Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard?
June 21, 2016 10:15 AM   Subscribe

 
Now I'm just imagining a PC sitting between a good cleric and and evil cleric getting Cure Serious Wounds and Inflict Serious Wounds over and over again. *shivers*
posted by lumpenprole at 10:20 AM on June 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


This straddles the border between banal overthinking of trivial diversions and fan fiction
posted by clockzero at 10:22 AM on June 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


Or, you know, you can read the Malazan books, where the point of magical healing is that the author can describe the characters getting maimed again and again in fetishistic detail only to be taped back together do do it again. Who needs a basalisk AI when you have that to look forward to?
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:23 AM on June 21, 2016 [10 favorites]


I parsed the title as "how incredibly 'scary-magical' healing is" and thought it was going to be about how we take the fact our bodies repair themselves for granted and barely think about it at all, even though it's some sort of wondrous miracle.
posted by dng at 10:24 AM on June 21, 2016 [20 favorites]


In the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, healers are generally adherents of the god Denul and it is shown as a fairly complicated process of slowly knitting damaged pieces back together, but also healing the mind at the same time:

Healing should never be separated between the flesh and the sense of the flesh. It’s hard to explain. The Denul Warrens involve every aspect of healing, since damage, when it occurs, does so on all levels. Shock is the scar that bridges the gap between the body and the mind.

There are examples where "forced healing" is used, which repairs only the body damage, and it is described as being similar to torture in many ways.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 10:25 AM on June 21, 2016 [6 favorites]


Antibiotics are creepy too. The apothecary fixed my rash from the inside out. I swallowed a small, flavorless, unnaturally-colored orb, where it was absorbed by a set of internal membranes designed for food but hijacked for the purposes of the healing orb. The contents of the "pill", which were harvested from trillions of living microfactories, permeated out to my skin, where they engaged in nanowarfare with the organisms there. The whole time, I couldn't feel anything different. Not even when billions of bacteria died and went... where? Did I exhale them? Excrete them? Are they still in me, my body both a living graveyard and a monument to our hubris?
posted by 0xFCAF at 10:26 AM on June 21, 2016 [107 favorites]


Many of the philosophical implications of magical healing can also apply to those with healing factors (Wolverine, Deathstroke, et cetera).

It's interesting that we assume magical healing is only physical. Why couldn't it also dull painful memories, or rub away traumatic experiences, or just make you forget?
posted by truex at 10:26 AM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


See also Are you my Mummy?, when the thing that magically guesses what you're supposed to be like and puts you back that way draws incorrect conclusions about how you're supposed to be.
posted by XMLicious at 10:34 AM on June 21, 2016 [6 favorites]


These are compelling arguments and from now on I am going to severely restrict the amount of healing potions the players in my D&D games get, and I'm going to institute mandatory sanity checks whenever their cleric casts Cure Wounds. Thanks, MetaFilter!
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:34 AM on June 21, 2016 [28 favorites]



I parsed the title as "how incredibly 'scary-magical' healing is" and thought it was going to be about how we take the fact our bodies repair themselves for granted and barely think about it at all, even though it's some sort of wondrous miracle.


It's a miracle, yes, but there's a limit to it that I learned on Metafilter: scurvy will cause old wounds to reappear.

Which brings to mind another possible horrible side-effect of magical healing: if the magic is removed or interfered with, all the cured injuries return.
posted by dragoon at 10:38 AM on June 21, 2016 [16 favorites]


I always wondered more about the economics of it - how many clerics are there that can heal people? You'd think there'd be legions of them. There's no concept of sanitation or germ theory but you can get a Cure Disease spell from any mid-level cleric? There's be hospitals the size of city blocks and clerics would be the #1 profession. Healing churches would have billions of whatever currency units you're using. I'm less worried about sword injuries than I am about glaucoma or gum disease - and does gum disease fall under clure wounds or cure disease? What about if you lose a tooth? Is there a spell to get rid of lice?

But the idea that too much healing would make people rather inured to being injured at all is interesting.
posted by GuyZero at 10:39 AM on June 21, 2016 [6 favorites]


if the magic is removed or interfered with, all the cured injuries return.

So many paintings in so many attics.
posted by GuyZero at 10:40 AM on June 21, 2016 [16 favorites]


Antibiotics are creepy too. The apothecary fixed my rash from the inside out.

You beat me to it. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all, so how many of us have survived injuries or ailments that by rights should have killed us? Our chirurgeons literally slice us open to remove inflicted organs, and we survive the process thanks to alchemical concoctions that fend off the natural processes of decay. Aren't most of us already the walking undead, not even giving a thought to the horror of our unnaturally prolonged spans?
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:40 AM on June 21, 2016 [11 favorites]


The Runequest world of Glorantha features mundane healing quite prominently---most everyone has spells that can heal minor cuts to anything up to a broken limb or so. That translates into the lore and the societies too: people are generally unafraid of hurt and of trying risky things that would merely injure. (A couple of societies have magic that can transfer the pain and injuries of child birth to the fathers, for example. Their males are expected to brave this out as part of the paternal duties).

