RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

Sigil.9054 · **10-02-2015, 05:17 PM**

I tend to favor the idea of magic having a cost. It's the physicist in me. You know: energy is neither created nor destroyed. That kind of thing. This has a huge impact on how I view healing magic.

I tend to be pretty flexible as far as receiving healing, whispering the healer OOCly to coordinate what we both want/expect out of the interaction. Seldi will respond with appreciation or amazement (or, perhaps, suspicion) depending on how things went.

When my character is the patient, my goal is to keep the gears of RP flowing smoothly.

When my character is the healer, though, things are a little different, and I tend to put a lot of thought into my healing:

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To heal a body with magic, I figure you need energy (Aether in FF14) to do the work of the spell and materials to work with. Let's face it: this is a physical body you're repairing here. Raw energy will only plug holes until the energy dissipates. That might work for a dedicated mage, but probably isn't going to work for the person you're trying to heal. For a permanent fix, you'll need nutrients, fibers, water, and things like that.

So whenever healing magic comes up in roleplay, I ask two questions right off the bat: Where are the materials coming from? Where is the energy coming from? Materials, I figure, can be fabricated from the energies of the spell, but this will both increase the energy required to cast the spell and the complexity of the spell itself. Materials could really come from anywhere, come to think of it. The energy can also really come from anywhere, but I tend to prefer life-related things for poetic reasons.

The next questions I ask are: How much energy will this take? How complicated should the spell be? The amount of energy is largely going to be hand-waved (particularly if you're drawing from the planet or the elements), but I do tend to factor in the severity of the wound, and whether or not materials are being converted.

Finally, I approach the complexity of the spell with the idea that a spell is like a computer script for the cosmos. A "healing script" that takes advantage of the target's natural healing, for example, will be simpler than one that does the repairs manually. Likewise, a spell that simply moves natural materials around will be simpler than one that converts them or creates them from scratch.

All this is considered before casting any given RP healing spell.

In the case of Seldi, as a scholar, she draws from her own Aether to heal. I draw inspiration from the spells available to the class when deciding how she heals.

She has three styles of healing: Preventative, First Aid, and Complete. Preventative spells are mostly shield spells designed to negate or mitigate incoming damage. First Aid spells are spells designed to do little more than hold a body together until proper care can be rendered. Both Preventative and First Aid spells can be cast with relative ease, but are very temporary, and don't do any actual healing.

The actual healing spells ("Complete") require time, study of the patient, and concentration. They can also take a lot out of her, depending on how much needs to be repaired, as, again, she draws from her own Aether to heal. (In fact, she's likely to nap after she's done).

Healing

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes