Brother Chaplain Magister said:

um, who said it can be applied any number of times? i didn't. check my post and your own quote of it. i said "each wound can only have first aid applied once to it". your marine gets shot in the head for 2, arm for 3, and body for 8 during an encounter; each one can have first aid applied ONCE. while the rules don't explicitly state it, the wording does suggest that healing one for more points than it actually inflicted does NOT carry over to another wound. i'm personally planning on having 1 wound from every attack that inflicts damage be healable only through natural healing and not first aid. otherwise, i suspect the healing gets pretty ridiculous.

Sorry, if I misunderstood something, but the way you say it works provides a very quick way to heal charachters to max wounds in a very short way.

For example: a battle brother takes damage: 2 W to the head + 3 W to the body + 5 W to the left arm + 5 W to the left leg = 15 wound

Useing first aid once on all of his wounds can heal him the number of wounds equaling the apothecaries INT bonus, 1d5 + INT bonus if he has the "Enchance healing ability". This means that with the enchance healing ability and INT bonus of 4 he will heal 5-9 wounds out of 15.

If he can apply first aid once to each wound, even without the enchance healing ability, he will heal: 4 to head wound (healed) +4 to the body wound (healed) +4 to the left arm (1 remains) +4 to the left leg (1 reamains) = 13 wound healed out of 15! If he has the above mentioned ability, the treated marine fully recovers!

So I think it is better to apply first aid to a PATIENT not to a wound, and restrict its useage to once every 12 hours, unless the patient gets wounded again.

Also - IMHO - keeping track, of how many times and on wich location gets a charatcer wounded, makes things difficult and slows the game down. The Cyperpunk RPG had a system for taking care different locations, but also in that system different location had different wound values. Also the way you suggest to use it: "1 wound from every attack" makes the enchance healing totally useless.

Lets say that a caracter with 20 wounds gets really unluky and gets hit in the head each and every time. How much damage can he take to the head ? Can he take 20 Wounds? In Cyperpunk each wound taken to the head had to be counted double, so 10 is the magic number? Its a totally different system and none of the WH40K RPGs deal with that and I think its just fine that way. Also you can bet, that in the heat of the battle some of the players are going to forget to take a note...

I like the way we use it, but of course it is arguable and open for debate

I would say that certainly, if a character has the first aid action applied, that it can not be used on them again, unless they take further damage.

This whole 12 hour thing is crap. Past the initial use of first aid, the only further healing they should be able to get is extended care.

The thing is, should only "new wounds" be treatable, or all wounds.

I can see the argument for only "new" being treatable, but I personally read first aid as just meaning it cannot be used until "new wounds," but is able to heal up to maximum. Personally, I see it as being far too much paperwork to track that.

Brother Chaplain Magister said:

A Narthecium doubles the number of Wounds healed, so an Apothecary with 50 Int will heal something like 11-15 W each time!

A little bit too much for me...

Apothecary heals too much, too quickly (1 full action!) and too often (for each new wound!), but on the other side gets useless in most combat situations.

I'm glad to have none in my group, because I would have changed it to heal much less (something like IntB/2 or IntB with a Narthecium), and I would have given him the possibility to fight a bit more (like Flesh render, swift attack earlier, etc.) which corresponds to the usual apothecary fluff (chainsword and Co.).

Quileurbist said:

11-15 W on lightly wounded marines, I'm fine with that. That way, marines can get wounded a lot, recover quickly and enter the next battle.

So unlike my DH Scum PC who got hurt early on by warp creatures in the 2nd Purge the Unclean scenario and then was more or less out of action for the rest of the scenario.

Alex

My Interpretation is similar to one posted above, but with a little less book keeping. My RAW interpretation is that each individual wound point for a character can only gain the benefits of first aid once, *until a character has had proper healing through downtime (extended care). *I believe this phrase, while not included in the book may have been the designers intentions.

Example:

If a character has 20 wounds and takes 10 damage to those wounds during combat, then all 10 of those wounds could be restored though first aid, but only once until healed properly by extended care/post mission downtime. So, going forward with the example, if the same character were to be damaged a second time for say 8 wounds, before the mission is completed or time for proper extended care has occurred. Then the 8 wounds taken during the second combat can not gain the benefits of First aid.

