Having an issue with the no healing magic or medicine

[rjshae]

ok, more thematic/logic problem than gameplay wise. I just find it hard to believe that nobody has worked on healing at all in any field in the setting. That the only way to heal/cure something is to literally sleep it off. oh, got shot by an arrow, let me sleep it off. Just does not compute. Before medicine like antibodies, people died all the time from the simplest infected cut. Not to mention how easy it is to spread disease. I am just trying to figure out how the game world will explain it without some vague "oh, the gods did it *waves hands vaguely in the air*" moment.

You're assuming that the sleep lasts 8 hours? My thought is that 'sleep' is just a representative mechanic for withdrawing from the field of battle until you're healed up and rested. If the developers want to make it realistic, they can make the rest period last for several weeks and require you to withdraw to some place where you can get proper care and have your humours balanced with leaches and purgatives.

[Tale]

Considering that magic healing wasn't that powerful in D&D, I'm not sure I see the confusion.

 

It took what, level 5 before a Cleric could heal even "moderate" wounds? Nobody was magically reattaching severed limbs or anything like that at those levels, yet the adventurers didn't drop dead from raiding your average goblin camp.

 

Taking a wound doesn't represent having an axe lodged in your skull. Even HP was already an abstract involving luck and fatigue.

[Gfted1]

So, to be clear, you could have 1 HP, but full stamina, and you'd survive the fight so long as you don't take any more HP damage... right?

 

My understanding is that any attack will simultaneously cause damage to both Stamina and Health just not on a 1:1 ratio and with limited / no healing and no resurrection it will lead to exactly the situations you describe below.

 

If you're at 1 HP and you know the boss is in the next room, I think most people will opt to trudge all the way out of the dungeon, rest up, and then come back to finish the thing off, completely negating the point of this system in the process.

[rjshae]

I like the system, because stamina makes sense, but I don't know how it will prevent rest spam. If you're at 1 HP and you know the boss is in the next room, I think most people will opt to trudge all the way out of the dungeon, rest up, and then come back to finish the thing off, completely negating the point of this system in the process.

Realistically, the situation should have changed drastically by the time you return. The opponents should either have had time to better prepare for your arrival, or else left the scene entirely. But that is in the hands of the developers.

[Gfted1]

^What choice would the player have? Cant heal, cant rez, and the only place to rest is at the few and far between "safe" places to rest.

[nikolokolus]

To be fair we don't know exactly how few and how far these rest stops will be... actually we don't know anything yet because the game is barely into pre-production.

 

Whatever gets implemented, an extensive playtest and balancing process will have to take place. Hopefully what comes out at the other side is thoughtful, challenging and fun.

Edited October 30, 2012 by nikolokolus

[tajerio]

I like the system, because stamina makes sense, but I don't know how it will prevent rest spam. If you're at 1 HP and you know the boss is in the next room, I think most people will opt to trudge all the way out of the dungeon, rest up, and then come back to finish the thing off, completely negating the point of this system in the process.

Realistically, the situation should have changed drastically by the time you return. The opponents should either have had time to better prepare for your arrival, or else left the scene entirely. But that is in the hands of the developers.

 

I think an intelligent way they could deal with this sort of thing is simply to respawn a new coterie of minions/protectors of the boss, without loot. Only really works if you get XP for objective completion, not monster killing, though.

[Somna]

Interesting thought:

 

What if the only way to magically heal yourself was to damage your soul? So if your soul took too much damage, it becomes one of those "fractured" souls that everyone discriminates against?

[Water Rabbit]

Realistically speaking, if healing is limited in the game, then most combats will become more like ambushes. Characters will do their best to avoid damage in the first place, so will only attack if the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor.

[smithereen]

It would be very, very cool if something provided a sense of urgency, causing enemies to become more prepared and/or quests to be failed if rest-spam was used. If you're chasing down bandits, and rest to heal a broken arm, you shouldn't expect to get there in the 'nick of time.'

[Dwarfare]

I'm cool with the idea of resting and the healing of wounds in that manner.

 

I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to play a game with a realistic approach.

 

 

 

Adventurer 1 steps forward, ready to begin his epic journey! Suddenly, a goblin rises from the bushes, firing a crude stone-pointed arrow. It takes him in the knee. Adventurer 1 lays there screaming until someone comes to help him. He is taken to someone who practices healing... And you spend the next 2 years game time recovering and learning how to walk properly, with a 40% movement penalty for the rest of the game due to your poorly treated wound. In fact, adventuring is right out. It's now Project Eternity: Legend of the Depressed 7th Best Baker in the Village.

