Lemming- It is true that cancer (and most kinds of degenerative diseases, like lupus, diabetes, and Alzeheimer, BTW) aren't very well covered for by hero system. However, this is a defect common to almost all RPG systems, which mostly envision disease as infectious disease mostly (or poisoning). I think this comes both from the fantasy setting roots of RPG, where disease mostly was indeed infections, and from PC typically being healthy, young subjects in their prime, not very liable to degenerative disease. However, in a modern scenario this is extremely unrealistic: real health concerns, both for individuals and the community, are chronic, "internal" diseases like cancer, lupus, kidney failure, diabetes, Alzheimer, Parkinson, induced by a mixture of genetic liability, unhealthy lifestyles, environmental long-term damage, again damage, and human body simply not being built to last forever, and even infections that are still a major concern have similar features (chronic course, cumulative long-term damage) AIDS and hepatitis. (of course, this callously completely ignores the plight of third-world areas where "classic" infective diseases are still a very major concern).
Therefore, for cancer (and similar "modern" diseases) in Hero you can either: add to the system some tweaks (such as Healing adders and LS subtypes) that explicitly cover it, or seek the most appropriate features in existing system. Assuming the latter approach (which I'd prefer): you can assume that Healing works just as well to repair body damage induced by cancer and chronic degenerative diseases as it does for wounds, infections, poison, radiations, fire, etc. damage: almost all RPG systems work under the same assumption, after all. There is something for semplicity, and it no great stretch of disbelief to assume that Healing, whatever its SFX, works as well on cancer that it does on life-threatening wounds. As reagrds Regeneration, well, one may assume that just as it is able to quickly repair wounded tissue, it works equally well to eliminate cancerous cells as they mutate, or repair DNA damage. It works very well for typical Regeneration SFXs (hyper-efficient immune and healing systems, nanotech repair, healing enchantments, etc.).
As it regards immunities (ie. LS), well, cancer may be assumed in most cases to be caused by lifetime exposure to cumulative aging damage, radiation damage, environemental chemical poisons: so you can assume that cancer immunity may come from being immune to such sources of damage: in hero terms, having any or a combination of: LS: longevity (aging damage), LS: radiation, LS: poisons.
Anything that would prevent body cells from mutating to cancerous cells, reapir harmful mutations as they occur, and/or quickly eliminate cancerous cells as they develop before they are able to grow to a sizable cancer mass, would make one effectively immune to cancer.
Wanderer got a reaction from Sean Waters in Cure for Cancer (Healing)
