vvardenfellcat

chamerionwrites:

jottingprosaist:

chamerionwrites:

bigwinged:

chamerionwrites:

Does anyone else occasionally find magical healing a really, deeply irritating detail to account for, when writing in settings that have it?

I mean, don’t get me wrong. At the end of the day trying to make sure that physical injuries have stakes usually leads to fun worldbuilding about what magic is and isn’t capable of doing, and how many people possess the specialized knowledge and/or expertise to fix really serious injuries, and what non-magical medicine looks like in a world where it’s developed alongside other forms of medicine, and the psychological effects of magical healing, and the like. But sometimes I’m feeling lazy and I just want to be able to hurt my characters without immediately having to explain to the reader why they should care, damn it.

I never assumed that magic healing could do everything perfectly, so I write accordingly (and read accordingly; I leave it to the writer to illustrate what magic can or can’t do in their setting, if it’s important). For example, it could close a wound if you don’t have sutures, but you’ll still need a potion to keep infection from growing. Magic probably won’t make the healing painless. A couple of casual lines of dialogue could even set up something like that. “Where did you get all those scars on your arms?” “Well, my Granny’s cat was a mean one. And Granny was a half-decent healer but she never bothered making it pretty.”

When it’s video game fic I just have to separate gaming mechanics from what a fight and injuries and healing would really be like. I’m not going to write about someone downing a potion (or a cheese wheel?) to heal a wound in the middle of battle, any more than I’m going to write about how much HP someone has left.

And definitely, not everyone knows how to use healing magic. There are probably lots of magic-gifted people with little formal training, who can soothe a sunburn or heal blistered feet so you can go back out and work in the field again tomorrow. Slightly rarer would be the experienced hedgewitch who can set a broken bone and start it healing so that it won’t have to be immobilized as long, or who can stop bleeding and fix up torn flesh after childbirth. Then you’ve got your really super focused, formally-trained types who can pull off medical miracles on the battlefield, but they’re already few and far between because of the amount of training that takes, and, well, they often die on the battlefield themselves.

Like any field of study, if you’ve really dedicated yourself to it, you’ll be good at it but maybe at the expense of other fields. My Dragonborn is a mage but he’s the equivalent of a physicist in a really narrow specialized field. His specialty is destruction magic, specifically fire. His healing skills are on a basic first aid level. The peril in his story comes from the fact that none of his traveling companions are healers. If someone gets hurt in the field they have to take care of it the hard way until they can find one.

Absolutely – I never assume magic can do everything perfectly either. It’s no fun that way. Occasionally I just gripe about the process of determining what precisely it CAN do. 

My standby is that healing magical accelerates the body’s own cell growth/repair processes, and that’s it. So, as you say: it can close a wound, but it doesn’t prevent infection, and if you lose enough blood beforehand that you’d need a transfusion you’re probably shit out o’luck. It can heal (or at least start to heal) a broken bone – but if you don’t want to do more harm than good you’d better make damn sure the bone is set right first. (Assuming it’s a pretty basic fracture, most people with a little first aid knowledge can probably reduce it, though. That part takes a strong stomach, and potentially brute strength depending on what bone we’re talking, more than specialized medical expertise.) I also tend to assume that it takes formal training to learn…magical triage, for lack of a better word, and that this is what makes serious injuries more difficult to heal: if somebody tumbles down a flight of stone steps and ends up with a split lip, a bunch of bruises, and a broken arm, it takes an experienced healer to direct their magic to the broken bone rather than burning it all out on the less pressing injuries. 

The interesting questions are always about whether there’s a time limit and what it is (is magical healing less effective/more difficult if it doesn’t take place immediately, or can you get to a healer two days after the injury?), if some types of tissue are harder to repair than others (maybe nerve growth is really tricky, as in real life), all the ways magical healing can go wrong, and how exactly you quantify the upper limit for damage that can be fixed in one sitting/by one person (who presumably doesn’t have an unlimited well of magic upon which to draw). Like I said, it all leads to fun worldbuilding eventually, but sometimes it feels I get drawn down a rabbit hole anytime I write about injuries in a magical setting, and there are moments when I’d rather just keep the flow of words going than sit down and think through all those details.

