Now that the Heal power is available for personal use, Healing Trance seems rather pointless. You can get more immediate bang from the basic Heal power, and even Improved Healing Trance is overshadowed by the Control (critical) upgrade. To summarize:

Improved Healing Trance: get a free Resilience check against a Critical Injury. Difficulty as per critical chart.

Heal, Control (critical): get a Medicine check against a Critical Injury. Difficulty fixed at Hard.

Given that:

- a Healer will probably have a better dice pool for Medicine than Resilience

- the Control (critical) upgrade difficulty is fixed at Hard

- the XP path to Improved Healing Trance = 50XP, to Control (critical) = 45XP

...the Control (critical) path seems a no-brainer. The whole Healing Trance tree seems pointless. I suppose a Force user could use it while knocked out...that's *if* the GM would let him commit a die. As a GM, I'm not sure I would (committing a Force die would require conscious action IMHO). In any case, that seems like a pretty limited application, hardly worthy of a talent.

Regardless of changes to the Healer tree, I think the Control (critical) upgrade should be modified so that the difficulty is the difficulty as per the Critical chart, and requires an extra Force pip.

Proposal:

1. Replace Healing Trance (5XP) with Grit.

2. Replace Healing Trance (10XP) with Resolve.

3. Replace Healing Trance (15XP) with new Force Talent - Enhance. Enhance is basically Stim Application, but with the Force. Make an Average (PP) Discipline check, target suffers 3 Strain.

4. Replace Improved Healing Trance with Natural Doctor

5. Replace Natural Doctor with Master Doctor

Thoughts?

I always thought that Healing Trance was quite weak and needed a retooling. I also think your modifications are quite good.

But I think you made a mistake in 3. Suffers 3 strain ? you mean "recover 3 strain".

But I think you made a mistake in 3. Suffers 3 strain ? you mean "recover 3 strain".

Nope, the purpose is to boost a Characteristic by suffering Strain. If you read the "Stim Application" Talent (which is available to the Doctor spec), it applies 4 Strain on the receiver in exchange for boosting 1 Characteristic by 1. Enhance does the same, but for 3 Strain instead of 4, because there is no "Improved Enhance" Talent.

Ok thanks... I thought you meant using a stimpack on oneself...
So it would read like :

Enhance : Take the Enhance action ; make a PP Discipline check. If successful, 1 engaged ally increases 1 characteristic by 1 for the encounter and suffers 3 strain.

Hummm... I'm not so sure... Doctor and Medic already have the "Stim Application" talent, I feel that giving the Healer this talent would make it redundant. Maybe something new like ...

Pain suppression : Take the Pain Suppression action ; make a PP Discipline (or Medicine...) check. If successful, 1 engaged ally ignores the effect of 1 Critical injury for the rest of the encounter.

New, useful, different....

What do you think ?

Yes, I was actually thinking that Natural Doctor should be left where it is (on the fifth row), because otherwise it's too close to the Doctor spec.

Instead, replace Improved Healing Trance with a Force Heal-related Talent. I like the idea of what you suggest, but I also think in this case that the Healer should be able to use either Heal for positive effects, or Harm for negative effects, similar to the way the Doctor can use Pressure Point. All of the Healer's Talents are positive, and granted not too many dark-siders will be drawn to Healer, but the temptation should always be there...

The contrast with Healing Trance is that while it's not as flashy as the Heal power, it's also guaranteed recovery of lost wounds per day, where the Heal power still has the chance to fail if you happen to roll at dark side pips, particularly when only rolling a single Force die, And not every GM is going to be willing to allow a Force user to retry the same power/effect ad nausem until they finally succeed. In fact, some GMs may rule that you only get one shot with Heal, and that if you fail the first time, you don't get to try again until a suitable amount of time has passed or the target has suffered fresh wounds.

That being said, I do think it could use a bit of a boost, but not a complete re-working, since it only needs one committed Force die and with all three ranks that means 3 wounds recovered plus natural healing, so for higher XP characters that's going to be a steady stream of healing in a system where fast healing generally has greater restrictions (bacta is expensive and takes you out of the action, stimpacks offer diminishing returns).

Perhaps instead of it being a 24 hour period, it simply be a 12 hour period that the PC recovers wounds equal to ranks in Healing Trance, while Improved Healing Trance is still every 24 hours but reduces the difficulty of the Resilience check to heal a critical injury by one, to a minimum of Easy.

