Topic: HARP Spellcasters Overpowered?

[masque1223]

No, I haven't played since the original Gary Gygax editions.
But I do know that 4e contains HEALING SURGES.

Meh.  Everyone in HARP has access to Minor Healing if they so desire, it being a Universal Sphere spell.  Healing surges are not a problem conceptually to me.

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Normal damage in Street Fighter heals instantly as soon as people stop trying to hit you. Nothing wrong with that if that's the effect you're going for.

[Mitchiban]

No, I haven't played since the original Gary Gygax editions.
But I do know that 4e contains HEALING SURGES.

Meh.  Everyone in HARP has access to Minor Healing if they so desire, it being a Universal Sphere spell.  Healing surges are not a problem conceptually to me.

Harp if you have noticed is filled with optional rules and is extremely mod friendly.  If you prefer a game where dmg is more lethal and healing is harder to come by the rules are pretty much there to cover that.   Dont like Healing spells remove them.  Dont like softer damage use Hack N Slash or Arms L style charts. 
The real issue is what Genre you as a player or GM want to play.  Find a group with a like minded playstyle and then find a ruleset or tinker with and existing one to suit your needs.   I find Harp to be extremely versatile and streamlined. If you removed the minor healing from universal and the cantrip version only the Clerical version remains.   That would limit access and make the skills Craft Apothecary, Healing and perhaps even horticulture more attractive.   Dont forget rituals and alchemy too.   Perhaps even the clerical version doesnt exist.  Then if you break your leg you are down for a long time or perhaps need a jumping spider leg (leg), lizard tail(regen), and pure sand(time).  Just healing after a big epic fight is a source for adventure.  Some might find it tedious but for others it would be their cup of tea.
 
The rules are already there for Low Magic Campaigns and with the various casting styles and mana sources to create campaigns from it.  If you believe Harp casters are overpowered its the campaign that is being run in that might have overpowered casters.  Talk it over with your group and see what they like, then make it happen.  /cheers     

[providence13]

I think Legendary (?) and Mythus (for sure) had a Power Point, Heka, Mana Point system.
I'm glad he finally came around.

[Uriel]

A bit OT, but have you not played D&D since 2nd Ed?

No, I haven't played since the original Gary Gygax editions.

But I do know that 4e contains HEALING SURGES.

I feel your pain/disgust. It was D&D going to 4th Ed that made me look up RM again, and thus I discovered HARP.
I will say that Pathfinder (D&D3.75?) is actually a well-balanced and fun system, allowing me to enjoy and love 2 systems at once.

-Uriel

[Kasdaye]

We thought about this in our group. I've never liked instant magical healing in roleplaying games as I think it makes the danger of combat slightly detached (even though in HARP as we all know the danger in combat is VERY real ). However taking out magical healing can lead to slow recovery times etc.

The way we've got around it in our group is by saying that magical healing is possible but is not instantanious and is very painful to the person being healed (Nerves being magically knitted back together, bones being snapped back into place etc... the same way magical healing is in the "Night Angel" trilogy).

This means that minor \ major healing cannot be cast mid combat to perk someone up. Instead it has to be used after combat in a safe place where the healer has several minutes to ply his trade (or several hours depending on the severity of the wounds).

While being healed the PC must also make stamina resist checks to avoid passing out from the pain. The difficulty of the roll being based on the severity of the wound (e.g. if trying to heal a -25 maneuver penalty, it would be a -25 modifier to the PCs stamina roll. Each point of bleeding being healed is a -5 penalty etc.)

The other point we use is that the energy and material for healing comes from within the person being healed (proteins etc) so after being healed the person will feel hungry / drained for a short while afterwards.

We haven't perfected these rules yet, and many of the rulings are still quite arbitrary (exactly how long does it take to heal someone with a gash in their shoulder and a bite out of their calf muscle?... as long as a piece of string!) but we have found it gives that bit of extra tension after battles.

[calmacil]

magical healing is very painful to the person being healed ...... the PC must make stamina checks to avoid passing out from the pain.

The other point we use is that the energy and material for healing comes from within the person being healed (proteins etc) so after being healed the person will feel hungry / drained for a short while afterwards.

Some very interesting ideas  I like them. I like the pain idea, it's gritty and dark. I prefer my games with low magic (doesn't really fit into Harp, but i love the basic Harp system)

For your second house rule you could say that the healer is transferring his energy into the PC he's healing. Hence the reason he's weak afterwards.

