The post from a few weeks ago about new healing spells for D&D sparked a conversation about new healing approaches for LARPing. In this case, I’m mostly interested in the hit-location based LARPs that I’m playing – hit point games are fine if that’s your thing, but I’m not the best person to ask about those mechanics. I’m also not particularly trying to speak to Accelerant games, which I’ve never played because I live in the South.

First, the History

History starts* with Shattered Isles in 1996. Shattered Isles supported nonmagical, slow healing as well as instantaneous magical healing. For nonmagical healing, a character could buy Healing Ways, followed by Chirurgery, or they could invest in Brewing (let’s call it semi-magical), for which one of the main products was healing brews.

*obviously all of these ideas came from somewhere, I just don’t know all of the prior experience and design conversations that went into this.

When a character takes a hit to a limb without sufficient protection, that limb is wounded and can’t be used. Same for the torso and a torso wound. Three limb wounds, two untreated limb wounds + 10 minutes, or a torso wound, and you’re unconscious and bleeding to death. It takes 5 minutes to bleed to death (with some other Advantages, Disadvantages, and other game effects modifying this time).

Healing Ways has the healer spend 1 minute in safe contact with the target (uninterrupted; no actual physical contact required) to bring a target that is bleeding to death up to stability, or to turn a bleeding limb wound into a stable limb wound that can start to heal on its own. With nofurther intervention, your wounds heal in 8 hours.

Of real time.

Good luck.

I forget the exact rules for when you regain consciousness, but if you have anything that speeds up your healing, you come to pretty much immediately.

(But that use case almost never occurred, unless you made the deliberate plan to go straight to bed and just… sleep eight hours. Now that I’m a father of two, this seems like a pretty good use of a weekend of gaming.)

Chirurgery has the healer spend 5 minutes in safe contact with the target (again, no actual contact required, but you have to have at least a needle and thread prop to mime stitching wounds) to cut that healing time down one step. (8 hours -> 1 hour -> 30 minutes -> 15 minutes)

Rapid Healing is an Advantage that a character could buy at the start of play. Once your wound is stable, you automatically gain the first step of improved healing time. For obvious reasons, this was seen as a very good purchase for any character who had even the faintest expectation of combat. So if you’ve got both this going for you and a friendly chirurgeon, you’ll be fine in 30 minutes.

The last thing that improved slow healing by one step is Accelerate Healing, a healing effect that you could get from Brewing or various forms of magic (Water, Water Bond, Sorcery, Spirit Bond). To be honest, 15 minutes isn’t that bad, especially since it:

• Counts as rest for regaining your per-combat abilities that are a huge part of fighter damage and staying power in this family of games
• Winds up being some pretty fun roleplay if there are several conscious wounded characters, or if the healer(s) can stay with you and chat. If the defensive line breaks and the healers have to move you in a damn hurry, that’s some great drama.
  • I realize this isn’t everyone’s thing, but I honestly did have a lot of good times during recovery as long as other people were willing to put a little effort into the roleplay.

Brewing gets Stabilize and Accelerate Healing brews at the low end, then Heal Minor Wounds and Heal Grievous Wounds brews later on. Heal Grievous Wounds brews are a huge deal and require a special semi-rare component to make. Supplying that rare component is a whole economic minigame for PC merchants and gardeners that I am so not covering here because I didn’t play it. Anyway, healing from a brew takes 1 minute to kick in, which differentiates it slightly from true spellcasting; it can also be stockpiled event over event, or purchased in substantial supply from a merchant.

Spellcasters, on the other hand, are running on mana as a per-day resource, resetting each day at dusk. You start with 1-5 mana, and to give you a sense of scale, my sorcerer ended as one of the highest-power characters in the game’s history with 42 mana. Spells cost mana equal to their Circle, so 1-5; being nominally able to cast 8 5th-circle spells in a day was a huge deal thankyouverymuch.

Anyway, healing options include:

Empathic Healing, a first-circle sorcery spell that moves a wound from the target to the same location on the sorcerer. If you need to get a front-liner back in the action quickly and cheaply, and you can afford to heal the sorcerer slowly, this is the way.