 

Or go the other way, the way D&D is sometimes. Oh gods, an assassin has murdered the king! Woe is us, the kingdom shall collapse! Oh, wait, raise dead scroll over in the corner here. Bam, King's back. Fixed. Father on his death bed, wasting away, passing on the dreaded family secret through his death rattle... And then a paladin steps in, pokes him on the shoulder, Lay on Hands, cure disease and BAM! He's fine! Woo! Traitorous spy put a dagger in your back, twisting it and leaving you fatally wounde-Cure critical wounds potion, you're good as new! Time to deal with that treacherous douchebag. Basically just removed consequences almost entirely.

 

Nope, low-moderate healing is where it's at, baby!

Edited October 30, 2012 by Dwarfare

[Amentep]

I'll wait until I hear more, but I haven't heard anything that has made me think the mechanic for healing (however its handled) isn't going to "work" in the game.

[temporalTemptation]

I would really like to know where some of you are getting your facts from because, from the looks of things, you're pulling all of them from out of your bum.

 

From what I've gathered, lore-wise, healing (both magical and mundane) is going to be about as crude as it is in real life, maybe a little easier because of magic, but not as deeply researched. In other words, don't go expecting to stumble across someone doing open-heart surgery. In the context that the developers were talking about, healing means everything from curing diseases to closing wounds to ridding one's bodies of poisons and toxins. This makes sense, as it would rob any and all possible drama from someone getting an illness or being poisoned, if all anyone ever had to do was trek down a Level X Spellslinger and get them to work their curey magic on them, in order make them feel immediately better. This ain't to say magic will be useless, it can likely ward off the symptoms, but don't expect there to be a catch-all spell which removes one of all possible ailments.

 

Now, to those of you worrying about the mechanical implications of this (likely ignoring the fact that healing doesn't just have to do with recovering HP; and the fact that Stamina and Hit Points are separate things in this game) do you really think that, if the game designers were going to such lengths for realism in healing up wounds magically, that they'd then slap on a rest system that let you get all your hit points back with ease? Are you really suggesting that, in this setting, magic can't do what eight hours of hitting the hay can miraculously do? The "healing" items and abilities, both magic and mundane, are likely going to have a feel of immediate, direct relief, the kind that is a short-term solution. Sure, that level 1 healing spell might perk you up a bit when you're in the heat of battle, but it's not gonna heal up the constant trauma done to your body by repeatedly getting whacked over the head by a troll's club.

 

Of course, how all this is implemented has yet to be seen, but I don't see anything particularly alarming. I can see more ways that it can be done well than it can be done badly. Admittedly, the ways that they can be done badly are ****ing retarded, but that's why I'm confident that they won't be done that way.

[Thangorodrim]

I would really like to know where some of you are getting your facts from because, from the looks of things, you're pulling all of them from out of your bum.

 

From what I've gathered, lore-wise, healing (both magical and mundane) is going to be about as crude as it is in real life, maybe a little easier because of magic, but not as deeply researched. In other words, don't go expecting to stumble across someone doing open-heart surgery. In the context that the developers were talking about, healing means everything from curing diseases to closing wounds to ridding one's bodies of poisons and toxins. This makes sense, as it would rob any and all possible drama from someone getting an illness or being poisoned, if all anyone ever had to do was trek down a Level X Spellslinger and get them to work their curey magic on them, in order make them feel immediately better. This ain't to say magic will be useless, it can likely ward off the symptoms, but don't expect there to be a catch-all spell which removes one of all possible ailments.

 

Now, to those of you worrying about the mechanical implications of this (likely ignoring the fact that healing doesn't just have to do with recovering HP; and the fact that Stamina and Hit Points are separate things in this game) do you really think that, if the game designers were going to such lengths for realism in healing up wounds magically, that they'd then slap on a rest system that let you get all your hit points back with ease? Are you really suggesting that, in this setting, magic can't do what eight hours of hitting the hay can miraculously do? The "healing" items and abilities, both magic and mundane, are likely going to have a feel of immediate, direct relief, the kind that is a short-term solution. Sure, that level 1 healing spell might perk you up a bit when you're in the heat of battle, but it's not gonna heal up the constant trauma done to your body by repeatedly getting whacked over the head by a troll's club.

 

Of course, how all this is implemented has yet to be seen, but I don't see anything particularly alarming. I can see more ways that it can be done well than it can be done badly. Admittedly, the ways that they can be done badly are ****ing retarded, but that's why I'm confident that they won't be done that way.

 

If they are truly going to go this approach in the way described then they would have to really ratchet back on the combat ... one reason that healing was so prevalent in the D&D style games like Baldur's Gate and Ice Wind Dale is that you were constantly fighting and constantly taking damage ... if you get knocked around and horrifically injured in the first couple of encounters you will not be able to do much combat for the remaining game ... unless they are planning for a stealth/diplomacy based game (which I would not be opposed to) they are going to have to provide one of two things to facilitate combat ... they will need cannon fodder (lots of disposable units who can take the damage) or healing (some way to restore your ability to fight) ...

