I’ve been playing with a group that is still relatively new to Pathfinder (but very experienced roleplayers generally). We’re playing 4th level characters right now. One of us is playing an Exemplar with the Radiant Epithet.
A recent session had our characters facing a horde of undead and their necromancer master, but before we actually confronted the master we rescued some civilians whose home had been surrounded by the undead. Some of the civilians had been injured, one severely, which meant it was time to bust out the healing before we could send them fleeing back the way we had come.
And this was the first time the Exemplar had busted out The Radiant. He was set up so that he had some Ikon that could be Transcended for relatively minor effect (that is, does not require him to blast a minion to nothing or anything like that) so would Spark Transcendence to invoke The Radiant, and restore 10 hit points, then Shift Immanence back to the same Ikon, and do it again, thus healing 10hp/round at no cost (but the limitation that it could only restore hp to an individual once in 10 minutes).
This wasn’t a huge deal in the given situation, where we needed to get some people healthy enough to run away. They were just a family, not dozens of people. The process would have applied significant healing to the PCs as well, but our hp loss was minor when it existed (mostly because my cleric character had used a 3-action Heal spell to deal with most of the undead attacking the house, which meant that significant healing was applied to injured PCs as a side effect). However, we also realised the full potential of The Radiant. If there had been a hundred civilians to rescue, it would have healed them all in 10 minutes.
Now, I want to say we are familiar with the idea that Pathfinder characters will typically heal completely between combats. I’m not saying I agree that they necessarily should (it seems hard to do this consistently without hour-long rests between combats, which makes sense sometimes and other times there’s more urgency to a situation) but we know that’s a thing.
But we ran the numbers on some forms of healing to see how they stack up.
Treat Wounds (performed by one character of our level, 4th) averages 9hp per character per hour for up to 6 characters, or 19 if using Expert Medicine and accepting a significant chance of failure. That’s 54hp total, if you have 6 patients. Continual Healing allows the 54/hour to go to one character. Ward Medic doubles the total, but does not raise the limit on a single character.
Lay on Hands (assuming use of 1 focus point which is regained before doing it again) heals 12hp, which becomes 72hp/hour (in packets of 12).
The Heal spell averages 9hp per character in its 30 foot radius, but is not repeatable in any timely fashion.
The Radiant heals 10hp to a single character, repeatable on the same character every 10 minutes, and repeatable every round on different characters. This works out to 6000hp/hour, if split across at least 100 characters.
There’s a rather big difference in scale there. When applied to an adventuring group in isolation, it’s a bit stronger than other out-of-combat healing, but maybe not over the top. But while the other forms of healing only handle small groups, The Radiant scales to heal armies. It’s fine if you never want to deal with armies or other large groups of people in the game (and at many tables this will be so), but if you do, this seems like it should reshape the world significantly.
Any thoughts on this?
We already have at least two homebrewed solutions under consideration (one being to only allow The Radiant to affect those who have been companions of the Exemplar; the other being to simply not apply the rules for hit points to injured minor NPCs at all, and instead they are just injured when the GM says they are injured and are healed when the GM says they are healed).
|
5 people marked this as a favorite.
|
Keep in mind that in your particular example, any character trained in medicine could have Battle Medicine each individual once for 9-19 hp with just 1 action each.
It's a bit arbitrary to try a metric of X Hp/100people because a party would never be 100 people.
Instead you should focus on 10min intervals for 4-5 people for out of combat scenarios, which are the typical ones. And for those, the Radiant isn't overperforming compared to other available options.
Multi-character heals in PF2e are pretty strong. You are surprised by the The Radiant a level 3 Root Epithet, but we already have pretty much stronger options available.
A good example is the kineticist's heal impulses. They heal a lot more HP, way more times (if we count all the healing options), and have the same per-target restriction, potentially making wood and water kineticists massive multi-target healers. Some of these healing impulses are level 1 feats accessible by any character that chooses to MC with kineticist.
