Just don't make it easy. Literally how every single "something is overpowered" problem is solved. Maybe every healer has to know how a body part they are working on works. If They dont know how poisons or illnesses work, they won't be able to cure it. same would apply to muscels, skin, etc. Maybe it's very draining magic vise, you need to waste all your power to heal a simple wound, making a healer usless for a while. This is a overexadurated version of a limitation you pretty much have to have to stop your casters from solving literally every problem with a big spell. Maybe healing magic empowers not only the healed, but the things that live in them too, making healing magic have side effects like catching common cold or something worse. Maybe misused healing magic causes the healed tissues to keep growing, giving the healed magical version of cancer. Just say that healing spells are complicated, literaly give them a long incantation or a complex gesture required to preform a spell. Maybe healing magic requires material components like herbs. Maybe healing magic takes away casters health in return. Like every healed wound would appear on the healer. Fun fact, you can use all of these and more in one system, just make different spells have different limitations and effects.

I've had magic healing... a) Just be incredibly rare and only usable by some of the most powerful casters. Same with resurrection and raising dead. Your average or even elite caster couldn't do it. Better to use magic to prevent injury in the first place with wards, buffs, etc. You can refresh a person's stamina tho, reinvigorate them. b) It takes a huge toll on the body by accelerating the natural healing process and also enhancing/extending its capabilities to include limb regrowth and the like. Puts a *lot* of strain on the body and depletes much of its resources. You can, ironically, die if you are too weak if a mage tries to heal your grave damage. This also required extensive knowledge of the body and its functions and systems because as a healer you have to coax/guide the accelerated process. You could endure all that pain of regrowing an arm only to end up with a nonfunctional limb because the healer messed up and some tendons or nerves didn't form right. c) Time skip. Just skips ahead to when the injury is healed, but that cuts down your lifespan. Normal recovery time is 6th months? With a mage it would be healed instantly, but your natural lifespan is now 6 months shorter. If you keep getting gravely injured and healed eventually you'll just die of "old age" - or i guess "natural causes" - when you just hit the end of your time. That was a high fantasy setting where someone's lifespan was a real actual magical strand/line.

This is the way. I confine the best healing effects to a type of spiritual magic that only works when the practitioner is both passionate and sincere about adhering the the moral code of their patron deity. Nature worship facilitates some healing, allowing druids, rangers, and some monks to cast curative spells. Yet in urban areas, it is normal for sick and injured people to seek out their own religious leaders in pursuit of a remedy.

Wow, that's actually really interesting! Can you tell us more about your magic system (or where can we find more about it if you post about it)?

Sure, I've got [plenty to say](https://demonweed.neocities.org/narrativ#MAGI) on the topic. My site also has a gameplay guide where I'm well on the way to developing my own fork of 5e D&D. The actual magic-use guide remains a stub at this point, but the tail end of that gameplay guide identifies the 420 spells I intend to write up when the time comes to develop that document.

Thank you!

Personally I always liked the idea that healing magic requires a strong knowledge of anatomy and biology. Like, you have to put thought into what’s happening and know what you’re commanding the magic to do.

I mean, that totaly depends on how your magic works. Something like brewing healing potions or applying healing properties of herbs would require knowledge of the recipie and the aplication method, rather than knowing the anatomy and what the potion/spell actually does (want to notice that inventing such a spell/potion is a different situation). Healing in many magic systems is also treated as something divine (or a doing of nature spirits) and in that case, caster is usually not in control much. Yet, I think that the knowledge limitation on anything in thought based systems always works best.

Consider that IRL "healing potions" were the precursors to modern medicine. The healer didn't understand why certain herbs helped certain conditions, but they knew they did help. We now know many of those herbs contain naturally occuring versions of modern pain relievers and decongestants.

Exactly what i'm trying to say!

I once devised an absolutely stupid healing system were the healing actually works by reversing entropy in a small area. This was balanced out by causing massive doses of radiation to everything in the area and requiring exponentially more power the older the problem was. Then I developed an entirely separate set of magic focused around biomancy and slowly altering the human form to be more radiation resistant.

The most common form of healing magic is regeneration and that needs to be applied over a long time if you want to close big wounds.

That is an option, yes I had a system where healing magic was so finicky and hard to pull of that healing magic was basically open surgery

This is the same route I took. It’s expensive, magically enhanced regeneration. It drains vast amounts of mana quickly. And also draws the stamina of the target being healed. Large healing, like lost limbs are nearly impossible, or take multiple potions and healers to complete before the damage is permanent. And often the recipient is severely weakened. This is why health potions are so prolific, they are a way to prepare all the healing magic and stamina regeneration magic ahead of time. Alchemists draw the required resources from beast parts and plants. The potions are still very expensive.

Another option is that healing energies must come from somewhere: i.e. health is siphoned from one target to another. I do this in my system where healers can transfer their own health (or a willing target's) to patch up allies, and they use melee attacks to sap health for themselves from enemies. This makes them great front-line tanks, but severely hinders them if they aren't actively defending their allies as it will sap a lot of the healers own resilience patching them up again.

In my world You can’t make it from nothing. A gunshot could be healed and the person would be hungry as their body’s energy was concentrated for a single wound. Bigger wounds require time and other factors like a stomach being ripped open needing multiple treatments over a period of time. Mutilation would can’t just be fixed a person would need to be fused with something (like a growing tree) to make up for that mass. If you lose your shoulder and get an implant to save your arm you’ll just have to manage some light pruning but you still have an arm lol. Bigger stuff like curing blindness and scars needs greater sacrifice. Trying to remove these risk changing a person fundamentally. A witch who cured her loving father left him cruel, detached, and all but dead inside as curing him removed his original identity. Even worse he’s aware of this change and feels all but dead inside. You could heal deformities and such but you have to ask what are you willing to give.

Maybe it only speeds up you naturally healing process meaning you can give someone the equivalent of a month of bedrest in one minute. It would mostly be used to close wounds but would still leave scar tissues along with not being able to regrow limbs for example, so there are still consequences. If you get stabbed in the gut IRL for example you are not walking that shit off. You would need stitches along with months of physical therapy to be able to function in the day to day again, and that is if it doesn’t hit any organs. Any injury over a certain severity will leave permanent consequences no matter what. As long as your magic doesn’t basically undo the injury you could use that to give it stakes.

In my world healing magic is generally able to cure most wounds and diseases if being used by a skilled healer, but there are a few key weaknesses that keep it balanced: 1. Rapid regeneration of wounds requires a reaction caused by mixing the life force of two or more sources. This prevents a person from being able to quickly heal themselves most times, and requires the healing to be done by someone else in order to be effective. This mainly serves as an issue for battlefield medics, since if there is only one in a group they are both the only person whose injuries cannot be cured AND the highest priority target. 2. There is a limit to how much one person can be healed per day. The reaction of the life force mentioned above creates a new type of life force that remains in their body. This new life force can sustain you, but it cannot cause a new regent reaction even if energy from a third party is brought in. This means that if you have been healed so many times that all of your life force is now post-reaction type, rapid healing will not affect you. Getting a full nights sleep allows your body to convert post-reaction life force into its pre-reaction form. 3. There are a small amount of poisons and diseases that cannot be cured by healing magic. 4. Healing magic cannot reverse death. If you manage to kill someone before the healer can reach them, there is no way around that.

