Negative Healing Effects, ...stop me before I hurt someone (incorrectly) Options

[MikeKozar]

Looking for a quick rule clarification on spells from the Health class. How many of these suffer the dice pool modifier for lost essence on the target? I get that I'll be short five dice trying to heal the party's cybersam, but what if I'm trying to Drain Logic a bouncer with three points of cyberware? How about if I'm trying to Detox a junky who has already taken Essence loss due to heavy addiction? I kind of like the idea of a weak aura resulting in all Health spells having trouble sticking, but I'm pretty sure the Essence penalty is only supposed to apply to Heal.

How do you run it?

[Muspellsheimr]

As written, it technically only applies to healing (not specifically the Heal spell). For clarity, I suggest altering it to apply to any Curative Health spell.

Most Health spells are curative, healing
damage, curing disease, and neutralizing tox-
ins;

Still not quite as precise as I would like, but close enough.

[Draco18s]

Detrimental health effects are not usually affected by the essence penalty (see: Harm). Others should probably be effected, but it is ambiguous in some cases.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

What justification is there for having a penalty? It makes it to difficult for the mage (or magic) to determine what state to restore to?

Oh, that'd be a nice glitch result - your boxes are healed, but your body rejects your left cyber arm. Roll Body against infection.

[MikeKozar]

What justification is there for having a penalty? It makes it to difficult for the mage (or magic) to determine what state to restore to?

Oh, that'd be a nice glitch result - your boxes are healed, but your body rejects your left cyber arm. Roll Body against infection.

Well, if you're asking RAW...

Healing Characters with Implants: Low-Essence characters are
more difficult to heal, as implants (or other damage) disrupt the body’s
holistic integrity. In game terms, this means a dice pool modifier applies
to the Spellcasting Test equal to the subject’s lost Essence (rounded
down). So trying to heal a character with Essence 4 (2 Essence
points of implants) incurs a –2 dice pool modifier.

...as for me, personally? I like to make every decision a player makes about a character important. It's like foreshadowing in a movie - if a character mentions they can 'fix anything with tires', then it's a safe bet that they'll have to prove it at some point in the film. If a character is low-essence, I like to play up the fact that they're a walking death machine, but they're also only barely alive/human. Mages flinch, animals get creeped out, Healing magic sputters...you are become Deathbot, Destroyer of Heavy Response Teams, and all it cost you was %95 of your soul. Any opportunity I can find to remind the player that their character is unique and his decisions are important makes the character a little more developed. I'm not looking for leverage here, just flavor.

You do make an interesting point about cyborgs having a strange biology. I had always played it as an aura deficiency, but that could be interesting as well. Thanks!

[Draco18s]

It has to do with the fact that if your cybersam gets shot, the odds that the bullet went through flesh is pretty slim, and magic doesn't heal cyberware.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

Mike, yes I read that section just before I posted, and was wondering if there was justification for it. The meta justification is "game balance". I'm hoping for an in-world justification. Any others, beside the one I just thought of.

The answer could help determine what spells are affected by the rule.

[LurkerOutThere]

I'm still convinced that the wording regarding all healing (not just magical) penalizing for lost essence is a mistake. Now from a logic standpoint if health magic has a harder time working on people with health based magic why would it differentiate healing or harming?

Of course i feel either case is just more of the tech hate which the setitng has more then enough of.

[Godwyn]

Lost essence does apply a penalty to regular healing as well. Core book p. 244.

The holistic integrity is an in-world explanation as well. The cyberzombie description mentions their cells constantly trying to commit suicide because they know they are not supposed to keep functioning. While essence does not equate to will to live, it does equate to the spirit connection to the flesh, and with a reduced animating spirit, the flesh does not function on its own as well.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

If it was *really* tech hate, it would give you a bonus to harmful health spells for low essence. I mean, those cybergoons are already halfway messed up already, right? No, wait - if their auras are messed up, they should be just plain hard to target. That would be totally unbalanced.

[MikeKozar]

Of course i feel either case is just more of the tech hate which the setitng has more then enough of.

I've heard this a few times on Dumpshock, and I'm still not sure I understand why people are so bitter about the Essence rules. The idea that Cyberware is traumatic, and too much of it *will* kill you, has been a part of the setting since the beginning. In my mind, the rules actually are too soft on guys with less then half a point of Essence remaining - since every component has a predictable and precise amount of Essence Loss, there's no way to accidentally get killed going down to .1 Essence short of an addition error, despite being %0.0166 from death.

I'm not saying that cyborgs need to be punished or nerfed, I just think its a very interesting part of the universe. Any time I can remind them of the grim sacrifice they made for power, I sneak it in...just fluff, of course, not trying to kill them with it. Spending 45,000 nuyen for a 3-point stat boost is *boring*...losing a big chunk of what makes you metahuman in exchange for becoming a ruthless and efficient killer, that's interesting.

[Aerospider]

Now from a logic standpoint if health magic has a harder time working on people with health based magic why would it differentiate healing or harming?

Consider a computer made from 75% alien technology, including some materials you have no scientific understanding of. Repairing it would be a hell of a lot harder than fixing something you bought on the High Street yesterday, but smashing one to the point of lost functionality is just as easy as it is for the other.

Magic 'understands' life-force and the associated materials but not the artificial substitutes, so restorative/optimisational spells (that relate to the body) have a harder time when these are present in the subject. A detrimental spell, however, doesn't need to take account of artifical elements and processes just to throw a spanner in the works.

If, however, one's view were that the essence-loss penalty was a result of the weakened mana link between body and spirit, then the penalty should apply to ALL spells cast on augmented subjects directly (but I for one do not support this view).