Or, instead of it being a generally passive effect, change Healing Trance so that once per day, as an Action, the PC can activate this talent and roll a number of Force dice equal to their Force Rating, with each Force Point spent allowing them to reduce their wounds by their ranks in Healing Trance; so 2 ranks in the talent means 2 wounds recovered per Force Point spent. And with Improved Healing Trance, the PC can make their Resilience check to recover from a critical injury when using the Healing Trance talent.

The contrast with Healing Trance is that while it's not as flashy as the Heal power, it's also guaranteed recovery of lost wounds per day...And not every GM is going to be willing to allow a Force user to retry the same power/effect ad nausem until they finally succeed...

Very true about the guaranteed recovery.

I'm wondering though about the GM allowance. This brings up how the Heal power is used and the limitations on it. How would you handle it if the healer was healing another target? Since the effects are similar to a stimpack (and is considered cumulative with them), I'm not sure I'd be adverse to letting a subsequent roll happen...maybe not right away, but eventually.

If the Healer had, say, FR3, but only managed a single white Force pip when trying to use the power, then the power is enacted, but with significant limits (i.e.: no Magnitude upgrades), and the healing applies only to the single target. If the Healer wants to heal the entire party, assuming there was sufficient downtime, would you as the GM allow them to then roll subsequently for each person? If not, then that would be consistent with the GM limitations above. If so, then it suggests that subsequent uses would be fine...basically if you have the time you can keep trying until you get the minimum to trigger the power.

I believe I would lean towards the latter, because there is already a limitation built into the application of Heal, i.e.: it equals stimpacks. However, rather than having the player keep rolling I'd probably allow an automatic success, but with only one Force pip. IOW, they get once chance to roll well, otherwise they take the minimum...again, assuming they have time.

Or, instead of it being a generally passive effect, change Healing Trance so that once per day, as an Action, the PC can activate this talent and roll a number of Force dice equal to their Force Rating, with each Force Point spent allowing them to reduce their wounds by their ranks in Healing Trance; so 2 ranks in the talent means 2 wounds recovered per Force Point spent. And with Improved Healing Trance, the PC can make their Resilience check to recover from a critical injury when using the Healing Trance talent.

I kind of like that, assuming "once a day" means, "even if you fail". It trades security for variability.

I have to admit though that part of my desire to re-work it was my impression that the Healer tree was kind of dull, and needed some variability.

I'd prefer to see it morphed into something a character uses when they're really hurting to recover more quickly--that's what the trance is often used for in the books (along with enduring hazardous environmental effects for a prolonged period).

I'd say it should probably be more like "Enter a meditative resting state and recover 1 wound per rank of Healing Trance or Force Rating for every 6 hours spent resting." If you end up with a chunk of downtime during the day, you can rest and recover health much faster than a normal person could, and if you have a full day, you're recovering at 4xranks faster.

It should probably be able to recover strain, and should have some way to deal with environmental hazards or ongoing effects, like poison or radiation.

I think the critical injury upgrade with Improved Healing Trance is fine as is.

The downside to my approach, is that the talent becomes far more narrative, basically only functioning between scenes.

Conversely, I'd say that maybe you could recover wounds/rank for every 2 hours you have a die committed to the effect. That allows for healing to occur during the action to some degree. We do have examples of this sort of application for the power, such as with Luke on the Eye of Palpatine.

And not every GM is going to be willing to allow a Force user to retry the same power/effect ad nausem until they finally succeed. In fact, some GMs may rule that you only get one shot with Heal, and that if you fail the first time, you don't get to try again until a suitable amount of time has passed or the target has suffered fresh wounds.

Is this same GM only allowing PCs to fire at enemies once? Where is this hypothetical dividing line?

I had suggested on another thread that it have two modes. If you actually meditate or go into a light trance you can recover wounds every 8(ish) hours, or you can just commit the one die and use as written, every 24 hours.

Honestly I think tying this power to a specific time runs counter to the narrative feel they are striving for, and it should take place in the implied down times when one recovers strain, like the end of an encounter or some rest period. In other words let them regain a wound per rank in the talent at the end of the encounter or during an extended rest, and deal with the committed die/dice based on how they are healing, commiting the die when they take a wound in combat to take advantage of the post encounter version, and commiting the die during the entire non-combat applications. That being said I think the Improved Helaing is fine the way it is, they already commited the healing of critical injuries naturally to extremely long time frames, and this level of shortening feels appropriate.