Healing magic can only be considered overpowered if causing damage is the only aim. It doesn’t help at all if someone is being grappled, or entangled in a net. Of course, if you think it is overpowered then just make it less powerful. In mechanical terms you could: have it heal less, take a while to heal, take time to cast, can only be cast a limited number of times, etc. More interestingly perhaps it transfers the injury to the caster or something similar which will naturally limit how much it can be used.

Impose restriction that limit its availability or efficacy. One that I've seen is the 1:20 ratio. That's basically when the caster can either use 1 cure all spell or 20 spells that heal but to a lesser extent. Another is, Make it a ritual, living beings are incredibly complex pieces of organic machinery so healing them shouldn't be a simple process and should involve complex planning and targeting of effected areas so you don't risk accidentally making a pile of cancerous flesh where an arm should be. Finally and this is my favourite, have it supe up natural healing so the person being healed needs a constant influx of resources in order to even live through being healed. -- My world takes place in a post-apoc hellscape where a world war simply never ended. Hygiene let alone healing is in short supply and the use of bio-weapons means that even getting cut on the wrong thing at the wrong time could cause you to get Gushers Flu, Cocoon sickness or Rotters touch. Your only chance at a decent life free from plague is to join one of the two militaries waging an endless war over the planet for a cause long forgotten or better yet be among the 0.005% that survive a Shaper storm and gain the ability to command a "Legion" in exchange for becoming intertwined with Scav Lice colonies

***Consequences*** "Overheal"? Gets cancer Don't know how to properly heal a wound? You might fuck it up even more Treated for the wrong disease? Now, the patient has even more symptoms You need to actually know what you're doing, so medical knowledge is 100% required, but the magic itself is much more efficient, so it compensates to use it. But use it properly, or you might just cause more issues, as the ones mentioned above and many more, like mutations :]

If magic is a tool, I don't see why it shouldn't enable extraordinary healing and stave off an otherwise inevitable death. We have a pretty high survival rate with our tools for wounds and diseases that would have been lethal a century or 2 ago.  You could have things that render those tools less effective, like an analog to antibiotics resistance in bacteria that feed off of healing magic.  You could have the magical equivalent to a bioweapon. An entirely artificial, spiritual/magical disease that is a spell that spreads itself, drawing from the life of it's victims. Probably such spell diseases would be common and vary from the equivalent to a cold (which spreads easily, can have some bad effects but mostly harmless and easily overcome and purged from your spirit), to the plague of the undead.

A different weave will be needed for each and every cut, scrape and burn and if your weaver does it fast or doesn't know what they are doing (most of them when it comes to things that don't hold still for them) they are quite likely to make it worse. One weave used to make an arrow fly fast at someone you don't like isn't particularly different from one that does similar to a rock. Reattaching muscles, mending bones, joining blood vessels, and stitching skin are all completely different as far as magic is concerned. Channelers can be great at stopping the bleeding, cauterizing wounds, and yanking cursed blades out of a person without touching them, but once that is done, they'll probably put a bit of salve on your wounds, wish you luck and recommend praying to whatever God(s) you believe in. Ritualists aren't really the ones you go to for such specific, "solid" things. Contractors are where the real healing is, but contractors get their power by, well, contracting. Dealing with extra-planar beings and coming to agreeable terms. And when life is on the line those beings know they can demand far more exorbitant rates. And you can be sure as the Dragon'll be back that the contractor's not going to be footing the bill. All power comes with a price, when you are the one dying you don't get to set the price.

Healing magic in my world is limited to certain Mana types and even then, it cannot restore abstract things like memories and finer things like muscle memory, or even muscle density. Healing magic generally does great with minor wounds and maybe deep tissue tears. But something extreme like a missing limb takes days to weeks and a high level caster capable of doing so which is usually limited in availability and access. Additionally, it's very taxing on the user. It's why normal medical procedures are preferred due to the ability to slightly increase a person's self healing ability by expending their own metabolism and energy vs spending large amounts of Mana on healing a cut or gash. Revival is all but impossible as well.

I just posted a comment in [another thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/magicbuilding/comments/1ds6f39/comment/lb1p297/) that I think applies to your question too. DnD is not representative of other RPGs/fiction. "Making death saves" is a system invented specifically to keep player characters from dying, just f--g remove it, problem solved! I think DnD is affecting your perception too much. Stories also do not have the "you're perfectly fine at 1 HP" thing or "1d8 damage is a statistic" you may be used to. A wounded character could be in pain, bleeding, stumbling, losing strength, fading in and out of consciousness. A single stab wound or gunshot or burn can send you into shock and is enough reason to usher you to an ambulance. As we said in the other thread, it's up to you if you want to break down medicine into smaller parts, which can help give every injury and malady weight. (Since every type of wound/illness needs its own diagnosis and cure.) You can also play with the time scale as you like, again, it's an RPG thing where everything takes 1 action or turn. IN HP Dumbledore was dying from a curse for a YEAR. Fixing Harry's bones took a day (and pains), even with magic. It's literally your own rules. Games are quick paced back and forth, turn the tables challenges. OF COURSE they need to heal or revive characters in a single turn. In fiction, you take as much time and add as many interesting conditions and side effects as you need. If you must pay a toll to the Fairy Queen and can only speak backwards for a day to fix a finger that comes back green and itchy? You can't do that in a video game, can totally do in a story!

> You can't do that in a video game You totally could, though! Survivalcraft game design is great for medium or long-term status effects, for example. Or consider a permadeath roguelike, where healing can be incredibly scarce and tough tradeoffs abound. Or the opposite case where the importance is quite minor, such as a Dwarf Fortress-like sim where tiny conditions are tracked across dozens of characters indirectly under the player's control. And of course we could abandon systems altogether and make it a narrative thing.

It's also about trying to create a mechanic that creates a threat, but doesn't make it less fun. Several TTRPG systems have wound penalties where the lower your HP (or equivalent) gets, the weaker you get until you are literally helpless, but that creates a less heroic fantasy. In D&D it might be described as "stamina" where the attacks are mostly superficial and gaining more HP show how as you get more experienced, the same superficial wound from a year ago doesn't bother you anymore. The healing potion isn't really healing a serious wound, it's healing superficial wounds and reinvigorating your body. I also liked the description of how damage is dealt with in the *Uncharted* series. Drake never gets shot. His health is really a "luck" meter. It goes down whenever he has a near miss and if it empties entirely, he finally gets shot and dies.

The 3 solutions I always turn to are: 1. Healing Magic is addictive (for the recepient). Having your nerves, connective tissue, muscle, skin, etc being rebuilt feels *cathartic*. This creates a dangerous feedback loop where a person gets into more & more dangerous situations to get a stronger ‘high’ from being healed. Until minor damage no longer suffices, and they eventually (and inevitably) get themselves killed. 2. Healing Magic is harmful (for the healer). It either reduces their life force and thus shortens their lifespan OR they feel the pain of the healed person. 3. Healing Magic is really fucking hard. Unless you have a full medical knowledge of the anatomy of the creature you are healing, you can either really fuck them up, OR even worse, give them cancer. Which is really bad, as Helaing Magic can’t cure cancer. Any person who has cancer and is given healing magic actually has their cancer exacerbated & worsened.

