I play an actual surgeon medic (On my mage) who has some limited Light casting capabilities but his mana pool being damaged means he can’t fix things without great detriment to himself. The problem I find is that magic cures everything in RP and everyone’s up and about the next second like nothing happened. It sort of leaves people who play actual surgeons kinda sat there like “I trained for no reason. I’m not needed.”
That could also refer to demons slowly overpowering him and his barrier.
And until Second War, use of Light was (at least in human society) limited to healing. Plus, we know it´s possible for someone to be unable to use the Light when they aren´t completely convinced about things they do, doubt themselves or maybe just believe what they are doing isn´t what Light wants (like Arthas did). This severely limits what you can do unless you are someone like Scarlets who can be murderous maniacs and still wield it.
So? Half of things in the world is invalidated by presence of someone who can wield magic. Should I now refrain myself from being able to create fire just because some hunter may have hurt feelings because he is really skilled at starting campfires?
Medics can be still useful when there are no magic wielders around or there are simply too many wounded. On top of that, they can use things like healing potions, herbs or I don´t know, enchanted bandages (be original).
This to me seems like farmer Joe demanding from Demon Hunter Ilthallas Felblaze who infused himself with demon, being one of the five trainees to survive the process, attacked Legion stronghold of Mar´dum, ended imprisoned by Wardens for years only to go right back to fighting demon armies immediately after being freed, that he stops using his Fel powers while fighting orcs that attacked general area where he lives, because farmer Joe feeels invalidated by him and is just kinda sitting there like “I trained with mah pitchfork for no reason. I´m not needed.”
Not every character concept is equal in terms of power and I don´t see any reason why lore should be straight out ignored to make RPers who decided to have their medic use thread and needle (instead of many other ways to heal) feel more useful.
And I am saying this as someone who RPed medic who wasn´t using magic.
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Welcome to the industrial revolution, ask all the blacksmiths about how they felt about the new industrial forges.
Although, blacksmiths still do exist so what does that tell us…
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Resident medic reporting in!
I find mixing both magical healing and traditional/conventional methods comes in handy. I.E. using stitching, bandaging etc for the less severe wounds while using magic for the more severe injuries.
I often incorporate the workings of an apothecary(traditional concept) in to my writing, making medicines, salves, tonics etc IC.
Relating to the whole apothecary thing, I can confirm the alchemy/medical side of it is rarely used.
Picking up from what a few posters have said, if you are treating someone IC. Always ask the other person OOC if they are okay with the surgical side of things.
With that said, there is a lot of potential things to explore with medical rp, while admittedly, I enjoy writing out the traditional side of healing and the apothecary side, as opposed to using magic all the time.
Wait, how Does the Rotgarde have a medic, aren’t you guys dead already?
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You are already dead
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Maybe not how the Light in itself works, but if you take using mana into account at some point a character would simply be too exhausted to channel anything more.
I mean, we can act as if mana is just a game mechanic, but I quite like taking the concept of mana into rp as well. I did that on all my healers. To save energy, they’d turn to more rudimentary ways of mending. Why waste precious energy on a wound you can easily fix by slapping on some herbal mixture and a bandage?
That, and I think always using nature magic or the Light as a sort of instant fix for characters if they get injured, a sort of free pass, is boring to rp as well. Characters don’t have to think about consequences because who cares, we’ve got a priest/druid/paladin/shaman who can just fix sh*t with magic (yes, regardless of this being a high fantasy setting). What’s the fun in that?
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Mana is a thing with Arcane, not Light.
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I really like that with mistweaver monks, they’re different. If I feel like healing again I have an idea for a Gnome mw, using alchemy and acupuncture together with chi to heal.
Pandaren mistweaving? Well, a bit.
My orc knows how to mist weave. But he also used to be Kor’kron. So he’s no stranger to battlefield trauma.
Okiba has and continues to make regular visits to Thunderpaw refuge and the temple of the jade serpent in pursuit of knowledge regarding all sorts of medical arts. Be it potions, surgery, recovery and beyond. So yeah, my Orc dabbles in Pandaren medicine, even has a Pandaren surgical box.
But to build on medical RP? First aid. Youd be shocked how much people overlook even the most basic, long established fundamentals of first aid and say “cauterize it!” Or “saw it off!”. It’s maddening.
Surgery and potions can do great things that can be costly for magic users. Can’t ever heal an arm that needs amputating.
Other than that, I have loose headcanon for how some of the magic healing works:
Druid, Monk and Shaman - speeds up the natural healing process.
Light - Just ‘heals’. And burns undead.
Basically you can heal however you want.
In one occasion a healing potion/magic is able to bring you back from the brink of death/severe injury in a blink of an eye, and in another, no matter what is done it doesn’t work.
It’s super inconsistent and basically you can just choose whichever way fits the best for the narrative you’re in atm.
When it comes down to healing RP, I like to ask the patient whether or not they’d prefer long winded and rather traditional methods (herbs, ointments, needle and thread ect) or whether they’d prefer a more magical route. Now when it comes down to it, I like to put my own flair on both methods, to make sure that either method is interesring for the patient. So they’re not just sat there reading my walls of texts.