The big problems are the spiritual hurts, Chaos and Death. Chaos is spiritual injury, insidious and almost impossible to heal, and worse, it spreads. It is immoral, bad actions like abuse or cannibalism that can make you into a literal monster. This is how you get vampires, for example. Disease is chaos in that world, not just a physical danger, but one that can damage your soul as well as your body.

Death is loss and change, even those resurrected by magic come back less or sometimes more than before, always altered. Death is division and not everything is recoverable.

I've always liked the Gloranthan takes on how simple injury is made relatively trivial, while other hurts we put off as somehow less serious, mental and moral defects, become the true perils in a really high magic world.
posted by bonehead at 10:41 AM on June 21, 2016 [12 favorites]


I always figured the fighters in this magical universe were just used to it. They run around slaying villains and monsters with a cleric in tow for this specific purpose; they must have been around the block a few times. Sure it's weird the first time, but only like in the sense that skydiving is.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 10:43 AM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I always figured the fighters in this magical universe were just used to it.

But what if it's not? Like, what if all your gladiator buddies died from sepsis from rusty weapon wounds and now that you're hanging out with this weird group of dungeon junkies all of a sudden you're getting healed left and right? WTF? Glothar and Riban and Rolrothlar could have been saved? By this schmuck in a robe with a mace? The survivor guilt would be the crippling part.
posted by GuyZero at 10:47 AM on June 21, 2016 [29 favorites]


Which brings to mind another possible horrible side-effect of magical healing: if the magic is removed or interfered with, all the cured injuries return.

Oh my god, what if there's no ontological inertia and your wise old cleric finally passes peacefully at the age of 93... and every person she's healed over 50 years of campaigning immediately watches their flesh rent apart as old wounds instantly reappear, but now in spectacularly-lethal fashion as dozens of injuries appear all at the same time.

My next adventuring party is going to haaaaate me...
posted by Mayor West at 11:01 AM on June 21, 2016 [35 favorites]


Clerical healing is divine intervention. If you set up massive cleric hospitals to thwart the very concepts of injury and death the gods would presumably turn their backs on you. The justification for your party's cleric spamming CLW after every bout of goblin-murder is presumably that they are Special People on a Grand Quest and the gods favor their undertakings.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:09 AM on June 21, 2016 [12 favorites]


There's a movie I love, Ravenous, in which Donner party-style cannibalism allows you to magically get healed of any injuries, and everything about the film is great, except I think they biffed the end.

It ends with a knock-down-drag-out fight between the films hero and villain, Guy Pierce and Robert Carlisle, both of whom know the healing power of a good hunk of human flesh. And I was expecting it would end with both locked in an embrace, chewing great grizzly chunks out of each other, and that this would continue forever.

I mean, it's a bit of a downer as endings go. Unless, I guess, you're a cannibal, in which case it's probably the equivalent of those explosively happy musical numbers that ended Fred Astaire films.
posted by maxsparber at 11:09 AM on June 21, 2016 [17 favorites]


I ran a game once where a side-effect of the Paladin's Lay On Hands ability was hair growth, say a milimeter for every hitpoint healed for every hair follicle. By the time the party emerged from the dungeon, they were so hairy they were almost mistaken for a raiding part of bugbears and slain on their way back to town.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:16 AM on June 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


Clerical healing is divine intervention. If you set up massive cleric hospitals to thwart the very concepts of injury and death the gods would presumably turn their backs on you.

Nah, people are just pawns in proxy wars on behalf of The Gods. And what if one side decides to collect as many members as possible by curing and and all human suffering? It would be a popular religion...
posted by GuyZero at 11:18 AM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]




What about if you lose a tooth?

In D&D, at least, regeneration will fix that. I always figured using that on a modern person would result in a small explosion in their mouth as their teeth blew apart caps and crowns, ejected fillings, etc.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:23 AM on June 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


This straddles the border between banal overthinking of trivial diversions and fan fiction

or like any modern spec fic piece that explores the psychic and social consequences of living inside of systems of magic written in sterling prose that gets wide recognition for blending literary, MFA writing practices with genre fiction ideas

ie basically anything and everything that's vaguely SF&F that gets published in the New Yorker or The Best American Short Story
posted by runt at 11:25 AM on June 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


As scary as magical healing may supposedly be, it's still better than the alternative. If not for magical healing there'd be a lot fewer adventurers saving the world and such, both because a lot of them will be dead, and because many fewer people would take up such a dangerous vocation. Without the adventurers, the world will end several times over, and magical-healing-induced existential crises will be the least of everyone's problems.
posted by ejs at 11:26 AM on June 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


Are there any RPG systems that allow you to sip potions instead of having to quaff them?
posted by griphus at 11:27 AM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yes, but it's called smallquaffing.
posted by maxsparber at 11:33 AM on June 21, 2016 [12 favorites]


In DUST mod for Fallout New Vegas there was a healing item. The description was as follows:

Name: Hydra
* Restores crippled limbs
* Reduces sanity
posted by Drexen at 11:37 AM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