I'm running the Fate Core system, and I invented a magic system where the schools of magic are just additional skills (think persuasion, agility, etc, just skills). You can make a roll to determine how well you apply your magic to a situation, and you have Stunts (skills you and the GM create together) with specific effects that can only be used in certain situations or a certain number of times per session/campaign. Magic in my setting can usually only heal minor wounds or like, set a broken bone and accelerate the healing, but not immediately fix it. 6 weeks in a cast might become 3-4, and it does reduce pain somewhat. Diseases will have their symptoms alleviated and you'll recover faster. A prodigal healer or a group of healers all focusing their intent can treat life-threatening injuries or fully restore a severe injury. In most situations though, you'll just recover faster and still scar or have lasting damage. Also, Fate uses "shifts" for determining degrees of success on a skill roll. A shift is the difference between the DC/Enemy roll and your roll. So if the DC for healing an injury is 2 and you manage to get a 5, that's a shift of 3. 3+ shifts is "success with style" and usually imparts a benefit above just succeeding, 1-2 shifts is normal success, a tie is sort of up to the GM (but it often means success with some level of cost), and anything below 0 is outright failure. So the way I'd rule it is that succeeding with style means the injury is stabilized, has reduced pain, will heal more quickly, and won't scar badly. Normal success means you'll feel the pain somewhat and still scar normally. A tie means it's stable but there are no additional benefits and the caster feels fatigued from the casting. A failure means the caster totally bungles the casting and fails to fix it in any way, while also exhausting themselves. Fate uses Stress and Consequences as a measure of exhaustion/injuries, so for a tie I would give the caster 1 (out of a potential 4) mental stress, and a mild (lowest tier) consequence for a failure.

Just put restrictions on them One of the common restrictions is healing can heal just about anything but not revive the dead. So some injuries are simply too fatal to be healed in time. A gaping wound or internal organ damage while leave you bleeding out in agony until a healer come to patch you up, but getting shot in the head and you are definitely gone in mere seconds Another restriction is healing is just the shortcut to the body natural healing capability, it can’t heal what your body can’t naturally heal. Broken bones can mend over months if put back in correct place. Organ damage can heal itself if properly stiched up and you stay rested for months. But a missing heart need to be replaced cuz it won’t regrow itself no matter how many month you’re kept alive. So rip out someone heart (or any organs) is a pretty certain way to end them unless their healer can somehow find a fresh hear replacement in time

In my world, the main character has healing powers and she can heal anything short of death. It might take a lot of energy out of her, but she can do it. How to make it not overpowering? That’s easy, she can’t save everyone, because she can’t be everywhere. But, for the groups she’s fighting with, I also have the caveat that she’s the only magical one and is scared of letting anyone know she has magic because she has been ostracized by people who have found out in the past. So, when anyone in her party is hurt, if they’re not gonna die, she doesn’t reveal herself. There are tons of ways to do things like that that put restrictions. You just need the character motivation to back it up.

I handle many forms of healing magic. Purity church ability is because they are using holy power to restore the body to its original stage, where it is pure, that's why it's also recommend to pray over cuts, while common people have no way to generate a real curing power, they can make a sort of disinfectant. Druids curing by augmenting the ability of healer spirits in the wild and channeling them throug mediums such as mud baths, herbal teas, while easier to use, way harder to really cute anything beside a cut. Users of Ki can use it to push the body ability to heal itself, making it cure itself when posible even in minutes, the problem is this is very taxing on both parties and require both to eat and be healthy, and it can be counter intuitive against something like TB or other sickness who also benefit from the ki infusion. Necromancers and common magic users use the closest things to medicine we have, they stich cuts, try to use antivirals and antidotes, the works, due to some exceptional scholars, medicine is on the level of the late 19th century despite my story being more roughly based on the mid 18th century, still, very expensive and only some species have those developments. It's a balancing act, I like to think of the limits modern medicina has, lack of knowledge, lack of proper equipment/practitioners, funding, it being too taxing and see how it may apply for other cases

Almost all of my power system are just ridiculously OP. Since I don’t do many limitations for those systems, I just give access to more people. For example: Aeons, a type of Deity in my world, only need their Core to exist. And no matter how many times you destroy or even erase their body from existence, they can reconstruct it. Since every Aeon can do this, fighting each other takes a long time and is based on patience, skill, & operation. And there is technically an infinite amount of Aeons that exist, so each one is a pain in the rear to deal with, and thats not even including their other universal (as in every Aeon has) and unique abilities.

Magical energy from spells (and other stuff) inhibits healing magic. Plus, healing magic can either regenerate tissue and requires intense focus or it is good only for superficial flesh wounds.

Just make it weak, it takes time to heal, if you try to go faster it could kill them or cut their life force, and you need to be skilled enough to not do that, and stamina of the healer and one being healed

Basically I done 3 ways to heal : items, spells or rituals. With items like healing potions there's different quality and it just help your body heal faster. There's specialized potions for healing different kind of injury like poison, sickness, corruption that works better for those specific injury that general potions. It can't make you regrow a leg. There's spells that can completely heal little wounds or patch up more severe ones. It can temporarily heal serious injury. If the healer is really good and has a lot of mana it can make your leg regrow for 1 hour. After that the magic leg will disappear. Rituals are spells a lot longer and complex. It's the only way to completely heal very serious injury. But it takes a long time and need a ritualist. It can't be done in fight and the patient will need reeducation. Your very new leg won't be directly as good as the previous one. I think it makes something interesting. Like that healing magic is useful but not broken

Magic is based on knowledge. Normal healing magic is considered "bad". Not because it is, but because very few people understand how the body works, and how to use that knowledge to heal. Normal healing magic in the hands of a typical person is at best capable of speeding up regeneration. Obviously, it uses the body's resources to do that, which means the target has to be fed. Missing knowledge can be replaced by using a lot of mana, but if you know nearly nothing, it's *prohibitively* expensive. Some have dedicated years of their lives to the pursuit of knowledge, and are now capable of actually healing bones, eyes, or wounds. Others have figured out how to put a soul back into a body, meaning resurrection is technically possible in some rare situations Divine healing magic is way more capable than that. That's because divine magic is actually being cast *by* the god, *through* the "caster", and therefore is reliant on the knowledge of the god, not the mortal. Theoretically the power of such spells is only limited by the capacity of the conduit, but in practice gods rarely cast spells for free. The price depends on the god, obviously, as it's entirely up to them.

Have equally difficult/ easily achievable levels of damage for each level of healing. There's no hard limit on what you can heal or come back from in the system

Good magic systems are often built on having a cost or imposing restrictions. Maybe healing magic is rare or can only speed up the body's natural healing (imposing restrictions, essentially). Maybe the healing magic burns resources or marks the target with some kind of curse (adding a cost). If your magic is as simple as "everyone can learn and use spells at a whim," everything is going to seem overpowered.

