Disclaimer: I know this is a tired discussion, but I had a question about Healing powers in WiP.
Situation:
My group consists of a very few players, two PCs and myself. One of my players has a character that I often found a little problematic in terms of balancing due to the wide scope of her power set.
Specifically:
She is from another dimension where she’s basically a medieval, magical, cop. She was very talented in her home dimension and such was in Special Ops (so to speak) and that dimension has a lot of magical stuff going on. Namely that everyone is born with a manifest spirit companion that shows your life experience in it’s personality and appearance. She is also in possession of life manipulation powers / as she was gifted with this at birth and honed it over many years of training. So she can heal wounds by manipulating her life energy and that of those around her.
Short Story:
She really pissed off an evil tyrant and he banished her from her home dimension to our worlds dystopian future.
The Issue:
On her character sheet she has Heal Wounds in Difficult powers and Bring Someone Back from the Dead in Impossible. I know that having the power Heal Wounds makes it possible for her to just heal physical wounds as long as she spends some time doing it. Since it’s Difficult it’s not something she can do without concerted concentration and effort.
The Question:
In order for the Conditions mechanic to stick, should I switch what I’m giving her conditions for?
Clarification:
I’m wondering if I should narrate physical injuries happening, but, since they’re not really consequential for our characters (unless they’re life threatening and Critical) given that they’ve got a dedicated Healer in the group, I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to switch my Conditions from things like “Broken Wrist” and “Punctured Lung” over to things like “Shaken Courage” and “Doubting my Philosophy.”
In this way there wouldn’t even be a question about whether or not she could heal it away, and it makes a lot of sense to me that she would be able to Fit In to make those conditions go away.
Thoughts?
I know you’re probably watching this community like a hawk right now anyway Kyle Simons, but I’m tagging you in anyway. 🙂
Hah! It’s actually coming up on 1:30 am for me over here, so I’m on my way to bed but let me get my thoughts down first. I’ll check back in when I wake up just in case.
You could go either way, or mix both I think. I’ve had a couple PCs with healing factors before and I usually do a mix of both – I play up other aspects of the character rather than the physical (so like you said, stuff that affects them emotionally like making them anger, reckless, etc. even worked well as it was in keeping with their character concept).
I also wanted them to get screen time for their powers though, so when there was big hits I’d narrate massive trauma and then say it’s not so bad for you though as you look down and watch your body stitch itself back together, that kind of thing.
The only time it gets a bit tricky is when they’re wanting to recover from Conditions in downtime as it can be a bit counter-intuitive for the player. I still have them Fit In to recover, and their healing factor can be brought into the scene if they like and everything, but I don’t let the power be an excuse to forego any personal narrative. I’ve even had some change a physical Condition to an emotional one after a miss on a move, so I’m pretty fluid with it. As long as they know and you’ve both talked about ways to keep things dangerous and all that it should work out well.
Awesome! I’ve been struggling with a way to go back to that game and make my player feel like her healing factor is working the way she wants it too for a while so i’m glad to see that I’m really starting to grok the system in that my solution was similar to the one that you’ve been messing with already. I do like the idea of changing a physical condition into an emotional/mental condition. I think that this will really help my game.
Thanks again, Kyle! Get to bed man. Sleep easy.