Heal Minor Wounds, which I mentioned earlier, heals one limb wound, and does nothing at all for a torso wound. Later rules tweaks made it stabilize the wounds that it didn’t heal. This is at second circle for sorcerers and at third for Water alchemists.

Heal Grievous Wounds (third circle for sorcerers, fourth for Water alchemists) is the linchpin healing spell. It heals any three wounds on one target, one of which can be a torso wound. Learning HGW is the moment at which a sorcerer becomes one of the big kids, to a maybe excessive degree.

Heal Mortal Wounds (fourth circle for sorcerers, I don’t actually remember if Water alchemists got this) heals all five locations.

Pherus Madar (fifth circle for sorcerers) heals all wounds, cleanses diseases, purifies poisons, and… I feel like it might have also cured blights. Also if the target has been dead 5 minutes or less, they’re raised and the death doesn’t “count” on their future resurrection draws. (This… got problematic in the very late game.) Pherus Madar takes 5 minutes to cast, while the lower healing spells take as long to cast as they take to say.

Restore Limb (fourth circle for Wood alchemists) is an incredibly expensive way to heal a limb wound, and I seem to recall that it also took a long time to take effect, maybe? This was cast maybe twice in ten years. Only once I remember for sure, as a way to remove a cursed bracelet.

Earth Loam (fifth circle for Stone alchemists) was an even more expensive way to stabilize and accelerate healing, and… that might have been all? I don’t think it even instantly healed limb wounds? As a result I’m 95% sure this was never cast even once.

There are also some resurrection spells that aren’t really important for this conversation. Long casting time, failure chance based on a card draw, et cetera.

Touch-Casting

Since I haven’t really spelled it out, all of these are touch-cast. That means you hold a packet in your hand and touch it gently to the target, or hold it within an inch of them. Shattered Isles locks ranged healing behind a very specific set of in-game deeds, and even then the sorcerer can only cast healing at range on one chosen character that has entered into a mystical partnership with them.

Anyway. What that means is that players are doing a lot of moving around in battles – either healers moving to the injured, or the injured getting moved to the healer. The thrill of legging it through a chaotic melee to get to a friend who is definitely more than halfway through their bleedout count is extremely real, for either the healer or the character(s) who are going to move them to the healer. For me, at least, this is a compelling reason not to go too far into moving healing away from touch-casting.

LARPing is also limited in options for even signifying a spell’s target(s). This will be obvious to anyone who has done it, but you’ve basically got touch-casting, strike-casting (that is, adding a weapon to the length of your reach – this is usually called spellstriking), packet delivery (so, limited to your throwing range), voice effect, and rarely some other definable areas like “everyone inside this circle” or “everyone in this room.”

Net Effect

These rules worked pretty much fine. The scaling of healing – in intensity and availability – governs the whole tone and power level of the game, probably more than any other narrow slice of rules. (I don’t thinkthat’s my personal bias as someone who played a healer.) The only other thing that matters anywhere near as much is the various forms of damage mitigation.

Because of lengthy healing times and high mana costs, the game’s balance of encounters – especially in the early parts of the first arc – was tilted toward less combat, especially during the day. This is a good skill for every game to cultivate. Stick jock players deserve to have content that appeals to them too, but there are going to be games where you just can’t or don’t want to field large amounts of combat. Skill in entertaining people – even and especially fighters – without combat will never go to waste.

But I digress.

King’s Gate

The King’s Gate campaign made one revolutionary change to the system, which had major effects on the flow of combat: all healing spells, once cast, take 1 minute to kick in. The mana cost situation is unchanged. The result is that it’s a tiny bit harder to bring a broken shield wall back to its feet, so protecting characters that are mid-recovery is a pressing tactical concern.

The KG playerbase overlapped heavily with the Shattered Isles playerbase, so players who already had several years of experience with the rules system approached it much more efficiently. Also, the KG campaign awarded substantially more XP in its early seasons than SI had. Between these two elements, the game shifted from “scary early game” to “confident mid game” years earlier. This doesn’t have much to do with healing gameplay, except that those Heal Grievous Wounds spells and brews showed up for multiple casters and brewers something like a full season earlier.