So if my interpretation is correct a character would only really need to track how many wounds gained the benefit (or were healed) by first aid. Thus, as one poster mentioned earlier in this thread, wound points truly become a dwindling resource that players have to manage through out the mission. The same is applied to critical wounds, they can only be “healed” by first aid once, until proper downtime has occurred, usually post mission.

I believe the restrictions for how many wounds can be healed per turn based on level of damage a character has sustained (light, heavy, critical) and the medics Int bonus + 1D5 is to limit how many wounds could reasonably be treated during the structured time of combat. Once a combat is completed and narrative time has resumed then an apothecary should be able to reasonably restore a character's non-previously treated wounds. What I mean is there is no reason to roll for first aid during narrative time as long as the apothecary and patient have several minutes of uninterrupted time to amply successive first aid rolls. This will most likely be time between combats. Hope this make sense to everyone and please let me know what you think.

I have no idea what the writers really intended, but I've been running with the system where each 'hit' regardless of number of wounds, could be healed once. So you get shot with 5 bullets, you take 1, 4, 5, 10, each one of those can be attempted to be healed. Yeah, you CAN go to full wounds as a result of this, but your Apothecary can f up his roll, too, leaving you high and dry. And if you're sans Apothecary, better hope you're rank 8.

The apothecary stopped and healed everyone after every fight in Final Sanction. At the end, three of four characters died from critical wounds (yes, using true grit and rounding down, you still can't escape from -20 wounds), and this was after eliminating the super armor penetration of the genstealers, removing several combat encounters and replacing them with straight rp encounters, and re-arming and re-ammoing the Marines. Once the Marines hit heavy/critical wounds the apothecary can help, but he can't totally fix your fighting force.

If I had only allowed the group to be healed once per encounter, or once per 12 hours, 100% of them would have died well before they hit Sollar and Sons.

I will say the book keeping is a bit tedious, and we may switch the system to once per encounter for brevity, and I'll just have to adjust my encounters accordingly. Personally I'm looking forward to the rules clarification that was sent off, if word ever arrives, it'll sage some complaints from my gaming group's peanut gallery.

I'm in the same camp as # of attacks that cause damage = # of Heals allowed once.

If you are hit with 5 separate attack actions that hurt you, then you are allowed 5 separate heal attempts. Even if those attacks were Full Auto with 5 hits apiece, I'd still only allow one heal check for one attack action.

SpawnoChaos said:

As a Harnmaster 1st Edition GM, I will require my players to write down wounds (how many and by which weapon). I don't consider this a substantial burden at all. Gives players sth to do while it's another player's turn. ;-)

Alex

From the Rouge Trader errata:

CHAPTER 3: SKILLS
Medicae (page 83): The following paragraph should be
added to the First Aid use of the Medicae Skill: “The First
Aid use of the Medicae Skill can be used to treat any number
of untreated injuries with a single Medicae Test. If successful,
the Medicae Test removes damage as detailed above. Once the
Medicae Test is performed, the injuries are treated (for better
or worse) and cannot be treated with another First Aid Test.
They may be treated with an Extended Care Test.”

Not sure what that means just yet, but it is worded different than DW

rbass98 said:

Basically, this is saying that when someone is wounded (no matter how many individual hits they took), they can have one first aid action performed on them. If successful, it heals an amount of wounds. The remaining untreated wounds from this cannot be healed by first aid, and will require extended care.

Its similar to what I was suggesting earlier, except that it does indeed track damage taken, but failed to be treated (or something like untreatable wounds).

rbass98 said:

That's pretty **** brilliant. Instead of circumventing the word wound for something else someone actually has a pretty good idea with the text still in tact.

I understand the book has some misprints but this makes the most sense, due to the dwindling resources statement.

Some poster's around here just don't give a **** that as a GM you are resource managment in the campaign.

Ahem, Ak-73...

Warhawk X said:

So first, Warhawk, not sure if it is your intention, but you're sounding a wee bit condesending and confrontational here. That's not especially helpful to the discussion. It may not be your intent, but I'm sure reading it that way.

Second, which may be a source for my first comment, I'm not really sure what "As a GM you are resource management in the campaign" is really supposed to mean here- could you elaborate? Also I'm not sure what the 'dwindling resources' statement is that you're referring to.

@RBass98; I'm not sure I follow your example- so could each player only get healed via first aid once per mission, or does each check of first aid count for all of the current wounds, thus marking them ineligable for future healing?