 

right now they are early enough in the design stages so they are not locked into anything ... so they need first to decide what type of game they want to make ... if they want a game where ranged combat and magic are dominant and the tank companions are totally disposable then they can limit healing all they want ... if they want to enable functional combat they either need to find ways to minimize damage to the fighter classes or provide some form of functional healing ... that's my take on it

[kabaliero]

i'm just rly tired of someone with healing magic necesserily needing to be a priest of some diety

i mean how awkward is that ->

-> someone made up that magic should be arcane and divine

and it became so common that ppl forgot it can actually be a diffrent way

srsly

one of Dragon Age's biggest pros is that all magic has the same source

 

Allods series had this earlier, too

and i liked it

 

i don't mean i don't like people of faith or anything

it's just that their role as magic users is highly overrated, imho

 

oh and i think the devs mentioned something about that there will be some sort of healing magic,

it's just not going to have instant effect

[Zephyrous]

ok, more thematic/logic problem than gameplay wise. I just find it hard to believe that nobody has worked on healing at all in any field in the setting. That the only way to heal/cure something is to literally sleep it off. oh, got shot by an arrow, let me sleep it off. Just does not compute. Before medicine like antibodies, people died all the time from the simplest infected cut. Not to mention how easy it is to spread disease. I am just trying to figure out how the game world will explain it without some vague "oh, the gods did it *waves hands vaguely in the air*" moment.

 

I also get the suspension that sleeping is part of the plot, like having dream visions, or being visited by a deity, or just to move time forward.

 

Not really complaining, It is just something that has been nagging me in the back of my mind.

First point of order: Antibodies are not medicine, they are an produced by your immune system (T-cells) in response to infection. People never "died all the time from the simplest infected cut" and the body has build in mechanisms for reducing the incidence of infection: bleeding pushes contaminants out of a wound, white blood cells attack pathogens (pus is primarily made up of dead white blood cells and lymph, expended to fight and encapsulate the infection) scabs form to prevent additional foreign material from entering wounds.

 

Similarly, spread of disease in a generally healthy or resistant population is generally slow. In modern times we build up resistance artificially through vaccination, which art has improved over time from the most basic (transfer pus from an infection survivor onto a rasped of an uninfected person), to modern cultured vaccines and anti-viral or retro-viral drugs. The big difference is that without vaccination, you end up with epidemics when a non-resistant population encounters a new disease.

 

As supportive healing without healing magic or medicines, how about things like using fire magic to cauterize a wound, blood magic or water magic to flush it any sort of buff magic to maximize a characters chance to fight off an infection naturally, etc.

 

In this sort of world, where you don't have the knowledge base for epidemiology, microbiology, or complex surgery, you might still have things like setting a broken bone, amputating an infected limb, perhaps even magical or Alchemical salves such as Sulfa drugs to prevent or treat infections, which all still require the body to undergo a natural healing process. Maybe magical healing is all slow, delicate, support magic, as another poster mentioned, it might be that serious wounds like broken bones, rather than just flesh wounds, require bed-rest, immobilization, and possibly a lot of time to heal properly. Or magic can handle the maintenance and feeding of the body in what amounts to an induced coma, with or without increased healing during the downtime.

It was never mentioned that there was NO medicine or healing, it's just that the two aren't very well developed or understood. Granted, considering the time period that PE is based off of, disease and the frequency of death are most likely going to be two very real issues that are prevalent within the world.

Still got the same problem, doesn't explain how a person can magically sleep off major wounds and if its so rare pretty much nobody uses it, then the world really should be filled with mass graves and the average people should be sickly to make the world believable.

Lack of advanced medicine would likely make the people more resistant to diseases native to their home biome, as the weak and sickly die young. infant mortality might be as high as during the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe, but unless you had some sort of a plague, or a disease introduced from a foreign biome, you wouldn't see mass graves from the results of disease, just as you didn't get mass graves in Europe during the dark ages, except in the case of a plague or epidemic.

 

If curative magic is rare, it will likely be expensive, so you probably would see mass graves near any major battlefield, as the curatives available are saved for the wealthy, high-ranking or mission-essential personnel (like heroes?)

[Gromnir]

vol has a point. in this game we will suffer trauma. we will be shot, stabbed, battered and used likes a chew toy by creatures o' mythic proportion and surly disposition. such is the fate of an adventurer in a crpg. not matter if you is in arcanum universe, d&d or fallout, the fact that you will be injured frequently and seriously is inevitable. crpgs is not reality, so don't talk us to death 'bout reality. all crpgs has got some mechanic whereby an adventurer or hero may endure injuries that should be fatal. the sheer number o' combats a crpg adventurer may conceivably survive beggars the imagination. healing stims and doctor bags coupled with a good night's rest is no more real than is healing potions and spells... aided by a good night's rest. however, it would be passing odd to have a magic world wherein the necessarily miraculous healing mechanic is something mundane such as a roll o' cloth bandages and a nap. fallout uses more mundane items to perform miraculous healing 'cause the setting does not have magic. even so, the healing in fallout is no less spectacular than the healing in the forgotten realms.