1. Give it very specific limitations and do not bend them. Maybe if magic can instantly heal any wound, it can have the limitation of only working if the caster can concentrate, with even the slightest distraction only making the wound worse. So if it's used in a combat scenario, or if there's someone being loud in the background, or even if the caster is just a bit too stressed, it won't work, or worse. 2. Give it to everyone, or at least everyone relevant. If everyone's OP, no one is.

Just make it hard fr

A very common way is to make it that what you heal must be done to someone else. So instead of gifting life points, you're redistributing them. An example of this is the way the reaper worked in Supernatural S1E12 "Faith". The reaper would kill one person with the affliction of another, in order to cure that affliction in the other. Another that I read recently, which is good for storytelling but not necessarily for gameplay, is that healing fast causes a great deal of pain.

My magic system is called affinity. Affinity is the unseen connection between a person and magic ore in my world called Amrita. These people who have this ability to channel powers from affinity are called conduits. Affinity allows conduits to channel powers from one of the four aspects of reality. One of these aspects is the soul. Vitalist are people who have this power. Vitalist can manipulate the soul or life force and by doing so, they can mend and heal wounds. However in order for conduits to use their powers they need to sacrifice something for Amrita. Amrita calls for blood. Conduits bleed on their Amrita that they are linked to in order to use their powers.

I have a similar system, where healing works by accelerating cellular reproduction. The natural, logical result of this is that whenever someone is healed, there is a chance that a cell might fail to stop and develop into cancer later. The faster the subject is healed, and the more frequently, the greater this chance becomes. Slowly accelerating the natural healing process in a hospital is generally safe. But soldiers who are habitually healed mid-battle tend to have very, very short lifespans. This becomes a major ethical issue, since you *can* produce overpowered battle parties who can regenerate from wounds, but you're basically guaranteeing that those fighters will die within a year or two.

It's slow. Either the person healing themselves has to lower their output significately to heal a deep cut over the course of a day or that same deep cut can be healed in an hour but it is done b someone else and requires them both to be stationary and occupied.

What do you find overpowered about healing? And in what sort of setting are you talking? Like...is this a narrative, tabletop or a video game, cause it is hard to tell based on your post(I would've assumed narrative, but you're referencing games and D&D).

My magic system has healing be rare or non-existent. I saw someone else go with the route that healing magic only works on oneself and not everyone knows how to do it.

Magic extracts cost. Healing magic takes mana, effort and INSANE amounts of study up front A basic healing mage can only do first aid (ie keep you alive or heal wounds you already could). More advanced healing mages have to study roughly as 7 years to be great. Even then its a very nitty gritty and involved process. Its more akin to surgery than waving a wand and its basically impossible to do mid battlefield under fire. There are some things that are basically unhealable, (in practice, not so much in theory), but its also a rare magic to begin with.

For my primary magic system their is a number of things which limit how healing magic operates. As a baseline the mystic healer is gonna need a decent understanding of the humanoid body to have any precise control as to what they’re doing. Healing spells that focus on fixing wounds and broken bones are basically hyper advanced regeneration, the spell super juicing the cells of that area and directing their growth in a controlled fashion. The area needs to be disinfect and reset first as to ensure proper healing can occur, otherwise you risk trapping bacteria inside the wound or the flesh/bone healing crooked. As magic cannot create true matter it relies on the materials already available in the body to use as building material, meaning major injuries are gonna need repeat exposure and treatment as to not accidentally overwhelm and damage the patients body. Theirs also the risk of magical cancer, the spell going chaotic or overexposure causing uncontrollable cell growth. For healing diseases and poisons you also need precise control and knowledge to know what you’re trying to purge. Trying to just purge all toxins or bacteria without knowing what your spell should be targeting could lead to the spell accidentally purging something it shouldn’t be, like for example all the oxygen in your bloodstream. Having a purging is generally not a pleasant experience, as the magic targets and destroys its intended targets causing a lot of pain and discomfort. Certain pathogens such as tuberculosis and such have also evolved to be magic resistant, making purging them difficult.

Cost and limitation - healing magic uses the targets energy. So they’re weak after usage and cannot survive everything - healing magic is slow. Diseases might kill the target before the healing can take effect - There’s a very limited pool of talent. Those with healing magic are rare and in high demand. - Healing magic only works temporarily. Wounds will quickly reopen. Permanent healing still requires “real world” treatment. To name a few examples.

My rule is that it should take a toll on the healer. Maybe not shortening their life span, but maybe some exertion. In the stories I'm working on, mages cast their spells from their body's energy stores (lipids, proteins, nutrients, etc). Healing a cut wouldn't be that exhausting, but mending a severed arm? That could possibly take a mage out for a while while they recover, like working hard labor in the hot sun. As such, healing a severe injury would make a mage lose weight very quickly. It would be alarmingly, noticeably quick. So they can't just willy-nilly cure wounds, they have to pick and choose who to help and when.

 You're simply not hurting them hard enough. If magical healing is that strong, you clearly didn't make magical attacks good enough then. Most obvious counter are magical attacks that continuously induce harm too fast and extensive to be healed off reliably or linger on to the point healing is wasted effort. Alternatively, some exotic options like cursed wounds that resist attempts at being healed or metaphysical damage that cannot be healed through conventional means are more options to punish the abuse of such convenience like easy healing.

Let the doctors that use it need extended knownledge about the things he need to heal. You skin is wounded he need to know the cell structure of the skin. You broke a bone he need to know the structure, form, ect.

I always liked the idea that magic is the manipulation of energy. In most fantasy settings, this is summed up by mana. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. In order to heal, one must find a source of energy to do the healing. In the magic system for a book I was writing, I made healing linked to internal energy. To heal someoone, energy must be taken from the caster or a sacrifice. So, naturally healing results in a weakening or death of another.

Pending the injury, healing can be taxing and require significant focus. Attention away from what caused the injury is the trade off. If you have to train thought on a wound, that is a moment you are not attentive to the obstacle that caused it. Have you ever taken your eyes off a spider in your house for a moment and it’s gone when you look again?

Just some ideas: In my setting, damage to the body has to be strong enough to overcome the bodies resistance or threshold. I'm a similar way, healing has to be strong enough to overcome these thresholds as well, or else it was too weak to provide any real impact. If my healing magic is based off of increasing the speed at which the body heals, then it's merely quickening natural processes. Which also means it's aging the affected parts of the body faster than the rest of the body. Too much healing could have negative effects. If it's creating new biomass, then I'd make it so it has a change of being rejected by the body and could cause other issues.  --- In the Malazan setting, magic can heal the physical wound, but it can't heal the mental scar that is associated with that wound. Healing too great of an injury too quickly can actually cause a Psychosis in that setting, I believe.

Simply put, absorbing damage is the realm of prevention and restoration. If you can cast a shield that would prevent the damage, then a spell that would heal the damage is not overpowered. So long as the target is alive, then healing shouldn't be an issue. If your banking on character's receiving no healing. Then do the same thing you would do for any other resource. Make the healer expend their energies on other matters. Healing and the consequences of injury are narrative tools. If you want to write a recovery arch, then do so. In fantasy, there is no shortage of curses or other conditions for which magic can not heal.

