Tilenas
Explorer
In a wacky case of life imitating art, I’m about to write a treatise on this, which will mimic my character’s initiation thesis.
Currently I’m in the research phase, and the books (4th Ed., 20th Anniversary, and Street Magic) leave so much ambiguity, I’m curious as to how you guys handle the spell. But first, I shall try to list the possible ways of dealing with the different aspects that are ambiguous, namely the spell’s initial and aggregated drain values, its duration, and its interaction with the Heal spell.
For simplicity’s sake, I will henceforth refer to the use of the spell as “curing” or “healing”, even though it does not actually do that.
Effect:
Not much of an argument here, at least none I’ve come across, but I’ll talk about it anyway, in case I need parts of it later:
In a nutshell, I consider Resist Pain as “Fake Healing”. It works just like Heal, with the exceptions that it relieves the recipient of wound modifiers, not of the wounds as such, and that each hit removes one box of physical and stun damage for the purpose of calculating wound modifiers. Finally, at DV-4 (whatever that means, see below), it has a lower drain code than heal, which possibly effects its applicability in combat.
It is the same as Heal inasmuch as it can be cast only once “on a given set of injuries”. This means that any boxes of damage left from a previous healing attempt are different from new damage, which can still be treated.
Initial Drain:
(i.e.: no leftover damage after previous healing attempts)
This is more tricky. What is this “Damage Value”? So far, I’ve heard the following interpretations, some of which are carried over from the heal spell:
a) It’s the total damage the character has incurred (total stun + total physical).
b) It’s the total level of physical or stun damage, whichever is higher. The reasoning is that because each hit cures a box of each, it doesn’t matter if you have 5P and 5S damage or only 5P.
c) It’s the size of the wound you are currently curing. Some groups hold that damage from multiple wounds does not add up to a single “set of wounds” (see below), but rather that each form a separate set that can be healed individually.
d) It’s the amount of damage you are curing with the spell, i.e. either equal to your hits (following the interpretation of b.), or twice your hits (following a.), each capped at the total amount of damage on both damage tracks (you can’t suffer drain for more boxes of damage than you have).
To get the full picture, one also has to consider the fact that curative healing spells can only be cast once on a recipient in a given situation:
As mentioned above, this tends to create a lump of incurable damage boxes, which might also affect drain, giving us even more possible methods of calculating drain. We’ll call this phenomenon Aggregate Drain:
e) It’s the total curable damage the character has incurred, i.e. the damage added since the last time the character was treated by the spell.
f) It’s the total curable amount of physical or stun damage, whichever is higher.
The relation between total and curable damage will become even more important later on. My own interpretation of drain is, simply put, a), as I think that neither was it intended that players keep track of each wound separately, nor does the ratio of 1 hit = 1 stun + 1 phys cured mean that you can simply ignore the lower figure for drain purposes.
Now on to the most difficult part: The spell’s duration and the issue of Permanency.
Duration:
Actually, there are two things amiss here. The first concerns the required time from casting the spell until it takes hold. There is no ambiguity in the rules here, but I shall argue that the spell’s write-up doesn’t reflect its intended mechanic.
The second issue is more severe: What happens when the recipient of a Resist Pain spell takes further damage?
On the spell’s incubation period:
The spell descriptions for Heal and Stabilize state that the caster may use hits to reduce the time the spell needs to be sustained in order to become permanent. Heal allows to split the hits between actually healing and accelerating the process. Stabilize uses all hits in the latter manner. There is, however, no equivalent passage in the Resist Pain write-up. For me, this is a case of RAW not reflecting RAI, or simply put, an accidental omission. I see the spell as designed for combat situations, where there is no time for proper healing of wounds (be it magical or mundane), but where it’s nonetheless important to keep moving without being slowed down by wound modifiers. Without the ability to reduce the incubation period of the spell, I see no point in ever casting it. The Heal spell allows you to rid yourself or others of as many as three boxes of damage in one turn with four hits (Drain is 3-2=1 for basic DV, 1x2=2 for Duration=P, 2-1=1 for taking one hit to reduce the time). The same four hits with Resist Pain can let you ignore as much as eight boxes (4P+4S), but that will also take eight turns (8-4=4, 4x2=8, no reduction possible), and at least two if you have only stun or phys damage.
That’s not even so bad if you’re casting it on yourself, because sustaining a spell for a couple of turns doesn’t prevent you from doing something else, it just imposes the standard -2 sustaining modifier. Healing others is not so easy, however, as you have to touch the target the whole time, which severely reduces your options in combat.
