question on healing

[potestas]

how would a healing potion or healing spell work. I am not sure how to use the difficulty. I know the rules say need something to start the healing, but how would you make a ritual or potion to simply eliminate the consequences. The consequence broken ribs takes weeks of game time to heal on its own even if you use "magic" to start the process. there has to be a way to heal faster then that with magic.

[devonapple]

there has to be a way to heal faster then that with magic.

I don't want to get into a setting argument, but the difficulty and relative weakness of magical healing in the rulebook is in keeping with the Dresdenverse, where healing magic is supposed to be incredibly complicated. The Reiki healing spell is the best most mortal spellcasters can do. But there are a few things in the book under Magical Items.

The big guns in the healing world come from entities with Sponsored Magic that allows healing Thaumaturgy to be cast as if it it were Evocation: that's generally the province of the Summer Court Fae.

A GM might allow a mortal caster to craft a ritual with enough shifts to "take out" the patient, and rebuild it without the Consequence, but that's pretty intense, and if the caster has to spend a lot of time gathering components, the patient may very well heal on their own (or perish).

A more lenient GM may simply require a caster to have some affinity with healing, and then figure out how many shifts a Contacting roll would be to find and secure the help of an actual doctor, factor in the time shifts along the Time ladder and add difficulty the shorter you want the healing to happen, and then figure out the final ritual cost.

[potestas]

how about a ritual that duplicates supernatural healing for a bit its refresh is -4 so maybe that equals a great effect. if you save up for it you can add it to your character for what 4 fate points on a permanent basis? the spell only has to last long enough for the regeneration to work once healed the body isn't going to revert back a severe consequence is reduced to mild, 2 mild consequences can be brushed aside so essentially a ritual that duplicates this power could eliminate a severe and moderate consequence with one casting.

another way: a severe consequence covers 6 stress so you might need a ritual that covers fantastic effect more per injury, since stress doesn't really count you would never need s difficulty higher then the total amount of the damage in consequences covered. Since almost no one is going to resist healing it should be easy to apply to others.

Just some ideas I've had right after asking.

[devonapple]

From TV Tropes "Healing Magic Is the Hardest" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HealingMagicIsTheHardest):

In The Dresden Files healing magic seems to be nonexistent, at least for humans (Listens-To-Winds does have some capability in this matter, but he's a Senior Council Member and regularly goes back to medical school). Magic can be used to staunch a wound or keep someone alert, but not in any more direct fashion. Very powerful beings like the Faerie Queens can do more, including fixing a broken spine and

(click to show/hide)

bringing Harry back from the brink of death, with the help of a powerful Genius Loci

. According to the RPG, Summer Magic can be used to heal people (at least, better than most people) as the magic grants some kind of instinctive knowledge of physiology. Miss Gard's Runic Magic and certain forms of Necromancy can also stave off death.

So if you have fictional support in your game for healing magic (Necromancy or Necromancy-adjacent magic, Runic Magic, Summer Magic, perhaps an appropriate Genius Loci), then there are many ways within the rules to go about it, depending on how much of a challenge the GM opts to make it.

Since almost no one is going to resist healing it should be easy to apply to others.

Whether or not someone can "surrender" to a beneficial transformative spell has been under some discussion. At the end of the day, healing mortal tissue is supposed to be very hard to do for mortals, so the shifts are almost irrelevant, as is the will of the patient. The spellcaster basically has to be an accomplished doctor, or tap into primal genitive forces. Humans don't know how to regenerate any quicker than their bodies self-heal, so their imagination is irrelevant: there's little they can "will" into happening to make it go faster.

Now, I imagine part of the issue is anyone coming from a D&D background is used to "black box" magic: you do a thing, you make some motions, you sacrifice some stuff, and something cool happens, but you don't know or care why. Dresden Files isn't D&D, and healing isn't a casual part of the fiction. Part of the setting flavor is that the spellcaster kinda needs to understand the physics of what she is doing in order to will the change into happening, and there is some passing nod to conservation of force/matter/energy.

If your GM allows it, of course, it is somewhat moot *how* it happens, as players can always find the shifts somewhere. If the GM doesn't agree that the healing you want is appropriate for the spellcaster's current abilities, then it can't be done without tapping some darker powers and incurring their debt.

And if you're not playing Dresden Files, but just using the rules for some other fantasy setting, then the Dresden setting stuff is moot, and your ideas are certainly a good start!

[Sanctaphrax]

There are rules for rituals that grant Powers. Use one to grant Recovery and you can basically heal people.

Power-granting rituals are hard, though.

[Haru]

Listens-To-Winds does have some capability in this matter, but he's a Senior Council Member and regularly goes back to medical school.