Some very potent healing impulses that can make a character a massive population healer:
Fresh Produce: Creates a nut, vegetable, seed, or fruit in any creature that you choose inside your aura that heals 1d4+1 + 1d4+5 at level 3 and increases this by 1d4+5 every two levels. The target becomes immune per 10 minutes, and this only costs one action, potentially allowing the wood kin to walk and give some senzu to many people to eat and heal every 6 seconds of turns. It also gives some good void resistance during this 10-minute immunity. This is a level 1 impulse feat perfectly accessible by any character with the kineticist archetype.
Ocean's Balm: A touch healing impulse that heals 1d8 and gives 1 of fire resistance per “rank”. It costs one action and has 10 minutes of immunity per target, so a kineticist can also walk, heal, and walk easily too. It also is a level 1 feat perfectly accessible by any character with the kineticist archetype.
Dash of Herbs: A 2-action level 6 healing impulse that heals 2d8+4 HP + another d8 every 2 levels. This also treat: confused, disease, poison, sickened or increases from d8 to d10 if you choose only to treat injuries. This is also a per-target 10-minute immunity heal, but that not only heals HP; it effectively allows the target to remove conditions and diseases, potentially allowing a kineticist to cure numerous people in a small amount of time. This is a level 6 feat, so you can also get it at level 12 with kin's archetype.
Torrent in the Blood: A level 6 30 ft AoE cone healing 2-action impulse that heals 3d8 + 1d8 per every additional 2 levels and is also limited only to 10 minutes per target that also treats poison or disease affliction (cumulative with Dash of Herbs). So now the water kin can heal and treat a lot of people at once, becoming a real massive healer. This is a level 6 feat, so you can also get it at level 12 with kin's archetype.
All these impulses are cummulative with each other once that the target only bocemes immune to some specific impulse not to all your impulse options.
Runesmith also have Germantria, Rune of Partnership a level 9 rune that basically allows healing of 20 HP per invoke. This thing doesn't have limit so basically a level 9 runesmith can fully heal someone in a matter of seconds. It's not so accessible via archetype because the archetype can only get access to level 9 runes at level 18. But it's still possible.
So don't be so surprised by something like the radiant and out-of-combat healing options. PF2e has many very potent limitless healing options available. If you want to homebrew to limit this, you probably will have to make a way larger limitation rule.
'Spark Transcendence' says you can do it "in a mighty deed". On the one hand, healing 100 villagers right before the enemy arrives so they can successfully escape sounds like a pretty mighty deed. Herculean even. So I would be inclined to say let it happen, it sounds cool and kinda in line with the classes' theme. OTOH, it's not a singular mighty deed, so if the GM is uncomfortable with it, maybe they that say as an exploration activity it causes fatigue.
Mechanically it's maybe a bit stronger from other options but probably not enough to disrupt a game. A 4th level kineticist could one-by-one heal a large number of people for 3d8 (Ocean's Balm) or 2d4+6 (Fresh produce) per 4 seconds, vs. the Exemplar's 10 per 2 seconds. A single R2 3a heal spell covers a 13x13 square grid. So you could fit 100 (actually 168 others, with the caster occupying the middle square) people in it and heal them all at once for 2d8...with no cooldown. That's a much faster option if they need to escape an oncoming horde.
And as shroud and others have mentioned, medicine typically heals more (than either radiant or the impulses) in more typical play circumstances.
Overall as a GM I think I'd okay it, and let the Exemplar shine as the hero of the moment. Maybe the next time the Cleric gathers everyone together and takes 6 seconds to do what took the exemplar 10-20 minutes rushing around to do, showing him how healing's *really* done. :)
shroudb wrote: It's a bit arbitrary to try a metric of X Hp/100people because a party would never be 100 people. I don’t think it’s arbitrary to look at the scenario that we find concerning. I don’t think anyone was terribly worried about this character doing quite a significant amount of healing in typical scenarios, but it’s a case of a game mechanic that appears to have an outsized effect when applied in a scenario that maybe didn’t occur in the playtesting phase.
Like I said, this ability heals armies. A “party” can definitely have more than 100 people when the character gets involved in a war.
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Quote: The Heal spell averages 9hp per character in its 30 foot radius, but is not repeatable in any timely fashion.
(...)
But while the other forms of healing only handle small groups, The Radiant scales to heal armies. It’s fine if you never want to deal with armies or other large groups of people in the game (and at many tables this will be so), but if you do, this seems like it should reshape the world significantly.
