"And you. You can't just put on a helmet and a cape and call yourself Doctor. Some of us went to medical school and earned our title. Now, please take this small girl out of my operating room, MISTER Fate."
More D20 talk. What can I say? It's my favorite system right now. I've been in more games of Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder than anything else. I've been in games with probably hundreds of different systems. I've even done a bunch of homebrews(Check out SeeD if you like Final Fantasy!), but everyone always seems to return to good old D&D. Really, it's the Pepperoni Pizza of the gaming world: it's some people's favorite, but not everyone. Most people can agree on it though, and the few who adamantly refuse it are often just being contrary on purpose. I'd like to take this time to do something completely unrelated to the topic and wave hello to a few of you.
It means you notice things. While there's really not THAT much difference between me and a newbie in terms of applicable system knowledge(I promise you that) I've been around so long that I've noticed where the cracks in design are. No system is perfect(Except for you, Shadowrun 3rd edition. I love you, babe.) but a lot of the problems you see in popular, hyper-playtested systems are little ones. Stuff everyone just lives with, and because everyone lives with them, they get passed down between editions.
When Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 came out, you have to understand it was a game-changer in a lot of ways. 2E used things called Non-Weapon Proficiencies. Basically, you only ever got a couple, and even then they weren't super impactful on an average game. In addition to that, fighters spent their NWPs on stuff involving weapons(pause for irony), AND a lot of the useful and sneaky stuff was strictly under the purview of rogue. If you wanted to be stealthy, acrobatic, or good at climbing things and you weren't a rogue? Rough luck, buddy. 3E introduced skill points and class skills. This meant that you got a certain amount of ability per level and you could put it wherever you wanted. If you were willing to sacrifice a bit or just take one level of a sneaky class, ANYONE could be sneaky. Compared to 2E, it was a lot of freedom and meant the game was overall more engaging.
One of the problems with this new system was that they sort of didn't know what should be a skill and what shouldn't. Some things were split just like they were in 2E like Hide and Move Silently. Others were just plain logical like Listen, Spot, and Search. There were frankly bizarre skills like Read Lips, Use Rope and Scrying. There was also a skill that still doesn't really seem to do anything USEFUL, Profession. Only Rogue really got a luxurious amount of skill points, so the large number of skills meant some just didn't see any use. If you knew someone with points in Scrying, it was probably because he was making a deliberate effort to try and make Scrying useful.
Later editions (and some other D20 properties like Mutants and Masterminds) would lump skills together to solve the issue. Listen and Spot became Perception. Move Silently and Hide became Stealth. Others had their incredibly thin uses lumped into other skills: Gather Information was rolled into Diplomacy, Read Lips just became perception, and I'm pretty sure Use Rope was just removed because nobody in the whole history of the game was ever justified in putting points into it.
So stuff like Use Rope and Scrying were removed, but I noticed a skill that really fell through the cracks. I'm not surprised, since problems that are passive tend to get overlooked. Heal has the same issues that skills like Scrying or Read Lips had, but isn't nearly as obvious. In fact, even if they'd defend Heal, I think most people already know how useless it is. I see people take Heal in one solitary situation: When they're playing an archetypal doctor and would logically be very good at it. Fluff, in other words.
I know some skills just aren't going to come up as much. That's okay, because they're often invaluable the times they DO come up: Decipher Script and its big brother Linguistics can save the players real-time hours of dicking around by providing valuable clues, or enrich the experience by rewarding a good check with some world or plot fluff. Heal just isn't one you're going to be rolling, though. Its primary use in games that don't have an Investigate skill is to find out what happened to a dead body, which is a pretty invaluable use, honestly.
It's also a house-rule. That use isn't actually in the books. Not in any supplement I ever saw, anyway.
So that clever but non-official use aside, Heal has a long list of things it does and some of them even sound pretty awesome. So let me do my favorite thing and go down da list and tell you why that's bullshit. To make this fun, I'm going to use a code word for a very common problem that plagues virtually every use of heal. I'll reveal what it means at the end of this section, so whenever you see the word "präst", try to guess. No peeking.
First Aid. This is the only use of the skill that's rolled very often. It can be helpful at low levels to save someone from death, but this drops off severely at higher levels. The thing is, negative hit points is ruled by your CON score, and it never goes up. Damage does, however, go up, so someone being at negative hit points instead of just stone dead happens less often. This is also the second biggest victim of präst simply by virtue of how often it comes up in a game.
