How do healing spells work? Can I get a step by step example? In my games even healing the essence 6 character threat and heal never seem to heal more than a couple boxes. It just seems useless to me. What am I doing wrong?

Heal is the best power to heal awakened characters and the only one that I know of that works without penalties.

To get more than a couple boxes, you basically need to throw your entire pool into it and a caster who has Sorcery Aptitude. If you can get both, then a Sorc 6 plus 6 from your pool will average 8 successes or 4 boxes healed, and 4 boxes is pretty darned good. Don't forget that different sets of wounds (up to your GM to determine what a "set" is) can be healed seperately.

Doing any more than that requires getting someone with a Sorc higher than 6, which admittingly isn't easy to get.

Every success heals one box, not 2 for 1. So on an Essence 6 character, using Heal or Treat, with 6+6 dice, you'll typically get 6 successes, assuming no modifiers (or that you center them away). That's 6 boxes healed, by a starting character! Don't forget to do some First Aid as well and you can go from 9 to 0 in the space of a couple of minutes.

They're pretty handy spells, especially for use on high Essence and low Bio Index characters, and especially combined with First Aid.

Thanks, Now some more questons. When the magician is resisting drain what is the level of drain resisted? Is it rounded up or down to the nearest would level of the total wounds the target has suffered? Also what effects do the bio-index of the target have on the healing?

The drain level is the the same as the wound being healed. If the magician is healing a serious wound, for example, then the damage of the drain is serios.

Bio-index, since it does not affect essence like cyberware, does not affect healing spells, IIRC. I could be wrong, though. Confirmation, anyone?

but what if the target has serious plus 2 boxes?

M&M page 78. 1/2 your bio index is applied as a TN mod to all healing tests, including magical healing tests.

A wound is considered serious from the labeled box up to the box before deadly. 9 boxes of damage is still serious, not deadly.

A few observations/comments:

The "base TN" for Heal or Treat is "10-Essence". Since it does not describe Essence as a "penalty" to the spell, IMHO you should not be able to Center vs. Penalties in order to lower this. Essence isn't a penalty, it's a benefit to the spell! If they wanted you to be able to center they could have described the TN as 4, with a penalty of how much essence the character has lost.

I believe that the best definition of a "Set of Wounds" is "All the physical Wounds received by the character since the last Magical Healing (for Heal)". For Treat, we'd also limit it to what damage had been received within the last hour. If a character receives 8 boxes of damage during an encounter, consider that a set.

Heal/Treat are limited in their effect to the Force of the spell. For a Troll who has 16 boxes of Damage, First Aid can't reduce it and a Force 6 Heal or Treat can't do more than reduce the damage to 10 boxes.

I will occasionally make a beginning character who is intended to be a great Healer, but with no starting Heal or Treat spell. Instead he earns Karma and tries to learn Heal or Treat at Force 7 or 8 after a few adventures.

Note that a correction to SR3 in the 3rd printing made it so that the Stabilize Spell needs a Force at least equal to the number of boxes of Overdamage to have an affect. A Troll who has taken 23 boxes of damage (13 overflow), and then receives 6 magical healing, still can't be stabilized with a Force 6 Stabilize spell.

I would think a decent [specific?] spell focus and an Ally spirit would make it possible, if not easy. And then one could consider karma pool.

Let's assume an Essence 2, or a TN of 8.

7 dice for Sorcery (Spellcasting)
7 dice from Spell Pool
7 dice from Focus
7 dice from Ally Spirit
28 dice with one Karma reroll nets around seven or eight successes.

Don't forget that using mundane First Aid first can be extremely helpful. Successful first aid puts the character at the next lower wound level. Someone who takes 5 boxes of damage (still Moderate) can be brought down to 1 box (Light), while someone who takes 9 boxes of damage (still Serious) can be brought down to 3 boxes (Moderate). So if you do first aid, then magical healing, it is much easier to completely heal a character.

Not only that, but it reduces the Drain on the healing spell, so you're not as likely to incapacitate your mage for a couple hours after the healing.

The exception to this is when the injured person is in Overdamage territory. Then it's better to use Heal/Treat first, to try to get the characer down to a Serious wound, then use First Aid to put him back to Moderate.

read the text carefully, a strict reading of the text shows that one can cast heal on a wounded subject, give them a light wound, then cast again with full effect... in short one can repeatedly use heal if one has a combat knife

It all depends on what a "single set of wounds" means to you. If you define it as Wounds up till the next time the person is damaged, then Kremlin's interpretation is perfectly legitimate, blatant or not.

If on the other hand, you interprete that a single set means a single Light/Moderate/Serious/Deadly wound without cumulation, then Kremlin's interpretation is wrong. But now, you can cast Heal over and over for each different set of wounds.

You can have one or the other (maybe there can be another set of interpretations) but you need to be consistant. Using Funk's method, the only consistant thing is going to be anything the GM allows goes, which might make for a better game, but is not going to have much consistancy.