I think it's fair to say that Clerics are generally assumed to be the main healers in the setting- Rahadoum has to do substantial work to get by without relying on divine healing. They're one of the best for being able to do lots of healing quickly.
Exemplars are not just uncommon, they're rare. And The Radiant is one specific epithet out of many. Finding that would be very difficult. They're not going to be disrupting the setting too much, but I still want to take a look at some more comparable comparison.
Clerics have four or five bonus castings of Heal at most levels, but that's much less specialized than a specific epithet. Clerics have an army-healing feat available to them at fourth level: Sacred Ground. With a one-minute prayer (which can be done every ten minutes), they set up an area healing anyone who remains in it for the ten-minute duration for the Cleric's level. That's about half the healing of the Exemplar, but it only takes one minute of the Cleric's time instead of ten minutes, healing up to 120 people compared to the similar maximum of 100 people in ten minutes for Exemplar. With people already being gathered, a Cleric can supplement that healing with a three-action Heal when they need to. Two Clerics will be much easier to find than one Exemplar, even before looking for a Radiant Exemplar.
That break is nice, because I don't see "moving your divine spark around" being something most people are going to be able to keep up for an hour at a time. Six minute-long prayers in an hour is pretty reasonable by comparison.
Now, if you're willing to let the Exemplar do combat actions for hours with no break, they'll do about twice as well as those Clerics, ignoring the Heal spells. But Exemplar is outclassed in the at-will healing department by Kineticist.
Wood Kineticist has Fresh Produce, giving somebody within ten feet a fruit that fills up their stomach and heals them for an average of 11 points at level 4. The recipient needs to eat it, so it's not going to be as good at bringing somebody back from unconscious, but there's no once-per-round limit if we're going all-out.
Water Kineticist has Ocean's Balm, healing an average of 9 points at level 4 for one action. No once-per-round limit, but it needs to be adjacent, so you can expect needing to move around a lot more to use it. Side-benefit of making them resistant to being fireballed.
Both of these can get a second at-will healing ability at level 6. Wood's can either outperform on healing or it can match the healing while also treating confused, disease, poison, or sickened. Water's hits a whole 30 foot cone at once while also treating poison and disease. I think that one is the real final word in hypothetical army-healing, healing more than twenty people at once if they're in formation. It takes the full three actions to do it, thanks to the overflow trait.
Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much. I'm not going to fault your group for deciding to limit how much NPC healing an Exemplar can throw around, although I would probably take the approach of letting the Exemplar feel miraculous but only be able to manage spamming it for about ten minutes at a time. That's still a hundred people healed in a go, and seems like enough for people to give them an epithet like "The Radiant".
Narratively, I think you want to be able to have an Exemplar walk through a group of injured soldiers, inner shard of godhood flickering with power, ripples of divine light flashing off of them to ease the injuries of those around them. I think that's very inspiring. I also think it's fun that they may be out-competed by an opposing army whose Kineticist quartermaster picks perfect plums from the elemental plane of wood to heal their army while feeding them at the same time.
In practical terms... it's probably easy to find a dozen or two Clerics that believe in your side's cause, and simply deal with the limited slots problem with more casters. The Heal spell is much more practical, healing dozens of individuals in less than a tenth of the time of most of the other options, and giving the flexibility of healing one person entirely almost immediately. Magical healing means injured soldiers probably aren't laid up for long for anything that simple hitpoint recovery can fix. A Radiant Exemplar's advantage is that they heal by doing their combat rotation- in the middle of a pitched battle, they're giving allies healing without stopping their own assault.
Easl wrote: A 4th level kineticist could one-by-one heal a large number of people for 3d8 (Ocean's Balm) or 2d4+6 (Fresh produce) per 4 seconds, vs. the Exemplar's 10 per 2 seconds. 10 per 4 seconds, at best. One action to Spark Transcendence, and another action to Shift Immanence to re-empower the Ikon than can be Sparked without causing other issues.
