Once again, time to revisit our favorite topic: healing magic. When we last left our heroes, we were considering a spiritual drain to balance out the physical advantage of healing. In the comments, we further explored a few other ideas, particularly related to methods of limiting healing magic over time.

Since that was written, we’ve had a few development sessions and a few play-test sessions and we’ve come to a slightly different conclusion. First, we decided that we didn’t want to put in an artificial (hard) limit into the game since it’s not really the ARPS Way. Second, we decided that we liked the latest approach we had (having the target character’s player roll Recovery).

What we did do, though is tweak things. First, we upped the Difficulty (Diff in ARPS parlance) from 10 to 15 for the check and, second, we upped the Diff of the Heal dweomer from 12 to 15 (essentially making it have a higher cost to the caster). This latter piece also changes who can learn the dweomer as a starting character, pushing the dweomer from the 2nd to 3rd degree, meaning that only primary Healers will be able to know it initially (or a more experienced character). Since the GM has full control over what dweomers  a character can learn in-game, this allows it to be more restricted, but not totally unavailable.

What prompted this update, though, was this article Hard System Limits in Scenario Design over at The Alexandrian. The analysis is specifically related to scenario-design rather than system design, but you can’t ignore the needs of scenario design in your system anyway. There, it talks about how soft vs. hard limits affect things. As a player much more entrenched in the old school mentality, I like the fact that the players can keep on going so long as they have the resources to keep it up. The soft limit, therefore, feels much more appropriate to my vision for ARPS. First, it doesn’t put in any hard limits (I try to avoid that and give the players as many options as they can; whether choosing it is a good idea is another matter) and, second, in keeping with the gritty realism idea (think Die Hard), it allows the characters to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ (as it were).

For now, at least, I think I can put this idea to bed and I feel confident I’m headed down the right path. There will likely be a bit more messing with the fiddly bits until we get it right, but it’s close.

(As a random observation, mostly since I don’t have enough to make a post on this, I’ve been noticing how much ARPS and RoleMaster seem to have in common, at least in vague philosophy. Didn’t really think about it, but RPG Blog II’s been putting up a RM retrospective, of sorts, and it occurred to me several times in reading through things there. Specifically Rolemaster Tales, which was posted today. Got me thinking of a situation we had over the weekend where our socially-oriented thief with little martial ability took out a magically-enhanced Awakened (undead) in a single hit with a dagger. Mind you, the dagger is magical, adamantine, and was temporarily enhanced with Holiness and Firebrand, but the feat was pretty astounding at the time.)