labskeever:
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one of my made-up bits of TES lore is that wounds healed by magic are almost guaranteed to scar, and usually in far worse ways than if they healed on their own. it creates consequences for waving one’s hand to get rid of an injury. sure, you could fix it now, but it will be ugly and pain you forever, whereas with bedrest and mild potions you have a chance of full recovery.
more thoughts: in real life, some injuries and surgical sites will not heal correctly with regard to the nerves matching up. I have seen injuries where, long after they were healed, touching the person on their elbow will make them feel the touch four inches up their bicep. I imagine this taken to an even further extent with magical healing—if rushed, it doesn’t allow time for the body to adapt to the changes, so a person can not only have all sorts of mismatched nerve endings, but even whole tendons moved to the wrong place. in the aftermath of a quick and clumsy healing spell, a person might need months to re-learn how to use a limb. so, taking the time to make sure a body part is functioning correctly as you heal it would take a lot of skill, and might be the big difference between mediocre and truly excellent healers.
this would obviously have a ton of sociological and political consequences. a military commander who cares little for the long-term well-being of his soldiers might instruct healers to patch them up as quickly as possible and get back on the field. poor working-class people would be more likely to ask for a wound to be healed instantly so that they can go back to work—it would be like the existing healthcare disparities of real life on steroids.
from @falmerbrook
this is exactly it!!
from @theropoda
as John Green likes to say: everything is tuberculosis
@kid-az I’m really not sure whether this is a good-faith attempt at engagement, but that’s what I’m going to treat it as, because I looooove talking about this subject.
I elaborated on my thoughts in the reblogs above, but I should be more specific: I also do not believe that any potion should be able to cure the injuries that it can in Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim. you can be on the verge of death in the game from being stuck with arrows, and a potion will patch you right up in an instant, without even taking the arrows out. these are very obviously game mechanics and not lore. from an anatomical perspective, I don’t think it makes sense for potions to repair major wounds the way that restoration magic could, say, put an open dislocation back into place. so, no—in my scenario, a healer should not rely on alchemy instead of restoration magic, because I don’t view alchemy like that.
your comment about how restoration “cannot even do the one thing it’s designed to do” is also a misunderstanding of what I proposed in this post. in this hypothetical, restoration magic does do what it’s designed to do. it just can’t do it perfectly.
let’s use the open dislocation that I mentioned above as an example—imagine your arm is completely wrenched out of its socket, and the shoulder is torn open, so that you can see muscle and bone. it’s bleeding a lot. with restoration magic, you can put the bone back into place, stop the bleeding, and knit the muscles and skin back together. let’s say it takes 10 seconds and a lot of magicka. great! you can go back into battle again, though you’re definitely worse for wear. this is something we cannot even fathom with real-world technologies.
what I am proposing is that these sorts of quick-fixes have consequences. @/falmerbrook (see above) put it perfectly: you might mangle that thing. it would depend on the skill of the healer, the severity of the wound, and how long they spent fixing it, but any battlefield medicine would usually have some medium- or long-term consequences for the patient. that aforementioned open dislocation might have poor blood-flow to the arm, or limited range of motion, or just chronic pain for life.
now, if you reduced the dislocation (shoved that bone back in place), immobilized the shoulder, and got the patient to a proper hospital, you’d have a lot more time to work on it. what I’m imagining is that they would still be using restoration magic, combined with potions to speed up natural healing, to slowly and painstakingly repair the muscle, tendons, nerves, and skin. they’d need the same knowledge as an IRL surgeon. this approach would make sure that everything was in the right spot and functional, so the results would be better than if they got patched up in the field
all that to say: my headcanon for restoration magic doesn’t make it “suck” any more than chemotherapy sucks because it has a lot of long-term consequences for a patient. the alternative is death. but I also do not want to make illness and injury trivial for my fictional people in my made-up-world, because as @/theropoda stated above, illness and injury are part of the human experience.
while my headcanon only exists in my head (and now, apparently, the heads of a handful of people who read this post and lovingly adopted it) I also do think it works with some existing lore. everybody knows the line from Skyrim:
“I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.”
okay, so, this guy had an arrow go through his kneecap, and he’s no longer able to be an adventurer. that is exactly the sort of long-term consequence I’m envisioning here.
to address your comment about alchemy, I also want to point out a bit of canon: in the Temple of Kynareth in Whiterun, there are people who are lying sick and shivering on cots while the priests take care of them. the player has Potions of Cure Disease as a game mechanic, but clearly these people do not. I am imagining a magic system that requires significant long-term treatment for some diseases, which necessitates the existence of places like the temple to take care of the sick.
and one final comment: I am a fanfiction author, and part of writing is creating major problems for your characters. not by coincidence, my self-insert favorite OC works in the medical field, so I wanted my headcanon to make her life a little more interesting.
okay, that’s all. hopefully this painted a better picture of what I was imagining with this post. ciao!
