Psi-Wars Wiki Update: Medicine in Psi-Wars and a new primer!

So, the big announcement is I've updated the landing page of the wiki in a big way.  I recently introduced some of my friends to Psi-Wars, and they found it a little difficult to navigate.  I wanted to create more of an essential starting point as the default entry, and here it is: the Psi-Wars Primer. Those more familiar with the Index will find it stripped down and still relatively easy to access. For those familiar with the wiki, you can navigate to both in the side-bar and the top-bar.  I've also updated some of the side-bar and top-bar elements, though not all the scaffolding for the wiki has been removed just yet. 

The other big announcement is the addition of Medicine for Psi-Wars. This took quite some time to get right, and I thought I would discuss some of the finer points of my choices here.

Recovery in Psi-Wars

So, I have a regular reader who argues that anything more complicated than "drink a potion of healing 1d6" is too complicated for him, and I get where he's coming from.  Fussing with daily healing rates and a bunch of rolls is a hassle. Why not just heal up and move on?  GURPS has this wildly complicated set of healing rules, and it mostly serves to keep people out of the fight for days.  Why not simplify it and speed up the healing process, especially since we have access to Ultra-Tech?

Well, one reason to not do that would be theme and the goals of our game design.  In Dungeon Fantasy, characters will typically go through a sequence of encounters as they journey through the dungeon.  If a character gets hit with a crit in the first fight, with the GURPS rules as written, he's out for the rest of the encounters too.  So, instead, GURPS DF facilitates quick healing via spells and potions.  It still hurts! But it becomes about resource depletion, rather than sitting in time out for the rest of the session. The downside is that it cheapens what it means to be wounded: in a normal GURPS game, taking 10 points of damage is catasrophic. In DF, it's a couple of potions and a Minor Healing.  This doesn't matter much in DF, because the average DF player doesn't want to ham it up or roll on injury tables to see what gruesome new scars he has. They want to get patched up and move on.

Action, by contrast, totally embraces all of the standard rules for GURPS healing? Why? Well, in part, it's to give the medic something to do, but it's also because an Action scenario works differently.  You can better think of an Action scenario as one big encounter.  Yes, a building might consist of multiple floors with distinct rooms, but all the guards are networked together via walkie-talkies and the security system in the building.  You're not going room to room fighting isolated guards, but instead, you're facing the combined might of the entire building (which is why mook-rules are much more important in Action than in DF).  Action is also built on seeing what players do when things don't go their way.  A failed roll often becomes a turning point for the adventure. Taking a wound in Action is like that: if you go into the lobby of a bank and get shot right away, then your entire group has to fend off waves of guards while also protecting you from bleeding it while you take potshots and groan on the ground and the Medic shouts "Don't die on me!" and then, after the heist is over, there's certainly enough downtime for you to recover.

So which is Psi-Wars? Well, the latter obviously except it is a sci-fi setting.  We see Luke badly hurt in one scene, go into the Bacta the second, and walking around fine in the third.  Or, really, pick a sci-fi show: characters go into the hospital, get beamed with a regeneration ray, and come out fine.  So why not quick healing? Well, that can cheapen things.  If you just watched some innocent keleni waif get gunned down by a gangster with a blaster and you just slap some bacta on it and move on, all the drama of the moment leaves.  And it also impacts the setting.  If people can be on death's door and fine again moments later, then we would expect soldiers to be in and out of healing wards and back on the frontlines within hours.  On the other hand, fast healing is already part of the setting, thanks to Psychic Healing. You can just lay hands and the Keleni waif is fine.  This is, of course, magical and wondrous, but it's real. So we can't really get away from fast-healing, but we should find a way to keep the drama.

"While mortally wounded, you cannot regain HP" --DFRPG p60

I found this little rule in the DFRPG. I double checked the rules on Mortal Wounds from GURPS and various other sources, but I couldn't find another reference to it anywhere.  It seems unique to DFRPG. I don't know if it's intended to be just for DFRPG, or if it's going to be the GURPS rule going forward in the future, but it's an interesting one and makes you think. For example, if you don't use that rule and you cast a healing spell on someone, when are they no longer mortally wounded? Is 1 HP enough? If you heal them above -1×HP? If you heal them to 1 HP? If you heal all their HP?  But more importantly, it allows us to fuss over characters and makes surgery much more important. If someone is dying, they need urgent medical care, and only after that care is received can they begin their recovery process.  Of course, this interacts strangely with more esoteric models of healing.  What happens if the character has psychic healing and esoteric medicine? Do all characters need surgery and only surgery if they're mortally wounded? GURPS DF uses Esoteric Medicine to stabilize wounds, so I've borrowed that rule, but it does make Esoteric Medicine very powerful.

The Economics of Health Care

So, another thing DF includes is the cost of going to the temple, which is an interesting thing that I see replicated in no other campaign framework.  I thought this worthwhile, as I wanted to emphasize the difference between rich nobles in pristine hospitals and punks forced to visit street docs, or the desperately poor begging a psychic saint to heal them.  I found some decent rules in GURPS Bio-Tech, but holy crap is medical care expensive.  I combined this with more detailed rules on my Abstract Wealth system variant, which creates some fairly stark realizations about what typical characters can and can't afford!  This also let me create three tiers of healing: medical care, street medicine, and esoteric medicine, in descending order of cost.

I'd like to explore the different sort of esoteric medicine traditions available in Psi-Wars (Keleni Mind-Body Energy Cleansing, Ranathim exorcism, talismans and fortune telling, or Nehudese herbalism), but I haven't gotten around to it, and this is a good stop-gap in the meantime.