Hot answers tagged magic
17
The best way to make healers fun to play is to make their profession matter in the culture of the setting and in the conflicts the group faces.
Is the character merely "Joe, with a Great-level Healing skill and a Good Herbalism skill"? If yes, why? Wouldn't it be more interesting to have the character be "Joe, an Adept of the Scarlet Order", with contacts ...
14
There's a few different things you can do here, from either the game system side or the game master side.
Systems: Give natural healers more potent long-term healing. The idea here is that you may be able to bring someone from near death to fighting fit in a few seconds with magic, but that kind of healing reduces long-term viability. Maybe magical ...
9
The simplest is to simply use the Sorcerer instead of Wizard - you get a small list of known spells, and a number of spells, and nothing else changes.
Slightly more effort, but more easily used for all classes...
Spell Points
Allow the usual numbers of known spells. Each spell costs spell points equal to twice it's level, with zero levels being treated ...
7
Your question can be generalized to the form of "Why are there mundane versions of healing/crafting/transportation/whatever", a question that comes up whenever the logistics, economics and day to day realities of a fantasy world are considered.
The answers can be any of the ones mentioned in the other answers: make magic rare, make magic costly, or make ...
5
In Shadowrun, there's explicitly a rule that each wound can be healed once by magic or by first-aid; the question then immediately comes up as to which is better; some characters may have a passive resistance to magical healing due to cyberware, but it can also be favorable because First Aid is quicker for most wounds, and doesn't come with drain.
Again, ...
5
Pendragon 4th Edition has rules for group casting. (but it's the only edition with magic rules.)
Burning Wheel has some in Magic Burner.
GURPS Magic for 3E had some; GURPS Fantasy for 1st ed did, too.
The Fantasy Trip has them in Advanced Wizard. GURPS Fantasy 1E was pretty much the same magic system...
5
Wizard's Communion in Ars Magica is the only way to pull of some of the obscenely high rituals promised by the system.
The rules for Wizard's Communion (A Rego Vim general spell) allow a number of casters to reduce the difficulty of a ritual according to a set number of guidelines. The spell is difficult, and can get very expensive, but allows commensurate ...
4
The biggest advantage I can offer for "mundane" healers is Preparation. In quite a few games, you can make all of the items that effectively heal ahead of time. Having the (let's call it) alchemical knowledge means you know what to bottle or powder and keep on hand. Not only this, but in some game, characters must use less expendable resources to generate ...
4
Firstly, spellcasters such as Bard and Sorcerer do not prepare spells. They simply know only a select few spells that they can cast “spontaneously” without special preparation.
Other classes, namely the Beguiler (Player’s Handbook II), Dread Necromancer (Heroes of Horror), and Warmage (Complete Arcane) expand this idea: they cast ...
4
I don't believe there is a magic system in 3.5 with the guidelines you're specifically looking for. Spell selection limitation is at the heart of many factors of balance within 3.5. Take the sorceror/wizard contrast for instance. The sorceror has access to a handful of spells throughout their career but gets more per day than the wizard, who can ...
3
Drain is a bit of a problem for mages who want to rely on spells rather than use them as an 'oh shit' button. Having your casting stat and willpower at a highish level is good, but drain (especially in a background count) can often scale much faster than even your attribute cap in both.
There are a few esoteric methods that help with this.
Fetishes. You ...
3
This is entirely setting dependent. It is entirely possible for a setting to be structured so that magical healing is relatively common and strictly better than mundane methods. In that case, there would be very litle reason for nonmagical healing, other than first-aid to stabilize someone until they get to a healer or for the very poor who may rely on ...
2
I see two ways you can go here
Rigid system with pre-defined effects and math to combine them. You can find a lot of element spells in GURPS Magic and adopt something akin to GURPS advantages(and mods) math to represent spell combinations.
Or more streamlined game where system is abstract enough to ignore everything beyond casting difficulty. PDQ# or Lady ...
2
The more healing/bigger healing dilemma
Sure, with this first point, your non-magical healer won't have many moments in the spotlight however, there are times where a non-magical healer will totally outclass a magical healer. The magical healer will get the vast majority of the healing work. Period. Yet, most systems I'm aware of have limits on magic ...
2
This is system dependent, but what I would do is create a "normal" healing character and reflavor the abilities to have a natural source rather than divine/magical/etc.
For a D&D example, I'd roll up the traditional cleric but leave out all the deity-specific stuff. All of my healing "spells" would actually be mundane treatments wielded by an expert to ...
2
Make healing limited
Similar to what @DuckTapeal has suggested, but limit what magic can do in scope to simply speeding up what the body can achieve; ie simply faster healing.
What this would mean is that magic could be able to (for example) fix splinted bones and bind skin together, but it it couldn't put those things back into place - the bones would ...
2
In some settings:
Magic is rare enough to make non-magical healing the only available option. This is doubly true in games where the amount of healing mojo a spellcaster can spit out is limited to a certain amount each day.
Magic may be mistrusted, either due to groundless superstition or because it's actually got some potentially nasty side effects and ...
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