If the Healer had, say, FR3, but only managed a single white Force pip when trying to use the power, then the power is enacted, but with significant limits (i.e.: no Magnitude upgrades), and the healing applies only to the single target. If the Healer wants to heal the entire party, assuming there was sufficient downtime, would you as the GM allow them to then roll subsequently for each person? If not, then that would be consistent with the GM limitations above. If so, then it suggests that subsequent uses would be fine...basically if you have the time you can keep trying until you get the minimum to trigger the power.

I believe I would lean towards the latter, because there is already a limitation built into the application of Heal, i.e.: it equals stimpacks. However, rather than having the player keep rolling I'd probably allow an automatic success, but with only one Force pip. IOW, they get once chance to roll well, otherwise they take the minimum...again, assuming they have time.

I'm really curious to get people's thoughts on how often you would allow attempts of the Heal power after an encounter. Answers would impact how important or effective the Healing Trance is.

I'd suggest treating as akin to a Medicine check, in that you get one shot to use Heal, after which you've got to wait until at least the end of the next encounter. The d20 versions of Star Wars were particularly guilty of this, as it was often quiet cost effective to employ the various healing skills/powers to heal up the party, and then move onto healing oneself. In Saga Edition, going by the WotC forum posts it was apparently quite common to have parties with 2 Jedi, both with the Vital Transfer power, with one having several instances to heal the party up, and the second only one, but spending a Force Point when using the power so that the Jedi heal-bot gets healed-up but the second Jedi doesn't take any damage from using the power.

One of the design tenets of this system has been that combat is dangerous and quick healing after combat is either sparse or offers diminishing returns, meaning that if a PC gets badly beaten-up during an encounter, they're not going to be quite as quick as rushing into another fight, particularly if they've incurred one or more critical injuries along the way.

Prior Star Wars RPGs ran into problems with Jedi heal-bots that simply spammed their various healing abilities to bring the party back up to full health after each encounter. While such a thing isn't a problem in D&D (which is generally designed to accommodate just such a tactic), it becomes problematic in RPGs where "magic" (be it actual magic, psionics, or the Force) isn't considered an assumed part of the party's make-up, as the group now has access to improved healing that the core game system wasn't really meant to address.

When working on my own take on the Heal power, the above issues were things I kept in mind so as to not unduly balance the game by making it so that damage recovery became as trivial a thing as it is in D&D, especially 4e with classes under the Leader role all having some kind of healing effect to keep their fellow PCs up and running during encounters. One of my earlier attempts was to limit the use of the Heal power to a once-per-day thing to keep it more in line with how WEG handled Force-based healing (target got two Strength rolls with a small bonus, but could only benefit from the power once per day), though I opted to go to a "per encounter" basis, which based on the feedback i got seemed to work pretty well for most folks, since it kept the Force user from completely supplanting conventional healing methods like stimpacks, Medicine checks, or even bacta tanks.

And going by the EU lore, the ability to heal others via the Force generally isn't a super-fast miracle cure, but rather is more akin to a quick boost to the body's natural healing ability, with prolonged Force healing required much greater periods of time. Despite the generally abysmal quality of the books, the Jedi Academy Trilogy showcased a Mon Cal healer (Clighal) that needed a significant amount of time to help Mon Mothma recover from a manufactured virus that she'd been infected with.

I'm really curious to get people's thoughts on how often you would allow attempts of the Heal power after an encounter. Answers would impact how important or effective the Healing Trance is.

Exactly like I'd allow Medicine: 1 check per character per encounter.

EDIT: Added "per character".

I'd suggest treating as akin to a Medicine check, in that you get one shot to use Heal, after which you've got to wait until at least the end of the next encounter.

So you're saying if the Jedi had only learned the basic skill, he could only Heal one person after an encounter? And later in his career if he'd progressed with a Magnitude upgrade and managed to get at least 3 Force pips, he could heal 2 people, but if he'd only managed to get 1 Force pip he could still only Heal one person?

I think I'd agree with this. I like the power-scale of it, but also what few references there are to Force Healing in the EU imply it takes considerable time...in game terms at least "5 minutes". However, if the party was quiet for a couple hours I'd probably allow an additional use per hour simply because it's still cumulative with stimpacks, which imposes its own limits.

The only problem then, though, is how often one can use the opposite, Harm? In theory this can be used every Action. I can just hear the players whining about it... How would you adjudicate this? I think I'd stick with the story of "light side things are harder"...