* Restores crippled limbs
* Reduces sanity


Also every magical experience in Call of Cthulhu.
posted by GuyZero at 11:41 AM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


I like to imagine that healing potions are distilled from the vigor of young farmers in deep hock at the Company Store, forced to mortgage their very youth and lives to afford the fertility spells of LifeCo that keeps their dragon-ravaged fields able to grow crops.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:42 AM on June 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


Anyone remember "overhealing" from World of Warcraft? If not the concept is to try to eliminate waste by not healing people for way more damage than they were taking. I always tried to be efficient but turns out maybe I was preventing strokes and other unnecessary complications!
posted by freecellwizard at 11:56 AM on June 21, 2016


Chrono Trigger had a pretty cool twist on this. The game is about time travel, and you go into the distant, ruined future in the second act. The ability to produce food has been wiped out (and part of your quest there is to return that to its inhabitants), but they have machines that can repair damage to the body. So there are no Inns (which typically function as full heals), but you can use the machine. However, a dialog box informs you something to the effect of, "Your body is healed! ... But you're still hungry." With your character sprites looking all sad. It's totally meaningless mechanically (you don't fight any differently, and you're healed just as well as at an Inn), but it's a cool twist. It makes you imagine this society that has to spend their entire lives starving, but not dying. It's pretty hellish!
posted by codacorolla at 12:03 PM on June 21, 2016 [18 favorites]


When I was twelve and thirteen, I played a lot of Final Fantasy II. In FFII, Heal potions and spells cured disease and Cure potions and spells healed injuries. I remember wishing I could find a Heal potion in real life to cure my aunt's lung cancer. I think she and the fam would have been okay with any psychological scars.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:06 PM on June 21, 2016 [6 favorites]


Many of the philosophical implications of magical healing can also apply to those with healing factors (Wolverine, Deathstroke, et cetera).

In the first Wolverine movie Rogue asks him early on if his claws hurt him to use and he says, "Every time." I think the comics back that up. So Wolverine, at least, feels the full effect of every injury he receives. Since it would immediately begin healing at his accelerated rate, I'd think the pain would subside just as quickly and there might be some side effects of the healing process that he gets to skip out on (he doesn't ever really have to deal with the itchy scab phase, for example) but for the most part, he's just gotten used to it.

It's even been implied that one of the reasons that he memories are so disjointed and jumbled is because his healing factor kicks in to prevent him from going totally insane. It's only his healing factor that has allowed various parties to screw with his mind so thoroughly while preserving some of his sanity.
posted by VTX at 12:10 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


What about RPGs where at sufficiently advanced levels it's basically just a cycle of your character maybe getting one hit in on the monster before being instantly killed, followed by resurrection from another character who's only job is to resurrect fallen comrades? That seems like that would be the ultimate insanity.
posted by Existential Dread at 12:13 PM on June 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


it would immediately begin healing at his accelerated rate, I'd think the pain would subside just as quickly and there might be some side effects of the healing process that he gets to skip out on

I think it would also be less subjectively distressing because, for the most part, he doesn't have to deal with the anxiety that makes pain so unpleasant. He knows that it's not going to kill him or do crippling damage, or even leave him inconvenienced for anything more than the very shortest period. When we experience pain, there is all the horror of having our body disrupted, like when you twist your ankle and you have that awful stomach lurching fear that it's going to break. And, of course, a lot of effective pain management, from hypnosis during surgery to cannabis for chronic conditions, is mainly effective by reducing anxiety. This is the "three dimensional theory of pain", and he would be almost entirely absent the cognitive -evaluative aspects of the experience .
posted by howfar at 12:27 PM on June 21, 2016 [7 favorites]


I mean this is ignoring the multiple times Wolvie has been reduced to more or less a skeleton. Or drowned. Or X number of horrible things happening, I have to think regeneration from skeletal form is worse than "itchy scab phase."

Of course there are also all of the emotional hurts that come with being nigh-immortal.

JEANNNNNNN
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 12:33 PM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hoping an actual (better-informed) grognard will come in to argue this case, but D&D hit points historically weren't meant to represent exclusively physical harm anyway, were they? More a catch-all number for stamina, morale, wounds, etc encapsulating your will/ability to fight on. It's just so much easier to think of them as injuries which are nonspecific, non-impeding and bloody-or-not according to taste, that that's how they've been used in D&D and other games. Magical healing is still weird though.
posted by comealongpole at 12:44 PM on June 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


sometimes a +3 vorpal bill-guisarme hits you in the emotions
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:48 PM on June 21, 2016 [31 favorites]


GuyZero: "how many clerics are there that can heal people? You'd think there'd be legions of them."

In D&D (all versions/settings) healing is rare because character rated people (IE: people of whatever race who are able to become clerics/fighters/rogues/wizards) are rare. And most of them aren't hanging around towns; they are out adventuring (and getting killed depleting their stocks even more). Town cleric (or paladin) is a retirement job; if you make it that far.

