Healing & Repair Skill (upgrade?)

[infinidibulum]

This post has 2 suggestions and a question. I'll start with the question first.

Question: Does anybody use the healing & repair skills once their characters get out of Korthos?

It seems to me that the game designers (at least, once upon a time) really wanted us all to use these skills a lot. When I started my first character, I let the game choose my skills for the first 3-4 levels, trusting that I'd be given useful ones. I decided to customize when I saw that my Wizard was dumping points into repair (apparently the game designers wanted to encourage me to make friends with Warforged). At that point, I had a spell which would do much better, much faster. It seemed to me that in the odd case in which my warforged friend was at -8 HP and I was the only one who could save him AND I was out of spell points... well, things had pretty much taken a turn for the worst and there wasn't much I was going to do with a hammer and pliers to save the day.

There are so many items with bonuses to repair and healing and every time I see them I think "what a waste." or simply "nope." It wouldn't be worth mentioning if I thought other players were taking advantage of these items, but the only advantage (or purpose) I can come up with is that somebody might be using the +5 Repair bracers of Ogre Power (I just made that up as an example, if they don't exist, please don't flame me) is because nobody would could afford better bracers wanted them.

We're given healing and repair kits to start (which is nice) and later on we find improved versions at vendors (which are sometimes rewards for achieving status). I'm not using these. It's perhaps one mission in three when I think I might have an opportunity to heal a comrade. 99% of the time, we've got a spellcasting healer in the party who can (and does) do the job faster than I possibly could.

So, I considered that, if time can pass quickly when one is at a shrine, maybe it can pass quickly elsewhere too. In PnP DnD, camping to rest happens all the time, and sometimes it doesn't occur in the ideal place. Perhaps players could heal each other, but not on the fly, during combat, as with a healing spell.

Suggestion 1
The basic idea is this:

If a player wants to heal/repair another who is injured but not incapacitated, the target player has to hold still during the process, or it fails. It takes (lets say) 6 seconds.

The amount healed/repaired should not be extreme (I was thinking 1/2 of the success over DC, rounded up). Perhaps Warforged could be repaired more easily than others (full success = HP repaired?).

After being treated, the wounded player acquires an enchantment, or curse (I'll call it "patched") and is considered untreatable by the heal/repair skills for (let's say) 30 seconds. The player would see in the top, right corner of their screen a little box counting down: "patched" 29...28...27.

Thus a group of two or more without a spellcasting healer or magic healing items (for whatever reason), that can't get to a shrine, could camp and heal themselves if they wanted to try to muddle through a mission in slow stages.

It would be a miserable way to go but perhaps occasionally someone would think, "It's a good thing I've got that skill."

Also, I had an idea that failing the attempt to heal might cause damage (rolls totalling less than 8, natural 1's, with a fortitude save for the target).

As a final word on Suggestion 1, I'm going to head off one or two posters by saying (though I think something like this wouldn't be a bad idea) I'm not really sure if it's worth the designers' time, myself. The forum is full of lots of great ideas which might be more exciting than this.

Suggestion 2
So, if it turns out that nobody likes the skills and nobody does want to improve them, maybe we could reduce the drop-rates of items that buff them?

[SardaofChaos]

I see no problem with this. But let's expand: What would the DCs be like? Would different races get different DCs? Would having a high heal skill yourself lower the DC for healing you slightly?

I think having the skills be changed this way would kind of be like the way Rise of the Phoenix works. Sure, it looks awesome. But in practice? You'll rarely use it in competent groups, and then it's only when everything goes up and the only healer dies. I myself use it quite often, but then I also play with only a single other person, neither of us twinked at all, so the number of times things have gone screwy on us is pretty high.


Personally I think the heal and repair skills should slightly affect your heal and repair spells. Not so that having a 0 would make you extremely ineffective, but maybe base levels stay as they are and each point in healing adds .05% to the amount of health your healing spells will give back. Same for repair.

[infinidibulum]

Okay, specifically, I was considering a DC of 18 for healing a standing player (un-incapacitated).

A player with a -1 heal skill stat shouldn't be doing this, but can try.

Rolls under 9 (8 or less) or natural 1's would result in 2d6 damage.

This could be mitigated by a fortitude save on the part of the patient.

Fortitude save would be made vs DC 15. Successful save means the patient takes only 1 point of damage.

There should be a tip, "tip number x99: Be careful healing friends if your healing skill is not 7 or higher." (natural 1 is automatic failure, so anything that doesn't fail on a roll of 2 isn't bad)

As I said, the target has to remain still, so it would be almost impossible to be killed by a Good Samaritan unless a player announced that they were going AFK and then an unskilled healer decided to go to work on them.

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I've had a new breakthrough in this concept.

A character who isn't "trained" in first aid, can't heal a character who isn't incapactitated. Any player can spend action points to become trained.

If a player spends an action point to take 1 level of the healing (or repair) skill focus enhancement, they acquire the ability to attempt to heal (or repair) standing comrades.

This will limit the number of incidents of newbies killing each other with kindness, because they have boosted their skill intentionally and hopefully have read the enhancement description. The first level of skill focus would say something like, "You can now heal wounded comrades who are not incapacitated, but there is a chance that you might injure them. DC 18."

The ammount healed would be 1/2 the number rolled over success + 1. Repair for Warforged might not be cut in half.

So, a roll of 18-19 would heal 1. A roll of 20-21 would heal 2. There could be a limit set also. "First Aid" could be capped out at 20 HP healed. Double all of this for Warforged patients.