Like I said: griping. :)

Oh man, all of this is catnip to my brain. I find it enjoyable rather than irritating. I’ve had a lot of these thoughts myself re: Skyrim fic, to the point where I’ve been tempted to write an outline for the curriculum of Restoration at the College.

I also subscribe to the “healing accelerates natural processes” model. And that triage, learning how to prioritize where one’s magic goes– yesss.

Bleeding out is a serious problem for less skilled healers, and even for educated ones who don’t specialize in trauma. Learning how to push the body’s bones into producing more blood very quickly is a skill that only specialized battlefield medics learn, and even then it’s necessary to get litres of water into the patient quickly so they don’t die of dehydration, plus the patient will be weak and hungry.

Actually, patients will be weak and hungry after any healing that involves tissue regeneration. Growing new cells takes energy, yo.

Speed is a factor in how well a wound gets closed. A quickly closed wound on the battlefield is still almost guaranteed to scar, unless the healer is bonkers experienced and has magicka to spare, because they’re just letting the patient’s body throw out collagen like nuts. Atrophic scars are particularly common from war wounds, because not all the underlying tissue is fully regrown. But if the healer works slowly and patiently, they can encourage the collagen to grow properly and close a wound without a trace.

Gut wounds are still hell to heal, and usually lethal. Infection is almost definite with a punctured bowel. Even if the healer assumes the the infection will be survivable, they’ve still got to get in there with their hands and reconnect all the severed intestines in the right order to prevent everything from healing in a mass willy nilly. If you’re being triaged with a gut wound, you’re probably shit out of luck.

Also, healing magic doesn’t undo natural healing that has already taken place. If a wound is half healed or a bone has had time to begin setting, a spell won’t remove the messy scab or badly-set new bone. Any scar tissue already formed is there for good (unless you remove it manually via chirurgery, a technique virtually unknown outside of universities in the Summerset Isles and Morrowind-that-was).

Oh, and also? Healing one’s own body is easier and more intuitive than healing someone else’s. When healing yourself, the magicka comes from within your own body and takes the… natural “flow” of your body’s energies, so it’s easier to direct magicka to the worst wound, and to heal cleanly. (Hence how “Healing” is so basic that every player character in Skyrim starts off already knowing it.) But if you’re trying to heal somebody else, your magicka won’t naturally flow through their body in the right paths; the healer has to know enough anatomy to know which severed muscles/tendons should be reconnected where, how to spot an artery in torn flesh and seal that first, and where to slow down and carefully heal a vein so it’s not occluded by scar tissue. Nerves are especially tricky to memorize, so yeah, they sometimes don’t get healed properly. Unless the healer has specialized training in eye injuries, they’ll probably leave scar tissue in the lens– hence that milky-eyed blindness. And bones are an exception: they always need to be set, even if they’re your own.

Shit that goes wrong for untrained healers:

– Patient passes out if they’re not given water/food

– Nerves not properly regrown; patient has areas of sensation loss

– Trying to heal an already healed wound (i.e. a scar) causes the body to form hypertrophic scars or even keloids

– Scar tissue forms in horrible places (prevents skin stretching, grows muscles together or causes adhesion in general, occludes veins/arteries)

–“I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow in the knee”– and the healer who fixed it didn’t do a good enough job keeping all the delicate and complicated parts of the joint separate, failed to reconnect all the tendons, or put too much scar tissue in there for me to be able to bend the joint

– Attempting to repeatedly (over years) heal someone using very low-level, undirected spells can cause cancer. Because if you’re constantly telling every cell in the body “grow, just grow”… well, it does.

– And guess what– cancer is a growth, so it can’t be removed with magic. When an experienced healer spots cancer in an adventurer’s body, they get told it’s time to retire. No more chugging healing potions for you.

…All this and I haven’t even talked about how various people perceive healing in-world?!

#I’m sorry this ran away with me  #I just have feelings  #I should stop

NO, NO YOU SHOULD NOT