So a single healing potion while cheap for adventurers amounts to one to two years income for a town resident and may be a life times savings for a rural peasant.
posted by Mitheral at 12:57 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Exactly right, comealongpole. It was often said that your last few hit points did represent the state of your body, or that the HP between 0 (edge of consciousness) and -10 (dead) represented real wounds....which always made it a bit weird that, for example, you could have a magical potion that would heal, say, 1d10 points of damage.

For a first level character, this potion would knit gaping wounds back together, bringing them from the verge of death to perfect health, while for a 10th level character, the same potion would bring them from skinned-up-a-bit to just-winded.
posted by Four Ds at 1:02 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Somehow the discussion has run this far without mentioning Darkest Dungeon, a game entirely centered around the concept of managing a fantasy group's encroaching psychosis in the face of the cycle of adrenaline, agony and utter horror that traditional dungeon crawling entails.
posted by FatherDagon at 1:03 PM on June 21, 2016 [13 favorites]


few things in my mind about this:
a) I rather liked the treatment of this in A Song of Ice and Fire, where some magical healing does exist, but it's like the modern healing of a bone fracture. You're never quite as good or as durable as you once were.

I'd be interested in some model of RPG where you essentially could get weaker or less nimble as you take damage or as stuff happens to you in campaign, and you have to adapt your character to favor other strengths because your leg never healed quite right. Or something that models general combat fatigue that is worn away by bruises or effort, and actual wounds. You can restore fatigue with some equivalent of spell or potion really quickly, but wounds have more dire and permanent consequences.

b) I once ran a fantasy campaign in an Alternate Earth where I assumed that ready availability to Remove Disease meant that First Nations People were not devastated by smallpox, and that battles turned into extremely cruel and bloody affairs because nobody assumed that just being wounded made you a casualty. There were frequently second and third battles that would erupt after the sides had their first encounter and then sent teams back into the battlefield to either execute the wounded or rescue their own lost troops, and then that usually resulted in the battle being fought all over again, except with newly healed or zombie re-animated troops.

c)
Somehow the discussion has run this far without mentioning Darkest Dungeon, a game entirely centered around the concept of managing a fantasy group's encroaching psychosis in the face of the cycle of adrenaline, agony and utter horror that traditional dungeon crawling entails.
in my brief attempt at writing Darkest Dungeon fanfic, I liked to imagine that the reason why all of the characters have such obscured faces is because they all bear the scars of blight acid, arterial cuts, and eldritch tentacle lashings; and while they have been healed by either the light or the Occultist's Wyrd Reconstructions, all of the actual visible wounds are still present. So they're all just an array of horrid badasses.

(also, yeah, let's also mention how one of the arguably best healers in Darkest Dungeon is an Aleister Crowley style occultist who heals you for anywhere from 0 - all your damage based on Lovecraftian battlefield surgery that has a greater than zero chance of actually resulting in you bleeding more)
posted by bl1nk at 1:39 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


bl1nk: "I'd be interested in some model of RPG where you essentially could get weaker or less nimble as you take damage or as stuff happens to you in campaign"

At the campaign level those sorts of games tend to mostly unfun for players. Very few people enjoy that sort of existential horror when they are playing it. Even reversible permanent damage like level or stat drain pisses people off. But as a one shot they can be great. Paranoia for example.

And in Traveller your character can die during character creation. That happens though before you've become attached.
posted by Mitheral at 2:06 PM on June 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


There's no concept of sanitation or germ theory but you can get a Cure Disease spell from any mid-level cleric? There's be hospitals the size of city blocks and clerics would be the #1 profession.

In 3rd Edition D&D, a Cure Disease spell would cost 150 gold, or the equivalent of $61,000 dollars (your average labourer earns .1 GP a day). So, it would be a tool for the rich only...BUT.

You can enchant a trap to cast a spell every time it is touched. So you enchant an alter to cast Cure Disease or Cure Moderate Wounds every time someone touches it, and amortize the cost (at 1 sp per casting, in a city of 10,000, it will pay itself off in a couple years at most). Yay! No need for armies of clerics!

But then looking at the rules, someone realized that you could do the same thing with other spells: Create Food and Water; Fabricate; Teleport Circle. And the results from following the rules end up with something that looks nothing like D&D.

Which is why the 4th and 5th editions of D&D changed the magic item creation rules.
posted by happyroach at 2:33 PM on June 21, 2016 [15 favorites]


There's a Pathfinder scenario with a pregenerated character, an oracle with the Dark Tapestry mystery that can heal people, but the effect is of having dark tentacles come out of the wound and knit it together. I based a character of my own off of it, and it's always fun to describe the process to unsuspecting party members.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:48 PM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


> I'd be interested in some model of RPG where you essentially could get weaker or less nimble as you take damage or as stuff happens to you in campaign

Try Burning Wheel. The system is built to inherently reward you for making decisions that complicate your life. Disadvantages like lameness cost character points as much as advantages do, because they are a constant source of experience points (Fate, Persona), which are awarded on the basis of whether you played your traits in a way that made your life harder. And when you heal wounds, if you don't make your check successfully, you can end up with permanent disabilities.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 3:46 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Try Burning Wheel.