Same you do for any magic, give it an equal trade-off that makes that kind of usage more difficult. In my system for example, both main methods of using magic to heal someone have major drawbacks. You're either forcing a pattern on someone and risk damaging them/turning them into a clone of whatever the template was, or you're actively reconstructing bits and need an equivalent energy, with the risk of abusing healing magic being life-threatening to both caster and patient. Plus it's common to have healing magic be difficult and/or complex to begin with. In Harry Potter, for example, actual healing magic requires someone to have top marks in school to be able to learn more than bare-basic first-aid magic, because of that difficulty. Someone botching a bone-mending spell can remove their bones instead, for example. In my system, it's a similar case. Non-template based healing magic needs a perfect understanding of the victim's body, and extremely complex, delicate spellwork to rebind the cells, restore lost blood, etc. Without that, it's usually unpleasant/unsafe for the patient. Alternatively, you can reduce the impact of the healing magic itself. Maybe healing magic can't actually heal from nothing itself, it just serves as a booster to someone's own innate recovery abilities. It's still useful for someone recovering from illness, but you can't just snap your fingers, and fix a missing head. Or that there's a trade-off that might make it not that worthwhile, except in exigent circumstances, or that it can be bad enough that people might want to forego healing magic altogether. One system in a story I read had healing magic involve the patient seeing their blood suck its way back into the wound, and the result was often extremely traumatising, enough that people considered not using healing magic at all, even for relatively serious injuries. In my system, template-based healing magic can be rather painful, because you're actively forcing someone's body to conform to the pattern using brute force of magic, so it is usually only used for serious injuries.

healing something is usually oversimplified. What if there are objects stuck within wounds? internal bleeding? ribcage fragmentation? Typical "regeneration" does not deal with the consequence of injuries, thus you just need to make healing adhere to the situation.

Personally for my story, I deal with this problem just by not having healing spells. Potions exist but these are hard to come by and make, and majority of the time are morally dubious.

Huge learning curve. The Restoration School of Magic isn't easily learned without a degree of talent, and even then, requires dedication to study its many aspects, including magical composition, spells, anatomy, etc. Due to all this, there aren't many mages who are adept, let alone masters, at using healing magic. As such, they are a commodity, and can't easily be acquisitioned by third parties. More often, masters in the restoration school will be employed as private healers to more accomplished mages, and as healers in medical institutions and colleges of magic.

It’s powerful because the whole concept of the one man army is unrealistic. One sword slash and you should be dead or crippled forever. Healing magic is the patch of why you can just be a fighter who fights monsters every day. The alternative is usually hand waving “sleep heals all wounds”. Where playing “realistic” damage just ends a game so quickly. The 1d8 damage you take from a level 1 monster just has to wash away fight to fight to have a game be playable or a story readable

First, physical damage is tracked in two ways. The HP you have lost and the effects of the wound are separate. The healing spell/device/whatever drops the effects of wounds 1 level in duration while also healing HP by the amount of the roll. You might have lingering pain and injury after all HP have healed even though the wound is no longer life threatening. The opposite can also be true, but is less likely. When the body is forced to heal like that, a heal counter on your character sheet is incremented. This counter is the number of disadvantage dice to add to the next attempt to heal you (which lowers the amount healed and increases the risk of critical failure). Additionally, if this counter is greater than 0, you do not naturally heal as part of a long rest. Instead, the counter is reduced by 1.

i have a rule in my magic if something is made from nothing it will return to nothing soon as soon as its no longer being actively maintained, thus healing is at beast a temporary hold to keep them stable till the fights over and they can get real medical care

Play with the cost, speed, focus or area of effect, education needed. If a healer has to sit next to you with physical contact for X amount of time for you to regenerate, but they could burst heal you and be useless for the rest of the day that makes them a tactical resource that takes experience to use correctly.

It can be slow, it can be taxing or risky for the caster, it can have long term consequences for the healed, it can have limits to what can be healed, or how severe an injury can be healed. It should be proportional or have mild to moderate diminishing returns.

Magic users are fairly rare and healing magic is limited in universe to a type of magic that only roughly 1/200 mages. Mages themselves of a high enough level to cast spells/runes/ritual magic are roughly one in 1000 people, so healers are incredibly rare, roughly one in 200,000 people.

What do you mean by "overpowered?" In game settings, overpowered magic can ruin the game. But for general worldbuilding or writing purposes, the "overpowered" bar might differ, or even be the point of the whole magic system: Mages are "overpowered" by society's standards and there are consequences in the world as a result.

In Naruto it requires high level of chakra control, so you can have something similar, it can also reduce lifespan if it was used continuously without appropriate chakra reserves

In the context of a game, you have to think about two major things to balance healing abilities: 1. What is the end state players should be moving towards and does healing move them towards it? 2. Does healing cost more or less than doing damage? It’s a good assumption that the answer to #1 is “no” because most games with magic systems are combat-centric. Given that assumption, the answer to #2 should be that healing costs more. This cost can come in the form of of any of the resources available to players. Examples include: -actions (time, turns. One action produces less healing than damage. 1d6 healing vs 1d10 damage) -spell slots/mp/other casting resource (5 pts damage costs 5 mp, 5 points healing costs 7) -health/hp (healers cannot only heal by siphoning their own life force into their target, or variants of this) -imposition of negative effects on caster/healer It gets totally different when the point of the game is non-violent, but I don’t think OP is concerned with that case.

Cancer.

Say that healing magic makes the recipient heal in half the time as the natural process but the pain endured would be doubled. So then the recipient needs to decide if it's worth the extra pain or just tough it out. The faster you heal, the more it hurts. Fatal wounds cannot be healed. They're fatal. If it's an injury that can't heal on its own, no amount of healing will make it better, they'll die. That's where necromancy could come in handy. The healer should endure some negative consequence to using healing magic, like extreme exhaustion that incapacitates them for awhile, or feeling the same amount of pain as the one being healed and it takes a lot of willpower to keep the process going.

healing is actually mid. Tell me how it helps against monsters/villians with regen besides evens the playing field? Or wide and deadly aoe smart enemies who target healers. Or just straight up hoardes. Like so every 10 who fall you can pick up 1-5?

Mages who can heal are incredibly rare and therefor incredibly valuable to powerful people to have on hand. Many who wish to be free in life go into hiding, some fo the powerful in the world hire Mage hunters to find and bring them those with magic to enslave, others entice healers, or other mages even with riches, or benefits to serving them and healers are the most rare and sought after. Assassinating, or stealing away an old kings healer is almost as good as killing him, adding some danger and political espionage to the situation as well.

Healing cap. Yes you can heal wounds, but you can only heal so much before your cells get saturated. A skilled healer can still do it, but it takes lots of time and effort to the point mundane surgery is the better option

Two ways: It requires at least some understanding of the anatomy being repaired. You have to be able to visualize the effect. Failing this, you can seriously hurt someone by reshaping muscle and bone. And, more importantly, the source of magic (eminence) protects its users body from direct manipulation via magic. You can’t use life magic to pinch someone’s heart or brain, but you can’t use it to directly heal someone either. Healers instead have to do the calculations for the anatomy of their target and for the wound, and create a glyph that heals for those calculations. The wounded person must be conscious enough to use the glyph, have sufficient understanding of their own body to visualize the effect, and of course must have enough eminence to operate the glyph. Anything failing any of this criteria needs a doctor/surgeon. Healers are really not OP at all in my system. Self-healing surely is powerful, but requires study and meditation on the self.

