Thanks. I wonder why the information in the game implied that just one herbal pack and four restoratives plus staying at an inn would totally cure the near-death condition? Kind of made it sound like some magic recipe. Anyway, now I understand it. Thanks for your help.

The best thing to do is to avoid getting into a near-death condition. I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but this game really penalizes you for getting KO'd in combat. You can't just cast a life spell or use a Phoenix Down. The commenter above is right about the mechanics. In practice. I usually just using a herbal pack, rest for 33 hours, repeat (sometimes using restoratives as well) until the condition is gone. As for "Owyn the pansy," there are ways to make him much harder to kill. Obviously, make sure the party is fully rested before entering combat. Make sure he has the best suit of armor, and that it's repaired to at least 80% or higher. Also, get all the defensive training that you can as soon as possible (Sumani in LeMut and Devon at the Eggley Inn). If you emphasize only defense for the training, that will improve your defensive rating by more than 20 percent between the two. Also, there's a quest in Chapter 2 in which you have to find a bag of grain for a temple. If you do that, they will give a huge (a whopping 25 percent if only defense is emphasized) defensive bonus to a single character. I would highly recommend completing this quest and giving the bonus to Owyn. After all the training (and the books too) and this quest, you'll find that Owyn is very hard to take down.

Near-Death condition isn't too hard to come back from, but whatever way you go about it it eats up a lot of resources, whether you spend a lot of money at a temple, go through a lot of restoratives and/or herbal packs, or just sleep on the ground for a few weeks (which works even without herbal packs, but just takes longer), going through a lot of rations. I guess it just depends on whether or not you have a lot of rations, restoratives, or money (and temple access).