Re: (TFT) Healing Spells - how has TFT philosophy changed with these?

[Peter von Kleinsmid <pvk@oz.net>]

Rick, it occurs to me that we actually had a bit of the healing your 
system provides, without magic. That is, when feasible, we often had 
fairly large parties with many NPC comrades, mercenaries or people 
induced into joining for a share of the loot, and a wagon/cart or 
two. When some people got wounded, they'd ride in the wagon to heal 
up, and the group was always assessing the condition of the men and 
rotating the healthiest into the front lines while the worst healed 
and the moderately wounded would avoid being up front, etc. Having 
some fighters out of action for a while made sense, provided 
consequences for combat risks, created interesting situations and 
choices, and caused the cast of active characters to be mixed up.

Clearly different people like different styles of play regarding healing.

Now, even though people here aren't generally advocating instant 
unlimited healing, I think it's important to consider the effects of 
such. I think some problems with D&D-or-CRPG-style healing, where 
people can heal up completely between battles with little/no cost, include:

* It makes combat consequences all-or-nothing - there are fewer 
considerations over whether to fight or not based on attrition. The 
players' decisions around whom they attack will tend to boil down to 
whether they can win, only. No more great concern for being injured 
and needing to rest to heal, nor for being injured and so the next 
fights getting more and more dangerous. Which makes it all much more 
all-or-nothing, and little for players to worry about besides actual death.

* Therefore the bar of acceptable risk is higher, and the cost of 
mis-estimating is more likely to be PC death. This gets closer to the 
territory of "not interesting because no real risk" or "upsetting 
because we died", since there is no possible outcome of "oh crud we 
got all butchered and now we have to hide and heal" (unless they lose 
their means of healing).

* If healing is very fast, then the world has little time to react to 
PC attacks, which removes an interesting and natural balance to the 
world situation. For example, if players need to heal up for several 
days, that gives their adversaries several days to heal, regroup, 
bring in reinforcements, retreat, make new plans, etc. If they can 
magically heal in a short time, then that kind of development has 
much less time.

* A challenging target becomes only as challenging as any one 
encounter between healing up. This means a group of players who can 
beat any one situation starts to be able to overpower much larger 
targets, even over a short time scale.

PvK

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