I think there are two sides to this. It's not only the caster himself who has to know precisely what he is doing, but the patient, different from what regular medicine can do, has to let it happen to a certain degree. If he doesn't, I think it acts sort of like a threshold (not linked to a special skill, just an inherent part of a human being that allows him to withstand magical changes to his body), reducing the effectiveness of the spell. Since the healing spell itself already requires a lot of power, an unwilling patient will make it pretty much impossible for all but the most dedicated of mortal practitioners. Fae, if they have a hold on you through a bargain can either ignore this or can simply overpower this inherent threshold, like Lea did in... I want to say GP?

And I'm not even talking about actively and willingly not consenting, I think it can be subconscious. Trust can be a real issue, for example. The two "healing" spells Harry gets in the novels from mortals are the reiki spell from Elaine and the stone necklace from Eb. Both are people he trusts, even though there are some tensions between them. And even they couldn't actually heal the damage, just make it less worse. Very few people will actually trust a stranger enough to let him rummage in their insides to get any real healing done. Listens-to-Wind might actually be an exception, because, at least in the white council, he has built a reputation as a healer, and I'd wager that a lot of wizards would trust him enough to at least let him help a bit.

At least that's my interpretation of the narrative limitations of healing magic. Of course you can do rituals to temporarily gain recovery powers, and I don't think from a mechanical standpoint they even have to be too complicated. A few aspects, and you're done. But getting those aspects is going to be tough. I would not accept any old aspects. Phoenix feathers, water from the fountain of youth, and so forth. It's going to take a while to get ingredients like that.

Over all, it's simply going to be too tedious to deal with something like that. Mortal medicine will stitch you up just fine, and as a wizard, you have enough time to let a broken leg heal for a few weeks. Not to mention, that it heals perfectly in time, just because you are a wizard. In the short term, it would be quite helpful, of course.

If you want to play a wizard who has mastered self-mending magic, you can easily let him take a recovery power and be done with it. If you want him to be able to heal his allies as well, allow them to take the recovery power as well. Instead of them having inherent magical healing abilities, you can narrate it as the wizard brewing a potion designed specifically for each of them, that they take regularly, that enhances their bodies self-healing capabilities. Or that the wizard has linked them in a biomorphic field that allows them to heal quicker. Or anything like it. As long as you have a good explanation, it'll work quite nicely. And it is ripe with compels, of course.
Basically, if the players want to heal quicker, I think it is reasonable to make them spend the refresh to do so. If they have a good in-game explanation, there should be nothing against them taking the powers.

[InFerrumVeritas]

My group doesn't let consequences be completely removed, but does let them be lowered a step.  The cost is 4+value of consequence to reduce to down to one.  Mild consequences can be removed this way.

6 shifts to remove mild.
8 to make moderate mild.
10 to make severe moderate.
Extreme consequences cannot be recovered this way.

So, if you wanted to let them completely remove the consequence, I'd add the two together.  Removing a moderate would then be 14 shifts.  Removing a severe would be 24.

[devonapple]

I think there are two sides to this. It's not only the caster himself who has to know precisely what he is doing, but the patient, different from what regular medicine can do, has to let it happen to a certain degree. If he doesn't, I think it acts sort of like a threshold (not linked to a special skill, just an inherent part of a human being that allows him to withstand magical changes to his body), reducing the effectiveness of the spell.

If we didn't want to build up a threshold-style subsystem, perhaps this be a good opportunity for the GM to Invoke (or Compel) an Aspect to make such a spell easier, harder or impossible? Like "Harry Has My Back" could be Invoked for a bonus (or just to allow the spell to happen), whereas "Trusts Nobody" would be something interfering with the process.

My group doesn't let consequences be completely removed, but does let them be lowered a step.  The cost is 4+value of consequence to reduce to down to one.  Mild consequences can be removed this way.

6 shifts to remove mild.
8 to make moderate mild.
10 to make severe moderate.
Extreme consequences cannot be recovered this way.

So, if you wanted to let them completely remove the consequence, I'd add the two together.  Removing a moderate would then be 14 shifts.  Removing a severe would be 24.

I think this is a good plan. If I feel it appropriate to the game, I'd feel alright with it.

[PirateJack]

If we didn't want to build up a threshold-style subsystem, perhaps this be a good opportunity for the GM to Invoke (or Compel) an Aspect to make such a spell easier, harder or impossible? Like "Harry Has My Back" could be Invoked for a bonus (or just to allow the spell to happen), whereas "Trusts Nobody" would be something interfering with the process.

We already have a threshold style system; it's called the stress track + consequences.

