Does Heal skill do anything other than help stabilize a dying creature? In the past I've tried using it to treat disease and such, but I've never seen any tangible effect. I quickly passed on this skill as I was rolling up a cleric to test the new prc..and then thought to post for discussion. I'd suggest that this skill should see some improvements, as I never invest in it anymore. Perhaps it could have a chance to immediately cure disease or poison? And/or heal HP up to the invested skill per day (similar to lay on hands - but not in combat)?
I've kind of been wondering this on my latest playthrough. One thing I tried is doing a heal on a diseased party member and then resting. In some cases they failed the disease check but still didn't suffer any ability damage. but I haven't looked to see if that's actually programmed in. I think there are rules for treating poison, so that you could use delay poision + heal to avoid ability damage, but I'm not sure that works, either. I suspect not.
Heal is kind of Diagnostic skill mostly in role play part of D&D. Like to determine which animal killed a horse or to nurse wounded animal in D0 - Hollow's Last Hope I currently run at home. Additionally it is used for stabilize when PC is below zero HP. I always tell my players to treat skills as information how much bonus they would have in certain situation. Some require training via rank increase. But most could be used directly from natural abilities.
This makes sense in a Pnp scenario, but most everything of that subtle nature is lost in translation to a single-player pc game. I was just wondering because the skill information in the character creation states that it can help in a number of things...so that should - as a minimum change - be corrected to only mention stabilize. Basically it's a new player skill trap, imho.
Im not sure we would want to give everyone a Cure Disease ability, even at low roll, or neutralize poison. However, it would make sense if high Heal had a positive effect on cure wounds spells for clerics, druids, paladins and rangers and would help differentiate a healing cleric from a fighting cleric, or a Hospitaller-style Paladin from a Templar-style Paladin.
I'm not sure what the concern is. If it's that you could just click the button until you're healed, yeah that wouldn't be good. The way it works in pen and paper is that when you would make a save for the poison/disease, a healer can also make a heal check against the DC, and you get the better result. You still need two consecutive successes to heal from disease, for instance. You only get one heal check per saving throw. If you don't have a trained healer, the action is only going to be improving your odds because you roll twice; an untrained heal check might have worse odds than even a weak save. Heal also lets you double people's natural healing rate, although I think that might be at the cost of not resting yourself.
All this can be done in the resting script, though I have never bothered. But yes, it would be well worth doing. The tricky part would be choice - to add some way of choosing whether you want your healer to stay up all night doing it, or rest themselves.
It's probably not too difficult to add a condition that gets checked during the resting function. Another aspect is that if you skip resting, you would eventually become fatigued/exhausted. I suspect that's also not implemented based on time passed; just spells/abilities. But it probably could be. I feel like that's one of the nice touches in the Infinity Engine games (also the morale stuff, where characters can start panicking just from their allies getting killed; and some recruitible NPCs have low base morale as a character flaw).