I guess if you didn’t care what extra effects Soarking Transcendence has, you could just repeatedly Spark Transcendence and cycle through Ikons, but that sounds like a way to produce a lot of undesired side effects. We just arbitrarily assumed that doing it once each round was more reasonable. I don’t like to assume that just because the rules allow something means it is practical, at the utmost limit. (If we think it does, let me tell you about a character I had 30 years ago who, according to the rules and without any particularly special ability to help, leap a distance of 1 mile… but only if he took a 2 mile run-up first.)
Easl wrote: A single R2 3a heal spell covers a 13x13 square grid. So you could fit 100 (actually 168 others, with the caster occupying the middle square) people in it and heal them all at once for 2d8...with no cooldown. That's a much faster option if they need to escape an oncoming horde. Can’t square a circle. 96 squares, according to the template in the Player Core.
And the thing is that that has a cost. 4 heals per day coming from a Healing Font, and if you prepare it as well you’ve got a few spell slots.
That cost is significant. I was playing the cleric, and was already down two Heals out of four. With no indication how many undead were left in the horde, I didn’t want to use them healing a family. (They might then have died when the town they would flee to got overrun.)
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Travis James Hall wrote: Easl wrote: A 4th level kineticist could one-by-one heal a large number of people for 3d8 (Ocean's Balm) or 2d4+6 (Fresh produce) per 4 seconds, vs. the Exemplar's 10 per 2 seconds. 10 per 4 seconds, at best. One action to Spark Transcendence, and another action to Shift Immanence to re-empower the Ikon than can be Sparked without causing other issues.
I guess if you didn’t care what extra effects Soarking Transcendence has, you could just repeatedly Spark Transcendence and cycle through Ikons, but that sounds like a way to produce a lot of undesired side effects. We just arbitrarily assumed that doing it once each round was more reasonable. I don’t like to assume that just because the rules allow something means it is practical, at the utmost limit. (If we think it does, let me tell you about a character I had 30 years ago who, according to the rules and without any particularly special ability to help, leap a distance of 1 mile… but only if he took a 2 mile run-up first.)
Easl wrote: A single R2 3a heal spell covers a 13x13 square grid. So you could fit 100 (actually 168 others, with the caster occupying the middle square) people in it and heal them all at once for 2d8...with no cooldown. That's a much faster option if they need to escape an oncoming horde. Can’t square a circle. 96 squares, according to the template in the Player Core.
And the thing is that that has a cost. 4 heals per day coming from a Healing Font, and if you prepare it as well you’ve got a few spell slots.
That cost is significant. I was playing the cleric, and was already down two Heals out of four. With no indication how many undead were left in the horde, I didn’t want to use them healing a family. (They might then have died when the town they would flee to got overrun.) Once per round is in the rules: "You can Spark Transcendence only once each round."
The 96 squares is for a burst. The emanation is thirty feet from the caster, so for a medium creature, it's 120 squares. (I made a diagram and counted...) You can cheese it with a large or huge caster, buuut I would really expect the GM to start throwing books by that point.
QuidEst wrote:
Clerics have four or five bonus castings of Heal at most levels, but that's much less specialized than a specific epithet. Clerics have an army-healing feat available to them at fourth level: Sacred Ground. With a one-minute prayer (which can be done every ten minutes), they set up an area healing anyone who remains in it for the ten-minute duration for the Cleric's level. That's about half the healing of the Exemplar, but it only takes one minute of the Cleric's time instead of ten minutes, healing up to 120 people compared to the similar maximum of 100 people in ten minutes for Exemplar. With people already being gathered, a Cleric can supplement that healing with a three-action Heal when they need to. Two Clerics will be much easier to find than one Exemplar, even before looking for a Radiant Exemplar.
That break is nice, because I don't see "moving your divine spark around" being something most people are going to be able to keep up for an hour at a time. Six minute-long prayers in an hour is pretty reasonable...
Okay, this is some more practical advice. The comparison to Sacred Ground is a good one, and one I hadn’t thought about. I question I asked in our conversation was, what is the cleric equivalent of this? Because yes, clerics are supposed to be the healers, and there’s little point to a class-based system if class doesn’t give a strong indication of what these characters might do. (While I am playing the group’s cleric, I had not intended for him to be primarily a healer, so I have avoided Sacred Ground for this character.)
