Unholy Heals
I’m not a big believer in party composition. Play what you want is my motto, meaning that no one should feel like they got stuck playing the healer. My thinking has always been that, if the party lacks a set of lock picks or a dedicated front-line dude or whatever, clever play and a few GM adjustments can make up the difference. All it takes is some potions, a well-chosen scroll or two, and a little imagination. So long as you’ve got the bare-minimum competencies in place, you should be good to go!
Note that my theory assumes those “bare-minimum competencies” are actually in place. Folks, I’m here today to tell you that is not a safe assumption.
Recently, I failed in my GM-ly duties as adviser to the party. It was the Strange Aeons game I’ve mentioned before, and I thought character creation went well. It was a mix of new and veteran players, and a party of bard/blood rager/kineticist/sorcerer/investigator seemed like a viable mix. A count of five PCs put them over the AP’s recommended party size of four, so a lack of dedicated divine casting didn’t strike me as a big deal. I mean, two of those classes have cure light wounds available from level 1, and another has the option of infernal / celestial healing.
Surely, thought I to myself, They’ll be fine! One of them will pick up the healing option, and we’ll skip merrily along with the eldritch horror from there.
We went over the usual session zero stuff, nailing down meeting times and house rules and all the rest. We covered everything from mature content to re-rolling off-the-table dice, so I figured we were set. Unfortunately, one thing that didn’t come up was coordinating spell selection.
The adventure began, and things were going well enough. Horror things happened, the party pledged to watch one another’s backs, and everyone fell into marching order. When combat inevitably rolled around, our dowdy band of fresh-minted heroes fought bravely. The dire rats went down easily enough, but the zoog that lead them presented more of a problem. If you’re not familiar with zoogs, suffice it to say that they’re some truly unpleasant low-level mythos monsters. For purposes of this story, the important thing to know is that their bite causes bleed damage. Under normal circumstances, magical healing is the go-to solution for bleed. It was the first session for an unconventional party though, so that wasn’t an option. Nobody had taken a cure spell!
No reason to panic though. As every good pathfinder knows, all it takes to stanch a bleeding wound is a DC 15 Heal check. Guess what nobody put ranks in? The evil rodents were dead, but everyone was gushing blood like it was a Bleach RPG.
“I rolled an 11 to stanch the blood!”
“Four!”
“Fourteen. Dammit!”
They began to fall unconscious one by one. And as session 1 of my latest campaign began to wind down, and as my players began to make Constitution checks to stabilize instead of Heal checks to apply first aid, I reflected that healing might be an important bullet point to add to the session zero discussion in future.
What do you say, guys? Have you ever failed to coordinate your party composition? Did you make like Succubus in today’s comic and actively seek out a workaround, or did it come back to bite you before you got the chance? Sound off in the comments with your tales of non-healing, non-casting, can’t-pick-a-lock-to-save-their-lives heroes!
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I’m a little astounded that none of the 5 picked up even a single spell for curing hp damage. Especially for a level 1 game, having that emergency backup should always be a bullet point on the build list.
Amusingly enough, the sorcerer did wind up taking infernal healing. Unfortunately for our rat-bite victims, he only got introduced in session 2, which (after hearing about the horrors of session 1) might have influenced his spell selection.
My first group has no designed healer, but considering we have a paladin, bard and, druid we do fine. My second group has a fallen paladin and a rogue with expertise in Medicine, so we…manage.
What is that second group’s go-to healing strat?
Try and survive to a long/short rest. That or healing potions.
Hey. I will have you know that some of us like playing support characters! Though admittedly in Pathfinder in particular a living happy stick just doesn’t work – I mean, the reason Oradin/Pei Zin is regarded as the best healer in the game is because these characters can do other (and often more useful) things while also healing at the same time. Kind of like a Magus, only instead of healing Magus “does the other thing”.
Also, honestly, after a fight like that I think it could’ve been a good idea to just come out and let one of the players retrain a spell known into a clw or an infernal healing. “Hey guys, I just remember I can close our wounds by singing this tune. Wouldn’t that have been convenient 5 minutes ago? Oh well, live and learn”.