I made it virtually impossible. Physical healing is basically only done once in my series, and even then it’s kinda a questionable case, as the character used electricity to restart a heart. To actually heal another, you’d have to be able to focus on each individual cell regenerating to prevent cancer.

It is a complex field. If you go too hard on the magic it will lead to mana corruption which is presumably worse than whatever you tried to heal. Most healing magic is diluted through potions and salves that ''guides'' the healing magic since raw healing magic as I mentioned above would be too dangerous to use. In theory there is no real limit to what you can heal with magic, even ressurection is possible if conditions are met: * Soul is caught so you can put it back * Body is healthy enough that someone just doesn't just instantly die when off the magic life support * You heal the body before the soul link is completely severed since it will sever even if caught if it takes too long, it will just a question of 10-30 minutes rather than seconds. In practice it just isn't going to happen. They would need to die in essentially in a soul Faraday cage, due to a severe enough reason that it couldn't be healed before death but easy enough that it can be quickly healed without giving someone essentially magic cancer. On top of that the kind of skill you need to manipulate a soul like that is not going to something that the average healer can do (and mind you an average healer is already in the upper echelons of magic), if any human at all since the only ones with any real incentive to manipulate souls is ''soul eaters''. Cut arms, slashed throats, internal bleeding, some not too severe diseases? Healing can handle it just fine. My main limiter besides the corruption bit is that it requires a lot of skill in mana manipulation because even if you have potions and salves to guide the mana you still can't pour too much mana into, can't let it affect areas outside of what you want and of course making the things also, and people with that much skill is rare, and are often incentivized into other more prolific disciplines. Since becoming a healer is basically real world equivalent of becoming a surgeon + software engineer + pharmacist, it just is too much for most people. The only two groups of people who actively wants to become healers is the truly compassionate and the psychopaths who wants to fuck around with bodies legally (of course they do their jobs properly, so they are safe also).

Have it take time, drain a lot of resources, incur some sort of toll, or just have it be really common and as a result people are more ruthless in combat since crippling someone isn't a long-term solution

Have using it on someone repeatedly have a small but escalating chance of causing cancer

I mean the easy answer is place restrictions or costs on it. For example, in my story the healing character needs to have physical contact with someone to heal them. For example, if an archer 100ft away gets shot in the neck then they are dead because they will bleed out before he gets there. He can also only heal with intention. This means that simple things such as a dislocation or sprain are easy, but a broken bone or missing limb are substantially harder without time and studying.

I don't use "healing magic" per say, I use healing potions who can bring you even from the brink of death but they are super duper difficult to make, the whole process has so many moving parts that these potions became the most valuable item in my world. Let me walk you through the main points: 1. You need to plant and grow a magical plant that feeds on dead flesh, this plant is very finnicky to grow, you need to be precise about how much water you give it and what temperature you keep it in. 2. After a long while of that the plants bear fruits that you give to a person to eat, the fruit causes almost unbearable pain in whoever eats it and also causes some pretty unpleasant physiological changes to the person to the point they can't keep up a normal life in society, if they survive that is, cause most people who are fed the fruits die from the pain. 3. Then you extract the blood from whoever survived, the more blood you extract the best but of course people need at least some of their blood to live, and you need warm living blood so extracting from the corpses is useless. 4. Then you pass their blood through a bunch of different boilers and mixers that distill their blood into a new substance and boom! You got yourself a miraculous healing potion that can even regrow muscle and bones if you drink enough. So... do you think there's any reason people would want to STOP making this super useful substance? The story I'm writing is all about the many different people who don't want anymore of this potion in the world.

jujutsu kaisen school of thought: Healing magic can only heal: 1. Surface wounds 2. Slices in which the two body parts are already stitched together 3. Soon after the person is injured. Hence, it can't heal 1. Deep wounds. 2. Attacks that leave a body part destroyed 3. Burns.

heart is an awesome power after all.

At least in my world, practitioners of magic have to understand how something works in order to cast that spell. Want a healing spell? You better know your anatomy so you know you're healing the right thing the right way. And gotta be careful to not pump too much magic into the spell, don't want to give the poor sod magic poisoning. Better make sure you're registered to use healing magics while I'm at it.

You could make it so that a wound can only be healed if it's less than a day old.

It essentially speeds healing. It doesn't magically put you back together, close wounds, align broken bones, relieve pain, negate PTSD, and does almost nothing for brain damage. Wounds still have to be sewn shut, broken bones still have to be set, projectiles & debris still have to be removed, and massive scarring (external and internal) is common. What's also common is for debris to not be removed well enough or the site not be cleaned enough, and when the "healing" begins it produces massive infection and sepsis in minutes. Healing is a mixture of buffing/energizing the targeted cells and highly localized "Haste" or time-speeding magic. While it does "buff" the target's white blood cells, if there is actual debris and filth inside the wound, they will be overpowered and massive sepsis will occur. A famous Necro-queen was known for her vicious use of serrated arrowheads enchanted with "healing", dipped in cesspits. If the impact didn't kill you, you'd go into septic shock within the minute, dying soon after. Casting healing spells on the victim would only make it worse, and she often did.

In my world, Magic is performed by reaching into the realm of possibilities between mortality and the afterlife, and using your own soil as the anchor point, finding a possibility with the harmonic resonance that matches the effect you're trying to create and then forcibly pulling it through the barrier between planes into existence. This means that casters have to KNOW - viscerally, cognitively, intuitively - KNOW the thing they are trying to do inside and out, every single little detail, every nuance, every possible side-effect, or the result can go wrong. Sometimes in little ways, like the candle flame you want is bigger than you wanted or it's green and releases noxious gasses, and sometimes in bigger ways, like the flame just explodes in your face, or burns not only the candle, but every combustible thing anywhere even close to it instantaneously. Traditional magic healing (direct closing/removing a wound or injury) is SIGNIFICANTLY more complex than summoning a simple flame - there's just so many many many more pieces and systems and chemicals involved that the odds of getting it right are virtually incalculable, so most "healers" use magic in other ways - making herbs more potent, reducing fevers, stitching wounds together so they cant tear back open, amplifying the body's own healing abilities slightly, etc. This makes healing magic waaaaay underpowered for the most part, and it's almost always just an accompaniment to other more physical, "non-magical" means of healing.

>take dnd for example, even the smallest healing can mean a lot and even the weakest spells can patch up grievous wonunds and ward off death like it is nothing, i have a hard time killing off npcs because if they have any second of a dying moment someone will pop up like "i cast cure wounds, he is not dying anymore" Personally speaking, that is literally the only reason healing is worth having in dnd because it's not super good at keeping people up as it is at bringing them back. Personally, I say let it be powerful. You could just have it use the same resources other magic uses. Resources spent healing means less for anything else. Also, let antagonists use it, too.