See also Fate, which has a range of 'Consequences' from minor up to extreme, which add temporary/semi-permanent negative narrative aspects (called 'Aspects'...) to your character. Hence you might obtain the consequence 'Cranky' or 'Black Eye' at minor, 'Lacerated' or 'Scared Witless' at moderate and 'Shattered Hand' or 'Recurrent Seizures' at severe. These can then be used by other (player or GM) characters to gain an advantage over you or compel you to suffer further negative consequences.

I don't think this is necessarily a better system than Burning Wheel, but Burning Wheel is a beautiful game that I don't think I will ever have the rules mastery to play. Fate is sort of close to rules-light, while, although there's not an ounce of fat on the Burning Wheel system, it does have a lot of muscle to get control over.
posted by howfar at 4:26 PM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


lot of the Apocalypse World games allow you to avoid death by taking unhealable wounds that represent physical and emotional damage.

Recently, I picked up Urban Shadows, a dark city-based fantasy game which encourages social and political interaction (you get experience by tying the story to multiple factions within the supernatural underbelly of the city) and offer "corruption," which is pretty easy to resist at first, but, once you build up enough, you are offered neat powers that require taking on more corruption to use, creating a pretty story-driving spiral downwards.

Unknown Armies 3rd edition does some interesting things with the mental stability rules you generate certain skills from how "open" or "hardened" you are in various "gauges" -- so, the more resistant you are to violence, the better you get at fighting but the worse you get at making honest connections with people. It's a pretty clever way to tell stories about increasingly-damaged people interacting with the weird.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:33 PM on June 21, 2016 [5 favorites]


What about 4th edition D&D where non-magical heroes can heal by yelling at you?
posted by charred husk at 4:38 PM on June 21, 2016


What about 4th edition D&D where non-magical heroes can heal by yelling at you?

You're really just so scared that you push on through.

I mean, after you dragged their body through that mountain pass after the goblin attack they repay you by screaming at you when you're feeling pretty vulnerable? Well we'll do it for now but let me tell you that the next 10' pit may be the last one for you buddy.
posted by GuyZero at 4:44 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yeah, bards are more the BUD/S instructors of the D&D universe. Forcefully encourage your dudes to push themselves, etc.

4ed bards can do SO MANY fun things via yelling. Insult a monster until it explodes? Amazing.
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 4:54 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


The Plastics were LE 4e bards.
posted by The Gaffer at 5:24 PM on June 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


This was the conceit of one of the characters in the Thieves' World series, to my recollection. Tempus - who healed perfectly from everything, up to and including quadruple-amputation and near-complete vivisection - was of indeterminate age, and a dangerous psychopath because of the things he did just to experience the only sensations he had left.
posted by mhoye at 5:29 PM on June 21, 2016


'What is a hit point?' is an eternal debate.

4e's nonmagical healing makes a lot of sense when hit points are an abstract resource for 'how long can you keep fighting' - representing both injury, exhaustion, despair, bad luck, and everything else - a priest healing your wounds won't necessarily restore your will to fight, but the inspiring words of your companion might work just as well. The thing you give up is the concept that 8 hit points of damage represents the same thing whether it's the first 8 you take out of your 493 hp, or the last 8, but I'm okay with that.
posted by xiw at 6:02 PM on June 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


Chrono Trigger had a pretty cool twist on this.

Can't grow crops but can heal lots of wounds? Sounds like an easy recipe for consenting cannibalism to me...
posted by gadge emeritus at 6:59 PM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've had some very interesting philosophy/worldbuilding discussions about the use of "life" and "death" magic - either could be used to heal or harm, depending on the specific application. Life mages are who you want to go to for treating injuries and repairing normal bodily function, but when it comes to treating cancer and parasites, death magic is far more effective. Which can create all sorts of interesting worldbuilding options if death magic is stigmatized, feels inherently creepy to the patient, etc. The king's life was saved due to the intervention of the Dark Healers, but some say he hasn't been the same since...

If you interpret death magic as "suppressing or halting biological functions", then maybe carefully-tuned death magic is used for anesthesia, sleep spells, halting epileptic seizures, and so on. Perhaps it can even cure hiccups.
posted by NMcCoy at 7:10 PM on June 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


As far as hit points and emotional trauma goes, let's consider Runequest 2, where individual body locations have a limited number of hit points- usually less than what a sword will deal. And on the other hand, if you have Healing 5, you can reattach them. So you get the following:
"Auuugh! I just lost a leg!"
stick it back on
"Aaaaah! Now I lost an arm!"
stick it back on

Runequest heroes must have amazing levels of PTSD...
posted by happyroach at 9:15 PM on June 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Hoping an actual (better-informed) grognard will come in to argue this case, but D&D hit points historically weren't meant to represent exclusively physical harm anyway, were they? More a catch-all number for stamina, morale, wounds, etc encapsulating your will/ability to fight on.

