5 Comments

I think the theory behind healing as a conjuration spell is that you're replacing lost flesh or something

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Really though it should just be necromancy, if the lore is that it's manipulating life energy or whatever

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Or transmutation if you're rearranging flesh to get rid of damage and cuts. either way, conjuration is like, 2nd place at best for "school you'd intuitively think healing falls into"

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There's still potentially a big problem with Disintegrate, although it intersects with HP metaphysics, and I'm not sure if you want to get into that.

If you throw a Disintegrate that deals 60 damage at someone who has 50 HP left, we know what happens: his body unsnaps like a summoned item. But what happens if you throw a 60-point disintegrate at someone with 80 HP left? Your description of unsnapping implicitly seems like an all-or-nothing process. Is "partial unsnapping" a conceptual possibility? Even if it is, the answer can't be "75% of his body unsnaps" because that causes a lot of problems for normal gameplay.

What kind of injuries, if any, would a Disintegrate-survivor experience? What does an "unsnapping energy" do if it doesn't reach the critical threshold?

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I think that really has to do with HP metaphysics, and should be handled by untangling HP metaphysics first, with knock-on effects for most spells that deal damage. I have some ideas for that, but they are still very vague and nowhere near post form.

HP is an abstraction over various kinds of damage, this means that chunks of your body vanishing feasibly can be handled through HP, though not 75%. Generally, I guess that souls should have spell resistance of some sort built in, such that disintegrate (and other spells, really) thrown at a person would just disintegrate their skin and muscle in a large area, instead of turning them entirely into dust, even if disintegrate of that power would wipe out a huge chunk of a stone wall twice their body weight without any problem.

If figuring out a consistent way to handle that kind of "effectiveness reduction" doesn't pan out, I'd rather just modify disintegrate so that it kills you instantly instead of trying to deal with the headache of having special rules for inanimate and animate objects. Makes the spell stronger but eh, I'd rather have an overpowered spell than an inconsistent physics system.

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