Okay. I may have missed a healing in combat section of F&D regarding healing Crits in battle, and I made the following house rule. I realize some GMs may say no to healing Crits in battle altogether due to the attention and time healing takes. Feel free to Constructively offer feedback. I appreciate it.

During combat heal wounds and/or strain per Medicine Skill. When healing a CRIT in combat, add 1 Setback for Easy Severity. Add 2 Setback for Average Severity. For a Hard Crit, add 2 Setback and upgrade Once. For a Daunting Crit, add 2 Setback and upgrade Twice (This does not heal effects of Gruesome Injury as it’s permanent, but does reduce the total number of sustained Crits by one.)

+1 Upgrade if either healer or hurt is engaged with an enemy.


I believe this provides the right balance between the cinematic flow of combat in F&D and the fact that you’re saying there’s a chance -especially since I found no RAW regarding healing Crits in combat.

There's no special rules for healing crits mid-fight.

I would however ditch what you propose. That's a pretty jerkface move to arbitrarily increase the difficulty of something with a baseline difficulty that's already scaled, especially at the higher crits as it could result in a flubbed roll by the medic killing the a dying character he's desperately trying to save. Likewise upgrading if the healer is Hurt is a jerkface move as a hurt healer will likely already have a penalty of some kind specifically attached to a crit they've received, so now you're adding a second penalty that's being applied for them having a penalty. You're basically saying "Hey healer, don't do anything dangerous, leave that to the real heroes that selected a combat specialization. You're just the hired help."

Instead consider focusing on actual conditions and apply modifiers from there. Is the player in cover or in the open? Is the location on fire, or the patient partially submerged in sea water? Is the patient incapacitated, or trying to cooperate hand help, or ignoring the medic and firing a heavy blaster while the medic tries to work around him?

The very nature of combat should give the opportunity to apply setbacks and such naturally (and by extension allow the players to change those modifiers by affecting the situation). This is better as it also provides the healer with more to do than just heal and hide, as now there's a legit reason to drag Steve to safety and THEN heal, and not just act like it's an MMO and heal everyone where ever they happen to be.

I mean, that's one of the points of tabletop RPGs, to add a level of detail and color that matters.

Yeah, you did miss something. The difficulty to heal a Critical Injury is the severity of said Critical Injury. You can only try this Medicine check once per week of in-game time.

I don't have a page number for you (AFB), but it's the last section of the combat chapter, entitled Recovery and Healing , Medical Care subsection.

The Setbacks and difficulty Upgrades are intended to encompass a specific Condition in their difficulty modifiers: mainly, the condition of healing a critical injury while you and the injured are constantly on the move during a battle (If both healer and hurt leave the immediate area and take cover, the difficulty could be mitigated.) The Severity of Crit checks are a baseline; no extenuating circumstances neither external nor internal conditions. RAW is intentionally left imo ambiguous regarding healing Crits during a fight in part because combat is chaotic inclusive of a well laid plan. My goal is to establish a means that mimics the feel of F&D. A possible solution is not to have healing a Crit in combat count towards the one Crit heal attempt per person per per crit per healer.

What about having painkiller stimpack ? It doesn't heal any wounds, critical or not, but allow a character to ignore the pain from wounds and act like if he was at full health.

Setbacks shouldn't be affected by the difficulty of the task, but rather by outside, situational factors. For example, if you get down with your triage kit in the middle of a firefight (under danger of crossfire), or in the middle of a burning building, or while you're being attacked by someone with a vibroax, then setbacks or difficulty upgrades can be appropriate. And a skilled medic might just have the talents to deal with some of those external factors.

But I agree with the others, the severity rating of the injury is just for determining base difficulty.

The problem, in other words, isn't that a setback die is applied for being under direct threat. The problem is that the direct threat of someone shooting at you doesn't become two/three times greater because the patient has a more serious injury, so it should be adding a setback die, full stop, not one per crit category or the like.

28 minutes ago, Garran said:

The problem, in other words, isn't that a setback die is applied for being under direct threat. The problem is that the direct threat of someone shooting at you doesn't become two/three times greater because the patient has a more serious injury, so it should be adding a setback die, full stop, not one per crit category or the like.

Exactly.

First time it came up in my group, I looked high and low for "how long does the treat Critical Injury check take," assuming that it must be more than an Action or something, and require some significant investment of time.

Nope. Nada. Not a thing.

So I've allowed treatment in combat, but still with the stipulation that it can only be once per week (and of course, if you wait until there are appropriate medical facilities available, you can take advantage of them to make your check so much easier).

This does make some sense. Maybe not for Critical Injuries in the middle of swinging your lightsaber at a Sith Lord's helmet, but there's a definite vibe to "battlefield medicine" you can explore here that's lost when it's just "finish the fight, get back to the ship, heal everything up between scene breaks," which can be what things boil down to. If characters are on a long trek through wilderness and can't easily return to modern (by Star Wars standards) conveniences, then healing Critical Injuries becomes a much more layered decision. . . heal this one now and be stuck with any others for a week, or keep this one and save that once-per-week for a more severe one, knowing that having one increases the chance the next one will be more severe? After a long, grueling, arduous adventure, the characters can be beaten, bruised, battered, fatigued, and just so darn happy they're still even alive at the end.

That there's some good storytelling.

The "once per week" attempt to heal a crit is PER CRIT, not per character.

Multiple characters may attempt to heal the same crit in RAW. A crit heal for a particular crit cannot be attempted by the same character more than once per week.

