Can you use medical care to heal wounds from a previous encounter?
For example:
In their first encounter char B suffered 5 wounds and char C managed to heal 4 of those, now in their second encounter char B didn't suffer any wounds, can char C use medical care to attempt to remove char B's last wound?
Preface: I'm currently AFB.
Can you use medical care to heal wounds from a previous encounter?
For example:
In their first encounter char B suffered 5 wounds and char C managed to heal 4 of those, now in their second encounter char B didn't suffer any wounds, can char C use medical care to attempt to remove char B's last wound?
I don't see why not. The fact that a second encounter occurred should mean some time has passed and the character can benefit from healing again. The game doesn't differentiate damage in regards to when the damage occurred, so it can't very well differentiate when it gets healed. There's simply no system in place to track that kind of information.
Beyond that, the typical limitations apply (only so many stim pack applications in... a day I think? Wound recovery from the medicine skill *may* be throttled by time, as well. GM may rule medical supplies may be needed, etc etc etc)
Can you use medical care to heal wounds from a previous encounter?
For example:
In their first encounter char B suffered 5 wounds and char C managed to heal 4 of those, now in their second encounter char B didn't suffer any wounds, can char C use medical care to attempt to remove char B's last wound?
Sure, it's one check per encounter so completely doable if you've had two encounters to make a second check on someone still suffering wounds.
All this being said, the characters shouldn't be allowed to initiate a trivial encounter for the express purpose of getting another shot at healing, since this would clearly be an attempt to bypass the rules to increase allowed healing.
And, yes, some players will attempt these kinds of shenanigans. "Oh, we negotiated with that merchant for ammo packs, that was a social encounter. I'm rolling healing again."
What qualifies as an 'encounter' should be left to the GM to decide. I typically use the encounters of consequence that I have planned for these milestones. As always, try to stay consistent as is reasonable and don't let the rules get abused.
Encounters are for structured gameplay and If there isn't some kind of time critical element or need for order of tasks everything else is not an encounter. So a social encounter is possible, but in most cases highly unlikely, and even then if the wounded PC wasn't part of the social encounter then they weren't in an encounter in my book.
Thank you all, yeah I know about the dangers of the shenanigans mentioned above and I think that they can be avoided if (for the purposes of applying medical care) you treat different "scenes" as different encounters.