So while taking a gander through the Injury section of the core rulebook, I came across the "Amputated Limbs" section, and all the additional rules that they entail. Previously, I just dealt with useless and lost limbs as they are described in the Critical Damage tables. I knew that both would require some Medicae skill to stop Blood Loss and Narrative Time spent healing, and planned accordingly.

However, I came across this little section that made it a little bit more ambiguous for me (as well as highlighting just how screwed a player is when they lose something)

A character that loses body parts (except for his head, which almost certainly means death) is also affected by Blood Loss and must be treated for it quickly. If the character lives, someone with the Medicae Skill must be found to adequately treat the stump to ensure that it heals well. If no medic is available, there is only a 20% chance that the stump will heal over. If it does not, the amputee dies a horrible death from infection after 1d10 days.

So this leaves me with a couple questions. First off, after the Blood Loss treatment, what kind of test would "adequately treat the stump" entail? It doesn't even mention a test, or a roll, just someone with the skill making sure it doesn't look bad. My next question is what is the 20%? Just a 1d10 roll, with the player getting infected on anything above a 2? Lastly, in that 1d10 days of infection before death, can the player be treated then?

Thanks in advance.

I would say that it takes a medicae-test, with some penalty depending on the circumstances, for examples see p.125 in the Core book.

The 20% is a percentile role, like most other in the systems, with your ten-die and your one-die. So to survive you have to role above 20% (or below 80%) each round until medical treatment is administered or death, or for 1d10 days.

When the medical treatment for the blood loss is administrated, that ends the 1d10 days. In order to determine whether or not the limb will become useless, you can add a rate of success for the initial blood loss role, or penalties for the following medical treatment roles.

I hope you find my input helpful, or at least inspiring.

The Emperor Protects!

You may have read the section wrong, it says that there is a 20% of non infection, not 80%. The way it is worded to me makes me think that you roll once, and if you fail, then boom the limb is infected, roll 1d10 to see how many days until you die.

So you have Blood Loss, which you have a 10% chance of dying if it isn't treated. Then, once that is taken care of, there is another, vague Medicae test to "ensure that it heals well." If there is nobody there to make that Medicae test, roll 1d100 and if it is above a 20, the limb is infected. Roll 1d10 to see how long until grisly death.

My main issues were exactly what the Medicae test would be to ensure it heals well, and then if that fails, what opportunities there are (if any) to retake that test before the 1d10 days until death by infection.

Keep in mind this is after a Useless Limb requires amputation, which kind of conflicts with the Critical Damage tables in how that works. If you go by the tables, the limb is just amputated or rendered useless by the blast/energy/impact/tear of the attack. Then you have these little morsels in the Healing section that make it invariably fatal for a player to be treated. RAW and RAI don't really seem to match.

I suspect that this is a case of copy/pasting from previous rulebooks, with the Critical Damage tables and the subsections in the Healing portion of the book not made to align. If that is the case, which is the one to go by?

Yeah, you're right.

It's worded very strangely, and I feel like it is one of those rules, or combination of rules, where you have to figure out what works for you, and not rely to much on the RAW

Now that I also read the blood loss section and consulted with other 40K-systems(DarkHeresy2nd.ed.beta etc.), I would say that if a character with the Medicae-skill treated the blood loss, the initial threat of infection is gone. But if a character without the skill stops the blood loss, further tests are needed until the injured guardsmen is no longer heavily wounded.

If the medicae-tests are failed, roll once to determine if the wound gets infected, if it does you have 1d10 days to be treated by a person with the medicae-skill or die.

I like that, as it gives the players a sense of urgency while also not just a drawn out death. The Useless Limbs section is also kind of wonky, if you haven't read that one over yet either.

Yeah I saw it.

The first part about the +20% to the toughness-test if helped by someone with the medicae-skill, I'm totally OK with. Maybe you could change it, so that the +20% is received if the medic makes a medicae test.

But my problem with the Useless limp thing, is that the time a character is out, even if every test is a success.
1d5+1 weeks(!) is a very long time, maybe not in the real world, but in-game, unless the mission is done the character is as good as useless in a fight.

I was fine with the Toughness test and the Medicae assistance, but I too thought that the time in a cast or sling was kind of crazy. I mean, not only does this kind of screw the game, but fluff-wise, is almost unheard of. If it was serious enough of an injury to be out for so long, why wouldn't they just lop off the arm and put a cybernetic in it's place? Somehow that only takes a max of 20 days to recover from (!) but a broken arm takes a minimum of 2 weeks?

Doing the math, and with a Toughness Bonus of 3 (an average human) it takes an average of 8.6 days to recover from an implantation of a cybernetic limb. On the other hand, it would take an average of 25.9 days to recover from a broken limb.

Granted, I did 10 rolls and averaged them up with Calculator. I am also aware that battlefield conditions and access to cybernetics may make acquiring one difficult. However, for a soldier in the Far Future, it would seem better to have them back in the fighting with a cybernetic in a third of the time it would take to have them naturally heal a broken arm. Especially when the soldier in question is a PC!

And then, of course, there is the matter of the danger of removing a useless limb, even by a trained medic. 1d10 additional damage to a critically wounded arm or leg, when it has already taken 6 or 7 damage? Bye bye birdie.