Now people might say that the RAW is yet correct, as Resist Pain lets you resist stun damage and nets you two boxes per hit. This is the only justification I can think of that would speak for it to be handled differently than Heal and Stabilize. Well, it doesn’t convince me. You can use stimulant patches for the stun damage, and even without those: Once a fight is over, more often than not you can get at least an hour of rest in to restore two or three boxes of stun.
Please tell me how you handle it!
The second issue concerns the final paragraph of the spell description:
What does dissipate mean?
Some people seem to think that spell simply ends once the recipient takes new damage because the “damage rises above the level at which the patient is resisting pain”. So we’d have a spell that regularly takes 4, 6, or even more turns to cast (assuming RAW), and then might last for one action phase if you don’t neo all bullets heading your way.
I mean, yeah, the damage rises, and the spell dissipates. Why else would they put a sentence like that in? Likely answer: To keep gamer min/maxers and other smart asses from treating the spell like the High Pain Tolerance quality. It’s a convoluted way of saying that you can’t apply the spell’s effect to damage you take after you are treated. There are two ways I can think of that are barred by that sentence: Keeping “leftover” hits for later use if the caster scores more hits than you have damage on either track, and healing some of the damage, then applying the spell to new damage, as long as it is still less or equal to the number of hits from the spellcasting test.So if you have 2P damage and the caster scores 4 hits, you are still only resisting pain at level 2. If you take another 3P, you have a wound modifier of -1.The same applies if you recover from the initial 2P, and then take the 3P.
I would consider the aforementioned “new damage dissipates the spell” reading only possible if Resist Pain were a prophylactic spell which allows you to ignore a number of boxes up to your hits, but falls apart once that level is exceeded. Basically what it says in the FAQ:
But that’s another issue. Finally, lets take a look at the sequentiality of healing magic:
Interaction with Heal:
If someone is resisting pain and receives a heal spell, which damage goes away first, the resisted damage or the unresisted?
The above passage can serve as be used as a justification for both. Either the heal spell heals from “the top” (on the damage track), where the old damage, including the untreatable lump is, or from “the bottom”, where the fresh damage is. The former means that Heal essentially duplicates Resist Pain with regard to wound modifier and gradually “eats up” the hits of the other spell.
I could also mean that casting a Heal spell completely dissipates the spell (see the above argument), which would mean you could potentially be worse off after getting healed if the caster did a bad job and scored fewer hits than whoever cast Resist Pain.
I think the solution is that one spell doesn’t affect the other. Hence, a Resist Pain spell retains its effect until all damage that was in evidence when the spell was cast has been healed (it is permanent, after all).
An Example:
Now I’d like to sum up how I believe the spell should be handled in a neat exemplary story:
“It’s been a rough night for Myles McMojo, Street Shaman. Barely two hours since he crawled out of bed, and already he’s taken 4 boxes of physical damage when a bullet from that ganger’s Ares Predator went straight through his pathetic Armor spell. Worse still, he got another 2S damage by botching the drain resistance test when he cast that spell in the first place. To make sure he gets to the meet with a straight face and standing upright, and somehow having forgotten the Heal spell, he casts Resist Pain on himself. His magic and spellcasting of 4, plus his mentor spirit’s favor (+2) net him 10 dice for the spellcasting test. Average as his reputation, he scores 3 hits, reducing the damage that counts towards wound modifiers to 1P and 0S for a total wound modifier of zero. After, he has to resist 2S of Drain, which he does.
Later that night, he gets whacked in the teeth by another ganger for 3S and a giant rat gnaws at him for 2P. Ouch! He is now at 6P and 5S total, of which 3P and 3S count towards wounds, giving him a hefty -2 on all (most) tests. In that light, he decides to visit his friend Boobarella the Nymphomancer. She knows a great deal about healing, sexual and otherwise, and restores 5 boxes of physical damage. With an hour of rest, he also recovers 2S. His wounds are now 1P and 3S, but because of Resist Pain still affects him, wound modifiers are calculated as if he had 0P and 1S, for a total modifier of zero. Yet on his way from Boobarella’s apartment, he falls down the stairs for another 2S. His totals are now 1P/5S, and 0P/3S for wounds (modifier -1). Lying on the stair’s landing, he hears someone big stomping up the stairs: Boobarella’s Orkish boyfriend. Myles casts another Resist Pain, scores 4 hits and resists the drain of 2S. He decides that time is of the essence here, and takes 2 hits to cut down the incubation time from 4 turns to 2 before making a hasty escape through over the fire stairs.”
That’s all for now, four typed pages, and again my question: How do you handle the spell? Feel free to disagree!
