So there are guidelines for giving a bonus to recovery rolls, and there are effects to reach full maturity of a body in a short period. True healing of a wound requires a Ritual for a permanent effect.
However, since healing is a natural phenomenon, I was thinking of a CrCo effect that could "speed" the process. It could allow to reduce the convalescence interval before the next recovery roll.
For instance, it could reduce one week of convalescence (light wound interval) to a single day or night ("only applies during the spell’s Duration, and thus full effect requires a Sun Duration spell cast early in the day or night" as with maturity effects).
Taking into account of the effect of the spell, the character would have a normal recovery roll in the end of the (reduced) convalescence interval.
Do you think it would dramatically change the game balance?
If not, what would be a reasonable level for such a base effect?
RoP:F has just such a thing in the section on Faerie Wizardry. Of course, incorporating those guidelines into Hermetic Magic involves inventing rituals, so you don't get to bypass Vis if using Hermetic Magic this way. But I figured you might want to take a look at that.
You can consider that the actual CrCo spell granting bonus to recovery rolls are in fact speeding up the process: since they can grant large bonus to recovery roll, these spells make sure that (almost) every recovery roll succeed, with the result being the fastest possible healing through normal means.
Going beyond that point would probably involve Muto. My reasoning is the following: you can grant higher characteristic with CrMe or CrCo up to +5, higher than that and it is beyond the capability of a normal body. Thus you could only get higher characteristic through Muto and it will be temporary only - even with virtus, up to a year.
So you can probably try to design a spell like: MuCo(An) Blood of the hydra(known for regrowing more or less instantly their head) for the duration of the spell, base spell ??? At least 25, like granting a magical ability (MuAn Guideline) but probably higher ?
Fertility spell turning a seed into a full plant have their base effect increased at it happens faster, from base 15 for an overnight growth to 40 for instant growth. So magnitude can speed things up. Maybe you can take also the CrCo guideline for recovery roll and add magnitude to increase the check frequency ?
But here, you definitely want to check with your group, because the system is carefully balance that healing can be achieved through three means:
CrCo ritual - expensive in virtus, but fast and perfect
CrCo spell granting recovery bonus - zero virtus cost, perfect but slow
ReCo Craft magic (magical surgery in A&A) - fast, cheap, but strong side effect
What you are looking at is: cheap, perfect, no side effect...
But healing is a natural phenomenon and it's totally in the capability of a normal body. It should not need involving Muto IMHO, because I just meant of speeding the natural process, the same way "full maturity " effects do.
The effect I had in mind is indeed cheap and fast, but it doesn't mean it's perfect: healing is natural, so it leaves scars and other possible defects (CrCo ritual doesn't).
We could also state that large time reductions case the body to age in proportion: if you cast 12 times a spell that gives 1 month recovery interval reduction, the target will age one year. It may be too complicated to track for sparse uses, but it will prevent abuses.
We could even consider that this effects exhausts the body more than this and apply a multiplier to the aging (e.g. a factor 4 implies 3 months recovery reduction will cause 1 full year aging).
Healing a natural phenomenon, but fast healing is not (how fast is too fast to be considered natural is a point to be discussed). The same way being strong is natural, but being strong enough to carry an adult cow is not natural.
Based on the rule (p179):
a light wound heals in a week under optimal conditions
a medium wounds takes a month and a week
a heavy wounds takes a season, a month and a week
Anything faster does not follow natural ability of a human body to heal, thus IMO should be handled with Muto magic.
Considering time acceleration as a drawback would be consistent with what the body is undergoing with accelerated healing. It would not take too much paperwork neither to track. By the side of the wound chart, the player make a notch in front of each wound healed through accelerated process and when it adds up to a year (like 12 medium wounds, or 4 heavy wounds - I don't think it is worth keeping tracks of the week, but if abuse occurs maybe), then he ages and make the appropriate aging roll.
You could take as a base line the Creo Corpus for normal healing. Then add Muto requisit (+1 magnitude), then for each extra magnitude the healing factor drops by one category:
+1 magnitude Week becomes day, month becomes week, and season becomes month;
+2 magnitude week becomes two hours, month becomes day, season become week.
The Creo corpus guideline gives the bonus to the healing roll.
One possibility would be to impose an Aging roll every time such an "healing acceleration" spell is cast, with the highest Wound penalty covered by the spell acting as a Living Conditions modifier. That represents the shock of the accelerated healing on his body.
So, for example, a 25-year-old grog who is currently suffering from one Medium Wound and one Light Wound who rolls a 5 on the Aging table would have an Aging Total of 11 (5 for the roll, 3 for his age and 3 for the highest severity of his wounds), and thus gain 1 Aging Point in any characteristic.
He would still need to do Recovery rolls for each of his wound, if the spell is powerful enough to cover the severity of those wounds. If both are successful, after the casting he would still be suffering from a Light Wound (from his Medium Wound getting one step better).
The Base guideline would probably need to cover each of the severity, much like the CrCo instant healing spells do. So Base 15 for Light Wounds, Base 20 for Medium and Base 25 for Heavy. I would suggest not introducing a Base for Incapacitating wounds, since the spell would simply kill the target (he's too weak and unstable to survive the shock to his body).
There is no Muto requisite to the "reach full maturity in the course of a day or a night" effect, and it doesn't seem more natural to me. I wouldn't feel necessary to set this requisite in my saga.
Sounds a bit severe to me. Seems more interesting to me to differ the effects of speed healing at a later time, only adding years to their character: players would be tempted to haste their healing to continue to act in the game, knowing that they will pay the bill at some point in the future
Yes, the idea wasn't to make wounds disappear instantly, so reducing one severity level at a time is fine.
Alternately the recovery reduction could set a penalty on the recovery roll itself in addition to speeding up the aging process. The stress of the acceleration could work to the opposite of the core rules CrCo guideline proposed by Ezechiel357.
so, we could have a base bonus following CrCo guideline, modified with:
+1 magnitude Week becomes day, month becomes week, and season becomes month, recovery roll penalty of -3;
+2 magnitude week becomes two hours, month becomes day, season become week, recovery roll penalty of -6.
After maturity accelerated aging is a PeCo effect, while healing is a CrCo effect, so accelerating the healing without vis would presumably be Cr(Pe)Co...
Hm. While I don't have any specific critiques, this feels like it's a modern understanding of healing (ie, an understanding of time and biology) being retconned into a world that objectively runs on Artistotillean physics and mideval philosophy. I mean, WE understand that the mechanics of growth are really freakin' similar to the mechanics for injury repair, but I'm not necessarily seeing that from AM's perspective.
Again, nothing specific, but this is setting off my "what would Aristotle say?" light.
Crafter's Healing C&G p71 allows the possibility of instant healing by letting you instantly make a recovery roll, at a cost of long-term fatigue for the Crafter and a warping point for the person being healed, and a possibility of the Crafter being wounded if they botch. This is fast, imperfect, and only costs fatigue - as it's long-term fatigue, that does limit the number of uses on an adventure quite severely.
If I understand correctly this virtue, there is no recovery roll at all in the process: there is only a Crafter's Healing against wound's Improvement Ease Factor.
Anyway, I was looking for an Hermetic spell effect and Crafter's Healing is explicitly beyond Magic Theory
