Talk:Skill Based Healing (3.5e Variant Rule)

Alternate Idea

An alternative to this is to make spells with the healing descriptor only heal 1 Hitpoint per spell level when the subject is below 0 Hitpoints. These spells will also not stabilize unless they bring the subject to at least 0 Hitpoints. This makes Cure Minor Wounds a lot less powerful, and makes the healing skill work well as intended. It also gives a neat effect to radius healing spells (downed warriors in an area struggle to stand up as divine power patches their mortal wounds). --Aarnott 16:22, 6 June 2007 (MDT)

That's 1/2 the story, and sounds like an interesting house rule. As my current playgroup has no cleric, this system is to give them healing without needing a cleric. The playtest of it went fairly well today. It seems to work as intended. I'll tweak things and comment as the playtest continues. --Dmilewski 18:29, 10 June 2007 (MDT)

I'm using that alternative right now actually, but I decided as it is written here, it hurts the intended effect of healing magic too much. The version I changed it to is that when a character is below 0 hitpoints, healing spells do not stabilize them unless they bring the subject to at least 0 hitpoints and they heal only 1 per die as well as any character level modifiers. A cleric may cast or spontaneously cast a spell with the healing descriptor and make a heal check on a target as a full round action. Thus, the spell "Heal" does the same thing regardless of the target's hp. Also, Cure minor wounds does not do anything and stays the way I think a cantrip should be. CLW on the other hand is still very useful since at first level it heals 2 HP (allowing a heal check too) and allows a heal check. This actually makes clerics want to take the heal skill too :-). --Aarnott 15:10, 13 June 2007 (MDT)

Curious. I can see how it would make things interesting. Cool.

We're actually solving two different problems. I want to KILL healing based magic, and you don't. The two systems really shouldn't be used together. A DM should pick one or the other.

My pet goals is to make a workable low-magic and non-magic setting. To do this, there are many systems that I need to decouple from that magic system. (One of my beefs with the game is that too many things are gated through magic that don't need to be.) I've done healing and armor. I still need to do the weapons writeup. Eventually, I need to rewrite skills so that all skills give level-appropriate benefits. --Dmilewski 13:32, 15 June 2007 (MDT)

Healing skill similar to trapfinding?

I don't know if this would make it a workable mechanic, but wouldn't this alternate be the same as trap finding for the rouge. Seeing as how anyone can gain ranks in search but only rouges can use it to find traps, shouldn't this be a 1st level add on to the healing classes allowing them only to use the heal skill as it is presented in the variant rule?

Raise Dead

So I have some questions about raising the dead. Do you still have to pay the 5000gp to raise a fallen ally, as required with the spell? Also, what math did you do to decide how many points casting "raise dead" would be? 5 seems too low, in my opinion. If your healer took the skill focus feat, he could raise 3 members of your party with that alone. Otherwise, I like this a lot and I wish I knew about it back when I was DMing a low-magic campaign. It's a much better system than what I was using. --Badger 18:56, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Problems

I like the idea a bunch. However, I don't like the way it is carried out. Making the heal skill in this fashion essentially makes classes like the cleric totally useless. Also, why is there a limit to the amount of times you can patch somebody up/day? Instead, I believe that healing should be given more uses than actually healing someone. To perform paramedics you need a good knowledge of anatomy and how the body works. Healing could therefore be made to recognize things about others bodies. Such as...

Determine the amount of health a target has. This is a free action that requires line of sight to the target. If you cannot see the target clearly, you take a penalty on your check depending on how obscured the target is(if they get too obscured you automatically fail). If you can see the target, make a DC 20 heal check. If you succeed you know how much health the target has left. If you fail, you make a bad guess. Exactly how off your guess is depends on how badly you failed your check. For really obvious cases(somebody who is critically injured or the like) the DC of this check may be lowered to 15 or less.

Heal checks could be used to identify poisons and diseases. The Heal check would effectively be considered a knowledge check. With the DC varying upon how obscure the poison and or disease is.

Finally, I believe heal should grant synergy to damage(ironically enough). Because your character has a great enough understanding of how the body works to more effectively attack it.

These ideas for other uses of the heal fit better with the Knowledge: Anatomy skill that is on the wiki. If you want to, you could probably replace the Heal skill with the Anatomy skill. It includes things such as adding damage to the rogue's sneak attack and to the Animate Dead spell. The reason it shouldn't affect normal attacks is because usually you don't have a full range of targets, so you just hit where you can. When a rogue sneak attacks, he can use his knowledge of vital organs to do the most damage.--Garan 09:31, 20 January 2012 (MST)

Overnight

I think healing might work better as something that happens overnight, based on your heal skill. I've seen this in DDO, where using "rest shrines" give you the effect of having 8 hours rest (for preparing spells), as well as healing you based on your Heal skill. I'd say that when you rest, you could get 1d4 hit points for every 2 ranks you have in Heal, and be able to share unused hit points at a rate of 1/2. For example, if you had 8 ranks in Heal, you would roll 4d4. Let's say you get an 11, and have 5 hit points you need healed. The remaining 6 can be converted to 3 that you can use to heal the rest of the party. The idea behind this is that someone with heal can heal themselves, but only at night. Clerics and paladins can use their spells to heal during the day, especially during a fight. Also, instead of having a dedicated healer, the party would benefit from everyone having Heal. Those without it still can be healed by others. While this might seem unbalanced for lower levels (stronger) and higher levels (weaker), it is looking at the fact that overnight, minor wounds might heal, but the heavier ones would take longer.--Garan 12:12, 20 January 2012 (MST)