So, the thing to note on Apprentice is you have to have the other person standing next to you and telling you exactly what to do. It won’t be practical in battle but that’s a minimum of your time.
It’s also important to note you can be helpful in an area of the game with no mechanical skills. Physicks need orderlies to move the wounded, ritualists can always use people to join in the roleplay, especially for dramaturgy (doing magic with a play).
If you think you want to try healing, I can recommend the following:
- Pick a farm, business, or a mana site as your resource. Farm or business because it’s simple, you get money. Mana site because it will help if you go mage, and mana is both easy to sell and a single resource.
- Take Chirugeon.
- Get some cool medical props. These do not have to be surgical props. I’ve seen rock healing (like crystal healing but more Marcher), Poking people in Virtue pressure points etc. For Navarr, you could trace designs to close the wounds using their hearth magic of patterns.
- Find some Vates to be helpful at and bandage up after their inevitable blood magic. Chat to them and see if magic is your thing.
- Do the same at the Hospital for surgery.
- Talk to Guides (Navarr priests). Their job is literally to help people find the right place in the world.
- Show up to fights as an enthusiastic goon with a sword, buckler and armour. Borrow these if needed, you can often find someone willing to lend armour, but having your own weapons is handy. Follow orders, be useful.
Chirugeon is useful on any build from full combat to full healer as it’s a super cheap, unlimited-use “stop someone dying so that the proper medic can get to them”. And the roleplay is a good means to talk to people.
Medic can be as relatively safe or dangerous as you like. As a back-line healer you’re mainly only at risk of “this entire section has been surrounded and is going to die”. My first PC was a frontline “charge in and stabilise people” Physick who died of being right in the thick of a bad retreat.