In Ptolus, the House of the Sacred Heat believes in the divine healing power of fire. They are not priests and they do not have truly holy magic, but their techniques “serve the needs of Ptolusites who cannot afford to pay a temple hundreds of gold coins to heal a wound or deal with an illness.”

This concept of fantastical healing lying somewhere between the naturalistic limits of the Heal skill and the magical extremes of divine magic has always been very appealing to me. Unfortunately, the purview of the sacred heat wasn’t given any mechanical definition. Without that mechanical definition, there’s no compelling reason for the PCs to ever interact with the Healers of the Sacred Heat. As a result, in a setting already teeming with activity, the Sacred Heat is a non-entity.

Reading through Reign t’other day, however, I found the esoteric discipline of Truil Bodywork. Greg Stolze describes this discipline, in part, by writing: “Some Truils argue, quite seriously, that bodywork functions by compressing a month’s suffering into ten or fifteen minutes. The bodyworkers themselves just roll their eyes at the jibe.”

Reign is built on the One-Roll Engine (ORE), so the pain-for-gain mechanics of Truil Bodywork don’t directly translate. But the basic concept was inspiring. Here’s the Healer of the Sacred Heat feat:

HEALER OF THE SACRED HEAT

Prerequisite: Heal 5 ranks

Benefit: The character gains access to the Healing Arts of the Sacred Heat. As long as they have access to an open flame, they gain a +2 circumstance bonus to Heal checks and they can also use any of the following abilities.

Burning Out the Poison: By using flame and heat applied to specific locations on the body, a Healer of the Sacred Heat can attempt to burn a poison out of a patient’s body. (Some ingested poisons will also require the patient to swallow specially prepared coals.) This treatments takes 1 round and deals 1d6 points of nonlethal damage to the patient, but if the healer succeeds on a Heal check with a DC equal to that of the original poison + 5 the patient is completely cured. (They suffer no additional effects from the poison and any temporary effects are ended. However, the treatment does not reverse instantaneous effects such as hit point damage, temporary ability damage, and the like.)

Cooling the Disease: By using strategically placed flames or heat sources around a patient’s body, a Healer of the Sacred Heat can create a biorhythmic vortex which will draw heat out of the body. As the heat departs the body, it draws non-magical diseases with it. The treatment takes 10 minutes and deals 1d6 points of nonlethal damage to the patient due to the sudden chilling of their body, but if the healer succeeds on a Heal check with a DC equal to that of the original disease +5 the patient will automatically succeed on their next saving throw against the disease.

Cauterizing the Wound: With 10 minutes of work and a successful Heal check (DC 15), a Healer of the Sacred Heat can convert lethal damage to nonlethal damage equal to their margin of success. A patient receiving this treatment also suffers 1d6 points of additional nonlethal damage due to the strain placed on their body by the technique.

DESIGN NOTES

I’m tempted to add a “once per day per patient” limitation to Cauterizing the Wound, but I’m  not sure it’s actually necessary. What do y’all think?

This material is covered by the Open Game License.

Last month in his “Legends & Lore” column, Mike Mearls discussed a skill system he and Monte Cook had schemed up in which DCs would be replaced with a descriptive tier of difficulties: Novice/Journeyman/Expert/Master/Grandmaster/Impossible. I wasn’t a fan of this system because it mostly obfuscated simpler mechanics and added complexity without actually giving much (if anything) back.

When Monte Cook revisited the topic this week, however, it made me realize they might be onto something — although I don’t think they’ve quite realized it yet. (Cook’s proposal is still over-baking mechanical complexity without actually accomplishing anything more than the current system.)

But if they can completely jettison the concept of skill ranks, I think they might have a winner.

(1) Set the target number for all tasks to 15. (Or whatever number makes sense; I haven’t actually run any math on this.)

(2) Define each task as Skilled/Expert/Master and give it a level. (For example, a Level 10 Expert task.)

(3) If you meet the minimum requirements for the task, you automatically succeed. (If you’re a Level 10 Expert, you succeed at any Skilled or Expert task of Level 10 or lower automatically without making a check.)

(4) If you’re missing one of the requirements, you have to make an ability check. This check is modified by the difference in level between you and the task. You also gain a +5 or -5 modifier for each difference in skill level.