(I’m not sure where you get the 120 people limit - it’s another 30 foot burst, which means 96 squares on the template… but then again, each person needing a full 5 foot square is a game mechanic that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, or the setting. But 96, 100, 120, it’s all similar enough not to matter much.)
Sacred Ground at the same level heals 4 hp, compared to 10 hp from The Radiant. Same effective cooldown. I guess the cleric can be doing Treat Wounds between castings, if healing is the priority.
The Radiant appears to be designed for use in situations where combat rounds are tracked, and whether any ability used within the span of a typical combat round should be repeatable 100 times in 10 minutes is an important question.
QuidEst wrote:
Once per round is in the rules: "You can Spark Transcendence only once each round."
The 96 squares is for a burst. The emanation is thirty feet from the caster, so for a medium creature,...
Okay, so we weren’t being arbitrarily limiting on that once per round, then. Officially can’t do 10hp every 2 seconds.
As for how many can fit in a Heal’s AoE, check out this terrible quote: “You disperse vital energy in a 30-foot emanation. This targets all living and undead creatures in the burst.”
I was thinking I could have sworn the spell description said burst, not emanation. There’s why I misremembered it.
|
2 people marked this as a favorite.
|
Travis James Hall wrote: QuidEst wrote:
Clerics have four or five bonus castings of Heal at most levels, but that's much less specialized than a specific epithet. Clerics have an army-healing feat available to them at fourth level: Sacred Ground. With a one-minute prayer (which can be done every ten minutes), they set up an area healing anyone who remains in it for the ten-minute duration for the Cleric's level. That's about half the healing of the Exemplar, but it only takes one minute of the Cleric's time instead of ten minutes, healing up to 120 people compared to the similar maximum of 100 people in ten minutes for Exemplar. With people already being gathered, a Cleric can supplement that healing with a three-action Heal when they need to. Two Clerics will be much easier to find than one Exemplar, even before looking for a Radiant Exemplar.
That break is nice, because I don't see "moving your divine spark around" being something most people are going to be able to keep up for an hour at a time. Six minute-long prayers in an hour is pretty reasonable...
Okay, this is some more practical advice. The comparison to Sacred Ground is a good one, and one I hadn’t thought about. I question I asked in our conversation was, what is the cleric equivalent of this? Because yes, clerics are supposed to be the healers, and there’s little point to a class-based system if class doesn’t give a strong indication of what these characters might do. (While I am playing the group’s cleric, I had not intended for him to be primarily a healer, so I have avoided Sacred Ground for this character.)
(I’m not sure where you get the 120 people limit - it’s another 30 foot burst, which means 96 squares on the template… but then again, each person needing a full 5 foot square is a game mechanic that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, or the setting. But 96, 100, 120, it’s all similar enough not to matter much.)
Sacred Ground at the same level heals 4 hp, compared to 10 hp from The... For a " dedicated healer" (in your party's case, the Cleric) the closest imo would be Battle Medicine each target once.
You can get 3 people per round once and heal them more than the average HP of a commoner.
So, basically, any half-competent doctor can patch up like a whole city in a couple of hours... Which means that "narratively wise", you shouldn't overthink out of combat healing cause it's straight up broken from the get go lol...
Travis James Hall wrote: (I’m not sure where you get the 120 people limit - it’s another 30 foot burst, which means 96 squares on the template… but then again, each person needing a full 5 foot square is a game mechanic that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, or the setting. But 96, 100, 120, it’s all similar enough not to matter much.) Emanations are a bit larger than bursts because they start from the token area but without counting it.
For example, a 5 ft burst covers a 2×2 square because it's put on the edge of a square, so the size limit accounts for every adjacent square from the target edge. A 5 ft emanation for the other side can count the token squares as an area 0, and then begin to count adjacent squares as 5 ft becoming a 3×3 AoE. This difference of one more square radius also counts for larger AoE like those used by 3-action healing and can even become larger if the creature size is more than medium.
For better or worse, Paizo has made out of combat pretty easy to acquire for a huge range of characters but at the cost of character resources (class feats, skill feats, etc). Compare this to PF1 where it cost no character resources but some money (Cure Light Wound wands).
I think the current best out of combat healing is provided by the Animist, but at the cost of them having to dedicate one of their apparitions to it (a moderate but definitely affordable cost).