Currently I’m in the research phase, and the books (4th Ed., 20th Anniversary, and Street Magic) leave so much ambiguity, I’m curious as to how you guys handle the spell. But first, I shall try to list the possible ways of dealing with the different aspects that are ambiguous, namely the spell’s initial and aggregated drain values, its duration, and its interaction with the Heal spell.
For simplicity’s sake, I will henceforth refer to the use of the spell as “curing” or “healing”, even though it does not actually do that.
Effect:
Shadowrun SR4A said:
Not much of an argument here, at least none I’ve come across, but I’ll talk about it anyway, in case I need parts of it later:
In a nutshell, I consider Resist Pain as “Fake Healing”. It works just like Heal, with the exceptions that it relieves the recipient of wound modifiers, not of the wounds as such, and that each hit removes one box of physical and stun damage for the purpose of calculating wound modifiers. Finally, at DV-4 (whatever that means, see below), it has a lower drain code than heal, which possibly effects its applicability in combat.
It is the same as Heal inasmuch as it can be cast only once “on a given set of injuries”. This means that any boxes of damage left from a previous healing attempt are different from new damage, which can still be treated.
Initial Drain:
(i.e.: no leftover damage after previous healing attempts)
Shadowrun SR4A said:
This is more tricky. What is this “Damage Value”? So far, I’ve heard the following interpretations, some of which are carried over from the heal spell:
a) It’s the total damage the character has incurred (total stun + total physical).
b) It’s the total level of physical or stun damage, whichever is higher. The reasoning is that because each hit cures a box of each, it doesn’t matter if you have 5P and 5S damage or only 5P.
c) It’s the size of the wound you are currently curing. Some groups hold that damage from multiple wounds does not add up to a single “set of wounds” (see below), but rather that each form a separate set that can be healed individually.
d) It’s the amount of damage you are curing with the spell, i.e. either equal to your hits (following the interpretation of b.), or twice your hits (following a.), each capped at the total amount of damage on both damage tracks (you can’t suffer drain for more boxes of damage than you have).
To get the full picture, one also has to consider the fact that curative healing spells can only be cast once on a recipient in a given situation:
Shadowrun SR4A said:
As mentioned above, this tends to create a lump of incurable damage boxes, which might also affect drain, giving us even more possible methods of calculating drain. We’ll call this phenomenon Aggregate Drain:
e) It’s the total curable damage the character has incurred, i.e. the damage added since the last time the character was treated by the spell.
f) It’s the total curable amount of physical or stun damage, whichever is higher.
The relation between total and curable damage will become even more important later on. My own interpretation of drain is, simply put, a), as I think that neither was it intended that players keep track of each wound separately, nor does the ratio of 1 hit = 1 stun + 1 phys cured mean that you can simply ignore the lower figure for drain purposes.
Now on to the most difficult part: The spell’s duration and the issue of Permanency.
Duration:
Actually, there are two things amiss here. The first concerns the required time from casting the spell until it takes hold. There is no ambiguity in the rules here, but I shall argue that the spell’s write-up doesn’t reflect its intended mechanic.
The second issue is more severe: What happens when the recipient of a Resist Pain spell takes further damage?
On the spell’s incubation period:
Shadowrun SR4A said:
Shadowrun SR4A said:
The spell descriptions for Heal and Stabilize state that the caster may use hits to reduce the time the spell needs to be sustained in order to become permanent. Heal allows to split the hits between actually healing and accelerating the process. Stabilize uses all hits in the latter manner. There is, however, no equivalent passage in the Resist Pain write-up. For me, this is a case of RAW not reflecting RAI, or simply put, an accidental omission. I see the spell as designed for combat situations, where there is no time for proper healing of wounds (be it magical or mundane), but where it’s nonetheless important to keep moving without being slowed down by wound modifiers. Without the ability to reduce the incubation period of the spell, I see no point in ever casting it. The Heal spell allows you to rid yourself or others of as many as three boxes of damage in one turn with four hits (Drain is 3-2=1 for basic DV, 1x2=2 for Duration=P, 2-1=1 for taking one hit to reduce the time). The same four hits with Resist Pain can let you ignore as much as eight boxes (4P+4S), but that will also take eight turns (8-4=4, 4x2=8, no reduction possible), and at least two if you have only stun or phys damage.
That’s not even so bad if you’re casting it on yourself, because sustaining a spell for a couple of turns doesn’t prevent you from doing something else, it just imposes the standard -2 sustaining modifier. Healing others is not so easy, however, as you have to touch the target the whole time, which severely reduces your options in combat.
