Staging Healing

From: Bruce Ferrie <bruceferrie_at_...>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 17:30:18 +0100


Hi All,

This is prompted by a thread Ian Cooper started on RPGnet about adventure ideas for healers and how to handle healing in extended contests. I started pondering how to add a bit of depth and dramatic impact to healing, so here's what I've come up with off the top of my head...

So you want to give healing a bit more depth and dramatic oomph - do it as an Extended Contest, that is? All types of healing - whether of injuries, disease, poisons - can probably be handled in fairly similar ways. In an extended contest, the healer and the condition will take turns in acting. But what do these actions represent?
Well, just as in any contest, the nature of the action is largely determined by the size of the AP bids that are being made, and who is making the AP bid.

THE HEALER AS ACTOR

If the healer loses AP, it might represent a misdiagnosis, a mistaken estimation of the severity of the problem, completely failing to notice a more severe problem...

If the healer loses AP, it might be that the condition being treated is more severe than first thought, or that the healer has been clumsy and has worsened the existing injury.

If this goes wrong, the healer has either given too much of a dangerous medicine, taken precisely the wrong action for the condition being treated, etc. And the patient is in big trouble.

THE CONDITION AS ACTOR When it's the condition's turn to act, things might seem a bit more abstract, but I think that we can draw upon medical dramas (like ER, Casualty, etc.) for inspiration. Again, it all depends on the size of the AP bid that you, as narrator, want to make. A good rule of thumb, though, is that the more severe an injury or symptom is, the higher the AP bids you should be making, to represent the fact that it might kill the patient before the healer can deal with it:

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE HEALER IS DEFEATED? For one, the injury succeeds in its 'goal' - for an injury, this means that the patient suffers the consequences of being Hurt, Injured or, worse, Dying... For diseases, poisons, etc. it all depends on what the effects of the disease or poison would have been (see HW p155 & Anaxial's Roster p224). The level of defeat suffered by the healer might have several effects:

  1. A marginal or minor defeat defeat will usually have little effect other than allowing the patient's condition to take its natural course.
  2. A major defeat might represent a particularly virulent disease/serious injury, etc. This level of defeat for the healer might increase the severity of the injury suffered by the patient - from Hurt to Injured, or Injured to Dying. If the condition being treated isn't life-threatening, the patient might be maimed or scarred - the healer may have been forced to amputate an injured limb, for example, or the patient may have been badly scarred by the pox.
  3. A complete defeat might be a failure of treatment so catastrophic that the patient dies even if the original problem shouldn't have been life-threatening. Or if it's a disease, the healer might have caught it from the patient.

A healer who suffers a particularly large defeat might instead be deemed to have committed an obvious error in treatment. This could cause problems with angry friends/kin of the patient blaming the healer (justly or unjustly) for what happened.

MULTIPLE SYSTEMS - GANGING UP You have the choice of treating multiple opponents as single or multiple 'actors' in an Extended Contest. This is perfect for representing multiple injuries. For example, Oddi the Unlucky has taken a severe mauling from a bear. His injuries are recorded as:

Broken Arm 17
Nasty Gashes 5W
Fractured Skull 20W

The healer attending him must defeat all these 'opponents' to fully heal Oddi. He could attempt to take on all three at once, using the multiple targets rules. Depending on how 'aggressive' the narrator feels each injury is, the healer might suffer multiple attacker penalties.

An interesting possibility that this allows is to represent some injuries as more aggressive or life-threatening than others. For example, Oddi's fractured skull might make higher AP bids than the broken arm does. This represents the fact that, if the healer does not get it under control, it will defeat him very quickly.

You could apply exactly the same principle to diseases with multiple symptoms. For example, a healer trying to deal with Creeping Chills might have to deal with:

Creeping Chills Spirit 15W
Fever 5W
Vomiting 17

Regards,

Bruce

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