You have just touched one of HARP weak points. In my opinion the healing/critical system should be better integrated and revised at some point.
Without house ruling, I believe you would be right: a Cleric with only 4 bacic ranks in Major Healing could easly get rid of the penalties, without having to heal the bone itself.
The same thing happens with the terms "burns", "frostbite" and so on.
Personaly I demand the Cleric to scale up to heal the fractured bone AND to reduce penalties if he wants to get the job done, but its my house ruling, NOT the official ruling.
I do this to create a huge difference between the apprendice with 4 ranks in Major Healing and the experienced healer with 20 ranks.
Welcome aboard.
That is a good idea and solution. So in your house rule the cleric can only make one spell per wound?
Thanks for the kind words and sorry for the late reply.
For now I am not
that evil (yet).
Lets say for example that the group?s fighter received a big crush critical and ended up with: -40 penalty / -38 hits / broken arm (he had no shield).
I would not alow a cleric to reduce the penalties without scalling up enough to:
4 pp = base spell cost
+2pp = "2 options" (hits + penalty)
+6pp = "heal broken & shattered bones"
Meaning a minimun of 12 ranks in Major Healing to even attenpt to heal the damage.
As I told before, this is a house rule, not the official one, but I think it works great.
On another subject: I have considered ways of messing up even more with magical healing, but that means improve the critical system and natural healing also. Tons of serious work here my friends.