As someone currently playing a Pei Zin Practitioner, absolutely agree with your first point. Get off my good heals with shield other and life link, then cast shit like waves of ecstasy or plane shift to remove enemies from the fight. We fought a linnorm at APL+3 (CR 14 at level 11 I think) and my healing kept everyone from dying while still giving me my turn, and nobody died because I was there.
Preaching to the choir my dude. I make the same point about oradins in this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/band-aid
I’m my particular case, the PCs have since won through to level 2, so no harm no foul. Except for the dead bard I guess, so…small foul.
Less of a “Duck!” than a ‘duckling’ situation?
One party I’m in is 18th level and absolutely destroys as 18th level parties do. Wizard Oracle Druid combo busts things apart, plus we have a rogue and a barbarian for the damage. Turns out being able to cast miracle 5 times a day is a little helpful.
The other party I’m in is level 15 and we have no full arcane caster. Party of 6 mind you, but time and time again we find problems where if someone was an arcanist or something, would be much less of a problem. We rely on NPCs and scrolls quite a bit and recently realized our current enemy has divination magic to spy on us and we have no way of stopping this. Oops. My character is bound to hell when I die so I’ll probably fill this gap if I die for good, I’ve never played a full caster at high level before.
What’s the best miracle you’ve managed so far?
I literally only used it to cast Greater Spellcrash so far
I pretty much play the role of “basic level party functioning checker” for any group I’m in, so no I’ve never experienced that. Admittedly it’s never been about healing just due to blind luck really, but certainly other things I’ve noticed and given a suggestion before the game got into gear enough for the GM to say no to changing things. (Like just recently I discovered I was in a party with an Eldritch Knight who hadn’t taken Booming Blade as a cantrip and I was like “Uh, why do you not have that? A reason?” which quickly solved the problem since the reason was something very silly that wasn’t well thought out.)
The idea of someone trying to shop evily is hilarious. It’s not the first time I’ve ever encountered it. But it always tickles me. =)
As ever, we strive to be paragons of originality here at the Handbook. 😛
Why the love for booming blade? It’s rock solid 1-4, but I’d think that it would begin to lose ground to extra attack pretty quickly.
With War Caster it’s the best Attack of Opportunity money can’t buy. And it’s handy if you need to do magic damage but don’t yet have a magic weapon.
And before Extra Attack it’s just better than a regular attack.
And if you don’t need your bonus action, once you have War Magic, Booming Blade + 1 attack is better than 2 attacks.
(And sure you could use two weapons and take two-weapon fighting and Dual Wielding and do 1d8+Str x3, but with EK you can have Dueling or Great Weapon Fighting and do Booming Blade for 1d8+Str+2 (or 2d6+Str) X2 + potentially 2d8 and use a shield and have 1 extra AC compared to the two weapon fighter build or just a better damage die. Though I recommend the shield.
And woe be to any enemy you actually hit with booming blade who winds up provoking an AoO in the form of second booming blade.)
Admittedly this works less well from levels 5-6 and 11+. But by those later levels you probably wanted War Caster already and had the ASI to spare due to being a fighter.
In general if you’re going to be doing EK, you might as well pick one of the things in the best things in the game for making you properly tank.
You mean there are people that actually DON’T pick a healing spell at first level? If I’m playing a spontaneous caster, the healing spells are the first ones chosen. Even as a prepared caster, I’d make sure to prepare that a few times.
It’s down to character concept. When you write “bard” or “investigator” on your sheet, the first thing you think of isn’t necessarily “healer.”
True, but still. If no one takes a way to heal, then there’s NO ONE to heal. And at those early levels, 3 HP can mean life or death for some characters. My bard’s concept is basically short female Indiana Jones and I gave her CLW. Heck, my two alchemists are Captain Cold and the Hulk and they both have CLW!
We are running Rise of the Runelords without a full arcane caster.
In most situations Shadow Dancer can fake enough magic or use magic device, so it’s not much of a problem in combat.