For example, if you’re a 10th-level Skilled Typographer and you’re attempting a Level 8 Expert typography task, you would make a Intelligence check with a -3 modifier (+2 for being two levels higher than the task; -5 for being Skilled instead of an Expert in the skill).

Similarly, if you’re a 6th-level character who doesn’t have the Decipher Script skill and you’re attempting to decrypt a Level 10 Master code, you would make an Intelligence check with a -19 penalty (-4 for being four levels lower than the task; -15 for being three skill levels lower than Master).

What’s the point? The point is that you’ve eliminated a Page 42 table look-up for skill DCs. And you’ve automated the equivalent of the Take 10 mechanic so that it doesn’t require any calculation at all.

You’ve also effectively eliminated skill checks entirely and focused things back onto ability checks as a core mechanic. This is mostly a sleight of hand, but it can provide one meaningful advantage: You can casually re-key a skill to a different ability score without needing to recalculate a skill bonus (since the check is just an ability check). (One thing I’ve always loved about dice pool systems is the ease with which you could do this, but it’s always been too much of a pain in the ass for D20. It’s not really meaningful for most skills, of course, but it can really crank up the versatility of a system.)

One potential problem with this system is that there’s no clear way to do opposed checks in a completely satisfactory fashion. But you can resolve this by setting which skill sets the task and which skill resolves the task. (For example, if Stealth sets the task then a character’s skill level sets the difficulty of the Perception task. A 10th-level character with an Expert ranking in Stealth, for example, requires a Level 10 Expert Perception task.) Or, alternatively, by always using player-faced mechanics. (If a PC is sneaking past an NPC, the NPC’s Perception skill sets the difficulty of the Stealth task. If the PC is trying to spot an NPC, the NPC’s Stealth skill sets the difficulty of the Perception task.)

Another potential problem is that you have done a pretty good job of obfuscating probabilities. If I’m a 10th-level expert, what’s the difference between a Level 12 Skilled task and a Level 7 Master task? You can work out the math, but it’s not as self-evident as pure numbers would be. On the other hand, in terms of actual play, is that significant?

Somewhere in the OSR blogosphere, somebody posted a list of alternative powers for old-school wights instead of level-draining. (Simply swap in the alternative power.) This was insanely cool and insanely useful and I used it a lot while stocking a mini-hexcrawl a few months back.

And now I’ve lost it and my Google-fu is proving weak.

This sound familiar to anybody? Can you toss me a link?

Thanks.

Bartosz Kielar has translated my essay “D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations” into Polish. You can check it out here.

I don’t have anything particularly witty to say on this occasion. But I’m still at the “tickled pink that somebody translated something I wrote” stage of life, so I thought I’d share.

(1) Raising the price of your streaming service because Hollywood is ratcheting up the licensing fees for their content by 1,000% (or more) is just the sad reality of doing business. And customers who can’t understand that just aren’t being rational.

(2) With that being said, trying to sell a price hike to your customers as actually being a great thing for them was a pretty stupid thing to do. The better approach would have been to be frank about the realities of what was going on: “Look, we have to raise the price you’re paying because Hollywood is raising the price we’re paying. What we’re going to do, though, is give you more control over how much you’re paying by letting you pay for just the services you want. If the new price Hollywood is demanding for streaming content is too high, then you can cut back to just disc delivery.”

After fumbling the initial delivery, your best bet would have been to offer your customers (including those who recently canceled) a 3- or 6-month discount as an apology while offering a more coherent and honest explanation of what was happening.

(3) What you really, really shouldn’t do is try to somehow “make up” for your previous mistake by splitting your service into two different companies which will not share queues, ratings, recommendations, or billing. That’s a plan which significantly reduces the utility of your service for your customers.

(4) The only thing stupider than that would be if you split the service, reduce the value of the service to your customers, and then pretend that this is all supposed to somehow be a great thing for them.

I mean that would be really, really stupid. That would be making the exact same mistake you just got raked over the coals for just a couple weeks ago.

… oh dear.

I actually look at the price increase and shrugged: It was more expensive (although nobody’s price “doubled” despite the ridiculous rhetoric posted by the math-challenged; and unless you were already in their lowest possible tier of service the hike was not outrageously large), but I was still getting a ton of value for the price they were asking.

But the split in services? It’s almost certainly going to result in me canceling at least one of the services.