But the medic archetype exists for non magical solutions. And there are oodles of magical solutions (a LOT of classes have options and the Blessed One archetype exists).
For in combat healing the Heal spell is still the best option available.
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
You can also go the Pathfinder Society route, Pearly White Spindle Aeon Stone for everybody, just walk to your new assignment fresh and whole.
shroudb wrote: So, basically, any half-competent doctor can patch up like a whole city in a couple of hours... Which means that "narratively wise", you shouldn't overthink out of combat healing cause it's straight up broken from the get go lol... Yeah, this is really where the concern lies. Applying game mechanics to the situation they are not really intended to cover produces undesired results. I don’t think the intent of Pathfinder’s mechanics is to produce worlds where serious injury just doesn’t exist; where regular people are healed within ten minutes of visiting a (non-magical) doctor no matter the consequences, short of death, of an accident that has befallen them.
And narrative elements involving NPC injury in an adventure, like our recent session, are just where sometimes the fiction doesn’t fully meet the mechanics that are designed to provide for a fun tactical combat experience.
Every 1st level cleric (and some others) can prepare the heal spell, which covers a 30ft emanation - ~120 people, assuming they have to be one to a 5ft square - which they wouldn’t be, you can pack them in closer than that*.
So if you can survive until the next heal spell is scheduled (and I’d expect it could often be expedited anyways) you’re fine. Only time you’re dying from a normal injury is if it kills you before that. Interestingly this also means deaths from childbirth are extremely rare.
What you actually die from is disease, which is historically a much larger driver of death than simple injures anyways.
*If the bodies of the people to be healed block the spell when there’s enough of them, the cleric stands on a raised pillar/ladder/whatever to have line of effect on everyone at the cost of a slightly smaller radius. In cities you might have a dedicated room.
ScooterScoots wrote: Every 1st level cleric (and some others) can prepare the heal spell, which covers a 30ft emanation - ~120 people, assuming they have to be one to a 5ft square - which they wouldn’t be, you can pack them in closer than that*.
So if you can survive until the next heal spell is scheduled (and I’d expect it could often be expedited anyways) you’re fine.
This has me wondering why anyone is bothering to learn the also-effectively-miraculous medicine skill, if there are Heal spells scheduled every few hours.
ScooterScoots wrote: What you actually die from is disease, which is historically a much larger driver of death than simple injures anyways. I didn’t suggest that people were routinely dying of injuries anyway. What is missing is the need to rest and recover following an injury (among other things, I suppose, as there are other aspects of this that could be important in the story). If all injury is easily recovered within an hour, it just feels to me like we aren’t dealing with human (or close-to-human) bodies any more.
I’ve said many a time before (across multiple systems) that when injury is important to the story of our RPGs, it is often necessary to set aside the system to deal with it. Hit points are an abstraction designed to help make the tactical combat fun, not to model injury. If I’m doing that, it really isn’t a much longer leap to insist that curing injuries requires something more than mere hit point restoration.
Travis James Hall wrote: This has me wondering why anyone is bothering to learn the also-effectively-miraculous medicine skill, if there are Heal spells scheduled every few hours. This is actually reflected in the worldbuilding: Rahadoum is the only place that bothered to research the field of medicine in any depth, because they're an atheist nation in a world where every other has been over-relying on divine magic to heal. As a result, however, they made such tremendous breakthroughs that medicine has become much more popular even outside its borders, as it is able to provide significant healing in the field without drawing upon one's magical reserves. It's perhaps not essential in a settlement with Clerics willing to cure your ailments with heal, cleanse affliction, and so on, but it is invaluable to adventurers who would want to save those limited daily spells for emergencies.
In my opinion, I also feel this particular use of the Radiant epithet, while perhaps a little game-y due to its reliance on transcendence spam, is probably fine in context: yes, this does mean an Exemplar could miraculously heal a mass of injured people, and that in my opinion is perfectly in line with the character's theme of being a demigod. These civilians aren't adventurers ready to assist the party and give them an immediate advantage in combat, and the net consequence of this healing, aside from giving the Exemplar a strong roleplaying opportunity, will likely be something the GM will handle through RP as well.
