On p104 it says that a Medicae test can only be applied to each Wound once.

Does that mean that if a character suffers 7 wounds, you can make 7 rolls?

Or does it somehow vaguely imply a roll per 'wounding incident' or something?

My method works as follows:

- Track a new number, treated wounds. Start it at 0.

- Make the first aid test and heal as normal. Set the treated wounds number to the number of wounds that remained after the test.

Any subsequent first aid test can not heal those treated wounds, but it can heal others. When methods other than first aid reduce the wounds taken below the treated wounds number, they also reduce the treated wounds number by the same amount.

Example:

- Bob gets shot, taking 5 damage.

- Medic comes along and performs first aid to heal 3, meaning Bob has two damage and 2 treated wounds.

- Bob gets shot again, taking 7 this time, bringing his total to 9 damage.

- Another medic comes along and attempts first aid. This roll says to heal 9, but since Bob has 2 treated wounds, he is only healed for 7. Treated wounds remains at 2.

- Bob gets badly beaten, nearly dead.

- A psyker comes along, casts seal wounds, healing bob till he only has 1 damage (he was really beaten). This reduces the treated wounds to 1.

- Natural healing takes care of the last wound, also setting treated wounds to 0 again.

Bilateralrope said:

Note that this natural healing happens the next day.

Don't you find this complicated? I would rather not be tracking another set of statistics, tracking enough already as it is

A simpler way could be, if they took damage since last medicae test than you can use the skill.

In our game we've changed the terminology to make our lives easier. We have damage, health, and wounds. When someone takes damage we just mark down a wound with an amount of damage. It's relatively simple. You even prevent the wearing down of a specific part of your wounds box on the character sheet!!

E.g.: I have 17 health and am shot for a total of 5 damage after absorb. I write down 5. Now I have 12 health and 5 damage and 1 wound. Next time I'm brutally stabbed by my betrayful (not a word, lolz) psyker and I take 3 damage after absorb. Now, I can write down just a 3, which indicates another separate wound for 3 damage. So, now my wounds box says 5 and 3. Bam, 2 wounds, 8 damage, and the damage per wound easily available.

Alternately, you can try really hard to remember, that works too.

If this isn't the best system ever, I'd like someone to show me a better one! I'm keen to improve!

I was looking into this too.

Until recently in game time, almost all of the healing was done with my psyker. After his tragic death, my next character is a Scholar with 47 int, Medicae, Medicae +10%, Talented (Medicae), Master Churgegeon and a Medikit. While my character has a rather high bonus now, the healing rules do seem rather convoluted to me.

Are there any official examples of how it is supposed to work? House rules are fine, but I like to understand the base rules first before applying them.

Also, is there a max limit on how much of a bonus you can have to one skill?

The easiest way to handle this, and the way our game group has handled it, is like Letrii said. You can attempt to Medicae any time after you have taken damage, and once you have done so a single time any damage that may have been left over is your new baseline and cannot be treated further. You can only attempt First Aid if you have taken damage in the intervening time between the last time you used First Aid.

Ex: A character with 25 total Wounds takes two hits from an Autogun, lowering him to 14 Wounds. After the fight, the party medic rolls Medicae and restores 6 wounds to this character, who is now at 20 wounds. This is as much as the medic can help him for now. In the next encounter, he is hit with a grazing bullet from an autopistol for a measly 2 wounds, bringing him to 18. The medic again treats him, and rolls well enough to restore 4 wounds. However, because the character was at 20 wounds after the last Medicae test, only 2 wounds are restored and he is again at 20 wounds.

I think RAI was probably a "wound" is a single source of damage from a single attack, each of which is treatable once with First Aid. So you get stabbed, shot, and hit with a grenade, each of those is treated separately by a First Aid roll to restore some portion, or all, of the damage they dealt. The semantics get confusing because they use lower case wound to refer to an instance of damage, and upper case Wound to refer to the number of "Hit Points" a character has. But that's complicated as hell to keep track of and really slows down the game.

P.S. Get Unnatural Intelligence, all of a sudden you're a white mage when it comes to healing. As far as a limit to bonuses toward a skill, I believe +60 is the maximum bonus you can get on a roll, and -60 the maximum penalty.

Your system sounds identical to mine.