But since our newly recruited cleric of no god(dess) didn’t listen to me during character build she didn’t take the travel domain, so at the moment we have to travel everywhere of foot.
On top of the shopping list: Scrolls of teleport.
What’s wrong with walking?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/travel-time
since my Shadow Companion will take another 28 days to return: Nothing at all 😉
Succubus is willingly endangering Dolphins? You’d think she’d hold more respect for animals that default to… NSFW tendencies. And don’t get me started on the summoned, fiendish- version.
Endangering dolphins is famously problematic from an alignment standpoint:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/evil-summons
Healing via your local temple cleric seems to three common situations:
One, the healing is mundane/nonmagical, which is utterly useless to 90% of parties due to how natural healing and the heal check work, unless you break both with feats, or play only commoners.
Two, they have access to any spell/scroll required to cure any given sucky condition, and require payment/favors as appropriate.
Three, they have no services to offer, even/unless you are a paladin/cleric of their religion.
In all three situations, the NPCs inside are incapable of handling a situation of combat nature, unless it is caused by the PCs, in which case the temple has mythic paladins and clerics passing by.
Option two is my go-to.
Not everybody has the high secondary stats suitable to the adventuring life. If you’ve lead a pious life and accumulated the Wisdom necessary to hand out heals, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ve also done the necessary pushups to bash monster faces. Just look at Priest up there in today’s comic. He might have a few scrolls of raise dead secreted away in the vaults, but I don’t know that he’d be my first pick for manning the walls and going toe-to-toe with monsters.
Makes you think what he does with all those high level unspent spell slots, after he’s done his shift at the temple for the day. We’re talking magic on par with miracles and worth more than a dozen peasants could ever earn in their combined lifetimes. Heck, he can single-handedly ruin or bolster the local economy (e.g. weather control to boost the crops).
Mostly he creates artificial scarcity in the market place. That new steeple isn’t going to build itself!
In session 0 for our Rise of the Runelords campaign one of the more experienced player was really worried that we didn’t have a healer, or have a front line fighter for that matter. “Don’t worry about that”, I said, “just play what you want to play”. Still, his winter witch took healing hex at first level, and CLW, just to be safe.
Turns out he was probably right, and the voice of experience was a good thing. Now thought we also have our ranger equipped with a CLW wand and my sorcerer/VMC cleric is finally getting to a level where his channel energy is somewhat useful, so we all get to share the healing.
Except for the hobgoblin pyrokineticist, who keeps threatening to heal people and we keep warning them off. Apparently someone taught him the word “cauterise”.
My experience in Pathfinder has been that having heals is necessary until you lay hands on a CLW wand (usually around level 3-4 or so). After that, non-item-based healing tends to be a nice-to-have until Heal comes online at 11th.
congrats to 400th comic btw.
Thanks! We are both exultant and exhausted. 😀
I thought the Handbook was Pathfinder based, not Exalted?
It’s based on whatever makes the joke work that day.
Our group has a house rule to help mitigate the lack of a dedicated healer, because we’re not a huge fan of someone having to always play that role.
The Heal skill can heal hp, but requires a healer’s kit to do so. Using the Heal skill in this way takes 10 mins and a heal check that uses 1 use of the healer’s kit uses. The health restored is equal to half the result of the Heal check
We’ve also been toying around with a Wounds/Vitality idea that splits your hp pool 50/50. Vitality is easy to heal and recovers on its own after a short rest. Wounds can only be healed with an hour of work with a Healer’s kit, or a night’s rest.
10min time for one use is not helpful when bleeding to death in rounds.
Most definitely not. I was more or less talking about solutions we’ve had to the, “we need a healer.” dilemma.
At least one person is encouraged to pick up the Heal skill in our group, as we’ve had some close calls with bleeding before.
Good on ya for homebrewing. It’s always cool to see different takes on these design problems.
If you’re looking to make healing less of a headache, I’d caution against the wounds / vitality system:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/wounds-and-vigor/
It sounds like you’re doing your own version, but that subsystem I linked is all about making healing more gritty and realistic, with lingering injuries and such. My understanding is that it’s very much the opposite of making healing easier.