[RandalThor]

I think he was referring to the fact that the person being healed would be weak/hungry afterwards, not the healer. (Go Aes Sedai.)

I have, over the years, preferred more and more the idea that magical healing should not be very prevalent and not so...., well, awesome. Takes the danger out of the adventure in my book. Also, complications due to being injured should just be classified as part of the adventure.

If you don't want to totally nerf magical healing, you can say that whatever is healed takes the next nights rest to do so, possibly longer for more healing. Also, for the Minor Healing spell, make it higher level and cost more PP to use, so that only higher level casters can use it. (The easiest way is to just double all the costs.)

[Cormac Doyle]

Did you read the Robin Hobb series about the Fat Shamans? The fatter they were, the more powerful they were at manipulating magic (more or less a linear relationship between ppd and weight) ...

[jurasketu]

I use the concept of "pain relief" and "lingering injuries". I use a hit point-less combat and healing system (of my own device - my players challenged me to write one - so being crazy - I did - and we've been using it for over a year now with a few revisions...). Anyway, the point being that pain (and hence minuses and/or hits) from individual injuries can be temporarily relieved up to a certain level with healing spells, medicines, potions or other medical intervention. Proper healing requires diagnosis and medical treatments (spells, medicines, herbs, etc) and recovery time measured in days [reducible with scaled Major/Minor Healing]. Even after the initial recovery, lingering pain (ie minuses) from the injury persist for days after that. The number of days being proportional to the severity of the injury. The lingering/immediate penalties still can be relieved with healing spells, medicines or other treatments. So often, the first thing every campaign day morning is a raft of pain relief spells and/or potions to allow the PCs with lingering injuries to operate at full strength for the day.

[Kasdaye]

I think he was referring to the fact that the person being healed would be weak/hungry afterwards, not the healer. (Go Aes Sedai.)

Aye, I was, but it could work either way depending on your setting. It could be that the healer is transferring energy and proteins from his own body (*Snigger*  ) to fuel the healing.

I do like the idea of lingering pain too. I imagine your PC's camp in the morning resembles a student house after a party. Full of semi-conscious people rolling around in pain. waiting for someone to bring them medicine (or coffee and breakfast at least! .)

I use some concept of lingering pain. When someone got their foot flattened by a kraken tentacle, the healing took days of painful magical healing (lot's of tricky bones in the foot!). Even once it was done It made sense that after that level of healing the nerves would be raw, and the new muscle tissue / bones would take some adjusting to. So the character was on crutches for a while and staying drunk to avoid the pain!

[choc]

I think there's a difference between magical and common healing.
For example imagine our hero got three different hits:
A a slash from a short sword, B an arrow still sticking in his chest and C an arrow broken in his upper leg.
Magical healing (minor and major) can easily fit A. B it will either still stick in his chest after the healing spell or someone tries to pull or push it out before the heal cast. This needs definitely a skilled participant to avoid the wound to be worse. C needs a doctor or the piece of arrow will stick in the leg after the magic cure and our hero will suffer moving penalties and pain.

We use minor healing to cure wounds up to the minor healing possibilities, you cannot cast mh twice on the same wound. Major healing is restricted to clerics and some paladins but even not every cleric has access to it. Lifegiving and keeping are restricted to a few worshippers of only a very small selection of gods.

On the other hand you can't play a fantasy game in a liquid flow with regular healing and out times for the heros and don't forget the possibilities of medival medical care. (Infections and so on)

[hal_s]

Did you read the Robin Hobb series about the Fat Shamans? The fatter they were, the more powerful they were at manipulating magic (more or less a linear relationship between ppd and weight) ...

The first book in that series was one of the best fantasy novels I've read.

But then it went downhill. It became about nothing except the main character becoming really fat.

[Cormac Doyle]

yep - I definitely agree ... by the third book in the series, it felt like I was just reading "Fat porn" ... that said, the first book was really cool

[GrumpyOldFart]

The way we've got around it in our group is by saying that magical healing is possible but is not instantanious and is very painful to the person being healed.

I've done similar things, even to RM "instant" herbs. If you took a dose of an herbal formula that normally would restore X in, say, 3 days, and it had been magically altered to make the effect instantaneous... well sure, it works exactly as advertised. And it uses a fair chunk of 3 days worth of the body's resources, and generates a fair chunk of 3 days worth of the body's wastes. Instantly.

Make sure you're somewhere appropriate, cos you're gonna want to go to the bathroom really bad. Probably be good to have clean clothes to change into.

It could be that the healer is transferring energy and proteins from his own body (*Snigger*  ) to fuel the healing.