It's really just window-dressing over a totally standard MMORPG system, but I've always liked the fact that Lord of the Rings Online uses "morale" instead of "hit points". It's very Tolkien, and it handily explains why Minstrels, Captains, and Rune-Keepers (who are basically orators, though they also do weird stuff with rocks) can all "heal" allies: they're not physically knitting injuries, they're just restoring morale through music, leadership, and rhetoric, respectively. (Look, don't ask me how the Beornings heal, though.)
posted by tobascodagama at 11:06 PM on June 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I ran games for a lot of years, and have thought about this problem a lot. I've come at it from various angles.

* In the most high magic game I ever ran, (a year long FUDGE campaign wherein the *second* most powerful character was a god), one faction of people had extremely easy access to healing magic up to and including resurrection effects. The source of the magic was divine, so it handwaved psychological issues. The result was that their people were universally in perfect health, aged at maybe 1/3rd the rate of regular people, and their soldiers were the most elite non-superpowered people the PCs ever ran into. (They got used to death during live fire exercises in their training.)

* I ran a D&D 3.5 campaign where one of the gimmick dungeons the characters ran into was positive energy themed. Turns out in D&D 3.x, it's possible to die from overhealing if you hit like double hp from positive energy effects in a short enough timeframe. None of the players knew that rule. During the climactic action sequence of the night, one character actually exploded from overexposure to a healing fountain. The players were suitably impressed when I explained the whole deal afterward. The same campaign also featured a chart pulled from some splatbook to make sure that resurrection usually had side effects to keep it from being too easy: a party member they did manage to rez came back as a kobold one time. (She continued using the character, and it was hilarious.)

* The thing that bothered me most as a GM wasn't so much healing magic side effects - in games that were supposed to be gritty, I often just made healing more about accelerated healing than 'poof, wounds gone' - it was more that players always know exactly how many hp they have left. That always broke my willing suspension of disbelief more than 'magic people can do miraculous stuff.' Efforts to obscure hp totals in games were always the place players balked, though - not having ready access to healing was one thing, but needing to make rolls to know how injured they were just never flew. I still want to write a horror game or supplement where that's a rule, though.
posted by mordax at 12:41 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think taking that aspect of narrative control away from your players is a specific stylistic choice that really only works in horror games, but I think it is most easily handled by never really allowing players to get many hit points in the first place. Call of Cthulhu is the obvious example. Yes, you know how many HP you have left, but even if you've got full HP, most gunshots can take you out if the Keeper rolls a lucky impale. Never mind what Bokrug is gonna do to you.

Seems tense enough for my purposes!
posted by howfar at 1:42 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


Plus the added wrinkle that healing magic is very rare in CoC, and if you do get a healing spell, the GM is encouraged to describe how it feels in horrifying detail.
posted by rifflesby at 2:11 AM on June 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


(How it feels: bad)
posted by rifflesby at 2:11 AM on June 22, 2016


TVTropes: Revive Kills Zombie
posted by nicebookrack at 6:26 AM on June 22, 2016


There's a Pathfinder scenario with a pregenerated character, an oracle with the Dark Tapestry mystery that can heal people, but the effect is of having dark tentacles come out of the wound and knit it together. I based a character of my own off of it, and it's always fun to describe the process to unsuspecting party members.

Check out Rat Queens :D
posted by curious nu at 7:33 AM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


I think Cheradenine Zakalwe would relate to this pretty well.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 8:02 AM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've had some very interesting philosophy/worldbuilding discussions about the use of "life" and "death" magic - either could be used to heal or harm, depending on the specific application. Life mages are who you want to go to for treating injuries and repairing normal bodily function, but when it comes to treating cancer and parasites, death magic is far more effective. Which can create all sorts of interesting worldbuilding options if death magic is stigmatized, feels inherently creepy to the patient, etc. The king's life was saved due to the intervention of the Dark Healers, but some say he hasn't been the same since...

If you interpret death magic as "suppressing or halting biological functions", then maybe carefully-tuned death magic is used for anesthesia, sleep spells, halting epileptic seizures, and so on. Perhaps it can even cure hiccups.


But what about natural biologically induced death pathways? Where does my activate-apoptosis spell fall?
posted by deludingmyself at 8:12 AM on June 22, 2016


I wonder what sort of an influence computer RPGs, and specifically JRPGs had on this. Final Fantasy 1 was, IIRC, based on the creator's own AD&D campaigns, but the NES only allows so much narrative fluff. Therefore, clerics go from channeling the will of Gods into healing miracles into W.MAGE who is just sort of throwing around nebulous healing energy. Hit Points go from an abstraction of ability to continue fighting, to a number in a database that correlates directly to energy (sort of like a human gas tank). Lots of people then have their first experiences with RPGs as digital games instead of tabletop, so we now have persistent metaphors of HP as an energy bar instead of as an abstraction of your combined mental / physical ability to live.
posted by codacorolla at 8:17 AM on June 22, 2016 [4 favorites]


they're not physically knitting injuries, they're just restoring morale through music, leadership, and rhetoric, respectively.

And if you watch the movies, it neatly explains why there is always inspiring music when one of our heroes seems to have reached their end and summons some secret hidden reserve of strength to push through to victory. That music isn't the movie's soundtrack/score but minstrels just off screen.