[Haru]

If we didn't want to build up a threshold-style subsystem, perhaps this be a good opportunity for the GM to Invoke (or Compel) an Aspect to make such a spell easier, harder or impossible? Like "Harry Has My Back" could be Invoked for a bonus (or just to allow the spell to happen), whereas "Trusts Nobody" would be something interfering with the process.

Sure, that could work. Though I wasn't proposing a subsystem. I was mainly thinking out loud my theories about how the magic works in the Dresden world in narrative terms. What that actually means in mechanical terms is depending on how hard you want healing magic to be. Not having a trusting relationship could double the difficulties. Or triple it. Or even make it outright impossible.

We already have a threshold style system; it's called the stress track + consequences.

That doesn't really work for healing, though.

[vultur]

My group doesn't let consequences be completely removed, but does let them be lowered a step.  The cost is 4+value of consequence to reduce to down to one.  Mild consequences can be removed this way.

When this came up for me in "Defending the Borders", I used the same basis as what you have above (derived from the Reiki Healing spell in YS) but I calculated it a bit differently for completely removing a consequence.

6 shifts to remove mild.
8 to make moderate mild.
10 to make severe moderate.
Extreme consequences cannot be recovered this way.

So this was the same...

So, if you wanted to let them completely remove the consequence, I'd add the two together.  Removing a moderate would then be 14 shifts.  Removing a severe would be 24.

But this wasn't, since I only added the +4 once (treating it as a base cost to do this on a human at all). So completely removing a moderate was 10 shifts (4 base + 4 for moderate to mild +2 to remove mild) rather than 14.

A severe consequence didn't get removed in that game, but if it did, by my rules it would be 16 shifts (4 base + 6 severe to moderate + 4 moderate to mild +2 remove mild) rather than 24.

IMO this makes it difficult enough, because if you look at the spells in YS even a 10-12 shift spell is a fairly big deal in the fiction (though, yes, if you allow endless declaration stacking things certainly can get crazy).

EDIT: removed repetition accidentally introduced when writing the post

[PirateJack]

That doesn't really work for healing, though.

It does if you just consider healing to be an another form of transformation magic.

On the other hand, I'd probably go with leaving healing as a Sponsored Magic only thing, including Self-Sponsored Magic for specialist healers like LTW. Humans don't really use healing much in the Dresdenverse; at least not the traditional DnD style healing.

[InFerrumVeritas]

When this came up for me in "Defending the Borders", I used the same basis as what you have above (derived from the Reiki Healing spell in YS) but I calculated it a bit differently for completely removing a consequence.

So this was the same...

But this wasn't, since I only added the +4 once (treating it as a base cost to do this on a human at all). So completely removing a moderate was 10 shifts (4 base + 4 for moderate to mild +2 to remove mild) rather than 14.

A severe consequence didn't get removed in that game, but if it did, by my rules it would be 16 shifts (4 base + 6 severe to moderate + 4 moderate to mild +2 remove mild) rather than 24.

IMO this makes it difficult enough, because if you look at the spells in YS even a 10-12 shift spell is a fairly big deal in the fiction (though, yes, if you allow endless declaration stacking things certainly can get crazy).

EDIT: removed repetition accidentally introduced when writing the post

I left it in per consequence level because I deliberately wanted to keep healing limited to mild consequences and lowering them a step.  We've got characters pulling off 10 shift rituals pretty easily (Lore 5, +4 Focus Item, +1 sponsor bonus).

[Sanctaphrax]

The stress/consequences system doesn't work too well for healing. Doesn't work too well for consensual transformation, either. It turns being tough into a disadvantage, and introduces some weird incentives/implications.

[vultur]

The stress/consequences system doesn't work too well for healing.

I agree there (assuming you mean the "overcome stress and consequences to transform the target" system).

A base difficulty (independent of stress boxes) makes more sense IMO... which is indeed stated in the Reiki healing spell description in YS*, and expanded by both me and InFerrumVeritas.

*Though it may be 4 because that's the max stress boxes for a human without Toughness/Size powers, come to think of it.

Doesn't work too well for consensual transformation, either. It turns being tough into a disadvantage, and introduces some weird incentives/implications.

I'm not sure I totally agree here. I mean, yes, it does make it harder to do beneficial transformations on tougher targets, that's true.

But I think it makes total sense in a "world" sense. Just consenting to it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have an innate "resistance" to being transformed into something else which happens on a non-conscious level, or even just as an "inertia of being" sort of thing.

And if you're a magical being with magical power keeping your body from being harmed, it doesn't strike me as a stretch that that should also get in the way of turning you into something else. I think it would be really hard to transform Magog or Ursiel in his alt-Denarian form (except maybe turning him into his human form) even if he agreed to it... there's a lot of magic bound up in that form.

Being willing should make it EASIER, but not EASY.