With traditional, get your gritty and grim wounds with salt to kill of bacteria which burns, with the joy of being smeared in a healing ointment that stinks or being stitched ect. With healing, it feels warm at first and then it burns a little and that exhausts my character because it’s magic and it might leave a good scar you can flash to the ladies.
I always whisper beforehand how much they’d like to be healed, if they’d prefer traditional over magical, that sort of thing. Just to get an idea of what people would prefer in the RP. You get some that dislike magic and prefer the traditional method, some prefer it to be quick and done with. Depends on the person I’m treating really.
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For me it too has always been depending on the other character. Most important for me is to make it interactive, something for both sides regardless of the method.
My druid here uses a mix. Some herbs there, some nature magic there. I really love mixing the two! So much exciting RP to be had within medical roleplay, whether you’re magical or not!
(Wrong character, meant to post it on my AD boy xD)
You could easily implement and use medicine/medical/physical healing as part of roleplay, not everyone knows magic.
As with most things in roleplay, my approach to healing - and that taken by most of the Hawks - is to put the control in the hands of the person who’ll have to deal with the consequences (in this case, the victim of the injury).
Some players (the traumagowning contingent, which I’m a card-carrying member of) like to ham up a lengthy recovery where the wounds they’ve taken have consequences for a while. Some prefer to have them immediately fixed, so they can get back to doing things they find more fun. Both approaches are equally valid; different people enjoy different things.
In general, i tend to view magic healing as Not Without Cost. Whether that’s in the personal resources of the caster, or the physical and mental impact on the patient. There’s also a lot of headcanon around things magic can’t do; as Narme mentioned, our Field Surgeon tends to treat the light as being more like a combined painkiller-and-combat-stim, and usually states that anything he mends is a bodge job of ‘shove everything in roughly the right place and sear it shut’, for example. Bones he’s healed tend to set crooked, wounds tend to have heavy keltoid scarring, etc etc.
The tl;dr is Communicate. Communicate early, communicate often. Work with your patient to figure out what’s an enjoyable and engaging story.
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Yeah, Brigante is actually a field surgeon as well, but he has no magical healing whatsoever ( except with animals, but hey that’s a Ranger thing), as Yas says, its down to the person taking the injury, how they best like to handle the outcome. The person -doing- the healing obviously uses whatever method they want after chatting it through, Magic Healing, Potions, Scalpel, Needle and thread, all have their place in the setting. Sometimes it is the sheer amount of trauma. Brigante has a pronounced limp and it causes him pain to run. Why? Because in Redridge he got mashed up in his left leg by one of our DM’d missions, we get back to Stonewatch, he gets healed but its still sore and inflamed, he’s confined to rest for a while, till it kicks in properly (Magical Healing). Then, the Alliance super mana weapon goes off, with Stonewatch tower at Ground Zero. Try as he likes to fling himself down the stairs to cover he is pummeled by rubble and ends up smashed and broken in the debris. They were able to dig him out, but the already weakened leg was broken even worse, and whilst they could heal him I was thinking “Hmm, no, I’ve had a broken leg before, If I’d been forced to dive for cover, then had a hefty amount of rubble land on me, breaking it again, less than an hour after surgery/healing, then, I don’t care how good at magic they are, there is going to be a lasting physical effect”
The Healer at the time did not take this as a slight, as I explained to her that this was the second crippling wound to the same location in under an hour, she was like “oooh, yeah, that is gonna leave a permanent-ish crippling effect.”
Communication is good. They didn’t go away feeling like a useless Healer, and I got to give some consequences.
Likewise we RP that the Sun Hawks are generally issued with a few Healing potions for active missions, but they’re not ‘Feelgood juice’ nor particularly common, they have limits. Besides, we have the Flight Surgeon, and a couple of other magical healers, as well as people who can do the needle and thread stuff like Brigante.
As someone mentioned earlier, it can be useful to gather a little bit of medical knowledge, as to how some wounds can be treated if you go down the surgery route. For example, I was once whinging to a mate, he doesn’t play WoW, but is a LARPer, and an Ex Royal Marine Combat Medic, about the amount of people who run around with guns and just shoot everyone and how every second injury my character was having to do surgery on was a bullet wound, and he told me this little gem. With a bullet wound, you should never just stitch it together (Obviously after removing the bullet), reason being, a Circular wound stitched together will always have a residual weak spot at the centre that will never heal as well as the skin around it. You have to basically make it a linear wound with a scalpel, -then- stitch the two sides together, and you end up with normal scar tissue and a normal healing process. It’ll look a bit lumpy, but if you’re shot, that’s the last of your worries. There are plenty of old books on medical procedures and theory and how people believed certain things could be cured, dating back right to the theory of ‘Humours’. But yeah, with a little research , you can make the surgery a bit believable is, at least certainly for a world with dragons, demons and glowing shoulderpads…
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