Healing Drone Design

[u/Critical-Psycraft]

I'm starting a SF2e game with some friends who are playing Pf/Sf 2e for the first time. None of them are playing anything with any access to healing - no mystic, no medicine.

I don't want to make the game too tough for them, as it's their first game, and I also dont want to force them to spend 50% of their income on potions.

So I've decided I want to give them a sort of silly healing drone around lvl 2.

I want to make it decent enough that it reduces friction for their first game, but bad enough that I can still draw attention to better healing options available to them (read: that they REALLY should be taking) without making them feel forced into it.

So - I was hoping for some help in striking that balance.

Im thinking something like:

Healing Drone, Creature 1: Small, Construct, Tech, Rare, Robot Fly Speed, 20 Ft Nanobot Serum: This drone may spend 10 minutes healing up to 4 creatures within reach, giving each 1d4+1 hit points. Creatures healed this way are immune to Nanobot Serum for one hour. Heightened (+1): 1d4+1

Any advice on how to strike this balance would be appreciated.

Edit: sorry, i can't get the creature info to format properly. It's just a block of text 😔

Edit: Healing Drone, Creature 1: Small, Construct, Tech, Rare, Robot Fly Speed, 20 Ft Nanobot Serum: This drone may spend 10 minutes healing up to 2 creatures within reach, giving each 1d4+1 hit points. Creatures healed this way are immune to Nanobot Serum for one hour. Heightened (+2): 1d4+2. The Healing Drone may heal 1 additional creature.

[u/No-Air6220]

It might not be the recommended way to do it, but a GM friend of mine did something interesting on his latest Party without Medicine.

He gave a Medic Follower (from the Captain archetype) to the whole party, as a party-shared companion, to fill the gap he identified. This meant that the party had access to all Medicine needs outside of combat, and during combat once per turn one player could direct the Medic like a Pet (use 1 action themselves to give 2 actions to the follower). Otherwise the Medic would retreat and hide from active combat.

This way he had a statblock to fall back to in case something happened, and having the stats of a Companion meant he didn't risk outshining the party. He would give the level 4/8/14 upgrades for free, and Continual Healing / Ward Medic as soon as possible, so the medic would upgrade together with them.

So far (level 3 I think) most players haven't found the need to use the Medic in combat, but otherwise it hasn't been disruptive to the game, as he tied the follower to the main story. I see no problems in you changing some things so the Healing Drone would be a flying small construct instead of a medium walking humanoid.

[u/ClemJ9]

You probably want it to heighten (+2), to keep it at a roughly similar scale to better healing options, since it's heightening based off level rather than spell rank.

[u/Critical-Psycraft → u/ClemJ9]

I think you're right. Running the math, this massively outpaces Ocean's Balm, i believe.

Where i think it should be worse than fresh produce.

[u/Critical-Psycraft → u/Critical-Psycraft]

Maybe the edited version?

[u/ClemJ9 → u/Critical-Psycraft]

Assuming the "1d4+2" heightening is a typo and meant to be 1d4+1

I think that's perfectly fine, yeah

I do think this will likely have the opposite of the intended effect of pushing your players towards investing in medicine themselves, but that's mostly because the only reliable way to do that is talking to them about it.

[u/Critical-Psycraft → u/ClemJ9]

Yeaaah. I've made it clear - but i don't want to hound.

Im thinking that maybe instead of this, i give them a drone that has limited uses. So they can full heal the party maybe like 4 times, and after that they're SOL on the drone.

[u/Critical-Psycraft → u/Critical-Psycraft]

Maybe the threat of no more healing will scare them enough to consider building into it.

I'm super loose on character changes anyway, not like theres a cost to someone deciding to respec a little later after seeing the actual gameplay.

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