Re: [HOE] Sykers and healing [Hopler]

[PEGHopler@aol.com]

In a message dated 8/1/00 12:53:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time, tsm@jlab.org 
writes:

<< Doesn't this make Sykers INCREDIBLY powerful and also kind of annoying?
 After any fight they can heal ANY wound no matter what (just takes time to
 build up the strain) sure they might go bust, but as most sykers have a
 5d12+ in blastin' the odds are pretty much negligible (maybe I'll try and
 figure it out). Add to that an annoyance factor:
 "Before we go in I want heal."
 <roll>
 "Didn't make it, I'll try again."
 <roll>
 "Almost, another try."
 <roll>
 "Damn!"
 <roll>
 
 Meanwhile the trucker has grown a third leg because the Doomsayer healed
 that critical wound and the templar is desperately waiting for that 23
 hours and 59 minutes to pass so he can try and heal his critical wound to
 the guts all the way down to a serious wound.
 This seems a little out of balance... >>

I've never had it cause a problem in my game. Any syker worthy of the name is 
going to make his roll for minor wounds on the first or second try. More 
serious stuff may be a little harder, but it is also very time consuming. If 
the posse has the time to sit around and heal up that's fine. If the heroes 
are up against some sort of time constraint, they're going to have to choose 
between allowing the syker time to heal and making progress. Add to that the 
time it takes for a badly wounded syker to get his Strain back after healing 
himself and it really adds up. Plus, sykers can only heal themselves.

In general, I have no problem with heroes being able to patch themselves up 
fairly quickly after a combat. It allows the group to get on with the 
adventure. One of my player's guest-GMed for a while and I actually got to 
play. Our only healer was put out of commission early in the game and the 
rest of the game was really frustrating because we were all walking around 
with -3 and -4 modifiers. (If you read this Dave, the adventure was great, it 
was just the wound mods that sucked). This past Sunday, two of the heroes in 
my game got put down and were within a few rounds of bleeding to death (one 
was bleeding at 6 Wind per round). If it weren't for the healing powers in my 
posse, the group would have had to make the decision of aborting their 
mission and basically putting the adventure on hold while they tried to get 
to a safe place where they could heal up or continuing in a much weakened 
state. That would have forced me to either scale back the threat level of the 
adventure or wipe the entire posse out--not much fun.


John Hopler
Pinnacle