Eclipse

Though it’s a science fantasy campaign, Eclipse introduced few changes to healing in its early game, except that I don’t think Heal Grievous Wounds injectors (brews) took a rare component? Man, the pandemic and the long break from LARPing has made me forget so many rules. Anyway, psionic healing was somewhat rarer than magical healing (though you get more psionic energy than mana, for the same amount of XP), while Med Tech healing was a good bit more common than Brewing healing.

Eclipse kept KG’s 1-minute delay on Heal Minor Wound-and-better effects. Instantaneous healing is part of the game, but I think only one player ever got access to that.

The real change in the game’s dynamic had less to do with healing and everything to do with mitigation. It’s hard to even scratch the surface of this without getting into an incredibly complicated conversation about armor values, other mitigation, the absence of hand-held shields, force screens, and… dammit, I almost did it anyway.

I feel like there were some rules changes in the second Eclipse arc that improved Surgery further. Anyway, one of the big things here is that Med Tech, as a build path, does double duty – not only is it giving you a crafting skill, it’s also improving or unlocking non-psionic healing features.

Dust to Dust

In creating Dust to Dust, we introduced the idea of Walking Wounded, increasing what wounded-but-healing characters can do. Specifically, they can walk but not fight. We also added Leechcraft so that nonmagical healers could handle diseases and poisons. The small number of characters who went deep on nonmagical healing still didn’t have enough to do compared to rapid (still 1-minute-delay) magical healing. We tried to solve this with additional story content – it’s not my place to say whether that succeeded, and even if it did, of course I wish we had done more.

We spread access to healing effects all over the place – two of the five Realms of celestial magic, ritualism, Brewing and Alchemy, scribes, some mystery cults, and a few other places. I think a lot of characters had somehealing ready to go, and some had enormous depths of healing, since we had doubled the amount of mana a spellcaster could expect to have at any given power level, compared to SI/KG.

I don’t think we made a lot of other changes to the mechanics of healing, though there are things you can do in the game to tinker with the efficiency of healing – “splitting” the spell to heal two for the price of one, that kind of thing. It adds some optimization options for the players that want to do that, but there isn’t so much of it that a player who ignores it falls way behind.

Altera Awakens

Altera Awakens moved away from Heal Minor Wound, Heal Grievous Wounds, and Heal Mortal Wounds toward Heal Wound [number value], where the target “spends” that value on their existing wounds and Vigor (hit points on top of their wound locations). One point heals a limb wound, two a torso wound. Still a 1-minute effect delay. There’s also a spell that heals Vigor but not wounds (also a 1-minute effect delay), rewarding fighters for stepping out of a fight to recover. I don’t think it sees a ton of use?

But there’s a lot more to the change than that, because the game has a bunch of different spellcasting types and some of them are a bit further off the beaten path. In particular, I want to talk about how Sages work there.

Sages have a small pool of casting currency called Intent, which comes back after half an hour or when they complete Deeds. Replenishing Intent during a longer battle is pretty hard at this point. Most of their spells don’t take more than 1 Intent, though. They have lengthy casting times, as they have to recite a poem or song from a page, possibly more than one repetition per casting.

I think there are also spells where you spend Intent to startcasting, but as long as you keep repeating the poem or song, you deliver an activation of the spell each time you get to the end of the poem. This presents a different decision-making structure for the healer; I’d like to see that go a little further, maybe imitating the much-maligned D&D 5e spell, prayer of healing – a very efficient slow-casting healing spell. A healing spell that takes 1-3 minutes of active spellcasting, but then delivers healing at a better currency conversion rate (Intent, mana, whatever), has a lot of potential because it rewards sort of “saving up” your target number of wounded characters. (This probably exists in Altera right now – there just hasn’t been a game in a year and a half to refresh my memory.)

Altera also has a combat trait called Empathy, which heals the character with Heal Self [number value] effects and heals others with Empathic Healing, moving wounds from others onto the character. If the character has Vigor, though, the Vigor can absorb the wound instead of the character actually takinga wound. Thus you can use Empathy either to keep yourself going, or to pick up everyone around you and then get yourself back in the action. It’s based in uses per combat and per day, but a separate pool of uses from everything else.