Now people might say that the RAW is yet correct, as Resist Pain lets you resist stun damage and nets you two boxes per hit. This is the only justification I can think of that would speak for it to be handled differently than Heal and Stabilize. Well, it doesn’t convince me. You can use stimulant patches for the stun damage, and even without those: Once a fight is over, more often than not you can get at least an hour of rest in to restore two or three boxes of stun.
Please tell me how you handle it!
The second issue concerns the final paragraph of the spell description:
Shadowrun SR4A said:
What does dissipate mean?
Some people seem to think that spell simply ends once the recipient takes new damage because the “damage rises above the level at which the patient is resisting pain”. So we’d have a spell that regularly takes 4, 6, or even more turns to cast (assuming RAW), and then might last for one action phase if you don’t neo all bullets heading your way.
I mean, yeah, the damage rises, and the spell dissipates. Why else would they put a sentence like that in? Likely answer: To keep gamer min/maxers and other smart asses from treating the spell like the High Pain Tolerance quality. It’s a convoluted way of saying that you can’t apply the spell’s effect to damage you take after you are treated. There are two ways I can think of that are barred by that sentence: Keeping “leftover” hits for later use if the caster scores more hits than you have damage on either track, and healing some of the damage, then applying the spell to new damage, as long as it is still less or equal to the number of hits from the spellcasting test.So if you have 2P damage and the caster scores 4 hits, you are still only resisting pain at level 2. If you take another 3P, you have a wound modifier of -1.The same applies if you recover from the initial 2P, and then take the 3P.
I would consider the aforementioned “new damage dissipates the spell” reading only possible if Resist Pain were a prophylactic spell which allows you to ignore a number of boxes up to your hits, but falls apart once that level is exceeded. Basically what it says in the FAQ:
[URL="http://http//shadowrun4.com/resources/faq_print.shtml" said:
But that’s another issue. Finally, lets take a look at the sequentiality of healing magic:
Interaction with Heal:
Shadowrun SR4A said:
If someone is resisting pain and receives a heal spell, which damage goes away first, the resisted damage or the unresisted?
The above passage can serve as be used as a justification for both. Either the heal spell heals from “the top” (on the damage track), where the old damage, including the untreatable lump is, or from “the bottom”, where the fresh damage is. The former means that Heal essentially duplicates Resist Pain with regard to wound modifier and gradually “eats up” the hits of the other spell.
I could also mean that casting a Heal spell completely dissipates the spell (see the above argument), which would mean you could potentially be worse off after getting healed if the caster did a bad job and scored fewer hits than whoever cast Resist Pain.
I think the solution is that one spell doesn’t affect the other. Hence, a Resist Pain spell retains its effect until all damage that was in evidence when the spell was cast has been healed (it is permanent, after all).
An Example:
Now I’d like to sum up how I believe the spell should be handled in a neat exemplary story:
“It’s been a rough night for Myles McMojo, Street Shaman. Barely two hours since he crawled out of bed, and already he’s taken 4 boxes of physical damage when a bullet from that ganger’s Ares Predator went straight through his pathetic Armor spell. Worse still, he got another 2S damage by botching the drain resistance test when he cast that spell in the first place. To make sure he gets to the meet with a straight face and standing upright, and somehow having forgotten the Heal spell, he casts Resist Pain on himself. His magic and spellcasting of 4, plus his mentor spirit’s favor (+2) net him 10 dice for the spellcasting test. Average as his reputation, he scores 3 hits, reducing the damage that counts towards wound modifiers to 1P and 0S for a total wound modifier of zero. After, he has to resist 2S of Drain, which he does.
Later that night, he gets whacked in the teeth by another ganger for 3S and a giant rat gnaws at him for 2P. Ouch! He is now at 6P and 5S total, of which 3P and 3S count towards wounds, giving him a hefty -2 on all (most) tests. In that light, he decides to visit his friend Boobarella the Nymphomancer. She knows a great deal about healing, sexual and otherwise, and restores 5 boxes of physical damage. With an hour of rest, he also recovers 2S. His wounds are now 1P and 3S, but because of Resist Pain still affects him, wound modifiers are calculated as if he had 0P and 1S, for a total modifier of zero. Yet on his way from Boobarella’s apartment, he falls down the stairs for another 2S. His totals are now 1P/5S, and 0P/3S for wounds (modifier -1). Lying on the stair’s landing, he hears someone big stomping up the stairs: Boobarella’s Orkish boyfriend. Myles casts another Resist Pain, scores 4 hits and resists the drain of 2S. He decides that time is of the essence here, and takes 2 hits to cut down the incubation time from 4 turns to 2 before making a hasty escape through over the fire stairs.”
That’s all for now, four typed pages, and again my question: How do you handle the spell? Feel free to disagree!
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