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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6212856" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't accept that healing is entirely subjective and abstract, and I think that the criticisms leveled against magical healing are largely fair.  I am not happy with the ambiguities of the current 'cure' spells.   However, I don't accept the argument, "Since X is broke, it's ok to break Y too."  Pointing out the problems with something is an excuse to fix those problems (if we can), and not an excuse to make more problems.  Still, I think Gygax anticipated this line of reasoning in his description of hit points as well, and his answer would be ultimately, "A 10th level character is just tougher than a 1st level character, and can bear more and more serious wounds."  Recall that he suggests that though the majority of a high level characters hit points are not 'meat', it's nonetheless that very tough characters do have tougher 'meat' than ordinary characters.   He sites the example of Rasputin as evidence that real people can sustain injuries that would kill any four other people, and yet survive.  So he's not entirely deprecating the idea that your 10th level character can resist shock and trauma to an extraordinary - heroic - degree.There is currently no perfect solution to the healing problem (at least that I have found), and though I can mechanically device one that solves the particular problem in question, you run the risk of healing magic becoming too weak at low levels and too powerful at high levels when you reduce the abstraction in the current spells.  It's possible that the whole 'light', 'moderate', 'serious' progression needs to be rethought.  It is an option I'm actively exploring.But, for the purposes of the current game, if you encounter two women lying in a ditch mortally wounded, one of which is 1st level and one of which is 10th level, I would narrate the situation accordingly:DM: "You see two women lying on the side of the road.  From their resemblance to each other and similar age, it's possible that they could be sisters.  There clothes are rent and they are clearly badly injured.  From their injuries, it looks like they were robbed, possibly abused, and then left here to die.   There is a lot of blood."Player: I use my Heal skill to ascertain if they are still alive.DM: At a distance or close inspection?Player: Close inspection.  I'm not afraid to get dirty.DM: Trivially easy for a physician of your skills.  As you kneel down in the blood and mud, one of the women stirs swatting at you, before collapsing back.  The other appears unconscious.  Though its likely neither woman will survive the night in their current condition, one woman is clearly far more injured than the other.  Had she not stirred at your arrival, you would have thought her dead.  She apparently put up more of a fight with her attacker, or angered them in some way, because she's been absolutely brutalized.  She shows multiple stab wounds, and even signs someone tried to slit her throat.  Nonetheles, she mutters something incoherent and starts thrashing as you inspect her"Player: I try to soothe her, "Peace, goodwoman..." etc.   With this narration, it should be clear to the players that one character's injuries are more severe than the others and the expectation would be that the more injured woman requires more healing.  The metagame information - the health bar as it were - is vaguely visible in the narration but certainly not as important as the concrete fiction.At a metagame level, probably the player if they thought about it could divine that both NPCs are at 0 hit points or less, and possibly the more injured NPC was higher level.  However, they also might assume one NPC is at say 0 hit points, and the other at -9, and that might also be true especially if in fact both characters had similar maximum hit points.   For now, let's assume both characters are at -6.  The greater injuries in the higher level character (per the fictional positioning) are consistent with the expectation that high level characters are just harder to kill, surviving injuries that others succumb to by sheer grit if nothing else.Suppose the cleric decides to treat the more injured character with the (we agree) badly named Cure Serious wounds, healing for 21 points, and restoring her to 15 hit points (of her normal maximum of say 50).  I can now narrate:DM: The healing power of Showna flows through your hands, suffusing your patient with a soft golden glow.  When the glow dissipates, many of the woman's wounds have closed leaving scabs and new pink flesh and color has returned to her face.  She still looks like she's in a pretty bad way, but she tries to struggle up to her feet anyway, coughing, "Sister." Now if the PC tries heal the sister with say the (we agree) badly named 'Cure Light Wounds' and cures 9 points, restoring the sister to 3 hit points (of say her maximum 10, humans having slightly more hit points in my game), the PC is going to achieve very nearly the same effect.  But, from the fiction, that's not completely surprising because I've already narrated that the first woman was the more badly hurt.  And if the sister was a small child, and really only had maximum 3 hit points, then the fact that her wounds were smaller but proportionally as grave isn't surprising either - there is less 'meat' here.I don't claim it is perfect, but in play it's not that glaring of a problem or I would have felt a more urgent need to fix it.What I deny is that the existence of problems in the mechanics here excuses us from introducing problems elsewhere.  Bad design isn't the excuse for more bad design.</blockquote>

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