knocking him out, and it detracted from my enjoyment of the game. A spiked pit? Why not just jump in it, take some damage, then get healed up on the other side? I don't like being too safe.

But that's the mechanical gripes. From the worldbuilding point of view, if healing spells exist, why would anyone ever learn any mundane healing skills, such as First Aid, Physician, Diagnosis (there's many medical skills in GURPS), when you can learn a spell that does everything much easier? Sure, you could say that not everyone has a magical talent, but I feel that anyone who would have the ability to learn magic, would learn healing spells and become a well-to-do magical physician for an entire town.

D&D tries to forbid arcane spellcasters from taking healing spells. By default, GURPS does not. However, Dungeon Fantasy limits the healing spells to clerics. However, just like in D&D, any cleric can cast healing spells. I don't like that at all. My main problem with D&D clerics is that they all feel the same - their patron deity is mostly a footnote on the character sheet. In my games, clerics are limited to spells and abilities thematically appropriate to their patron deities. Thus, healing spells are only available to clerics of deities of healing. Those deities usually require their followers to be pacifistic or ascetic, which is a harsh limitation for your typical adventuring party. I also allow healing powers to other power sources that require harsh limitations - chi and nature. However, I still allow alchemists to brew healing potions, but those require a lot of money and are much less prone to abuse, so I'm okay with that.

The bottom line is that I restrict healing to divine spellcasters of deities of healing, certain chi practitioners, witch doctors with nature powers, but forbid them to arcane spellcasters and psis (I split the Psychic Healing power into Biokinesis and Psychometabolism, and forbid the Cure ability). This applies not only to the Healing advantage, but also to Affliction that afflicts Regeneration. I feel like all this makes supernatural healing more limited, retaining the feeling of every wound being important, and does not invalidate mundane medical skills and such traits as Rapid Healing and even low levels of Regeneration.

That was a rambly post, but I hope that you could understand my point here.