Finally, there’s the Healing skill, a full skill tree for physickers. In addition to effects similar to Healing Ways and Chirurgery that I described above, it has features that gather information and shave down initial usage time on their healing skills. This is a more ambitious set of offerings for nonmagical healing than SI, KG, or DtD had, but at the same time, it takes more XP to get to the top end, and it doesn’t really shine as a skill until all of the magical healers are out of juice.

Calamity

Sorry, I never learned Calamity’s rules. Someone else gets to write that section. I do know that even with a lot of major improvements to nonmagical healing, doctors still feel like they’re at a disadvantage compared to magical healers. On one level, the problem is exacerbated by the game’s fundamental promise that a nonmagical doc would be a full and sufficient game experience.

That Was a Lot of Summary

There are basically three big tensions in healing gameplay. (I already know that at least one of you is going to say there shouldn’t be healers as a skill set. I don’t know what to tell you – it should be obvious by now that I find healing in and out of combat incredibly satisfying and we’re very unlikely to agree about this.)

1. Healing with consumable items (brews, injectors, whatever) costs in-game money. Because healers are focused on the wounded rather than on killing treasure-bearing monsters, they also have much less income than front-line combatants. This is where healing design collides at speed with team dynamics and game economics.

2. Time spent out of the action can be super boring if the healer can’t or won’t stick around and keep you company. An hour of healing is a serious bummer. The more personally powerful a character is, the more likely that people with Heal Grievous Wounds and similar spells or effects think you’re worth the cost, which means strongly favoring veteran players over newbies and combat-focused characters over everyone else. That’s, you know, not great, even if it’s completely rational from the character’s standpoint.

3. To what extent is it important to support nonmagical healing alongside magical healing? This doesn’t have one answer, but the amount of healing people accept from sources that are nonmagical in the narrative is lesser and slower than what they accept from magic. Is it necessary for magic to be better that nonmagic along every vector, or can there be ways that nonmagical healing is preferable?

Kainenchen has some great ideas around economic transactions at the core of healing. I’m not going to try to describe that whole campaign concept here, because I’m worried I’d misrepresent it in some nuances. Another idea that came up in a conversation about this was having a local authority figure just… pay a flat per-event stipend to people willing to commit to being healers. It’s possible that you’d have everyone with any magical healing at all collecting money and not spending those spells to anyone else’s benefit, but I feel like solving that in-character might be a way to go. Maybe there’s also some additional money or materiel for consumables.

As I tried to explain in the Shattered Isles section above, I had a lot of good experiences with roleplay during recovery. I dunno, maybe it’s weird that I find the other-people-giving-a-damn of moving the wounded to safety to be a good part of the game? I think it has meaningful, valuable effects on a game’s sense of camaraderie, a very real part of the fun that I get from the games I’ve played. That said, the possibility of, say, 1 minute of fighting followed by 1 hour of recovery has obvious Total Bummer properties. I don’t have a definitive solution for that. Some additional in-game resources that might trigger a Heal Grievous Wounds effect as soon as you get stabilized, or whatever, might be worth exploring.

I expect a great diversity of opinions on magic vs nonmagic in healing. For me – yes, nonmagical healing needs to be an option. It bothers me when magic has to suffuse all things at all times for a game’s reality to exist. It disrupts the sense of grounding that gives me a basis for understanding stakes and what’s possible. Therefore, I want to at least understand what happens if no one provides magical healing to a wounded person. If there’s nothing you can do for them without spending magic in some fashion (beyond maybe stopping them from bleeding to death), that… isn’t my preference, but okay. I can see why you’d make that call.

One of the things I really like at the top end of Altera Awakens’s Healer tree is a skill that lets physickers improve magical healing received from other sources. I think cooperation and synergy are a great approach for keeping nonmagical skills relevant and desirable when spellcasting is at its zenith.

New Idea: Healing Tolerance

Nothing of what follows is a polished, ready-for-play idea. I’m hoping to spark the rest of the idea in someone else, since I know I’m not running a new LARP… maybe ever.

First off, I’d like to see a game chip away at the idea that magical healing is completely good for you, with no downside other than its power cost to the caster. “A little bit bad for the target” doesn’t have to undermine it as healing – what if you’ve just got a limited spell tolerance, after which your body can’t receive more magical healing for a bit? If that goes too far, what if you start inflating the power cost? Your healing tolerance resets per-combat, so sometimes nonmagical healing is how you’re getting it done. Maybe there’s also a skill in the nonmagical healing tree to restore some healing tolerance?