I think it would make sense to combine the two ideas. You get energy that works like LotR online's system and can be replenished during a fight and then you have actual health points that represent the wounds you take. A wound received in battle might take some points out of your energy bar but then it also adds a bleed to your hit points that mimics bleeding from a wound. It starts fast and then slows down (if it's small enough) and keeps ticking off long after the fight. So if you make it through the fight, it only takes a moment to restore your energy via magic but the wounds keep ticking away and if you took too many, you might win the fight only to bleed out an hour later.
posted by VTX at 9:09 AM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


Is it Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress who says something akin to "game design ends where hit points start"?

My list of hilari-terrible under/never-developed computer game ideas includes one where the player begins with a certain number of HP, but HP secretly doesn't stand for hit points. Oh noes, a tweest! Instead it's revealed to be Happy Peons, Hardy Pedalos, Henry Pootle, Heterodox Practices or Hog People. Ah the pathos at those poor, poor little HPs dying for my sins! (obvs not Harry Potter though, no-one's got any sympathy for that lazy little cypher-viper)

tl;dr - never play a game written by comealongpole
posted by comealongpole at 10:12 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


Forgot to say that that Tippyverse link was interesting stuff, kept me scrolling and reading. Cheers happyroach.
posted by comealongpole at 10:15 AM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


I think it would make sense to combine the two ideas. You get energy that works like LotR online's system and can be replenished during a fight and then you have actual health points that represent the wounds you take. A wound received in battle might take some points out of your energy bar but then it also adds a bleed to your hit points that mimics bleeding from a wound. It starts fast and then slows down (if it's small enough) and keeps ticking off long after the fight. So if you make it through the fight, it only takes a moment to restore your energy via magic but the wounds keep ticking away and if you took too many, you might win the fight only to bleed out an hour later.

I've mentioned it before on here, but for a few years I've been building and prototyping a deck building system for character management in a dungeon crawler / tabletop RPG. It revolves around colored and numbered cards that correlate to abilities. Like, you map Blue cards to Intellect, Green cards to Cunning, Orange cards to Athleticism and Red cards to Brawn, and the character is represented by a deck of cards (with some interesting special ability cards thrown in, and wildcards that represent dumb luck). The hand that the player draws when they are trying to do something then represents the moment to moment state of that character - for example, they might be trying to figure out how to read ancient runes, but at that moment the inspiration doesn't strike them.

Wound cards, then, would operate in a similar fashion to junk cards in a deck builder. They clutter up the moment to moment of the character, making them less able to effectively do stuff. Also, if a hand is ever drawn with 50%+1 wound cards, it represents the character's collapse (they're too overwhelmed by what is happening, and their body or mind gives way).

Healers would take on the role of having the only trashing (to use a deck builder term) ability in the game. At campfires or resting places they can search through a character's deck and remove wounds (if you want to distinguish, you could even have mental and physical wounds - maybe even specific wounds (severed limb, acid burn) that HAVE to be played, and have a specific negative effect). In battle they can remove wounds from player hands, and allow them to draw a new card to replace it.
posted by codacorolla at 11:06 AM on June 22, 2016 [10 favorites]


I wonder what sort of an influence computer RPGs, and specifically JRPGs had on this.

A mechanization of an existing practice, I think. P&P RPGS started as a way to tell stories about figures in tabletop wargames. As such, the stats were always present in games, and always an explicit marker of, for example, health or strength in the narratives between players and DMs. As you remark, they weren't primarily an abstraction of a story, they were resources and attributes to be managed.

It was later authors, like the World of Darkness, like FUDGE, that allowed a narrative and/or a simulation of the world to become more important than the game mechanics. D&D itself sort of played with these ideas in some of their more recent editions, but arguably, with less sucess. D&D has always been a system that's strongly about mechanics, with narrative or simulationist approaches often called forcing, cheating or fudging.

It's possible to play memorable fun games in any number of ways---I played in a group that was variously diced and diceless for a decade---but the important thing is that all involved have to be happy with that kind of game.
posted by bonehead at 11:19 AM on June 22, 2016


I've mentioned it before on here, but for a few years I've been building and prototyping a deck building system for character management in a dungeon crawler / tabletop RPG. ...

This is great. I love the way that deck-building games can represent such complex ideas with such simple mechanics. I wish more designers would use card mechanics this way. Seems like most computer game designers only use cards as a cheap way to represent RNG effects and maybe as a way to tie collectibles into gameplay.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:37 AM on June 22, 2016


comealongpole: My list of hilari-terrible under/never-developed computer game ideas includes one where the player begins with a certain number of HP, but HP secretly doesn't stand for hit points. Oh noes, a tweest! Instead it's revealed to be Happy Peons, Hardy Pedalos, Henry Pootle, Heterodox Practices or Hog People. Ah the pathos at those poor, poor little HPs dying for my sins! (obvs not Harry Potter though, no-one's got any sympathy for that lazy little cypher-viper)

Undertale did something like that, but with EXPs and LV.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:45 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


Patrick Stuart's and Scrap Princess's RPG-supplement cum statless bestiary Fire on the Velvet Horizon has a scarier take on the matter (maybe close-ish to the second link) in the form of a Wound Wisp.

