I realized that healing should apply first to any vitality point damage (the superficial stuff) before it heals actual wounds (represented by the Wounds points). Note how in the books there are times when an Aes Sedai wishes she could heal someone, but purposefully leave them with a headache as a small lesson (ie - Moiraine healing Egwene after Fain escapes Fal Dara in The Great Hunt); however, healing can't do that. If you heal the worst wound someone has, all their more minor wounds and bruises are gone.
So as I continue to read through the series, I come across things that change how certain weaves should work. In the prologue of
Crossroads of Twighlight we see a POV from Sumitsu (sp) as she heals Dobraine, who is on the verge of death. In it she states a few things that are revelations about how healing works. The first is that she could heal Dobraine just a hair, or she could heal him to full health. This itself isn't really a revelation, but it is what she decides to do. The result of that healing is the revelation that causes one to reinterpret Moiraine's thoughts on not being able to leave a headache. Sumitsu heals Dobraine just a hair, and it stops his internal bleeding enough that he doesn't bleed out, but it also slightly heals a minor wound on his scalp, making it look as though it had been healing for several days. Thus, not all superficial wounds are fully healed before any healing is applied to deep, life-threatening wounds. They do heal somewhat in proportion to each other; it's just that minor wounds end up getting fully healed before major damage is fully healed.
The second revelation is that the amount of shock the patient experiences (and thus the likelihood that the patient will die while being healed) increases with the amount of healing the patient receives. That's why Sumitsu only healed Dobraine a very small bit, and is allowing him to recover the rest on his own, as imperfect as that will be. If she had healed any more than enough to give him a mere chance at stabilizing, he would have died from the shock of it.
Lastly, she states that healing him a hair and healing him fully requires the same amount of the Power. This is seemingly counter-intuitive to every other thing we've seen done with the Power throughout the series. We've seen time and again how using more of the Power makes an effect stronger. It also doesn't work well as a game mechanic in a game based upon levels, and on that basis (more than the apparent contradiction), I am disregarding it for the purposes of "perfecting" these weaves.
The first revelation about healing being spread "evenly" between serious and minor injuries makes sense when you think about it, but it becomes somewhat difficult to implement in an encapsulated fashion for a game making use of Vitality and Wounds points for a HP system. The best I could come up with was that the Healing weave should heal
X1d8+X2+channeler level, where X is the weave slot level spent to cast the healing weave. The X
1+Channeler level would apply to the Vitality points, while the X
2 value would apply to Wounds point damage. Then, if the vitality healing surpasses the amount of vitality damage, it would then start healing the wound point damage. Yes, this system gives a little "extra" free healing in the amount of the weave level, but that's ok... due to the Vitality/Wounds system the PC's have more HP's that need to be healed anyway.
The second revelation about the system shock being proportional to the amount of damage healed leads me to make the 1d4 damage that is immediately healed something larger that scales with weave level. Whatever method is designed for this, it becomes important to note that it becomes more dangerous to heal more as your current percentage of HP total gets smaller. There are two methods in my mind at the moment to simulate this. The first is to simply make the 1d4 into 1d4 per weave level, thus a 5th level slot would require that you can survive 5d4 system shock. Alternately, it could be a little less random, and make the value equal to 1d4+weave level. Thus, someone at -3 HP's would almost surely die from a 5th level weave, causing 1d4+5 "damage," but would be fine getting healed by a 1st level heal (he could easily survive 1d4+1 "damage").
Anyway, I'll write this all into a coherent weave later.
