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I have often had discussions with the GM's about things like resurrection and healing in FH. if its "fun" or not, if its interactive enough for the healer or boring, if they are healing enough, why it requires two paths to resurrect and not just the healer, etc. etc. (personal opinion, its almost there)

one of the main reasons cited back at me is that death is actually very rare in FH, and so one player having the sole means to essentially negate that fear would be too powerful, so thus it was split to require two. (healer and empath respectively)
so my question for everyone would be this, would you prefer more deaths but they be easy to come back from? or prefer less deaths but they be harder to come back from?

even if you don't answer here I would ask that you include it in any private feedback to the GM's in this off season. ^_^

aslo as most of you know you have to draw a chip(s) when you are brought back from the dead, would this be better done at the beginning of the resurrection or the end? as it was expressed to me that it would save a BUNCH of time if they deceased drew there chip at the beginning so as to not waste so much time.

Over the past 10 or so years, the time of many skills has been drastically reduced. When I started in 2004, it took an empath an HOUR to rez someone. At that point, I don't believe there was a need for a healer to be involved, nor were there any chip draws. All you needed was a body to put the essence into (which was not necessarily the deceased's original body).

At this time decipher script also took an hour. Today, it's 5 minutes (unless stated otherwise)! - Just another example.

Would you like to brew potions? In 2004 you needed to head out into the woods and spend X amount of time foraging for herbs (non-tagged items) that were the ingredients of your potions. (I heard later that some people spent their time "foraging" in the corner of the tavern *sigh* - thankfully, I think we have a happy medium with the introduction of the flagged herb/tagged ingredients system BTW)

Anyway, back to the main point..

Why do we keep drastically reducing the time of these skills? Are PCs complaining that taking the time to do these things is boring and not fun? Honestly, I think the fault lies on the PC side of things then. With time reductions down to what they are, it is the lack of a PCs ability to creatively role play how they are using their skill. It will take an empath 15 minutes to perform Gather Essence and the Healer 5 minutes to mend the vessel. So, the dead person gets to take a 20 minute nap. The Healer only needs to spend 5 minutes preparing the body. The girth of the time falls on the empath to find a way to spend a whopping 15 minutes role playing a scene which visually describes to any spectators their connection with essence and how to manipulate/convince/harness the deceased's essence to somehow funnel it back into its former physical vessel. (Really, an empaths raw connection with essence is what they're all about.) Really, if a player is incapable of figuring out how to RP for 15 minutes, perhaps the empath path isn't for them.. or maybe they should consider swapping out that skill with something else if they are against having a skill that will take 15 minutes of their time. Besides, we've been pretty good about finding NPC empaths to help with the resurrection process.
On a side note, if anyone hasn't seen how Octavious gathers essence, you've missed a great show. I suppose, however, we could ask why there have been so few people playing empaths as of late. I think the last few FH events we've had 1 or 0.. heh.

General healing - since the healing rate has been reduced to heal/30 seconds, it has become a lot more active because it's a charged skill. As in, you charge a heal, and you can walk/run with it. Because of this you can safely charge, and hold it as you run right behind the front line and "tag" someone with a heal (yes, it says you can RUN right there in the healing skill description). It completely baffles me that there's still a huddle of healers in the back. Old habits die hard I guess.

Chip drawing - luckily I've not needed to use the surgery bag out on the field, so I can't testify that. It's just seems VERY time consuming at 1 chip/minute when there are better, faster and safer ways to heal up from negs out on the field. There is point however, when just letting someone die, and rezing them is far safer/easier than trying to utilize healer skills to heal them up from negs. I feel this is broken and backwards. A specialized (not saying general. Not even saying master. I'm saying SPECIALIZED - someone who has devoted many skills beyond the healer path to be a better healer), should be able to bring someone from deep in the negs easier than just letting them die and rez them.

