The spell specifies a target they are engaged with, but doesn't call out that they can Heal themselves.

I think the only issue with allowing this, is that the Heal spell can remove Strain, and if you roll well enough, you could remove the strain it costs to cast the spell in the first place, essentially making Healing unlimited.

Going by the consistent language of Augment and Barrier I would say no. It also means Dispel can’t be used in themselves!

This warrants a discussion I believe. What does everyone think? I like it, although I’m unsure about Dispel, there are no non magical ways to remove a spell. At least with Heal you can take a potion of Healing

also because Arcane can’t cast Heal and Primal/Divine can’t Dispel there’s no good combination of magic users to deal with this problem

Strictly speaking, while Augment and Barrier both specifically include the caster, Dispel and Heal do not specifically exclude the caster. That seems like it would be a significant enough omission to warrant a notation. If the rules state that a character is considered to be in engaged range of himself, then whether specifically stated or not, a caster should be able to target himself with Dispel or Heal.

I would borrow the rules covering medical care for magically healing oneself: increase the Difficulty by two, and further, not allow Strain recovery from the spell unless at least one Success was generated. That should significantly mitigate the problem of perpetual self-healing.

Agreed. I feel it’s a decision that hinges on the power of magic in your setting. This is a perfect place FFG could have put a side bar saying “we excluded the caster for this generic system for balance reasons, but here are ways to change it if you’re looking for a different type of magic”

Personally I like that “add 2 Difficulty” thing, probably should have just been an additional effect

A great question that didn't occur to me at all. Coming from decades of D&D/Pathfinder I just assumed the Heal spell could target the caster.

Strain recovery could be an issue, but casting the spell does require an action. Any skill check could generate advantage that can be used for strain recovery, and with a spell at least the caster is spending 2 strain to make the skill check.

RAW doesn't specify, so I'd say go with what works for your game (and of course that is the whole point of Genesys). I will be allowing casters to target themselves with the Heal spell.

I think the benefit to not allowing it is it avoids the question of Heal spamming after an encounter

45 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

I think the benefit to not allowing it is it avoids the question of Heal spamming after an encounter

True, this is a real issue as characters aren't limited in the way they are in a vancian setting to a certain number of castings. Is it more of an issue than spamming healing for the rest of the party? How would you limit this party-wide? Once per character per encounter/day/session? Per rank in magic skill or knowledge?

Because you can’t cast it on yourself you can’t heal all your Strain easily. You will hit your Strain cap before you finish Healing everyone

3 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

Because you can’t cast it on yourself you can’t heal all your Strain easily. You will hit your Strain cap before you finish Healing everyone

But can the caster not use advantage generated from any magic skill check to heal strain?

Technically yes, but if you’re trying to heal everyone and there are crits then the Difficulty will be higher reducing the Advantages. Also if you want to heal the targets Strain then you don’t have Advantage to spend on Healing your own. Once they are fully healed why are you even rolling a heal check?

Personally I have a hard limit on one check after an encounter for something like this Spell. I’ll grant boost if there’s extra time to devote to it... or setback if the clock is ticking! The reason I do this is simple: a single roll represents your best efforts to do a task, if you fail then your efforts where not good enough. If you heal a few wounds then that’s great, if you resurrect someone then they are probably just happy to be alive.

But this spreads further into the way I run a game. I rarely have a roadblock than must be passed with a single successful check. Failure will still progress the story, there will be other ways to go even if that’s a harder path.

If a player said to me “I’m going to cast heal until everyone is better” I would consider the situation. Is there a week game time between now and the next scene? Is tgere only 3 minuets? Is this a safe place to rest for an hour? If I think there’s enough time and it’s safe I would respond “Sure, don’t even bother rolling, you succeed. But you don’t get to do anything else, anyone else trying to do something now has two setback to their checks because of your constant interruptions”

Give them what they want, but never for free.

Slightly related: because of the scarcity of healing magic in the setting I'm working on (and the absence of a doctor or healer in the party), and because six-packs of healing potions don't really fit well with swords & sorcery, I devised an alternate way for characters to heal up. Instead of carrying around medpacks or healing potions, I'm allowing them to Rally: as a maneuver, a character may spend a Story Point to immediately restore 5 Wounds. They may only do so once per round. Each time they Rally before they rest for at least six hours, the number of Wounds restored decreases by one, until no healing is provided.