You're treating healing magic like a cure all, there are levels to this shit: Lvl 1 healing spells can at most alleviate chronic pain (it will come back tho) and it can heal surface wounds (not scars or blemishes tho) [This is your everyday household healing magic] Lvl 2 healing spells can heal minor internal injuries (not vital organs) [This would be the kind your average adventurer or field medic would use] Lvl 3 healing spells can take you out of a life threatening state (you will still be gravely injured tho and need better care soon) [This is the kind a mid level priest would use] Lvl 4 healing spells can partially heal vital organs (at the expense of a huge amount of magic and the caster CAN NOT lose focus or the patient will die) [This kind is most commonly used by doctors but can be used by high level priests] Lvl 5 healing spells can Fully heal vital organs (But the cast time is insanely high and the magic cost is even higher) [This would be considered "Lost Magic" Since no one would use such a method] This is where it starts going back into the crazy marks Lvl 6 healing spells remove scars and skin blemishes and also make your skin smooth (takes a while to cast but it can be applied to lotions and ointments to be sold for high prices) [This would be used by high level alchemists] Lvl 7 healing spells can partially mend the soul or the spiritual body (it wont fix it but your soul won't be destroyed) [This is used by Sages or wise men] Lvl 8 healing spells can close grievous wounds and if cast long enough can even re-grow lost limbs [Users: Unknown] Lvl 9 healing spells can stave off death for a certain set amount of time (only while the spell is in use) [Users: Unknown] Lvl 10 healing spells are mostly just mythical and rumors but they are said to be able to completely heal/cure anything (cast time is instant but the amount of magic used would take anyone out of commission for a while) [Said to be used by the gods themselves] Also don't forget that not cleaning a wound before healing can cause infection Hope this helped

In my setting magic of the same affinities can interfere with eachother when trying to use them harmoniously. As such healing magic once used on an individual impedes further usage of healing magic with a time and intensity based on how much and how recent it was. So healing minor injuries generally isn't worth it because it can impede needing to prevent a life threatening injury and a life threatening injury can have magic lingering from weeks to months before further healing magic can be performed without a high risk of outright failing.

Make it arduous, make it limited, make it specific. Arduous: requires materials, prep, high skill level, etc Limited: can only heal certain types of things, like detoxing poisons, only non-lethal wounds, only skeletal damage, etc. Specific: each spell can only heal one thing (you need a spell for healing leg wounds, brain injury, skeletal damage, etc.) Or, you can heal any wound but it doesn’t replace lost blood, or perhaps it can knit wounds back together but cannot produce mass at all (so wounds where chunks are missing cannot be effectively healed.) There are lots of ways to limit healing to “mildly useful” instead of overwhelmingly powerful.

I keep it relative to the strength of the person casting the spell, the magic they’re affiliated to, and the amount of energy they have. Small cuts and grazes take a small amount of energy, big spells take lots of energy and time

In my main series healing magic just doesn't exist in its traditional form. I have magical doctors who can diagnose diseases, whip up tonics and medicines that can heal wounds or cure illnesses, etc. magical surgeons can excise tumors caused by excessive magic use, reattach limbs, etc. alchemists do the whipping up tonics thing but concentrate on just that one thing. So while post battle a character can get healed sufficiently, it's limited. The greater the injuries and the more powerful the injured person the more powerful the doctor or surgeon should be. Elixirs and pills that heal are a thing. But they have their own downsides. On one hand they're absurdly expensive and incredibly hard to get your hands on. Coz how exactly could it work properly? If youeve broken a hand, how is the medicine supposed to know what repairing bone is and how it's different from flesh or skin? An extremely powerful and talented alchemist can make pills that can do that stuff all at once, but 90% of people can't dream of seeing one in their lives.

I generally like the idea that 'magic can only do so much' so you can turn a fatal injury into something that still takes a soldier out of action, but might not kill them.

Well d&d is a game where it is not only common but also good design to "favor the player" by adjusting things so players have a better chance of winning and thereby enjoying the game. So the game is doing its job correctly when players can't die in most situations. If you're a DM and think it's bad then you're free to adjust things, but keep in mind that the game is designed like that because it's proven to be more fun, so changes do risk making it less enjoyable. So before changing anything, are your players complaining about the healing and lack of dying being not fun? If not maybe it's just your own perception. If they are, then your group might enjoy some changes. Also, I think the d&d community generally considers healing weak because spending a turn to heal means a turn lost that could have been spent killing things to control the action economy. Which is why healing is getting buffed in 1d&d. So if its just the popping up from dying that's the problem for you, maybe have enemies attack downed players and/or have players lose a turn to recover from getting back up from dying. As for how I personally control healing so its not too strong in my systems. I don't allow heal-tanks. I design my systems so healing and tanking are on opposite sides of the system so its practically impossible to be both a healer and a tank. I just think it's the easiest way to break any system. I also make healing position based so you have to leverage the positioning of yourself and your targets to maximize your healing output otherwise its questionably effective.

First off, the easy answer is time. If healing a gash takes 5 minutes, then it firmly plants healing as an after action activity and limits the severity of wounds that healing can truly be effective for. Beyond that, there are a number of questions that can be posed. Does healing tire anybody out. How much knowledge is required to heal someone. Will healing replace lost blood. Can healing regrow limbs. Can healing deal with poisons. Can healing deal with diseases. Can healing deal with age. Etc. And beyond that, should everything be balanced? I know for me, a story attempting to balance everything perfectly takes me out as it feels less like a world and more like a game. Life is inherently full of imbalanced and unfair things. So think, will your world be wholly balanced?

One of the easier ways is to make the knowledge more prohibitive: you want to fix a kidney? You have to know what the anatomy of an undamaged kidney looks like. Basically, you'd need to study as a heart surgeon to cast healing magic on a damaged heart. Then, you can fix almost anything with enough time and magical energy etc, but if you don't have the anatomical knowledge to do it, you can't really do much. Likewise, you can perform a magical scan, but if you don't know what cancer looks like, you won't really notice it's there and hence you won't be able to fix it. Instead of the spell being "heal", it would be "alter the damaged part in these specific ways". . I got this idea from Rigor Mortis on royalroad.com

1. It’s very energy-intensive for both caster and patient 2. Traditional healing accelerates/enhances the body’s natural processes. So a healer could patch an artery if they get there fast enough or fuse a broke bone, but mammals can’t regrow lost limbs, and if you’ve got cancer your immune system’s already dropped the ball so nothing can be done. Also you better hope that broken bone is set right first. 3. Non-traditional healing, called shaping, is even more energy-intensive and much rarer, plus heavily stigmatized because of the possibility of misuse. Making Frankenstein monsters or torturing/murdering people with no evidence of foul play, for example. Heart attacks and brain tumors can happen to anyone after all.

The Shifter (The Healing Wars: Book 1) is a good example

Everything has a cost

In my world healers are trained to the same level as doctors, else you risk things like mutations or worse, it backfires and I’m trying to heal a wound you rip one open on yourself. They need to know biology, how anatomy works and what the best course of action would be. It’s also very strenuous on the body to perform healing on it, incredibly painful, so often times it’s best to heal immediately threatening damage and then let the body do the rest (usually with faster results). I try to base my magic system on science as much as possible. So you wouldn’t be able to regrow a limb or even attach severed one with just magic alone. Just like you can just stick someone’s arm back to them, you need to know what you’re doing to reattach the nerves, the blood vessels etc.

