
Mavrickindigo |
A friend of mine wants to make a character who heals with stitches and scalpels and not healing magic. He said he'd like to use rules from D20modern's "treat injury" skill and be a god-less cleric with a few specific domains, and he said he won't use cure spells
problem is that We're playing in Golarion and I want to make it as setting friendly as possible, but I don't want to upset him because he seems so interested in the character concept.
What are some good builds for a non-magical healing guy?

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Thirding the Chirurgeon Alchemist. They get Skill Focus: Heal and the ability to do minimum damage when using the Heal skill (such as for removing caltrops) which makes them awesome as a sort of non-magical doctor with tons of potions.
Though, honestly, if he's going to want to crack open his comrades on the battlefield or in a dungeon to try and heal them up, this plan is unlikely to go very well.

zergtitan |

a couple of other things you might want to add in order to make him more of a surgeon is to use the vivisectionist archetype in order to make him less of a bomb thrower and more of the nick the vein or tendon and have his opponents fall apart, type of fighter. also you don't have to be a serial killer type persona to use it. it could just be that he focused more on his studies on anatomy then on bomb making, and so uses what skills he can to gain the edge in combat.

Lochmonster |

You can really just use whatever class you feel like it and just re-skin the flavor of it, but not the mechanics.
Want to be a battle field surgeon? Be a cleric and say you have a "Doctor's Bag" instead of a holy symbol, you are still useless when either get lost so call it whatever you want.
Don't want to cast spells, fine you aren't "curing light wounds" but doing emergency trauma response. Still takes a standard action, still can be interrupted and you still need to touch the person, so the mechanics remain the same.
Once you get past the "doing something different/not in the books" it's all just flavor and window dressing anyway.
I once made the Green Goblin from Spiderman comics. He's just an alchemist on a flying carpet when it comes to mechanics.

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Let him pick an appropriate class (necromancer wizard or alchemist are obvious choices).
Let him trade out healing with another class skill (flying for example), then give him a class ability that (with the use of 3 healing kit doses, and a craft alchemy roll) allow him to apply long-term healing effects that work twice as well as normal.
Surgeon is not fast healing - it takes magic to do that, but giving him enhanced non-magical healing as a class skill doesn't seem too broken to me.
Heck, you could just write up a trait that gives you double long-term healing ability, a +1 on heal checks, and healing as a class skill, and call it good.

Roberta Yang |
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Let him trade out healing with another class skill (flying for example), then give him a class ability that (with the use of 3 healing kit doses, and a craft alchemy roll) allow him to apply long-term healing effects that work twice as well as normal.
Surgeon is not fast healing - it takes magic to do that, but giving him enhanced non-magical healing as a class skill doesn't seem too broken to me.
Heck, you could just write up a trait that gives you double long-term healing ability, a +1 on heal checks, and healing as a class skill, and call it good.
Oh man, doubling the effect of the Heal skill? If he has that and makes it to higher levels and starts treating higher-level characters, he's going to end up being like a third-level cleric in terms of healing per day (except it will take him hours more to perform, also the cleric pulls ahead again by putting a couple of points in Heal themselves).
That doesn't seem "too" broken, but when you're dealing with something as dangerous as letting non-casters do something competently, it never hurts to be cautious.