So as an example of the latter, say you take 10 wounds in combat one, and are healed for 5 by your apothecary. You take 3 wounds in the next fight, setting your wound total to 8. None of these wounds can be healed because they're all within the first 10. Then in the next fight you take 4 wounds. Only 2 of these wounds can be healed becaues they're in a 'fresh batch' of wounds, but the other two are still within the fist 10 that can't be treated.

To me, that becomes a higher burden in the book keeping department, requiring more of a White Wolf style guide to wound managment (boxes flagged with when/where they were taken, what type, etc.). Ultimately I don't have a problem with asking my players to track their wounds/sources/what have you, but then again I could be totally misunderstanding you.

KommissarK said:

This, to me, makes the most sense from a system perspective. From a gameplay perspective however I can say that it has been surprisingly easy to kill my players, even with a more 'generous' take on the rules. Overall I think the interpretation is spot on though...anyone hear back from FFG yet?

After reading the errata rules for Rouge Trader and KommissarK post, I think my interpretation was off and would have to agree with KommissarK's interpretation.

An example of how I uderstand the first-aid rules thus far:

Say a character takes 10 wounds in battle, and his apothecary heals all 10 wounds with a first-aid test, then all 10 of those wounds could be healed by first-aid at a later time.

Now say the same character receives 15 wounds in the next battle, but his apothecary only heals 10 of the 15. The 10 healed wounds could benefit from later first-aid rolls, but the 5 untreated wounds are quasi permanent wounds until they are healed by extended care. Thus a player really only needs to track the number of untreatable (by first-aid that is) wounds he has sustained over the course of a mission, until he has had some down time to heal them properly with extended care.

So what I guess this means is that if a player only takes a few wounds in battle his apothecary can fix him up with no lingering side effects. However, if a character takes more than 10 wounds in a battle before his apothecary can get to him, then he will most likely suffer from the lingering side effect of untreatable wounds via first aid. This would make wounds a dwindling resource as mentioned earlier. Long missions with no down time could get tricky as players accumulate more and more untreatable wounds. I think GMs will have to take this into account when designing missions, especially those that have a constrained time limit like Extraction.

I have an official rules update from Ross Watson himself via email after I brought this issue to his attention.

Here's the email in it's entirety.

Hello there!

On Oct 22, 2010, at 1:50 AM, <Warhawkx@hotmail.com> <Warhawkx@hotmail.com
> wrote:

> Message from:
> Aaron Nowick
>
>
> E-mail:
> Warhawkx@hotmail.com
>
>
> Rule Question:
> Deathwatch page 102 under the medicae skill under first aid states
> "First Aid may only be applied to each wound once and is a full
> round action by you and your patient"
>
> Since wound is the actual game term for a measure of health I think
> a lot of players need clarification as to exactly how often and how
> much healing can effect. A lot of players are coming up with home
> rules to circumvent this text because it's not very well written.
>
> If you could have someone email me an actual explanation of healing
> using the skill I'd be most happy.


The following paragraph should be added to the First Aid use of the
Medicae Skill: “The First Aid use of the Medicae Skill can be used to
treat any number of untreated injuries with a single Medicae Test. If
successful, the Medicae Test removes damage as detailed above. Once the
Medicae Test is performed, the injuries are treated (for better or
worse) and cannot be treated with another First Aid Test. They may be
treated with an Extended Care Test.”


Ross Watson
Senior RPG Developer
Fantasy Flight Games
rwatson@fantasyflightgames.com

I hope this helps.

Warhawk X said:

the way i have been handling first aid is as follows:

example. Marine with 21 wounds can only be receive a total of 21 actual damage healed, so, if he takes 10 damage, and the apothecary heals him for 13, the 3 extra points are discounted, he is healed by 10, bringing him back to 21, however, his pool of healing is down to 11, so, if he were to take 17 points of damage, and the apothecary heals him for 10, he would be back up to 14, with only 1 wound left in his pool,

does this make sense to anyone else?

Why is everyone adding the extra 1d5 from the apothecary AFTER doubling for a narthecium? I get 6-7 intelligence bonus, plus 1d5, and then double the total wounds, for up to 24 wounds healed per go, which is usually more than enough to bring a marine to full regardless of the damage he has taken.

