So some discussion came up on the viability and tactical use of Rescue, and it occurred to me for the first time that its absolute garbage. Facts:
1. Rescuing a Unit halves two of your stats (unless you take a special Character Skill to make it viable), making you a significant target and making the likelihood that you'll join your rescuee in death (basically the main thing Rescue is used to deal with) very high.
2. Rescuing a Unit ties up at least two characters for one turn (the rescue drop scenario) or two characters for multiple turns (anything that's not that). With a time investment like that, a stat penalty is unnecessary at best, and detrimental at worse.
3. Two points is plenty.
My suggestion is that we drop the stat penalty on Rescuing (and Savior since this makes that worthless) and just let people Rescue anyone they want without further penalties.
But Blade, wouldn't that make rescuing too powerful?
Not by half. It just makes it viable. It would also encourage more sensible behavior on the battlefield.
Say you have a one tile choke. A mage got in front, and a knight right behind them. The mage goes down. Under the penalized rescue system, the knight can't rescue the mage without becoming much more vulnerable and be unlikely to respond to threats effectively. So the knight doesn't do this, and instead turtles aggressively while the rest of the party passes them medicine so they can occasionally heal the mage to stop them from hitting the death counter limit. Not great.
If the knight can safely rescue, however, he could hoist the mage one turn, operate for an EP without having his speed and skill halved, then drop him behind him where the healer can reach. The knight is tied up for two turns, and isn't attacking, but things get done.
TLDR: nix Rescue penalties and we can avoid vuln dancing quite as often.