One of the big advantages of humans in Cerilia has always been their access to divine magic. Elves & even to some extent goblins have had great difficulty dealing with human forces because of it.

The introduction of the 'cure light' spell to the bard in 3rd ed has therefore posed a little bit of a problem. If you can cast it on yourself what's to stop you healing a unit?

Personally I like the bardic ability as it brings a little uniqueness to bards as opposed to the other arcane casters but in the case of Cerilia it can cause some serious queries.

My suggestions are the following:

The 3rd ed bard is only available to humans, essentially a new ability created by the human attempt to learn spellsong. You could then rule that the cure-light is a result of the human's close tie to their gods. This then requires a slightly modified bardic class for elves if you want one (loremaster maybe).

Another tack is to look at the nature of healing magic. Generally described as pulling positive material energy from the associated plane, this is justified as being divine magic because the gods, being extraplanar, give better access to this kind of magic than the plane bound arcane powers of the prime material.
So we could have arcane healing magic, but make it much higher level, perhaps 5-6 for weak healing, 7-8 for moderate & 9 for heal like effects. This could be covered by claiming that it takes a lot of brute force to yank things between planes.
So bards have a short cut because their spells are much less powerful on the whole than the sor/wiz and can therefore slip the energy accross rather than yank it through. But this effectively caps them at very weak healing until getting something say at lvls 5-6.

So let's stipulate:
cure minor sor/wiz 5, bard 0
cure light sor/wiz 6, bard 1
cure moderate sor/wiz 7, bard 5
cure servious, cure disease sor/wiz 8, bard 6
cure critical, neutralize poison sor/wiz 9
minor restoration sor/wiz 7, bard 5 (?)
restoration sor/wiz 9 (?)

I'd rather keep heal, & the bring back from the dead spells exculsively divine.
These level suggestions are just that. A different game might require lower or higher
levels thus adding or removing from this list.

Other changes could be to make this easier/harder for the wiz as opposed to the sorceror. Instinct vs. learning, which is better in this case?

Finally, to get back to how this affects Cerilia. Elves would have some battle healing, but only their most powerful casters could perform it and they would have to thin out their usual repertoire to do so.

The unique nature of divine magic, and most notably the sheer mass of human divine spellcasters as opposed to elves who have fewer who bother getting to the higher spellcaster levels, still makes a good case for humans overrunning both the elves and goblins in their mutual war.

If you've got this far, thanks for reading.

have a rest
([_]

and let me know what you think.

ta