At Last Forgot said:

That is always an option. There are two reasons I don't use it:

The first is that it will be annoying to track the damage caused by each hit as multi-shot attacks always have the third hit in a different location to the first according to the RT multiple hit location chart (first one I could grab). So you have to track the damage from each hit, unless you are saying that a hit to the head and a hit to the arm, with nothing hitting the body, is only one injury.

The second is that there is the potential for lots of low damage hits. Especially if the character is armoured. So if the character is heavily wounded, the medic would be best to try and treat the lesser injuries first, since that may bring the character down to lightly wounded where the large injuries can be healed for more. It gets even worse if all the hits are for 1 damage (Power Armour vs guys with autoguns), meaning each test can only heal each injury for one point (because that's all the injury did) so heavily wounded is meaningless.

BoringInfoGuy said:

Last I saw, the max modifiers on a test is +60.

At Last Forgot said:

This is what my group always did. And this is also my understanding of the actual rule.

Ok, my understanding is slowly increasing.

Now, how about Heavily and Critically Wounded characters?

What's the question exactly?

Heavily wounded is more then double your toughness bonus in wounds.

Critically wounded is wounds into the negative.

First Aid provides 1 wound recovered on Heavily wounded and critically wounded characters (on a successful test), per injury. Failure by three or more degrees injures a Lightly and heavily wounded character 1 point of damage.Characters with 0 wounds must take a toughness test or die.

Natural healing is 1 Damage a day recovered when lightly wounded, 1 damage a week recovered with Heavily wounded and Critically wounded is only recovered 1 a week whilst under medical attention. You do not recover from critical wounds without medical attention.

Elohiem_Militant said:

My question is healing multiple wounds that put someone into Heavy or Critical Wounds.

My group typically has a Toughness bonus of 3, so we can take up to 6 wounds before getting heavily wounded. With my Master Chirurgeon Talent, I can heal 2 wounds on a successful test.

Let us say that our patient was injured 3 times during a battle, taking 3 wounds (arm), 2 wounds (leg), and a final hit for 4 wounds (chest). He's taken 9 wounds total by the end of the battle, and is Heavily wounded, but has not taken critical damage.

Assuming my checks are all successful could I then heal the Leg first, removing 2 Wounds, dropping his total wounds to 7. After that, I could look at the arm, healing another 2 wounds, (1 wound on the arm remaining for extended care), and dropping his total remaining wounds to 5. With the patient no longer heavily wounded, I then get to use my Int modifier to heal the final wound in his chest, removing the 4 points of damage.

Is this the RAI way Medicae is supposed to work? Do you need to attempt to heal injuries that put you into / past Heavy wounds first? In this example, the chest wound.

BoringInfoGuy said:

Okay using this scenario, (with the understanding that he's Heavily wounded, not his "chest" is Heavily wounded) You could test medicae on any part first. Based on Raw, I'd say you would get the most out of Leg, Arm, and Chest in that order (or Arm, leg). He would still have at least one wound missing from his arm.

I think the practical application of this would look more like (based on my experience with my other group): You test medicae after the fight, you're heavily wounded you heal 2 from master chirurgeon and that's it untill you're injured again. This is only because we were to lazy to really track damage and hit location. If you wanted to heal after each injury would be the way to get the most using the lazy system.... (I guess)

The first one is my understanding of raw and the better one.

With rules like this, the seeds for a second edition (revisied, clarified and updated) are sown ...

Look at the Inquisitor's Handbook (it does contain lots of extra rules that kind of clarify what BI intended with certain things, but some of them have not been taken up again by FFG). Under the section on Medicae there (p.233) it says that you can benefit from First Aid once per combat encounter. If you want to use the more advanced rules they also present there you can give treatment for each type of damage inflicted (ie Explosive, Energy, Impact and Rending).

borithan said:

If this is correct, then what about when Medicae is used during combat? The Dark Heresy rulebook, if I recall correctly, say that Medicae is a full round action for both the person using the Medicae skill and his patient.

So, if during a single combat, my character applies first aid to an ally, and he is damaged by the same type of damage again a couple of rounds later, Medicae can not be used on that ally again?

Also, sorry for having to ask a newbie question, but who / what is BI?

BoringInfoGuy said:

BI = Black Industries.

BI was a GW subsidiary that developed Dark Heresey. GW shut them down shortly after the core book shipped and handed the 40K RPG franchise over to Fantasy Flight Games.