3.5e Can you heal useing the healing skill?

[BloodSnake'sCha]

ItHello guys :)

I am trying really hard to find a way to make the healing skill able to heal.

Do you guys know a way to do it?

***
I know you can use it to get more hp from rest.

[Zaq]

You mean “start with X HP, make a Heal check, end with Y HP, where Y > X”? If you’re looking for something that works immediately rather than over a period of rest, there’s the Healing Hands skill trick, but that only works when stabilizing dying folks and doesn’t work when the target has a positive number of HP to begin with.

Other than that, you’re pretty much looking at rest-based healing, I think. I know the spell Healing Lorecall has your Heal ranks influence your healing spells, but I don’t think it just makes the skill able to help you recover HP on its own.

[ComaVision]

I don't think there's any way to do it by RAW.

I've houseruled it into my games.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I pretty much just wholesale replaced heal with the Treat Injury (http://www.d20resources.com/modern.d20.srd/skills/treat.injury.php) skill from d20 modern in all but name, including adding the surgery feat and surgical kit.

[The Viscount]

A favored soul of 6th level or higher using the Dead Levels (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cwc/20070227x) perk can heal very small amounts of damage using Heal for first aid. Depending on how your party feels about making first aid checks, you could conceivably turn this into slow but bottomless healing.

[Pleh]

I like adding the Star Wars Saga First Aid application of Treat Injury to the 3.5 Heal skill.

Basically, it's a DC 15 check to heal the wounded character a number of HP equal their character level (in 3.5, their ECL), plus 1 HP for every point by which you exceed the DC. You can try as many times as you like, but you can benefit from being healed this way only once every 24 hours. Having proper supplies (like bandages and medicine) adds +2 to your roll (and they are consumed regardless if your check succeeds or fails), but trying to give First Aid to yourself applies a -5 penalty.

No where near as great as magic healing, but a good step more useful than just bonus rest healing alone.

[HighWater]

I find that the heal skill is mostly useful as a "stop poison, disease or other adverse secondary effect" skill... It is niche usage, but rather powerful in that regard.
Otherwise, the 3.5 designers clearly felt that a heal skill in a magic world should be as mundane as possible. A patch-up application that actually healed hitpoints would have been nice, either scaling with max hp healed or in uses per day, but I'm not entirely sure that the impact of wands of Cure Light Wounds was properly appreciated when they determined what the heal skill could and couldn't do.