I appreciate how Pathfinder RPG is chiseling away at the need for a mandatory healbot Cleric. Treat Deadly Wounds, the Heal Skill application, seems like a step in the right direction. It also seems both underpowered and overpowered in certain ways.
1) A Healer's Kit costs 50 gold. A Potion of CLW costs 50 gold. You get 2 uses of TDW from a healkit, which can only be used once per day... Either the healer's hit is overpriced, or more likely TDW consumes too many uses.
Healers kits should contain more uses, and ideally they should be restockable through use of the Survival skill, foraging for herbs and poultices and such.
2) I think HP are so abstract that I really don't have a problem with regaining hitpoints through the Heal skill. Heck, I might even USE it that way. I think the primary difference between healing magic and the heal skill should be that Healing magic is fast enough to be used in combat.
Treat Deadly wounds should be able to heal more HP (I like the margin 5 effect of adding Wis bonus, but I think it could do more). In my game, you recover you HD in HP for every 5 points above 20 on a heal roll.
However, it takes 1 minute per hit point healed, and should expend 1 use of a healer's kit per 5 minutes. You can't do anything else while treating the wounded.
Make the Heal skill good enough to use and buy ranks in. Make it as good as magical healing, just slower, thus useless in combat. That's how I'll be playing it.
I like this idea a lot, actually. It's quite well thought out. Long have I agreed with the sentiment that heal is kind of a useless skill. Why would anybody bother putting ranks into the heal skill when magical healing is available? Every function of the heal skill as written can be surpassed with spells below 4th level.
Allowing the heal skill to repair HP in a meaningful way would be a great boon to parties without clerics. I understand that you do not want this to be super-fast, but I think a minute per HP might be a little too slow.
Even so, heal still might need a boost. Heal is a very flavorful class skill for clerics that is hardly ever used.
What about vastly expanding the effect of the heal skill? Here are some possibilities.
1. Pershaps the one i like the most. Grant a synergy bonus from the heal skill to healing magic. Make it cure more hp, or be better at removing status or something. But then why put more than 5 ranks into it? Not sure, perhaps you could solve that problem by making multiple levels of synergy. IE, an ability at 5 ranks, 10 ranks, etc...
2. Make the heal skill a bit more like the craft skill. As your ranks in heal go up, so does the availability of various healing items to your character, perhaps some which could not otherwise be created. For example: DC 15 create a potion of CLW, DC18 create antitoxin, DC20 create potion of cure mod wounds, dc23 create potion of lesser restoration, dc 25 ... I'm not saying that should be the distribution or the items made necessarily, but something like that. Maybe if the check was high enough you could get an stat reparier that worked instantly (as restorations take 3 rounds to take effect)
3. Allow the heal skill to be substituted for a Knowledge(appropriate) check, perhaps at a -5 penalty, when attempting to determine the strengths and weaknesses of a monster. So, to know that a Ghale has DR 10/Evil and Cold Iron attack may be a DC 23 Knowledge (The Planes) check, or a DC 28 (Heal) check.
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I like this idea a lot, actually. It's quite well thought out. Long have I agreed with the sentiment that heal is kind of a useless skill. Why would anybody bother putting ranks into the heal skill when magical healing is available? Every function of the heal skill as written can be surpassed with spells below 4th level.
Allowing the heal skill to repair HP in a meaningful way would be a great boon to parties without clerics. I understand that you do not want this to be super-fast, but I think a minute per HP might be a little too slow.
Even so, heal still might need a boost. Heal is a very flavorful class skill for clerics that is hardly ever used.
What about vastly expanding the effect of the heal skill? Here are some possibilities.
1. Pershaps the one i like the most. Grant a synergy bonus from the heal skill to healing magic. Make it cure more hp, or be better at removing status or something. But then why put more than 5 ranks into it? Not sure, perhaps you could solve that problem by making multiple levels of synergy. IE, an ability at 5 ranks, 10 ranks, etc...
2. Make the heal skill a bit more like the craft skill. As your ranks in heal go up, so does the availability of various healing items to your character, perhaps some which could not otherwise be created. For example: DC 15 create a potion of CLW, DC18 create antitoxin, DC20 create potion of cure mod wounds, dc23 create potion of lesser restoration, dc 25 ... I'm not saying that should be the distribution or the items made necessarily, but something like that. Maybe if the check was high enough you could get an stat reparier that worked instantly (as restorations take 3 rounds to take effect)
3. Allow the heal skill to be substituted for a Knowledge(appropriate) check, perhaps at a -5 penalty, when attempting to determine the strengths and weaknesses of a monster. So, to know that a Ghale has DR 10/Evil and Cold Iron attack may be a DC 23 Knowledge (The Planes) check, or a DC 28 (Heal) check.
I think that the 1 HP/min would work just fine. Especially if you are trying to convey the fact that natural healing (even with bandages and poultices and such) takes time.
(1)Synergies were removed from Pathfinder. However, you could change the wording for TDW to say "...you heal +1 HP for every 5 points by which you beat the DC."
(2)I could see the Heal skill for antitoxin, but that would be about it. All the other items are magical in nature and should still require the proper spells.
(3)I fail to see how the Heal skill would grant a person knowledge about a creature aside from any known poisons/diseases it possessed. How in the Nine Hells would a Heal check tell you a monsters weaknesses?
This might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know if using the heal skill for removing a disease cures the ability damage? I see no mention of it anywhere and one of my players insists that it does remove the damage.
I think curing disease with Heal should also cure ability damage.
This game has no recourse to realism, and magical healing is superior as it is. No need to widen that gap.
In fact, that was the point of the original post— close the gap! Make the Heal skill foolish in combat but on-par with magical healing between encounters! No need for "healing surge" silliness, just accept that a realistic heal skill could never be anything but useless if every town has a cleric (or druid or adept or bard...). Make effective healing abundant but time consuming.
For a legitimate interpretation of the rule, you may want to ask elsewhere where there isn't an agenda. ;)
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Treat Deadly Wounds is a great idea, but it has a few flaws:
With a fixed DC of 20, it's practical use will be from about 5th level up. And with the damage repair being 1 hp per HD, possible 1 hp per HD + Wis modifier, it's application will fade after a while -- perhaps 10th level. Especially with the expense (later annoyance) of a healer's kit that will simply be circumvented with a potion of healing.
I think that Treat Deadly Wounds needs a scaling Heal DC, with an increase in the Healer's skill bringing greater healing, removal of the limit of once per day usage requiring bookkeeping to track who has received treatment today, and the ability to revive creatures that have died the round before (with a hefty increase to the DC, of course).