Chip drawing during rezing - frankly, I could care less if this is done just after the healer completes their thing, or after the empath completes their thing. I just need a good RP or metaphysical reason as to why. "hang on, I gotta sew this head back on before we put that essence back in. Oh man.. I really botched that! This body will never hold that essence." VS "Ok, I got the body ready. Shove that essence back in. Ok. Good. Oops! Look at all that essence fall back out..."

However, doing this tends to put blame on the healer if there's a red chip drawn. It could have been the fault of the empath for not properly gathering/funneling essence correctly/successfully back into the body. Maybe I'd lean to after completion then... but then again a healer could have a "naughty bag" and ensure a botched job if only one white chip is in the bag and the deceased needs to draw multiple chips.

hmm.. maybe the empath should also have a bag for rezing purposes...

Another side note - back when rezes were changed to how they were now, it was because people felt there was a need for a fear of perma death. Over the last few years we've made it easier to be rezed with special skills, hero point skills etc. Also, there was something about having more character turn over. I had asked what the life expectancy of a character should be. Chris said 3 years. I think with the introduction of more skills, hero point skills, and perks/specialization skills, it's again to the point where it's hard for a character to die.

Perhaps there should be some sort of scale that makes it harder to rez a character the higher level they are... either by more chips, additional resources.. sacrificing magic items and so on.

LOL, I love your rez dialogue, oops it fell back out. XD

skill times is dependent on the skill, sometimes its balance, sometimes its arbitrary, etc. some times have gone down yeah, others have gone up (at least since I have been playing ) scout went up quite a bit, but I think that was REALLY silly as they tripled the time on scout then added ways to reduce it back to were it was (face palm) I actually don't mind variable skill times (like you said decipher script) because sometimes it makes sense for something to take a while (you recover a tome at the end of a dungeon and need to decipher it, its assumed you are going to spend some time back at the inn doing that) vs deciphering the way to stop a trash compacter from crushing your buddies in the detention level during a scene (this need to happen fast)

I just hate it when time breaks a scene, and I think that's why things are changing, that's why I hate torture, I just cannot RP that for half an hour, etc. or when we are mid adventure and the sage stops the GM for a sage hint and everyone else collectively sighs. lucky for us most of the GM's will just advance time and give you the info, but if 20 people have to keep stopping for 15-30 minutes every time 1 person wants to use scout or recall? people would start to loathe those skills and anyone that uses them.

That said, that's why I am a fan of variable times, the GM's can decide before time or on the fly what is best for the scene or group as a whole, everyone is ready to go? takes 1 minute, everyone is healing, repairing armor, tired, and rezing 2 dead people? takes 30 minutes, etc. I don't mind having a relatively short time on info skills that don't directly effect combat, or torture as that is almost exclusively done in a safe and secluded place, with usually a bound subject. however on things like healing / repairing armor / resurrection / combat skill then yes its an issue as this is tied to the groups power and survival.

right now I feel the PC group in general are bottle rockets in terms of there overall longevity in combat as the combined healing output of the group almost always cannot keep up. if the combat lasts for more then 5-10 minutes to the point were multiple people need healing it just goes down hill, watch combat in the future, the PC's initially almost always head out and start fighting, near then end there all tucked into a ball half dead XD. this is why I hate bad fighters, as they go down then end up using a valuable healer better spent on a good fighter that can make better use of their healing, instead they are selfishly hoarding one. this is also why I make such a big deal about skills like channel and crit strike, as well as shields. doing the most amount of damage while taking the absolute minimum in return is pivotal in combat where healing just cannot keep up. this is why warriors suck, they take so much damage to do damage and are all down or useless within the first 5 minutes of combat, where as rogues and empaths can last much longer despite having less / no defensive skills and soak.

bear in mind the above is actually not that much of an issue because of how broken potions are! alchemists are the true healers of the battlefield. I told Mike if he removed cure potions for one event he would see how bad it is.

as for chips it would depend on how you RP what the chips represent, if its before hand it could be searching for their essence to find out if you can bring them back in the first place, if its the result of your work it then it would make sense if it was at the end.

and I could not agree more on character turnover, and that is something I will address in another thread coming soon ^_^

My two cents on some things....