Also, the Narthecium increases the lightly wounded state to triple the marine's toughness bonus (24-30 early on), which means a marine who has taken 5 critical damage, treated by an apothecary, might still be considered "lightly wounded" and healed to full.

Warhawk X said:

Thanks for getting this for us! Though I don't think most of the players here are trying to work around anything, we're just trying to understand what was meant by the rule.

A shame Ross didn't supply an example

broutefoin said:

I'm a little confused by your example. The 'heal-able pool' is whatever has not been rolled on and failed on previously.

1. Say you have 20 wounds, you take 5, bringing you down to 15.
2. Your apothecary heals you for 3, bringing your current wounds up to 18.
3. You take 10 damage, brining your wounds down to 8.
4. Your apothecary heals you for 20, bringing your wounds up to 18. Your wounds are not restored to 20 because you were left with 2 wounds from the first encounter (where you were healed for 3).
5. You're injured again for 10, bringing your wounds back to 8.
6. Your apothecary heas you for 5, bringing you up to 13.
7. You take 10 more damage, taking your wounds down to 3.
8. Your apothecary heals you for 15, bringing you back up to 13. You're not restored to 18 because all of the previous damage you've taken has been treated with first aid and requires extended care.

Scoates said:

I don't have my book handy, but most of the 'add a dN to X action' are applied after double/triple, etc. Like the bonus to strength from power armor is applied AFTER you double your strength due to the unnatural characteristic. It depends on how the rule is written, but healing 20 with one go seems excessive to me, though some of that may be your amazingly high intelligence bonus...

As for lightly wounded state, again I'd triple their base bonus (or add the double notation as a triple, as the power fist does), not triple their unnatural bonus, which would be more like 12-15.

Then again as I said I'm not reading the rules right now, so could be way off base...

Charmander-

Isn't the point of Unnatural Toughness that your toughness bonus is doubled? Is there some place in the book where it specifically calls for the use of your base bonus and not your modified bonus?

As well with the power fist example, I would use the unnatural bonus, not the base bonus. Is there a place that states otherwise?

The power armor states specifically that the bonus to strength is applied after the multiplication from Unnatural Strength. To me, and in the spirit of the RAW, this is the only reason why the bonus is added afterward. If the book does not state that it is added afterward, then it is not.

But I am interested to see text that contradicts/corrects me.

Lastly, if you are interested in my calculation of the intelligence bonus:

I figure it is a primary stat for an Apothecary, and therefor you are likely to reroll it during character generation if it is under 40. You are likely to choose a chapter that adds 5, and you are likely to buy the first three intelligence increases at rank one. I think it is far more likely that many groups will not generate their stats randomly, but roll stats first and then assign them to traits as a house rule. This is likely to get your initial intelligence around 50, with a maximum of 70 easily attained in early ranks.

Scoates said:

RE specifically the power fist, it states that the bonus is addative, not exponential (p155: "A Space Marine already doubles his Strength Bonus from Unnatural Strength. Therefore, the power fist increases the multipleir by one, tripling the space marine's strength bonus"). That was really the core of my argument...

Given that it seems like they're saying that your TB would go up to 3x from 2x for lightly wounded, but the description of wounded states they're taking the TB of 8 (which has got to be an unnatural bonus) and multiplyig it by 2 to determine your wound state. So I think you're right here, in that if being healed by a narthecium a Marine with a Toughness Trait of 45 would be considered lightly wounded at up to 24 wounds (TB of 8, x3 for the narthecium). Without it, they'd be lightly wounded up to 16.

I still disagree with critical wounds, as the critical wound section is separate from lightly/heavily wounded section, and specifically calls out that the character is 'critically wounded' when they take more damage than they have wounds. But in essence this prevents most marines from being heavily wounded at all provided they have someone with a narthecium in their party.

I also think it's up to your best guess on when the 1d5 from the apothecary's ability would be applied. To me, I read "doubles the ammount of damage healed by first aid" to come first as the first aid roll is all about your int bonus. Then I see "1d5 additional wounds with any successful medicae test" to come after mainly because of the wording "1d5 additional." As you can see though, I tend to be conservative and will default/knee jerk to applying bonuses after all the doubling has gone on. Maybe its from too many munchkin players over too many easily broken systems in the past that try to double doubles all the time

For your Int bonus, I see where you're coming from- I agree with not generating stats randomly (seems very old fashioned), and yes if you're concentrating in that area, 70 is totally attainable after only a handful of missions. Most of my players are rounding themselves out a bit more, so I think the 60-70 score caught me off guard.