Roberta Yang |

Math time!
Suppose that there are two types of days: adventuring days, in which there is time to Treat Deadly Wounds but not to provide Long-Term Care, and rest days, in which everyone gets full bed rest and can receive Long-Term Care (but cannot receive Treat Deadly Wounds due to the once per day and 24 hour limits).
We'll stack the situation to make our healer as amazing as possible. He's 20th level, his patients are 20th level, and he's maxed his wisdom out at 36. (How did he get 36 Wis when all the proposed classes are Int-based? It is a mystery.) Presumably, he has full ranks in Heal, Skill Focus [Heal], Self-Sufficient, and pretty much anything else that could be used to max out his Heal score.
On adventuring days, Treating Deadly Wounds lets him heal everyone HP equal to their Level plus his Wis. That's a total of 33 HP per person per day! On non-adventuring days, Providing Long-Term Care doubles their natural healing rate while resting from 40 to 80. That's a total of 40 extra HP healed per person per day!
Well, this third-level cleric here can. Even with only 10 Cha, Channel Energy alone provides an extra 21 HP per person per day. That's without spending a single spell - a modest 14 Wis lets the cleric Cure Light Wounds three times per day for an average of 7.5 HP healed per casting, and Cure Moderate Wounds twice per day for an average of 11 HP healed per casting. Since the effects of Heal don't really scale up with higher rolls, this cleric can Take 10 to be just as effective as our master surgeon at Providing Long-Term Care, and can also do so to be almost as effective at Treating Deadly Wounds (they can hit the DC of 20 to heal equal to the patient's level but not the DC of 25 to add their Wis to the healing, so they can heal the party an extra 20 HP per person per day this way).
tl;dr: The undisputed master of nonmagical healing can't out-heal a third-level cleric with 10 Cha. (And a fifth-level cleric with 12 Cha is far, far out of his league, even with PSusac's minor buff to our surgeon's Heal skill.)

Roberta Yang |

Yes: but you are forgetting the OP question. What would be the best no magical healer. While true the alchemist is a magical healer he also has skills to do nonmagical healing: the OPs request.
I assume the OP would like their character to be not completely awful at their job. Being the best nonmagical healer in the world still isn't saying much when you're strictly worse at healing than a mere acolyte in the clergy.
At pretty much any level, the Heal skill gives your surgeon enough healing power to, once per PC per day, undo the effects of one successful non-crit attack by one CR-equivalent enemy. There is no level at which that is even adequate if you're having more than one encounter every few days, let alone even remotely impressive, and it's just going to invite major dissatisfaction when the fluff of "I'm the greatest surgeon who ever lived!" meets the crunch of "My healing is meaningless, let's just pick up a flunky cleric hireling who can do my job far better than I ever could."
I know "It's okay if the non-caster sucks at their job because if they wanted to be effective they'd have played a caster instead" is a common sentiment on these boards but that's not how real human beings actually think. Generally speaking, not being terrible is good.
I'm pretty sure Roberta's math shows that it doesn't really matter what class you are.
As long as you have the Heal skill as a class skill (which I think you can take as a trait, if nothing else) and a strong Wisdom score, you can be the best non-magical healer possible. Which isn't saying much.
Even Heal as a class skill isn't needed, all that would do is let you meet the DC's a few levels sooner. In the long run it makes no difference, since the DC's don't scale. A high Wis score at least makes some difference by making Treat Deadly Wounds a bit more effective, but even then you're still treading water to make your entire daily healing catch up with a single standard attack from a single monster.
Pathfinder doesn't let you specialize in nonmagical healing, and even making out your nonmagical healing still makes your nonmagical healing abilities a joke.

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It's not needed, but if you want to be the best non-magical healer possible you would need it.
It'd be a massive waste of effort, but you could do it. The only real solution to this would be to refluff Alchemist Extracts of Cure X Wounds or assorted other healing spells to be surgical procedures... but where magic closing a wound in six seconds is very "It's magic, ain't gotta explain ****!", using surgery to close a wound in six seconds is pretty much "What, that's not possible!" because it's explicitly non-magical, according to the OP's player's request.
Honestly, if he was at my table, I'd shrug at him and tell him that it just doesn't work in PF, and I would suggest against him playing such a character. He'd likely feel really, really useless during play, and nobody wants their players to feel like that.

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I have a couple suggestions to fit his theme. First, I second the vivisectionist slightly refluffed. He is a surgeon, he knows where to cut. Second, for healing, there's a few ways to do it. If you haven't read the Pendragon series, on third earth they have this device that you pretty much press it to a wound and it automatically seals it and all. Second, make healing spells longer than 1 round. In combat, he's a cold-blooded man who's simply working for the good of the party. It pains him to kill, but he knows it's a world of kill or be killed. Out of combat, he stitches you up, does a blood transfusion or something, and you're as good as new. His patched wounds won't reopen, and the herbs he gives you cures you of superficial tiredness or fatigue. Of course, he can only prepare so many unguents in a day without letting any more spoil under the toils of the adventuring day. As he levels up, he can prepare more in an hour, better medicines, and keep them preserved.