In addition to keeping nonmagical healers as part of the game’s “answer” for healing, the thought is that this would force the playerbase as a whole to rely on second-string fighters either early or late in a field battle, because the first-stringers can’t take any more magical healing. I’m imagining healing tolerance set to around 3, and maybe there are ways you can buy that up or expend it for other things.

Magical healing spent on someone with no remaining healing tolerance probably can’t do worse than stabilize the target. I’m not trying to punishthe magical healers here.

New Idea: Quest Shrines

One of the conversations I had about this idea touched on getting players to move around site to active locations. So you have shrines, possibly tended by a PC?, where you can receive a small task to perform that restores a little of your healing tolerance. Or, to fit a little better into the flow of this idea, it grants you 1-2 points of temporary healing tolerance. Some of the shrines just want a pile of money donated to its god (taking money out of the economy and/or funding the healers), while others are micro-modules.

There might be a semi-random stack of index cards with different tasks. This would give PCs who aren’t getting pulled into adventures or main plot something to do that makes them more effective in the field battle that night. Maybe Plot seeds a few bigger tasks into that, as things they want to nudge a player into doing later in that event? If you have to sweeten the pot with other kinds of rewards, that’s fine too.

(DtD used shrines with micro-module content in one of our Season 5 events, and maybe other times I’m forgetting as well. As usual, I’m remixing ideas Stands in the Fire and/or Kainenchen had five years ago.)

New Idea: Prayer of Healing

This is just changing up the rhythm of a magical healer’s gameplay and generalizing the idea that Altera has going on with Sages. Altera has a concept of spell flurries (available now at Dairy Queen!), where you get X many activations but you have only 5-10 seconds to use all of them. I’m interested in pairing that with a longer casting time, so that you want to stabilize a lot of people (for free/with nonmagical healing if possible), then the spellcaster drops a bunch of Heal Grievous Wounds effects all at once, for much lower cost than you’d usually pay for that much healing. This doesn’t replace spot healing (that is, single-target healing), but it emphasizes situational triage.

New Idea: Vampiric Healing

I think there would be a lot of interest in a vampiric healing option. Not talking about biting people here (that’s already its own LARP), but about dealing damage to enemies in order to generate healing. In brief, I loved playing a Disciple of Khaine in Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, and D&D 4e clerics are pretty great if you can massage their aesthetic to work a bit better.

Getting this to work in a LARP is the trick. It’s not 100% obvious when your weapon has dealt body damage in a lot of cases – especially if a lot of other players are attacking the same target. I think you want to make the player build up a pool of power points by taking down enemies, then spend that pool for healing. So maybe you just harvest from downed targets, and a single target can only be harvested once (this is common with searching and other resource gathering, after all).

There’s probably a (low-ish) maximum power pool based on XP expenditure, encouraging you to empty your power pool, then go do some more murder to refill it. Like I said, I haven’t fleshed any of these ideas all the way out.

New Idea: M*A*S*H

For… some game that is okay with significantly slowed-down action and only gritty, nonmagical healing, I would love to see something emulating the meatball surgery of the 4077. (Uh, this idea can wait until a long time after the end of a pandemic that has massively traumatized our actual healthcare workers.) Anyway, when you go in to get a torso wound healed, there’s a card draw that determines an extra detail about your torso wound – broken rib, perforated bowel, punctured lung, whatever. Maybe you’ve then got a puzzle of some kind to solve, and PCs specialize in different types of wounds?

Or maybe you follow Calamity’s lead and replace death and easy-ish resurrection with the Mortally Wounded condition, and this is only for healing mortal wounds. That could be pretty cool, turning “resurrection” into a surgical theater skill challenge.

Conclusion

Okay, I think that’s about all I’ve got for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my summary of healing in one lineage of boffer LARPs in the American South, along with ideas for changing up healing gameplay. If this isn’t your deal, I’ll be back sometime soonish with more TTRPG content – but I do have a big project that has just started up, so I may be a bit quieter than usual for the next several weeks.

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