Treat Wounds from Caltrops, Spike Growth, or Spike Stones. This use basically has to exist even though nobody in their right mind has used caltrops in the last twenty years. In addition to that, injuries from all three share the same method of removal: Ten minutes and a Heal check, 24 hours of time, or the barest amount of präst applied. The thing is, all three of these things are chiefly used to assist someone's escape, right? That means ten minutes may as well be 24 hours because it's a LOT of time the other person can use to get away. Ten minutes of a double move action each turn is 6,000 feet. So, over a mile. This makes präst the only way to remove the penalty and still keep chase.
Long Term Care. Useful really only for downtime with no access to präst. The fact that it's only a DC 15 and only ever happens on downtime means this skill is a prime candidate for always taking a ten. Heal isn't a trained only skill either, so this all means there's no reason to put points into the skill for this purpose.
Treat Deadly Wounds. I think this was added in pathfinder If not, it was buffed. Its arguably the only useful thing Heal can do, and even then, it's not very good. This ability is the only thing that Pathfinder Unchained's Skill Unlocks system buffs. Basically, make a heal check and give someone HP back. Combined with Skill Unlocks it's not even that bad. However, aside from the obvious fact that präst beats the shit out of it, it takes an hour to make the check, meaning that you can't use this at the end of the day to assist the entire party. Meaning it's far, far less useful than it seems.
Treat Poison and Treat Disease. These two got lumped together because they have the same problems. Simply put, even a successful check only gives a +4 to the next save the person makes. In addition, the check doesn't remain easy, and is going to rise as the PCs face bigger and nastier poisons or diseases. All still only for a +4. Aside from präst obviously being the far superior way to handle this, poisons will nearly always expend all their saves in combat. Thus the victim is stuck with a potentially huge amount of ability damage and all the heal user can do is shrug. Diseases will sometimes do the same, but if they do not, they leave ample time for the player to find outside help.
Did you guess? Präst is the Swedish word for Priest, and for our purposes has stood-in for divine magic. The fact is, there are so many sources of divine magic that even a party that doesn't have a cleric, oracle, bard, druid, alchemist, paladin, warpriest, or other divine caster is still going to have some sort of magic item to compensate. The problem is that Heal can not be used as a supplement to spells, unlike skills like disguise, perception, diplomacy or stealth. Spells overwrite all of heal's uses. Divine Casters will always have spell slots or uses of class abilities like Lay on Hands or Fervor to use at the end of the day, and even serious "I go hard in the paint" warcasters who never memorize things like Cure Disease can do so the next morning.
What would I do to fix it? I hate doing this, I really do. In my mind, it crosses the line from teaching to thinking I'm better than someone else. Still, this one has some easy fixes and that's the only reason we're doing this. First, make investigation and knowledge a core use of the skill. Easy. Most groups already do that. Second, make the Skill Unlock buff of Treat Deadly Wounds baseline. All it does is increase the number of HP returned based on your ranks. Tie it to a scaling skill check if you must. Then, make Treat Deadly Wounds take roughly ten minutes. It already has a "once every 24 hours" restriction, so this will not impact throughput. Ten minutes per use means a healer can roll it for everyone in an average sized party at the end of the night as a supplement to save their cleric some spell slots in a pinch. It still leaves the skill with many non-uses, but it'd finally be something you wanted to put points into outside of flavor.
Speaking of that, don't cry for Heal. No, it's got a brother we don't talk about. A skill so bad I can't even fill an entire post about it, so we're tacking this paragraph on to the end of another post. Profession claims to be skills relating to a particular job's basic tasks and knowledge about the job in question. However, outside of some very esoteric things, it can't actually do anything another skill doesn't already do. If your GM's even allowing you to roll Profession to accomplish things covered by other skills, he is being nice. Clerk? Scribe? Researcher? Librarian? Try Linguistics. Gardener? Herbalist? Fisherman? Butcher? Woodcutter? Isn't that Survival? Brewer. Tanner. Sounds like Craft to me. Literally, tell me what Profession(Shepard) would cover that Handle Animal wouldn't do better. No, outside of some ridiculously esoteric stuff the only thing Profession ever does, the only thing it's supposed to do is make you a pathetically small amount of gold. Remove Profession. Change its only book-listed use into a basic "Plying a trade" check any other skill can roll, or just fucking remove it entirely because nobody's ever actually going to roll it. It's never more than a pathetically small amount of gold and the only value it's ever had was that which was added by more complex downtime systems presented as alternate rules, like in Pathfinder Unchained. So, unless your GM brings those up, forget Profession exists. Unless you want a few ranks of flavor, I guess.
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