I'm going to test this out when we play and see how it goes. I think that, absent reliable healing magic or medpacks/potions, it should be a pretty effective way to get out of tight spots, while the requirement of spending a Story Point will keep them from over-using it. If it turns out that they hoard Story Points for healing, I may have to think of something else, but I expect a pretty active turnover of Story Points.

This is one instance where I liked what the Force powers did better: the Heal power worked like a Stimpack, and "stacked" with Stimpacks, such that you could only benefit from such healing sources 5 times in a day, and then you got no benefit. I may institute that as well.

My other concern is that critical injuries don't end up lasting very long with this either.

12 hours ago, yeti1069 said:

The spell specifies a target they are engaged with, but doesn't call out that they can Heal themselves.

I guess there's a question of whether a target is at engaged range to themselves. If they aren't, I'd have a hard time saying what range they would be instead, so I think they are. Based on that, I think it's perfectly acceptable to allow Heal on self.

Outside of combat, I think it's reasonable to limit Heal to once per target per encounter (perhaps once per caster per target per encounter). This keeps the session from being too focused on one player making a bunch of rolls while everyone else is inactive.

It's true that with magic, severe critical injuries heal faster (for the easy ones, a simple Medicine check is probably better). This may be an advantage, if you want your players to continue the session. It may be a disadvantage if you want your players to really feel the sting by being inactive for some period in the hospital recovering. You're generally putting the story on hold while this happens, though (or just having the bad guys win off screen), so the table time is the same regardless.

18 hours ago, yeti1069 said:

The spell specifies a target they are engaged with, but doesn't call out that they can Heal themselves.

I think the only issue with allowing this, is that the Heal spell can remove Strain, and if you roll well enough, you could remove the strain it costs to cast the spell in the first place, essentially making Healing unlimited.

The book calls out that you suffer 2 strain afterwards, so I'm pretty sure the order of events would be:

1. decide to use heal

2. form the dice pool

3. resolve the check, healing say 3 wounds and 4 strain if you rolled 3 success and 4 advantages

4. suffer 2 strain

4 minutes ago, GroggyGolem said:

The book calls out that you suffer 2 strain afterwards, so I'm pretty sure the order of events would be:

1. decide to use heal

2. form the dice pool

3. resolve the check, healing say 3 wounds and 4 strain if you rolled 3 success and 4 advantages

4. suffer 2 strain

Good call out.

Still, you basically have unlimited healing: so long as you can recover 2 strain per cast, you simply end up with 2 strain damage when all is said and done.

Based on Developer comments too it seems like they intend magic to be the one heal that can be used infinite times provided you have the strain and time to do so.

The GM can always put other restrictions on it if they need to, such as a one per encounter rule like medicine checks.

From my point of view, magical healing should be more potent than regular medicine techniques and painkillers.

Personally, I plan on making certain critical injuries take a longer time to heal for the narrative, unless magic is involved. Stuff like crippled limbs can represent broken bones and fractures, stuff that doesn't heal fast but takes time. Being Blinded, if the GM rules it as temporary, could also take time to heal the eyes or to remove whatever substance got in them. I've ran star wars in the past where crits can be healed as quickly as with a single action but if it's more severe than getting knocked down or taking a minor nick, that just doesn't make sense that it can be healed within 1 minute.

7 hours ago, ubik2 said:

I guess there's a question of whether a target is at engaged range to themselves. If they aren't, I'd have a hard time saying what range they would be instead, so I think they are. Based on that, I think it's perfectly acceptable to allow Heal on self.

Except it doesn't say engaged range, it says " one target they are engaged with..." I agree that it's hard to imagine anything than you being at engaged range from yourself, but the question is: can you engage yourself?

(Bring on the jokes about marrying yourself...)

"The character can use the Divine or Primal magic skill in place of a Medicine check in order to remove damage or heal Critical Injuries." is a quote from pg 217 GCR. To me this means that it falls under the same frequency restrictions as a medicine check, which on pg 81 states that any one character can attempt to heal a crit injury once a week, and that any one character can only benefit from one medicine check per encounter.