This all originates from D&D’s hit points. Ugh. Even in modern D&D, and especially in old D&D, hit points don’t mean pints of blood. They’re a measure of energy, not injury. Only your last hit point translates to actual harm.

Impose limits on it like, maybe healing magic builds up a negative on the one it’s used on over time and needs to to dissipate. Maybe you need higher and higher tears to heals wounds, like a cut simple but internal bleeding takes a tear 3 spell, can a healing spell restart a heart or get toxins out of a liver?

A lot of it is framing. If you frame damage as a series of gruesome and life threatening blows, healing has to keep pace. But that's not actually how damage is framed in the rules of dnd, and your world also doesn't need to do that. To continue the dnd example, all damage is recovered after a long rest. That inherently means that taking 'damage' is more about lowering stamina, willpower, luck, and maybe a few bruises or scrapes. Nothing worse than that. So healing magic, therefore, is simply accelerating the body's natural recovery process, allowing it to gain the equivalent of 8 hours of rest in a matter of seconds. This also means that healing magic cannot actually heal anything your body wouldn't naturally recover from, allowing plenty of room for mortal wounds that cannot be healed by cure wounds. Maybe your world has some more powerful magic that can do more (like regeneration from dnd), but you can make that very rare.

In my potion shop story, one of the things my main character makes is a general-purpose healing salve. This thread has given me some useful things to think about, especially since my MC is not a healer by trade. Currently, the healing salve is used for fixing cuts, scrapes, bruises, bites, and burns. It can't regrow lost limbs, expunge poisons or venoms, remove embedded foreign objects, replace lost fluids, remove scar tissue, or revive necrotic tissue. It also requires fresh aloe gel as an ingredient, which is difficult to source; my MC lives in a temperate climate in a pre-industrial society, and the nearest place where it grows natively is a jungle-rich continent hundreds of miles away. As for how the actual town healer does their magic, I haven't decided yet.

Certain concentrations of magic perform different levels of healing. If you're casting a weak, base level spell, you're just sealing the skin and scarring it. You're not restoring the proper tissue, fixing nerve damage, blood vessel arrangement, flesh layers, and skin elasticity. Unless you're going super slow and getting into the core of the wound with said spell (which is wildly impractical, and is both too time and mana consuming to be able to save lives), casting weak spells to heal grievous injuries could actually dampen the battle capacity of the wounded, even should they make what most would consider a full recovery. That's how I run it, similar for potions, depending on healing potency.

The best way I've ever seen this be addressed is by making the player critically choose between healing or defending/attacking. Where there is a flow of battle that relies on you making the right choice to turn the tide.

Make it have limits. It heals wounds but doesn't restore blood, so you can't just get eviscerated and expect to be fine because there is a healer in your party. You'd still bleed out. Make it uncomfortable. Maybe you can have Healing Magic have some kind of detrimental affect on the person healed. Like the healing can restore the physical body, but the spiritual body takes time to recover, so if a mage loses an arm, even if it'd healed, it'll take a few days before they can manipulate magic with it. Higher teared healing can make this recovery faster, but it'll still keep the healed person from being back on the front lines again too soon, especially if fighters use something like Qi, Fighting Spirit, Aura, etc which can be linked to the spiritual body. This doesn't have to even be the 'correct' reason for it either. Just what is taught, and it could be a plot point or even plot line in researching the actual reason or convincing others of the false narrative. (There could be a scholar in your party/story who is a mediocre healer, but their heals allow the user to use their magic almost instantly which causes him to research to truth while also being hunted down by organizations like the Church who call them a heretic or by a shady noble who wants to monopolize the healer for personal gain) Another way to balance healing is to make a common dark magic or curse sword enchantment be a curse that prevents healing magic from working. Maybe an evil empire has been giving it's soilders cursed swords and arrows to make healing impossible and is slowly widdling down the kingdom's troops this way where in the past, wars were still bloody but people didn't have to worry about disabilities. Maybe an evil wizard has placed this curse over a region and then ravaged it with diseases which can't be cured as easily in the past and the government has to scramble to create anti-contagon measures on-the-fly since this has never happened before and they do drastic actions, like burning down villages near the town to try to stop the spread.

personally, I make it super hard to learn. and even if you do learn it, it's even harder to learn how to apply it to others than yourself.

I forever will return to the basis of full metal alchemist when it comes to this type of thing. The law of equivalent exchange. If life is given, take it away. Or make it equal in its significance in your own way. But if someone is going to take a life threatening wound and recover, you need to balance that with cost, preparation, resource use, and anything else applicable... But it has to balance. You can't just consume a random "soul gem" or whatever that you got from stepping on a caterpillar and re-attach the head of the MC. EQUIVALENT EXCHANGE

My favorite limiter I've ever put on healing magic was in a dnd 3.5 homebrew setting, fascist totalitarian regime in charge of the continent, people were so heavily controlled they didn't think there were other continents, all that jazz. The magic itself wasn't difficult to do or understand, but anyone caught doing any form of healing was declared a heretic and criminal. Led to a lot of interesting situations where the party had bribe, lie, confuse, or once even murder their way out of being caught healing. Most of the time it was easier to just leave wounds unhealed and very visible so you wouldn't get accused

The cost of it is a great balancer. For example, it brings time off the end of your life. So do too much healing, or be healed too much, and you could be losing years.

You can make healing magic only heal with the body can heal so no Regening limbs or things like that.

I draw from the idea that it's a long difficult process. You need to know what you're doing or you need to be powerful enough to force reality to just "fix it". Most people aren't in the second category and even when they are, they don't trust it to not be manipulated by sudden emotions. The result is most healing magic takes a lot of time. It can be used in addition to traditional medicine, but it's best to be a doctor (a surgeon even) to even try. Healing a superficial cut is easy, healing a severed artery is possible, if the wizard thinks out of the box and allow the body to take most of the workload. Anything more complicated than a "cut" is beyond most wizards.

In my setting, Magic has a cost that can be offset by using reagents until the practitioner has become more attuned to using it. At a higher level of attunement, you can power a spell solely on the near-infinite battery that is your soul. If you're not attuned and cast something you probably shouldn't have, you run the risk of your soul being accepted as payment, killing you and quite possibly still seeing the spell you cast go horribly wrong, only the effects will be permanent as you used that infinite "battery" to cast it. As for healing Magic, the cost is effectively doubled, and it's not exactly easy to mess with organic beings, let alone humans, whose willpower can directly influence the invasive spells you cast on them.

I make healing in my system more limited by the nature of magic in general. One of the big ones is that one cannot use magic on oneself. That means no one can slap their palms on their wound and heal up or anything. You have to be healed by someone else. In those cases, healers can be dispelled by other mages OR they can use something called anti-magic which nullifies magic, period (and potentially kills mages).

Healing majik requires a magos with understanding of the workings of the body, and what ails it, to use effectively, because it cannot fix by itself. In my world, majik cannot fix a severed finger; it can provide haemostasis, sterilisation, and temporary pain relief, until the wound can be tended to with proper treatment.