This is the rough draft of what we are thinking of using for Pathfinder. It builds upon our initial idea with heal kits, and relegates magical healing to “patching up” people.
Wounds and Vitality: HP: Hp is divided 50/50 into Wounds and Vitality.
-Vitality: This is your general combat endurance. You may use magic in or out of combat to heal Vitality. Magical Healing has double the effect on Vitality. Vitality fully regenerates out of combat after 10 minutes of rest. You may not take any strenuous actions during this time.
-Wounds: This represents legitimate damage to your well-being. Wounds can only be healed in one of two ways. You may recover 1 wound per character level after a night of rest. You may consume a use of a heal kit and recover half the result of a heal skill check over the course of an hour.
We found in our games that the players would have significant resources for fully healing everyone back up to %100 after each combat. Every post-combat just became, “okay, so how many uses of cure light wounds do you need from my wand?”
The intention of our wounds/vitality is to make it easier to heal up, but also give the GM the opportunity to wear down the players. The added rule for using the healer’s kit makes to where the players still have a resource for getting back up to %100, but it also comes at a semi-significant time cost. This forces them to choose between healing and up-keeping buffs and such.
We added the clause about double-effect healing to vitality, as we’ve always felt that most healing spells were a less efficient thing to do in combat. When given the choice to remove an enemy from combat or heal an ally, removing the enemy always seemed better since available healing spells rarely kept up with the dps potential of enemy’s attack rotation.
My worst group basically never coordinated with each other. You could pretty much always count on some things happening, though: One guy would play a soldier type character, one would play a mad scientist, one would declare himself party leader, one would play a seductress, and the last would basically play herself, and often forget all her abilities.
When I was a player in that group, I’d usually just try and coordinate with one person. Everyone else did what they wanted.
One day I’d like to make an all-cavaliers / all-inquisitors party in Pathfinder. I bet that baking teamwork feats into classes would make a big difference.
We all made our characters at home for ToA, and one of the other players had said he specifically wanted to play a healer.
Come that next week we all arrived to see our new party:
Bugbear Barbarian
Kobold Artificer
Goliath Fighter
Tiefling Dread Necromancer <- me
Halfling red dragon Sorcerer <- the healer
Luckily we hadn’t started as of yet, and we were able to get cure wounds on me and the kobold, but we almost tried to start ToA with no healing outside of resting and the fighter’s second wind.
What, no healing word? Heresy!
Look, we were functioning with jank healing, jank trapfinding, and an overwhelming offense.
Also, I just remembered that the fighter was a Dragonborn, he made a Goliath fighter when his first character bought it.
Well, at least you had a plan:
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/back_up.jpg
The “We need a healer” mentality is one of the most damaging legacies of older editions/MMO design. You don’t need a healer, you need to play smarter and take short rests.
Cure Wounds is a garbage spell anyways. It heals Xd8+Mod where X is the slot used, and costs a slot. A Warhammer/Battleaxe (Or Longsword if you’re a sad loser who smells bad) deals 1d8+mod for no cost.
Low level healing spells are beneath your dignity.
The trouble comes when you run into a GM that believes short rests are a privilege, not a right.
They are a privilege. One you earn by being smart aboot where you rest.
It’s not that Priest and Acolyte are prejudiced against adventurers with fiendish heritage; they’re just easily intimidated by cleavage.
(Perhaps the scripture they follow includes passages linking it to the causation of earthquakes.)
It’s all the timpani sound effects that follow Succubus around.
I don’t know why it’s funnier when I imagine the overture from Also Sprach Zarathustra, but it is!
Rarely had this problem as a player, partially because I’d always pick up a lvl 1 healing spell if I could (Witch/Bard) and Pathfinder 1E had CLW wands which were far too good at healing. Heck, one of my GMs even had a houserule that CLW wands in his setting basically just had a push button that anyone could use to activate even without spellcasting knowledge.
That being said, I am very much looking forward to 2E partially because they’re improving the actual heal skill & allowing mundane healing over a 10min rest period to be rather effective. I’m very hopeful that this will help remove the idea that divine healers or a sackful of CLW wands are necessary to the standard adventuring party – since it was a bit grating to be forced into that idea.