Charmander said:

My mistake was thinking I remembered how the power fist was worded. I get the argument better now.

One thing to also point out, is everyone's examples seem to always base it off of a medicae check being 100% successful, all of the time. Here is a different example and how I would run it:

1st, we have an apothecary with enhance healing, Brother Castus, IB 5, so w/ narthecium, 10 +1d5 (from enhance healing. I rule that it is not multiplied, as it is not an addition to the IB).

2nd, we have a tac marine, our bullet magnet, Brother Marcus (lets also assume hardy, and 25 wounds, since I'm lazy)

First encounter:

Brother Marcus attracts fire, and takes 6 wounds. At the end, Castus rolls, and succeeds on the check. Marcus heals 12 (6) wounds.

Second encounter,

Marcus takes 7 wounds. Castus rolls, and fails. No healing applied. Wounds are considered treated.

Third encounter

Marcus takes 11 wounds. Castus rolls, and succeeds. Gets 5 on enhance healing roll, so heal 15. However, since there are only 11 untreated wounds, Marcus only heals 11.

Fourth encounter

Marcus takes 15 wounds. Castus rolls and succeeds, healing 12. 3 wounds are untreated, for a total of 10 untreated wounds.

And so on...

Obviously, I was using hardy in this example (as I don't have my book with me, and somewhat forget lightly-heavily wounded thresholds, and how narthecium modifies that), so heavily wounded comes into play as needed.

My point is, failure is actually quite possible on medicae checks, and I would rule that this means the wounds are treated (or rather, the first aid use of medicae cannot be applied to them).

One possible house rule I've considered before is adding DoS/DoF to the healed amount, so even a botched medicae check heals some wounds. With the narthecium though, this still becomes very effective. Possibly rule that narth is only good on passed checks, and/or if DoF > IB/2 then no healing is done. Also, I see value in rewarding a good medicae check, so I got no problem with 1 wound healed per DoS (although this can get good as well, possibly make it per 2 DoS, and/or cap it at IB/2).

KommissarK said:

And that's how we have been playing it since the Inquisitor's Handbook came out. Marines get D10 per karma point and Apothecary's get to heal more because Marines have more wounds and will take more wounds than PCs in DH and RT. The set-up in combination with True Grit is actually fairly clever, I think:

Marines can lose a lot of wound points fairly quickly, especially with the right enemies (genestealers anyone?). They can get multiple critical wounds but they are hard to kill. However, they can be healed again much more quickly.

The standard strategy in all 40K Roleplay games is to use unspend fate points at the end of a session to heal. I don't believe this to be a cheat but rather use as intended. In the case of DW this means that the Marines can get from 0 Wounds to lightly wounded fairly easily at which point all untreated wounds can be dealt with quite effectively.

And that's how I like it - a certain risk of death but a higher risk of just getting critically wounded (multiple times?) and a good chance to come back from serious wounds to being fully operational in the next session.

Question: when you spend a fate point - can you choose which wound points get eliminated? Instinctively, I would say, yes...

Alex

ak-73 said:

Instinctively I'd say it would heal critical wounds first, then start healing the freshest wounds (so the untreated ones). But then again I'm a **** of a GM. Thinking about it, I like your method better- let them pick, or have it heal the already treated wounds first (widening their 'heal-able' pool for the next session).

And in my games, players literally check the clock during late night encounters to see if it's time to start spending their fate points or not. It's a little meta, but the whole use of fate points kind of is in the first place

KommissarK said:

If I were in/running for a squad of marines with no apothecary I think I'd be down with this or a variation of this HR. Or if the Apothecary is ridiculously unlucky.

With a 'standard' Apothecary though, they're going to have a 70+% chance of healing the Marine on the first session with the narth. If they pump up their intelligence or buy medicae with their starting 1k xp, it'll be a higher chance. Failure can and will happen, but I don't think it'll happen all that often. Even in Final Sanction, the most brutal adventure my group has been on to date, the deaths weren't really an accumulation of wounds that did it, it was some lucky (unlucky) rolls by me that killed them in 2-3 hits, before the Apothecary could get to them. That and really unlucky critical damage results.