In retrospect, what I proposed here is way too difficult. Now I’m thinking just a Setback for Easy and Average Severity, two Setbacks for Hard, and an Upgrade for Daunting with the exception of Gruesome Injury of course with one Setback added when engaged with an enemy. This is to heal a crit while in combat. Medicine checks are already limited to once per encounter and crits to once per week. Proper healing is tough.

Why not just add the setbacks for the situation, as base difficulty already represents the damage to be healed.

So setback for doing it in the middle of a firefight, setback for poor sanitation, setback for no sterile conditions, upgrade for doing it without cover, upgrade for trying to rush and get it done in a round in structured time, etc.

27 minutes ago, Darzil said:

Why not just add the setbacks for the situation, as base difficulty already represents the damage to be healed.

So setback for doing it in the middle of a firefight, setback for poor sanitation, setback for no sterile conditions, upgrade for doing it without cover, upgrade for trying to rush and get it done in a round in structured time, etc.

That's the way it works for Mechanics tests. Use the same environmental/situational modifiers from Fully Operational and you should do fine.

1 hour ago, nondemon said:

In retrospect, what I proposed here is way too difficult. Now I’m thinking just a Setback for Easy and Average Severity, two Setbacks for Hard, and an Upgrade for Daunting with the exception of Gruesome Injury of course with one Setback added when engaged with an enemy. This is to heal a crit while in combat. Medicine checks are already limited to once per encounter and crits to once per week. Proper healing is tough.

I want to reflect your proposal back so you can see the issue and make sure this is what you want:

Situation 1) You're in combat and Your buddy Steve goes down with At the Brink; a Hard Crit. The setting is inside an air-conditioned, well lit building, with clean floors and lots of space. You drag Steve around the corner, well out of the line of fire. Your buddies are effectively holding off the opposition, and Steve is still conscious and intentionally doesn't do anything so as not to suffer strain and to make your job easier.

Your proposed solution: The Difficulty will be PPPBlkBlk, with the 2 Blacks added because "you're in combat."

Our suggested solution: Difficulty is PPP. While not ideal, you've got room to work, and conditions aren't unfavorable to at least get him patched up enough for the Crit to no longer count against him.

Situation 2) Later Jimmy suffers the same Crit, but it's right at the end of the encounter. This time you're in a storm sewer system on a hot summer's day. It's near total darkness, Jimmy is lying in 5 inches of sewer water, it's hot as heck, and Jimmy is sucking up and taking the strain so he can try and pop the lock of an access hatch because he doesn't want to be in the sewer anymore. Your pop

Your proposed solution: Difficulty will be PPP, with no Blacks added because "you're not in combat."

Our suggested solution: Difficulty will be PPPBlkBlkBlkBlkBlk. 2 Blacks for near total darkness, 1 for water, 1 for heat, 1 for Jimmy not staying still and letting you work.

Situation 3) George goes down with At the Brink as well. You're on a dirt mountain road next to the remains of your burning speeder, in broad daylight, it's snowing. Imperial Snowtroopers are shooting at all of you, George is actively returning fire. You all remembered to wear cold weather clothing.

Your proposed solution: The Difficulty will be PPPBlkBlk, with the 2 Blacks added because "you're in combat."

Our suggested solution: Difficulty is PPPBlkBlkBlk, with 1 Black for being caught in the open and trying not to get shot while working, 1 Black for the snow always needing to be brushed away, 0 Black for the cold (good planning bringing those parkas!) and 1 Black because George isn't cooperating because he's too busy trying to kill Snowtroopers.

See, if you apply the situation and environmental effects, you'll usually get about the same resultant difficulties you want, but it'll have attributable reasons that the players can manipulate.

There's a Setback because of snow, drag George out of the snow and the setback goes away. Your in the open, drag George out of the line of fire and that's another setback gone.

If you just arbitrarily apply setbacks for "being in combat" then it looks like you're picking on the players for being in combat in the first place, because there's nothing the players can do about it other than end combat.

Finally, if your plan is to give setback for environment and arbitrarily for being in combat, run the probabilities. It might be kinder to just ban the healing of crits in combat altogether than to drop 4-6 setback on every attempt and give the players hope.

Great post, Ghostofman. I added the extra ‘f’ because you left it off when you said “..pop the lock of an access hatch..”

I didn’t mean to make it seem no other Blks would apply.

Your character is in combat: being shot at, or being swung at. Your character gets knocked silly. Another character wants to come up and get your character back to full strength. Now, if another character wants to get your character out of the fight by distance or by cover, the roll would be as judicated by the crit severity. If the other character wanted to heal the crit while your character is actively engaged in combat, I believe your propaosal calls for only One Setback. My line of thinking is combat acts as an environamnetal condition at least as far as Setbacks are defined. So, I agree with you there. The place I’m trying to get to, is this situation:

Silo the Selonian gets whacked, mechanically suffers the Hard Crit of Horrific Injury which temporarily reduces a random Chatacteristic by One while engaged with an Iquisitor. Chief McKallen rushes up to help his companion. PPPBlk or PPRBlk?

Dammit. Should be GhostofFman.

Also- ..combat acts as an environmental condition.

On 7/31/2018 at 12:53 PM, WolfRider said:

What about having painkiller stimpack ? It doesn't heal any wounds, critical or not, but allow a character to ignore the pain from wounds and act like if he was at full health.

This item exists in the Forged in Battle sourcebook in the form of Nullicaine. Patient suffers some strain but gets to ignore the critical injury for the rest of the encounter.