One of the few things I miss about RM is the possibilities inherent in the transferring Healer. But yes, it should have its cost.

For that matter, back more to the original subject of the thread, I like tweaking HARP so that magic is a little bit more difficult to control and much more dangerous if you fail. I have seriously considered introducing something like sanity checks into HARP magic in my setting.

If you removed the minor healing from universal and the cantrip version only the Clerical version remains.   That would limit access and make the skills Craft Apothecary, Healing and perhaps even horticulture more attractive.   Dont forget rituals and alchemy too.   Perhaps even the clerical version doesnt exist.  Then if you break your leg you are down for a long time or perhaps need a jumping spider leg (leg), lizard tail(regen), and pure sand(time).  Just healing after a big epic fight is a source for adventure.  Some might find it tedious but for others it would be their cup of tea.

I gotta say it, I just gotta...

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog.
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing.
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

I'm still considering what I want to do with magical healing in my game. My problem with it as written is that it's too bland, every wound should be studded with more story hooks, so to speak. I'm not griping though, not everyone wants that with their healing, and the system is intentionally designed to be tweaked. It's easy enough to get it the way I want it.

[calmacil]

I like tweaking HARP so that magic is a little bit more difficult to control

If you wanted a low-magic setting, maybe something very simple such as "add 4 to the basic PP cost" would work?

Using an example of the fireball someone gave earlier. This make the fireball a basic cost of 10PP, which means you won't be able to cast it until level 3, instead of level 1.

[GrumpyOldFart]

I like tweaking HARP so that magic is a little bit more difficult to control

If you wanted a low-magic setting, maybe something very simple such as "add 4 to the basic PP cost" would work?

Using an example of the fireball someone gave earlier. This make the fireball a basic cost of 10PP, which means you won't be able to cast it until level 3, instead of level 1.

I'm not thinking of a low magic setting. I'm thinking of a potentially high magic setting, if you have the courage to try it. "I don't have the power to do this" isn't the worry, "I don't have the skill to be certain it'll go the way I planned" is the worry. With the example of a fireball in the hands of a low level caster, "catastrophic success" would be a bigger source of jitters than "catastrophic failure". At least the failure is unlikely to kill anyone except the guy who cast it, but if he gets too much power with too little control he could turn everything within X feet of him into just a glass surface with interesting little inclusions.

Anyone remember the "thermonuclear hand grenade" from the Paranoia game? Yeah, that.

 

[Thom @ ICE]

There was once a discussion on the boards of allowing overcasting in HARP. It involved being able to cast a spell scaled above your normal # of ranks in it, but then it increased the chance of failure and the chance of fumble.  I can't seem to find it right now, but I'll keep looking.

[Thom @ ICE]

Of course, as soon as I indicate I can't find it.. I do.

The forum discussion was pretty basic - but here is a link to the TGC article.
http://www.guildcompanion.com/scrolls/2006/jun/overcasting.html

and here is another...
http://www.guildcompanion.com/scrolls/2007/may/overandundercasting.html

[Mitchiban]

Had a few more thoughts on the healing stuff.

First off without changing to much of the system unless desired add an additional cost for the healing.   That cost would be the healing time of the wound in age added to both the caster and the patient.   The thought is that healing is using temporal magic to speed the recovery.  (That post on pain for healing brought this to mind :p )  Both would age.   This would slow down the use of healing in an RP way rather than just mechanics.   Add in a few aches and pains, some greying hair or loss of hair, and finish it off with some modifiers like -5 penalties in the early morning to physcial activities until you stretch out.   These penalties would be for a more high magical way of healing.   Using the previous low magic version the caster could avoid the penalty of age as the materials involved would provide the vehicle of magical healing rather than the caster. The patient however would still be under the temporal effect.  And the longer lived races might be willing to heal a bit more of the fast and dirty kind where the short lived races would have to rely on the old ways.

Secondly if you want to increase the difficulty of healing change the casting time.   Most healing that needs to be done quickly would be at a disadvantage as you might have to speed cast an incur the penalty to do so.  A few extra rounds of bleeding might have a few interesting hold breath moments.  This also boosts the desire for healing skill development by all characters as the Casters have to perfom triage to determine who gets healed first.
 
And finally increasing the casting difficulty also enforces the extra time required to cast and if you are really vile add in the arcane magic fumble table from Rolemaster.   Nothing says take your casting seriouslly like turning you and the rest of your party into ash and the ground into smoking glass in a nice radius.
 
Need coffee brain is mush....