It also states that you increase the difficulty by 2 when performing a medicine check on yourself, so i'm just adding a "target self" effect for +DD to heal and dispel to keep it simple

I am unaware of any examples in the CRB where the word "engaged' is used in a description of character maneuvers/actions where the text does not make sense if that word is interpreted as a range. Perhaps "engaged" should be interpreted as a range whenever it is used in a description of character maneuver/action.

Has anyone put this to the developers?

6 hours ago, Nithri said:

I am unaware of any examples in the CRB where the word "engaged' is used in a description of character maneuvers/actions where the text does not make sense if that word is interpreted as a range. Perhaps "engaged" should be interpreted as a range whenever it is used in a description of character maneuver/action.

"Engaged
To reflect two or more targets who are grappling or otherwise engaged in hand-to-hand combat, there is a special range status called engaged. Two characters engaged with each other are in very close proximity. A warrior needs to be engaged with a target to hit them with their sword. When two or more characters are engaged with each other, it is called an engagement.

Engaged is also used to indicate that a person is close enough to an item to use it. A hacker needs to be engaged with a security terminal to attempt to hack it. A pilot needs to be engaged with their fighter jet to board it. A hunter needs to be engaged with a tree if they want to hide behind it for cover while tracking their target. The engaged status simply indicates that two things are close enough to each other to directly interact.

Consider engaged as a subcategory of short range. Obviously, someone can be slightly farther away if they’re at short range, instead of being engaged with someone else. However, the difference in distance is relatively minor. Thus, spending a maneuver to move to engage someone or something is as much a matter of moving into combat cautiously enough to avoid receiving a blow unnecessarily as it is moving a physical distance."

-Genesys CRB pg. 106

Also, in terms of the Heal spell. I will point out that on page 214 of the CRB under the Heal spell it says, "Healing magic works much like the Medicine skill..."

As a GM, I am going to take this line literally, and apply the same limitations that the Medicine skill has. On page 61 of the CRB it has the Medicine Check Difficulty sidebar, and in the last paragraph that starts "Three final notes:" It explains the limitations of using the Medicine skill including: "Any one character can only make one attempt to heal a particular Critical Injury per week of game time." And "Also, any one character can only benefit from one Medicine check per encounter."

A character once again gains access to "once per encounter" abilities if used during an encounter, on "Step 5: Encounter Ends" of structured gameplay as explained on page 96. I have looked for how to resolve these sort of situations outside of structured encounters, but after reading and rereading the rulebook I haven't been able to find any mention of them. I feel like the game more or less just wants the Narrative stuff to be the transitional phase between encounters. Because of this I will probably apply some GM decisions to limit using skill checks and abilities during non-structured narrative "scenes" to use the old Star Wars beta lingo.

I will most likely be adding the caveat that the narrative time between structured encounters will be considered a 'narrative scene' time, and once per encounter abilities will only be able to be used once during the narrative scenes between encounters, as if the narrative gameplay was an encounter of its own. An idea I had for these narrative scenes to work out in a cause and effect way, again to use another game's lingo (Fiasco) I will have the PCs either "Establish" or "Resolve". I shall endeavor to do this structure in my head and through narration rather than in gameplay terms, so I will consider the scene set-up coming out of the last encounter, and determine whether it makes more sense for the PCs to Establish or Resolve the narrative scene time.

Establish/Resolve example: If the PCs are being chased in a starship by the BBEG in a bigger starship, this will be the antagonists (GM) "Establishing" the scene, and the PCs can "Resolve" this scene, so I'd call for some skill checks to figure out the proper resolution of the scene, maybe the PCs decide to fly into an asteroid field, and I would call for difficult piloting rolls to avoid being pulverized. And during this time perhaps one PC is piloting check, and another is doing a mechanics check, and another PC is doing an intimidation check against a robot on board who is starting to freak out.

7 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

Has anyone put this to the developers?

If you mean in regard to the frequency, the developers responded that the strain cost on the spell was meant to be the limiting factor, and players are able to cast Heal as often as they like.

If you mean a target restriction, I'm not aware of it being specifically asked or answered.The developers indicated that the Heal spell is intended to be a viable replacement for the Medicine skill, and it probably wouldn't serve that role if it cannot be used to heal yourself (which you can do with the Medicine skill).

D&D had a similar issue where people weren't certain if you were in "touch" range of yourself (you are).