I haven’t looked at 2e yet. How does that 10min heal stack up against the house rule Ruvain mentioned further up the thread?
This reminds me of a PFS scenario called The Disappeared. The non-spoiler, readable-on-the-website blurb described it as an infiltration mission to discreetly slip into a fancy dinner party to gather info about a missing noble that was an ally of your organization. Being the tabletop equivalent of the fat WoW player in that one South Park episode, I had a bouquet of at-level characters to choos from, so I opted to let the party lock in before I’d fill a possible gap.
So a fighter, a barbarian, a warpriest, and an archer wizard walk into a bar.
I look upon the group, half crestfallen and half in humorous disbelief. We’re about to pull some Fantasy James Bond stuff and we get a bunch of stone slabs with “Power Attack” etched onto them. With a defeated sigh, I tuck my beloved Oozemorph into my bag, and trade her out for my wayang summoner who is functionally two rogues.
By a combination of luck, safety nets written into the scenario, and a few moments that felt like the entire table was watching me do a Metal Gear Solid Let’s Play, we managed to succeed.
“Just play what’s fun” some people would say, while I simply grimmace at the idea of spending three hours of auto-fails as my “fun” pick gets to sit there doing nothing. Yeah no thanks. This is why I always play casters and skill monkeys. I legitimately feel selfish for bringing a big fightdude brute.
Big difference between a home game and a scenario. A GM can tailor challenges to a party in a home game. That mess doesn’t happen in Society play. That’s where “just play what’s fun” stops being good advice.
You’d be surprised. I fjust finished a Starfinder campaign where our only melee, prior to my character, was a suboptimal built-for-flavor Melee Mystic. Imagine having your only dedicated healer be the first one to drop most fights.
Hell, up until our Envoy took proficiency with big guns we had literally no use for anything bigger than a pistol.
Well, our cleric renounced his god, took up druidism, and forswore healing for RP reasons, leaving us with 10 HP a day from the Aasimar. The solution so far is to have a DMPC Circle of Spores druid, which works really well in that no one wants healing enough to feel like they’ve eaten a pound of raw yeast.
Just met an herbalism druid. Those nuts and berries potions have a unique flavor, let me tell ya.
as DM I let potions heal at 8hp per d8 instead of rolling, because someone spent plenty time creating them specifically for use by everyone and there is some substance to it to do some good from the inside. Twice the price should do twice the healing.
Whereas a wand is the actual spell stored ina stick, basically less than hot air.
I’m guessing you have a high drop-rate on those potions as well…?
Before I switched to the other side of the DM screen, I was the party paladin, and between that and being the host, that meant I got to be the guy who held all the healing equipment. Between lay hands and potions, I did a decent job of playing combat medic, and nothing could actually stop me from doing whatever I wanted because Paladin. We did have a dedicated cleric/druid player (RIP the first cleric) but he couldn’t always show up.
You hit on an important point here. If the healer goes down, it’s a good idea to have a way to heal the healer! Even if that’s only the ubiquitous potion that everyone carries in their pack, a little redundancy goes a long way.
That reminds me of my inquisitor that by the double-digit levels had looted enough cure serious potions to fill his hip flask.
What do hp taste like anyway?
If vampires are to be believed, blood I’d assume.
One my group were prepared for the new campaign we were about to begin. The day we were to play we all reveal our characters. They were a whole anti-paladin party, for an Only War game. The group coordination was not the best in that time. So we start remaking our characters and discussing the campaign. We ended playing Exalted 🙂
On other time, the group got another communications failure, we ended with a full cleric party. Since that time we got a “Just one cleric per party” rule. We were so OP, our DM was screaming 🙂
Is there such a thing as an “anti-healing zone?” It would be like anti-magic, but for healing. Just about the only way to challenge an all-cleric party.
Yeah, because healing is the only trick a cleric has.
