But Seriously, Someone Just Buy Health

Question: How do you handle the healing needs of a group (assuming that they don’t have anyone with the Health purview)? For the time being I have given them a relic that allows them to spend a Legend point and heal an amount of bashing damage equal to their Legend and an amount of lethal damage equal to the higher of their Courage or Valor, and occasionally I will have a third party heal them. This doesn’t seem to be working very well. Do you have any better ideas?

I'm not surprised it isn't working well. Your band of Scions is just begging to get their faces murdered off.

There will always be players who don't want to play "the healer", but the brutal truth is that Scion is very, very hard to survive without someone with Health in the band. Scions get beaten up, chewed on, set on fire, mentally flayed and physically wringered all the time; it's in their job description, which means they need medical attention on a pretty constant basis. That means they need someone with the medical expertise to take care of their constant high-octane injuries, and that usually means someone with the Health purview. I've never seen a Scion band that didn't include at least one person with Health; that might be because we've been lucky enough to have at least one or two players who like having Health and a few more who wanted to try it out, but I can't imagine any of our bands living more than a few months if they hadn't been there.

It's not that surviving without Health is totally impossible for Scions, but their decision to not have it means they're going to be pretty goddamn miserable about the situation, and there isn't much you can do about that. More to the point, actually, there isn't much you should do about that; they decided they were going to adventure sans doctor, so don't coddle them about it. They wanted other powers; they'd better figure out how to get along by using other powers, since that's the choice they made. We frankly wouldn't have given them a free relic to solve the problem, because it's their job as the players and characters to address their problems; if they realize they need healing and go out on a quest to find and obtain a relic to help them with that, then sure, but we'd never hand it to them. That's absolving them of the consequences of their own choices. Make them own those choices.

And they can own them and even thrive, actually, without having Health. It's just a lot harder.

The easiest thing is for any of them having medical problems to pick up Self-Healing and/or Regeneration so they can heal themselves; they'll be doing it more expensively than someone with Health could, of course, but the upside to that is that the band is spending their XP on other things they wanted more than Health, so it's really their call. The more Stamina Scions have, the better their soaks and abilities to convert damage will be, so having no doctor may mean they'll all have to start becoming really hardy; more Dexterity will also help when it comes to getting hit in the face, but it's less of a sure thing than Stamina since it can't prevent diseases or environmental hazards.

There are also several other powers in the game that can allow Scions to heal themselves. Those with Sun can pick up Rejuvenation, and if they want to be proactive about helping the rest of the group, Life-Giving Rays is incredibly useful for those times when you have no Health and have to just slowly heal your wounds over time. Consume Shadow in Darkness and Mouth of Madness in Moon both allow a demigod-level Scion to perform actions that heal them, and high-level Scions with Water can take advantage of Renewal.

Of course, by far the smartest and easiest thing for any of them to do is to just get freaking Health. They don't have to become Gods of Health or anything like that, but Heal/Infect is only a level three boon and will take care of a lot of their problems; hell, Resilience is only level two and would also be vastly helpful even if no one bothers to get further than that. Especially if none of them are interested in taking on a full-time healing role, several of them could get low-level Health and then everyone can pinch-hit first aid on one another when necessary, allowing it to be spread out across the group to whomever has the most free resources instead of being dumped in a single person's lap.

But, for the most part, the name of the game for these Scions needs to be avoidance. If they act like they have a healer who can take care of them when they really don't, they're just going to die. They may have to look at some situations or battles and say, "We can't do that right now, we're too injured and we'll die." They may have to stop and rest for a week or two to heal their wounds instead of charging on to the next thing they're supposed to be doing. And yeah, those things suck - but that's what they signed up for when they came in all guns and no bandaids. They don't have good survivability, and they have to either accept that and find ways to do things within those limits, or ignore it and find that they're probably going to die off.

I think the most important piece of advice we have for you here is this: it is your job as the Storyteller to write a good story for the players, to give them fun things to do and to provide them with as many cool options as you can, but it is not your job to keep them alive. That's their job, as the players. You can suggest options to them, you can provide outs they can take if they decide to, but if they do boneheaded things and get themselves killed, it's not your job to pull some magical deus ex machina move out of your ass to keep these silly bitches alive. You should never be trying to kill your PCs intentionally, and you should always give them options for survival and even fudge the numbers a bit for them once in a while if they're really trying and just barely falling short or have been so awesome that you want to reward them, but if six guys decide to go fight a dragon with no medical aid and no way of taking care of the wounded, some of them are going to die. That's a decision the players made, not you.

And it's an okay decision, as long as they're willing to deal with it. The best thing for you to do now is, at the beginning of your next session, to choose the person with the best Perception + Medicine or Intelligence + Medicine roll and say, "Hey, so, with your incredible brains and understanding of medicine, you realize that things are getting worse and your group won't all survive if you don't find a more sustainable way of helping yourselves." Then lay out the options for them; you could get these other powers, you could take these other tactics, but you can't keep doing what you're doing or you're going to fall over. Let it be an in-game decision that the PCs and players talk about, and be prepared for it to move to an out-of-game discussion if the players need clarification or suggestions from you about how to best keep themselves alive. Maybe they didn't understand how hard it would be without Health, or they were trying something else that isn't working very well, or they just really didn't want to take Health and are looking for other options, or they just weren't sure how to handle the problem and needed a little nudge; there's nothing wrong with any of that. Help them find those other options, but remind them that these are their choices. Their characters need to make a change within the game, or they're going to die, simple as that.

In a game like Scion, where any PC can be and do anything if they decide to, trying to compensate for characters who don't have particular powers is pretty much pointless. They chose to have other powers instead of those, so write your stories and let them handle their problems accordingly. Asking what to do about nobody being able to heal is like asking what to do about nobody being able to fly; you, as the Storyteller, don't have to do anything about that. If they want to fly, they can find various ways to do that; if they don't care enough to do so, then they'll remain groundbound. If they want to heal themselves, they have plenty of options; if they decide not to take them, their lives are going to be very hard.

Give them all the help and guidance toward their options that you can, but at the end of the day, it's not about you handling their lack of Health. It's about them handling their lack of Health.