Basically there's a chance when a healing spell is cast that the wound isn't just removed but sent... somewhere else. So you end up with a nasty floating semi-sentient ribbon of flesh, a wound hovering in the air like an ACME-brand hole from a road runner cartoon. It's magnified in size, got two horrible little eyes, just a dark black pudding mess inside, lined with teeth. It is "always frightened, tired and angry. It is an incompleteness in the air..."

All it wants to do is to find its mother or father. It wants to latch onto flesh and become the original wound again (bit like what Mayor West said), so it can rest at last, either by healing naturally or by its host/new parent dying. Both are fine, and any host is better than none. It's lost and stressed and basically innocent but if it is the 'ghost' of a bad axe wound it will absolutely kill you in its panic.

It's a real piece of work. Stuart took a really... game-y RPG concept and didn't just make it 'horror' or an excuse for a monster but something sad and pathetic and pitiable. Being magically healed is kind of messed up for all sorts of reasons but if it makes a 'child' like this...
posted by ocular shenanigans at 1:24 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've mentioned it before on here, but for a few years I've been building and prototyping a deck building system for character management in a dungeon crawler / tabletop RPG.

Have you ever looked into the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, based on the post-3.5e DnD ruleset that Paizo kept producing after DnD proper shat the bed with 4e? The deckbuilder card variant came out last year or the year before I believe, and is 90% of what you're describing. Different character builds put different tailored abilities and equipment in their decks, with both short term adjustments (things you pick up or experience during an adventure) and long term adjustments (permanent tweaks to your base deck as you 'level'). Damage/Healing in that game is based on discards and redraws from your deck - instead of gaining trash cards filling up your hand, you end up discarding your potentially good cards and if you run out of cards to discard, you are kaput. (description of mechanics based on playing the game twice a year or two ago, so may be a smidge hazy)
posted by FatherDagon at 1:55 PM on June 22, 2016


It was later authors, like the World of Darkness, like FUDGE, that allowed a narrative and/or a simulation of the world to become more important than the game mechanics.

I dunno. I've been involved with tabletop RPGs since before Dragon Magazine, and I don't really see World of Darkness that way. Or, rather, I think the various WoD people kind of wanted that kind of game, but they shackled it to a very inflexible mechanical system that keeps getting in the way. That said the 3rd Edition Exalted rules do a fair job of modeling the wuxia/anime aesthetic by explicitly setting most combat damage as "initiative," where damage is cinematic but ultimately unimportant until one character is down to the point where they are taking real damage -- the point in a wuxia film where the character spits up blood. Still, it's trapped in a cumbersome system that wants to be really fluid (I enjoyed running a test game of Legends of the Wulin, where everything is abstracted as minuses to a character's ability to act, whether it's wounds, poison, worry for a comrade, disease, passion, or whatever. (The game system has some problems, notably dealing with mid-range opposition, which tends to go on too long for the narrative weight the characters have, but it's an interesting rules set.)

Gumshoe games are insistent that the character abilities do not measure anything specific in game, they are just benchmarks for the character's ability to affect the narrative -- so, when you have used up your Reassurance pool, it's not that the character is somehow menacing or dull, just that they have exhausted their ability to "be in the spotlight" in that area. Additionally, a given character's Reassurance stat could reflect being a good listener or a good liar or having a "mom vibe" or whatever that makes GMCs trust that character. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's a pretty liberating concept once you do. Gumshoe also does some interesting things to speed up genre conventions -- in a game involving a heist, for example, there are rules allowing players to retroactively evolve a plan rather than spend agonizing play hours planning the damn thing ("there is a metal detector? Good thing I came in disguised as a UPS man and stashed a box full of guns in the broom closet" "OK, roll to see if that box was found."). This extends to the Health stat (the systems HP), as long as the stat is positive, you are completely fine. a bit below 0, you are beat up or exhausted and take penalties, lower still, you are really beat up and act with difficulty. Ratings above 0 can mean that you are particularly hardy, but it could also mean that you are lucky or dexterous or anything that you like -- it measures your ability to keep active in a physical contest.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:25 PM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think the various WoD people kind of wanted that kind of game, but they shackled it to a very inflexible mechanical system that keeps getting in the way.

I think this is more than fair, and one of the things that frustrated a lot of people with WoD. It never really lived up to its billing. I think that disappointment also has a lot to do with the evolution of much more rule-light things including LARPing.
posted by bonehead at 2:31 PM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Sword comic covers some of the problems with healing tied to magical items. You are granted fast healing as long as you are grasping the sword, but if you lose contact with it for too long the wounds all recur.
posted by benzenedream at 8:12 PM on June 25, 2016


Deadpool is an exploration of the combination of continual healing and dissipating sanity. He routinely cuts off limbs to escape restraint and ends up with baby hands. He is often wreckless because the consequences are short term. Then there's the whole "what if he gets bifurfacted" story line.

How much of a warrior's limbs can I amputate and cast regenerate on the remains and the core to get 2 warriors?
posted by plinth at 7:26 AM on June 30, 2016


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