I’ve found some rules details that are relevant.
I looked more closely at the Exploration Activities rules (including those found in the GM Core, which I haven’t previously looked at closely because I’m not the GM for this game). The guidelines allow for a fair bit of GM choice here, but in general the activities are based on performing one action every six seconds, rather than three. 3 actions per round is intended to be sustained for only a very brief period. So, that would slow our Exemplar to using The Radiant every 12 seconds, because he alternates Spark Transcendence (which causes his Immanence to move) with Shift Transcendence (putting his Immanence back into his preferred Ikon for doing this). Possibly a character could be built to just cycle through multiple Ikons, but then there may be more side effects of the repeated Sparkings. Anyway, that reduces the hp restoration to 3000/hour, split across at least 50 characters, which still seems very large but halved is a bit more reasonable. (And now much more on a par with Sacred Ground.)
Also, Repeat a Spell (the closest activity given to what is being attempted here) says that doing this with some spells causes fatigue. (Sustain a Spell has the same limitation.).The specific factor mentioned is having to make complex decisions, but if creating a new activity (which is what we are talking about here) it seems pretty reasonable to consider other factors that might contribute to fatigue. The description of what is required to Spark Transcendence seems like another factor that could cause fatigue when doing this as an exploration activity. And fatigue doesn’t stop a character from performing all exploration activities, just the ones that also allow travelling. So now it’s an activity that the character can do, but at a cost. He can do it for multiples of 10 minutes, but the logic on the inability to travel and perform an activity together is that the character can’t keep up the pace of an action every 6 seconds while fatigued, dropping to an action every 12 seconds, so the rate of healing should be halved after 10 minutes. Now we are down to 500 hp split across up to 50 characters in the first 10 minutes, 250 hp split across 25 characters for every 10 minutes after that, and the penalties of fatigue. And that sounds like a much more narratively-interesting decision to me. It’s no longer a freebie, with this character restoring everyone to full hit points wherever he goes as a matter of course.
Much of that logic is likely to apply to other forms of spammed healing, like the kineticist’s and animist’s abilities, too. I haven’t looked closely enough at those to have worked out all their details.
The other thing I have noticed is that The Radiant is not a healing ability. The Heal spell has the Healing tag. So does Sacred Ground. The Radiant does not. Its hit points restoration effect has Mental and Emotion, but not Healing.
Now, it is important to understand that hit points are not a model of injury. Loss of hit points may be due to injury, but it can be other things. Gain of hit points is not necessarily healing of injury.
So based on the tags and the description, I would be inclined to say that The Radiant does not actually heal injury at all. It might help people to press on despite injury, but in the fiction,I’d be inclined not to describe it as knitting flesh and bone back together at all.
(Not that I am the GM for this game, mind. I don’t know whether she or the other player would like that approach.)
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
Teridax wrote: This is actually reflected in the worldbuilding: Rahadoum is the only place that bothered to research the field of medicine in any depth For similar lore and story reasons, the surgeons of Lepidstadt are quite good in Ustalav. Their interest in medicine came from a different approach.
As described by others, there is the difference between hit point damage in a tactical setting and applying the ability to go from "beaten within an inch of your life" to "perfectly fine" in a few minutes for the world at large. There have been dozens of ways that systems have tried to balance this out with Wounds, Vitality vs HP, penalties as you become more injured, et cetera. Pathfinder doesn't want to be a simulationist game which means that there are going to be odd interactions with how the system works when applied to population level systems instead of tactical level systems.
That is where the shared storytelling also comes in. Yes, in a small town (we'll use Sandpoint as the exemplar) there will be a cleric who can cast Heal. That works fine if you are in town, but the farmers, hunters, and loggers are much higher risk. The risk of Bleeding damage and Disease also becomes much higher because the cleric has to choose to save multiple folks when there is an attack on the town or give a heal to the higher level sheriff. What if the cleric is visiting a sick family a few hours outside of town? Now we have dynamics that allow for a broader story and the chance for the PCs to actually be heroes and step in.
Also, the transition from encounter mode to exploration mode is very much at GM discretion. The Exemplar can reasonably restore hit points to a half dozen other party members without becoming fatigued, if applying that ruling.
|
