Healers kits, whilst fantastic to players when grinding away on monsters as witnessed by moi, are the single most irritating and unrealistic thing i've ever seen. The kits can give up to 50+20+heal skill HP back twice per round, which makes it hard to balance DM events, because people are more than happy to spam them off.
As a LARPer, i'm more used to putting up with 60 second counts to restore 1 hit point (often out of 3, 4 or 5 maximum hitpoints), the count being halved with an assistant.
My suggestion is, removing the kits from the game completely and in its stead replacing them with scripted kits. There could be a number of them that would require some time to apply, roleplay and so forth to be necessary. For example, 5 tools, each of which might heal d20+healskill/5, meaning that over time you'd gradually heal the target of their ailments.
Items might consist of Scalple (removing crappy flesh), Needle and Thread (repairing good flesh), Iodine (sanitising stitched wounds), Bandages (keeping stitched wounds clean), Splints (assuming the player is badly injured or worse). Each, to my mind, would apply a 'Recently X' debuff on the target (Recently banaged, recently stitched, recently sanitised, recently splinted, recently cleaned of damaged flesh), which would slowly wear off over time. For example, five minutes, three minutes, one minute. This would represent the minimal skills that a surgeon can make use of whilst on the fields of battle, and the limitations involved with regards to surgical healing as opposed to magical healing. A wounded man, after all, still needs time to recover. Constant stitching will not keep him alive if he loses too much blood.
In terms of tools for 'out of combat' areas, for instance cities, where it might be asumed that there is a hospital, or a temple, a pale masters tower, a flesh grafters lair and so forth, in which there would be tools available for surgery, we could have another widget for healing wounds, which would function as per healers kits, either with or without the "Recently Tended" debuff.
To those of you who enjoy the spamming of healing kits this might sound like a kick in the arse, but it does promote the play of priests and druids, of which we've very few. It also gives people the chance to be creative during events, set up a field hospital and make a base camp of operations whilst out in the deep jungle in wait of incoming wounds and perform surgery on their targets through roleplay rather than just clicking.
I personally would prefer to be rid of the heal kits. What would the general concensus be?
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