The only problem then, though, is how often one can use the opposite, Harm? In theory this can be used every Action. I can just hear the players whining about it... How would you adjudicate this? I think I'd stick with the story of "light side things are harder"...

A bacta tank was good enough for Luke, it's good enough for my players.

Whafrog,

As far as Harm goes, to apply an old adage, "it's much easier to destroy something than to restore it or create something new."

So for Harm, since that part of the power is more about ripping a person apart, possibly even by accelerating the natural decay rate of the body's cells, I'd say there is no time limits or restrictions on when it can be used. This also helps to make the usage of Harm far more tempting to a PC that's hoping to stay on the light, as it provides them with a fairly nasty attack effect, particularly as one starts stacking on the Upgrades.

One use in combat might just be able to slide with the single Conflict that's gained for using the power, but as a GM if the player made Harm their 'go-to' attack, I'd consider larger and larger Conflict awards, likely on par with unnecessary cruelty. It's one thing to shoot a person in midst of combat, but another to use the Force (something created by and in turn creates life) to rip someone apart from the inside out. If you've read the Dresden Files series, in particular the first novel Storm Front, Harry goes on to describe how inherently wrong the idea of using magic to commit murder is to his view on magic, which bears more than a few similarities to how the Force operates in terms of light and dark (which is not surprising given how much of a pop culture geek that Harry and by extension Jim Butcher is). Such a thing isn't spelled out in the books, but it goes with the general idea that using the Force repeatedly to kill is something that's inherently wrong and thus going to twist the user the more the continue to do so.

In that case, to come full circle, it looks like Healing Trance still has a purpose.

I do think they should codify this better though. If people assume they can Heal at the same frequency they can use Harm, then the utility of Healing Trance vs XP expenditure is dubious.

In that case, to come full circle, it looks like Healing Trance still has a purpose.

I do think they should codify this better though. If people assume they can Heal at the same frequency they can use Harm, then the utility of Healing Trance vs XP expenditure is dubious.

Agreed. I think adding a sentence that says Heal can only be used once per encounter similar to a Medicine check would work fine, and as you said given even the RAW version of Healing Trance a purpose.

As an aside question, if you use heal on a character and fail to generate force points to activate it, does that still technically count as a use of heal, and thus take up one of the stim pack "slots" for that character for that day?

I ask, because this also would improve the use of healing trance, as there is no chance of failure. Som mild food for thought.

As an aside question, if you use heal on a character and fail to generate force points to activate it, does that still technically count as a use of heal, and thus take up one of the stim pack "slots" for that character for that day?

I ask, because this also would improve the use of healing trance, as there is no chance of failure. Som mild food for thought.

The way I've currently opted to run it for my games is that if the Force user failed to activate Heal, then it doesn't count as a stimpack use, but rather as a failed Medicine check; thus the Force user has to wait a bit before they can try and use Force-based healing on an ally again.

But the way the power is written, it sounds like it counts as a stimpack use regardless of the success or failure of the power.

This is just a thought, but isn't it safe to say that if you are playing the Consular healer, that you will also get the heal/harm force power? How about instead of trying to rework Healing trance, you change Healing trance as is to just a universal ability because in the EU, I'm fairly sure that every force user could use it. So Im thinking about just having it be something like the narative stuff where "Oh, Im stuck on the ship for 55 hours while we are going to Endor. Might as well go into a trance and heal up." So the force users can heal up faster than non force users. I know it seems to take it off balance, but when you think about it yes they gain the benefit of healing faster, but they are also being hunted down by bounty hunters, the Empire, and just about anyone during the time period. So I think that faster healing is reasonable. You can keep the Improved Healing Trance in there because I think that signifies that this person is a specialist. Now to replace Healing Trance in the skill tree I can think of 2 possibilities.

1. Add in another Force Rating. Lets face it, the Healer is generally going to turn to the Heal/Harm skill more often than not when healing, so why not increase their force rating to accomodate the healing?

2. Make a new passive ability saying that you double the effects of the Heal/Harm force power.

So basically, you are just trying to encourage the Healer to get into the Heal/Harm tree. (The second option is overpowered, but something along those lines.) I also think that by doing this you open up the door to temptation for the Healer. They can get these bonuses if they decide to heal their companion, or they could just strike out at the enemy and be done with it at the cost of morality.

I don't plan on allowing the Heal/Harm force power in my campaign, so I'd rather have it independent from the talent tree. But that's just me.

As a general rule the talent trees hardly ever interact with Force powers (the only instance I'm aware of is the Niman Disciple)