 

...

 

honestly, this feels a bit like chrisA's silly avoidance o' swords for tno in planescape. am not a fan o' the ubiquity o' magic swords our self, but their absence from the planescape arsenal were odd. why can't the Nameless One use a sword? because chrisA said so. why in a world of commonplace miracles made possible by magic must we have dirty bandages and a sawbones performing the miracle healings? 'cause tim cain or chrisA or josh sawyer said so. whatever rationale is provided, it is gonna seem more than a little ridiculous and a bit patronizing... 'cause as a crpg adventurer you will be getting Miraculous Healing, regardless o' whether or not obsidian calls it magical or mundane.

 

can we conceive of a magical world with no magical healing? we can imagine such a world wherein peoples can heave fireballs and yet still die ignobly 'cause o' amoebic dysentery. Bob the Bold may have the Sword of INFINITY, but he died after he received a shallow cut on his thigh from a peasant with a fire sharpened stick. the wound became infected and festered, and Bob the Bold became Bob the Fevered... followed shortly by Bob the Dead. can we imagine? of course we can... but that ain't the issue. project eternity is a crpg in which you gets frequent shot, stabbed, battered and used likes a chew toy by creatures o' mythic proportion and surly disposition. there will be miraculous healing. will just be passing odd that the miraculous healing will be non-magical.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Zephyrous]

project eternity is a crpg in which you gets frequent shot, stabbed, battered and used likes a chew toy by creatures o' mythic proportion and surly disposition. there will be miraculous healing. will just be passing odd that the miraculous healing will be non-magical.

 

HA! Good Fun!

This sounds like the reason for the split between "Stamina" and "Health"

It looks very much like Palladium's split between S.D.C. and HP. One is punishment you can take and represents your will to keep going in the face of adversity, or the ability to shrug off minor wounds. The other is actual real damage to your person, the difference between being grazed across the thigh and the bullet shattering your femur.

 

Healing need not be "Mundane", the point is that it is not common, and it is not fast. A good night's sleep and you might feel better after a fistfight, but if you break your leg, even the finest medical technology the modern world has to offer won't make you better overnight. It will just increase you chances of healing well and not dying of infection while you do.

[ravenshrike]

And then a paladin steps in, pokes him on the shoulder, Lay on Hands, cure disease and BAM! He's fine! Woo!

All characters in D&D have a predetermined age. Assuming he died at that age, no matter from what, he could not be resurrected. Reincarnated, but not resurrected. Edited October 31, 2012 by ravenshrike

[HungryHungryOuroboros]

I'm still not entirely sure why magic being unable to heal people is any less magical than magic that can heal people but can't, for instance, turn people into frogs. Various magic systems have different limits, but none are any less fantastical or outright made-up than any other magic system.

Edited October 31, 2012 by HungryHungryOuroboros

[Somna]

It's really not that big of a deal. And just because healing is specifically at a low, crude level doesn't mean protection/preventative magics are too.

[FrostPaw]

Don't forget there are two kinds of "health" the regular health translated into hit points which are not touched until you first run out of stamina. Since stamina replenishes if you step out of combat for a breather you won't constantly need to heal up unless you intentionally stay in combat when it's going badly....or perhaps during a particularly hard fight in which case having a rest after it is probably expected anyway.

 

Also, I thought it was "no healing magic" not "no healing of any kind" So presumably things like first aid, poultices or remedies and potions exist in some form.

[Elerond]

Don't forget there are two kinds of "health" the regular health translated into hit points which are not touched until you first run out of stamina. Since stamina replenishes if you step out of combat for a breather you won't constantly need to heal up unless you intentionally stay in combat when it's going badly....or perhaps during a particularly hard fight in which case having a rest after it is probably expected anyway.

 

Also, I thought it was "no healing magic" not "no healing of any kind" So presumably things like first aid, poultices or remedies and potions exist in some form.

 

Character takes damage to health and stamina from every hit. Stamina don't protect character from health lose.

[FrostPaw]

Character takes damage to health and stamina from every hit. Stamina don't protect character from health lose.

 

That's not how I understood it, do you have a source please?

[FlintlockJazz]

They haven't said no to healing, just instant healing. My guess is that healing magic takes time to take effect and can only really be done in camp. You are pretty much using magic to alter a person's body in a delicate way, so you could say its as complicated as surgery: trying to perform what could be the equivalent of heart surgery in a combat situation just isn't going to end well.