healing: poison, disease, & long-term care

[Droogie]

Can a pc with the Heal skill use it on the very first saving throw for poison and disease? Intuitively I have to say no, since the skill is only used on the PC's turn and by then its too late. Whats the opinion of people here?

Also, the heal skill says that 8 hours of light activity is required to provide your pals with long-term care. The term "light activity" is kind of a relic from 3.0 and I assume this means a healer can still fight and adventure throughout the day and still tend to the wounds of her comrades. Agree or disagree?

Finally, can you take 10 on a check for long-term care?

 

[Droogie]

erm...double post. can the mods delete this one please?

 

[Urbannen]

My take is that you can't make a Heal check on the very first saving throw of poison, since it happens immediately. If the disease has an incubation period, then yes, you can make a Heal check. If it strikes immediately, then no.

My take is that if you are providing long-term care, you can't do anything out of the ordinary, including fighting. As far as I can tell, you can only provide long-term care to people that are resting, since now in 3.5 you can only recover hit points by getting bedrest. Of course it's kind of bad for the healer, since he or she will very likely miss out on sleep in the course of treating comrades.

I think officially you can take 10 on a Heal check to provide long-term care, although if the character is ever threatened during the hours of giving the care he will not be able to take 10. So for example if the healer's camp is attacked by orcs while is he giving care, but the healer's companions defeat the orcs, the healer will still not be able to take 10 on his check.

Personally I think Taking 10 is a cheeseball mechanic since a character with a +4 Heal check has a 50% chance to make the check under normal conditions, but a character with a +5 Heal check has a 100% chance to make the check under normal conditions. Anyway, yes, the character can take 10.

Many people forget that Heal can be used untrained. If people took advantage of the mechanic, everyone would get two saves against secondary poison damage and two saves against disease.