A further question would be what constitutes magical healing? Does Alleviate Allergy or Cure Disease or Antidote count? What is the rule that yuo use to determine what is a magical healing? For me, it is quite simple; the spell needs to remove or attempt to remove Wound boxes: that is magical healing.

Not a big deal, toturi, but there is the interpretation I put forth 6 hours ago. It does not match either of your interpretations, and I think it is the one that the writers intended.

IMHO, if magical healing is successful but leaves one or more boxes of physical damage, those boxes are part of a "set" of wounds. Any wounds received until the next successful magical healing make up the next set.

True, your interpretation is valid as well. My point was that the GM needs be consistant.

The other thing that is important about magical healing is it can really reduce the time and cost of natral healing. If your street sam was at 6 boxes, and got healed for only 1, it means that he now has a moderate wound, which heals faster, and does not require hospitalization. Healing someone at deadly of one box saves you a lot of healing time and hospitalization fees.

A street sam with symbiotes-3 and the quick healer edge just needs a slight push to bet fine in just a few days.

One thing that caught my attention, why are people casting Heal or Treat on a character in overdamage? Granted, it decreases the number of boxes the character is over Deadly, but if I remember correctly, Stabilise takes you down to 10 boxes on a sucessful cast.

Just thought I'd ask the question.

Our team, your ruling is pretty much what I use in my games, they really needed better examples in this section... Funkenstein, you don't know me so the misunderstanding is reasonable, but I wasn't trying to lood hole the rules so much as make a joke about the loop hole.

Tot, I would rule that those spells are not magical healing... only spells which reduce boxes of damage are literally healing spells for the purposes of this debate.

I guess they changed this over the errataes, but I honestly thought you only got one healing shot, make it be Magical or First Aid. After that all other attempts would be wasted. Then again, my BBB as the FASA logo plastered on its side and FANPRO have a way of changing things ...

Concerning Treat: I wonder why they changed the TN from 8-Ess to 10-Ess?

Pixel, the drain code for Treat isn't as severe as for Heal. Personally though, I think 8-ESS would be much better but then again, I'm a guy who thinks a human should have Essence 3 :o)

Noname, I'm pretty sure my book says that Stabilise drops you back to 10 boxes. I could be mistaken, but I don't think I am. Though to be honest, very few of my players ever take overflow. They either go down in the first volley or not at all :o(

Well Kage, as the old chiche goes, each to his own and it takes all kinds :o)

It does make healing the PC shapeshifter awefully easy though, TN 2 for treat and no bioware :o)

Or then again you might just want to let him regenerate and save yourself the Drain.

Uhhh. A shapeshifter regenerates partial damage at the end of the Combat Turn even if he only has 3 or 8 boxes of damage.

/Edit: The only time I believe Treat or Heal is useful on a Shapeshifter is when he fails to regenerate after reaching Deadly, but has not yet exceeded his Overflow Boxes.

If he takes Deadly, he needs to roll to regenerate. If he takes anything less, it all vanishes at the end of the combat turn, no chance about it.

~J

Where's it say that? I looked for it and couldn't find it, so I ruled that the shifter could invoke regeneration as an exclusive complex action. Still had to test for magic loss too.

Critters, page 14.
The creature suffers standard penalties for the rest of the Combat Turn in which he is wounded, but those wounds are normally healed at the end of the Turn. It's only if the creature reaches 10+ boxes that it has to check for failure to regenerate.

I always thought each time the char was damaged, shot, cut, etc, counted as a seperate wound.

Why would you fudge for a shifter and not for a regular PC anyways?

No, I fudge for them all.... but I won't be for the shifter. Last night the shifter's player decided to not bother rolling damage resistance for a 6S falling damage because he knew he'd regenerate......

Get even passed his magic loss check.

You don't roll magic loss for a serious, He didn't even have to pick up a die for that either. You only roll for magic loss at a deadly.

Really? Oh crap.

Well, guess that changes things too...

I know this might not be what was intended, but I read a wound as a wound. In other words if you get shoot in the foot for 2 and then shot in the arm for 4 you can heal either of those wounds 1 at a time.

I now see that this is incorrect?

Feonyx

Magical healing can be useful for shifters spellcasters. They only heal one box of drain every minute and can't implant trauma dampners.

I think the rules intend Our Team's interpretation. But we use seperate injuries. I.e. if someone takes an M from a pistol and an S from a shotgun, we would allow two heal spells, the first only able to heal 3 boxes of damage (i.e. the moderate wound). If it had been a single D wound, it would have to be one spell, and obviously they would only be able to heal up to the force of the spell in boxes so they probably couldn't heal it all.

If the mage wants to attempt it and has a spell powerful enough to heal all 9 boxes from the first example in one go, we'd also allow that. The spell becomes more flexible, and it makes life easier for the mage and makes characters more survivable - but its most definately a house rule. The example in the book I don't beleive is clear enough, but I think Our Team has the correct canon interpretation. We didn't like it, so we changed it.

I was thinking more about a few minutes passing before HRT could reach the fallen troll who might have only taken a light and a deadly. It's not as if stabilize is extremely useful beyond this role, but perhaps a more canon "number of successes up to the Force * 2" would work better.