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+--- Thread: Medicine in Eorzea (/showthread.php?tid=3153)
RE: Medicine in Eorzea - Ellie - 07-31-2013
This thread has been just wonderful, most of the stuff I had to say on the subject was already expressed on page 1 alone. You guys are amazing, and I'm really going to have to struggle to come up with something new, but I'll give it a valiant effort.
I think we can definitely agree that healing with magic, at least on the battlefield, is more of a superficial healing meant to get fighters back on their feet and into fighting shape. I also definitely like the idea that the effect is basically a sped up process of natural healing. I also like to think that healing with magic could be useful outside of battle, but it's difficult to really pin down what they can do without it seeming too overpowered.
Still, I think there's something to be said for making sure that if you're going to have a storyline injury or illness (something that you don't want healed right away), you would be wise to make sure that it's something that's difficult to cure if you don't want it to be cured right away. I made this mistake with my main storyline for Keisuna, and I realized shortly after that it seemed a little silly that she'd still be injured when it sounds like something that the healers at the Fane could easily heal.
As for non-magical medicine, I'm going with a sort of mid-to-late 1800's level of sophistication. The reason I say that is because while there's a definite medieval sense to the setting and level of technology, but also have more modern discoveries such as latex and rubber. It seems that medical tools and technology would be pretty advanced, but not so much that we're getting into the territory of hypodermic needles and x-ray machines.
RE: Medicine in Eorzea - synaesthetic - 07-31-2013
I'm going to side with Eva and see that mundane medicine and magical healing are two different sides of the same healing coin. Magitek medical devices might bridge the gap a little, but when it comes to healing magic, this is how I see it:
On the battlefield, you're taking mostly superficial damage. When you're dropped to low HP, you aren't losing any speed, agility or strength, so you really aren't that hurt yet. Being reduced to 0 HP means you are now seriously hurt, and you need some major intervention to repair yourself. It's a way of handwaving the Critical Existence Failure aspect of RPG game mechanics.
So the fast, rapid-fire healing that conjurers and white mages perform in combat is basically combat medicine--quick, dirty, stop the bleeding and throw 'em back into the fray. It's not going to cure things like decapitations, limb amputation and the like.
When it comes to serious injuries, I'm not of the mind that magic is impotent, but that the effort required is significant. Raising the dead takes a truly powerful healer who must sacrifice a great deal of their own energy, perhaps even permanently, to re-anchor the lost soul to this reality. Amputations, serious wounds, horrible diseases? All of these should be able to be cured via magic, but at the cost of significant investment of power and resources, with multiple extremely-powerful healers working together.
Mundane and magical medicine aren't a linear sliding scale with magical healing the superficial and mundane handling the grievous, but they're actually different methodologies, different routes to the same destination. Serious life-threatening wounds shouldn't be "easy" for even the most powerful of conjurers to heal.
For example, in most D&D rule sets, raising a PC from the dead requires a significant investment of energy, resources and materials. The character being raised from the dead loses a full level of experience, a point of Constitution (that they can NEVER get back unless they use a wish or miracle spell) and the priest who does the casting has to expend a chunk of their own experience points as well as material components that are extremely high in value. On top of all of this, the spell itself takes a long time to cast, and the body has to be in good condition--if it's gibbed or disintegrated or melted into goo, the raise dead spell will fail to work, and a much more powerful version (true resurrection, or a wish or miracle spell) must be cast.
I'm not really seeing how this is "easy" just because it's magic and not mundane.