Sacred Flame
Guiding Bolt
Inflict Wounds
Blindness/Deafness
Spiritual Weapon
Animate Dead
Guardian of Faith
Contagion
Flame Strike
Blade Barrier
Planar Ally
Fire Storm
Resurrection
Earthquake
Gate
Yep, cast an anti-healing zone and the full cleric party is dead. Sure, because if it works as an Antimagic field “Spells and other magical effects, except those created by an artifact or a deity, are suppressed in the sphere and can’t protrude into it.”. Deity, Divine Intervention class feature, surelly there will be a huge TPK 😉
OBJECTION!! …Why isn’t Miracle on this list?
There is indeed an anti-healimg, anti-cleric and anti-paladin zone. It’s called Barovia.
Uh, i really like that place. Excellent for summer vacation far away of those pesky clerics 🙂
So in a low magic campaign I ran I allowed alchemical cooking to create potions that could heal almost as well as spells, but required rare/expensive ingredients the party had to collect. It also made fast healing potions possible which could recover folks over the course of a night, etc.
Our World of Darkness system game I was the party healer…but I was playing a Russian sleeper-cell descendent who joined the USAF and became a pararescueman. One of the more badass fighters…and healer…of the group.
What’s the functional difference between alchemical cooking and healing potions? Is it mostly a flavor thing?
One tastes like Mana, the other like chemicals?
Side effects may include burning, itching, oozing, weeping….
My party has actively opposed the notion of any dedicated healer, I asked about their healing solution and it was to wait till the ranger could cast cure light wounds. (They were level 1) I then provided an npc cleric to heal and they complained I was hand holding so I made that cleric go away because if they want to die I’ll kill them.
Did… Did they died?
I’d assume they all got to go to an Adventure on a farm upstate, where there’s lots of room for them to run around and they have lots of fun every day.
lol
I would say there was one instance of our group messing up party comp, but that was in fact done purposely for the hilarity of it. On one side, we had my gish wizard and a shapechanger rogue who made up on team stealth and secret planning, on team open diplomacy with a bit of kick in the door style, we had 2 nobleman paladins, one oath of the ancients, one oath of vengeance. And then there was mordred, on team charge the door down, yell at everyone that he was going to arrest or kill them for their crimes, and then cut his way through people in a massive bloodbath, consistently getting to the edge of death while everyone else quickly changes their plans around what just happened and thus taking a few rounds to get into combat themselves. He was our third paladin. The team comp itself wasnt much of a mess, and we actually had alot of healing between the 3 paladins and my one cleric level, but damn the character styles clashed, and it was alot of dumb fun.
Hey, I remember hearing about Mordred. From what I recall, “character styles clashed” is a bit of an understatement.
This is why I love playing my Witch. Healing Hex ensures I always have a Cure Light Wounds in my back pocket and it doesn’t even cost me a spell slot.
Do you have any helpful tips for remembering which PC has received healing that day? Do you pass out hex markers or anything?
I’ll admit that I mostly play Society, so it’s usually pretty easy to remember since it’s all over the course of a single session. Actually, if I ever find a regular Pathfinder 1E group, hex markers sound like a pretty good way to keep track of who I’ve bopped with the heal stick already.
Healing Hex is awesome, and Pathfinder has put out more than a few ways to get Hexes on non-witches now. Sylvan Trickster puts it on a rogue, and there is one for Magus as well. Infernal healing is fun, especially on a tiefling who cuts herself and anoints people for the material component since she is an evil outsider. (Selfish Evil more than Mustache twirling.) I’m often the “makes sure we have healing” person in my group when I’m not running, and when I do I often compensate with items and the occasional hireling.
I have, however, brought too much Healing once. It was Anima: Beyond Fantasy, and I was playing a Creation Mage. Creation is the magic of creating, repairing or perfecting things or people. It’s a super defensive school that has no direct attack spells and is even forbidden from learning them, but does get the ability to create life (and souls later, which was…problematic.) But my GM decided to overlook the potential deific implications and instead let me play. So I showed up to the first session, and we wandered off into the ruins with everyone doing their thing and wondering why the little girl that the “paladin”(Actually a supernatural entity that I had created as a bodyguard.) had brought along kept humming to herself.