I think that if you played a healer for a while you would see how frustrating the characters in the main line of combat can make things. Healers are always seen to be tied up with a single character because noone ever cycles in and out of combat efficiently. They are only dragged back to the healers when they drop and are bleeding out. We (meaning healers) should only be using surgery and first aid on characters that are surprised by sudden large amounts of damage, not ones who were still fighting at 1LP and took some damage to put them into the negs.

A good crew of healers working together with an (efficient) front line can be a very tough force, especially if holding a position. I know as Marcus with absolutely no sage buffs, special items, potions, or artefacts, I can heal 3LP every 30 seconds, just from being higher level. As for special items, with my first aid kit (and triage) I am doing surgery/first aid from -15 to 0 in a minute and a half - and while I think it's not really in the spirit of the rules, steady hands as written actually lets me do that while carrying my subject, to stay out of danger, though I can't remember ever doing so, as it seems cheat-y.

With the right crew, healers should be able to be a second line behind the main fighting force, simply topping up damage with first aid and mass heal, and using other stuff to put out fires.

And I never use Cure potions to supplement myself, because I always forget.

Also, after 150-some levels and 5+ years of of experience, I have only had to ressurect maybe a half a dozen characters, losing one patient. Conversely, at Waypoint, my healer Tamyrlane, using the exact same Res. rules, amount of chips (1 red, 9 white) and method (neither having a character to negate a drawn red chip) lost a patient on his first ressurection after less than four events played.

I agree with almost all of what you said, and completely agree that not only healers but any group working together is going to be a tough force, and that yes people seem to go till there in negs. I have yet to play a full healer but every character I build or am a part of has some form of healing, and its almost always first aid / healing from healer because its more effective and flexible then regen and I agree with people overstaying there combat welcome. Matt / Gin has been pulled out of combat many a time because he cannot help but get people out of negs if he sees them in it, and I would much rather him up in the fight.

and even if most warriors wont pull back I have seen healers like Marcus and Kami that are not afraid run up and throw mass heals when you can, I know you guys are trying. (I remember the red X when you were trying like MAD to keep everyone up because of the scream damage, trust me we noticed that)

question for you as another one of Final Havens premier healers, what kind of death do you prefer? often but easy to come back from, or rare but hard to come back from?

I'm a full healer and working towards other disciplines that build well with a master healer. I'm not a combat heavy person and I enjoy that it takes anywhere from 25 sec to 20 min to heal people depending on if it's a quick ouch or oh dear god my leg is two feet away.

I like the idea of having to work with an Empath and the time it takes. Healing isn't an easy skill and bringing someone back or stitching a head back on should take a little role playing. I'm not great at it but I'd rather sit and attempt the role play. Maybe I'm weird but shouldn't death be a very real option and difficult to come back from? Maybe that's just me...

Seraphina wrote:Maybe I'm weird but shouldn't death be a very real option and difficult to come back from? Maybe that's just me...

its not weird to have an opinion on how death should work that's why we are here, there is no perfect answer just ideas so feel free to always throw yours out there. ^_^

and there are really two topics on death, one is how often should people die in FH and legitimately stay dead. this is a thing as FH has very little to no permanent death, that leads to abysmal character turnover, lots of very high level characters, and an overall lack of fear of death.

and two is how death itself works. for instance CARPS had many more ways to die and "deathstrike" or just calls with "death" in them were more common, but it was fairly easy to come back from death (risk of permanent character death was still there though) where as Final Haven opted for deaths on very rare occasions but coming back from death was much harder and the risk of permanent character death high per individual death then carps.

overall the amount of permanent character death was the same, the only difference being how often people were in a "dead" state and how easy it was to bring them out of it.

I admit death is scary in Final Haven if you don't know the fine points of it, but so much so that its avoided and usually only comes about under circumstances of incredible mistakes or ignorance on the PC's part. as NPC's avoid killing players at just about all costs unless the encounter REALLY, REALLY. . .REALLY! calls for it.