The first fight turned into a horrific ambush that saw one of the characters criticalled and losing an arm. Since it was an axe wound, the Gm decided it was a fairly clean cut when I asked, obviously more worried about how he had just crippled a character. The Paladin and the rest of the party begin fighting the monster while the injured PC gets dragged away by the little girl. She begins singing a different song, grows glowing golden wings of ephemeral feathers, and then the wings break in a cloud of feathers that flows down and coats him.
GM: “Nice visual. What did you cast?”
Me: “Regeneration at 120 Zeon. He now has a Regen rate of 10. he heals 1 Hp a minute, will not bleed out, and if it’s a clean amputation, we can hold the stump on his arm and it will grow back in a day.”
Party: stunned silence
Me: Costs me 10 Zeon off my Recovery each day to maintain this.
GM: Your Recovery is like 130, right?
Me: nod
https://media.giphy.com/media/zXA5VEmXr7OUg/giphy.gif
Did you wind up getting nerfed?
Zeon is effectively Mana. That’s not actually a lot of it, given that most really potent spells cost over 200 to cast and you pay the maintenance per turn rather than per day.
And I was actually asked to play something else, as Elena caused problems in his concept of the world. Namely, she was too good at trivalizing combat. The GM said that if someone had the natural talent for this type of magic like she did, she would have been abducted by the Church and declared a walking saint rather than “hanging out with these losers.”
Imagine a fairly real life approach to fantasy violence and healing. Wounds have a chance of getting infected, healing from normal injuries is done at a rate of 10 or 20 points a day while resting and half that when not. Grievous injuries such as criticals typically result in permanent penalties for life. Now imagine there was a 16 year old girl who could make people able to grow back limbs with a song. By the time she’s 18, she’ll be able to make people new arms. All because she “sings the music she hears in her dreams”. I was playing an Escaflowne character in his gritty Conan setting.
He checked my next character’s spell list very throughly. XD
RPGs generally don’t have a win condition, but if there was one….
My in-person group has been pretty good about party composition since the early days. Aside from having an assigned healer, we often make sure each PC packs their own healing potion as a contingency.
There’s one time in recent memory where we didn’t have a healer role, during a Spelljammer-flavored version of the Skulls & Shackles module. The GM’s solution was to give us an item that other players dubbed the “Estus Flask” — it could produce a Potion of Cure Light Wounds 6 times per day. We could invest gold into increasing its potency and quantity, much like improving a magic weapon or armor. Several jokes were made about the mental image of the PCs sitting around the table at the mess hall saying “the flask gets its share too” as if it was a full-fledged party member.
It’s even worse:
“Characters taking continuous damage, such as from an acid arrow or a bleed effect, automatically fail all Constitution checks made to stabilize. Such characters lose 1 hit point per round in addition to the continuous damage.”
Character goes down bleeding. Conscious character stops unconscious character’s bleeding. Unconscious character begins making saves to stabilize. Conscious character tries to apply first aid to self. Conscious character becomes unconscious character. Unconscious character is bleeding. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I try not post on these if they are too old but given the topic and our session 1 this week I could not resist. Started a game of D&D 5e Party of six with a Paladin, Cleric and Druid; we should be find right?
DM got the party together by having us all arrested after a bar room brawl broke out. We get offered a job and let out of jail to start the adventure. The problem was we did not get kept in jail over night [no rests] and some characters were injured. Paladin uses all his healing on himself before we got to the first encounter.
First round a lucky roll from the Giant Rodent and the Druid is bleeding to death! Cleric only needs 5+ for the medicine check but a dreaded fumble means it is round two of the first fight and a player is already dead…
First rule of being a paladin: dole that shit out carefully!
I think you meant “daughty” instead of “dowdy”. 😀
I think you meant “doughty” instead of “dowdy”.
Even I can’t get it right!
I think you meant “doughty” instead of “dowdy”.
A wizard says precisely what he means to! The heroes in question were *squints at dictionary.com* ‘unfashionable and without style in appearance.’ Yeah, that’s it!