Pardon me if this has been answered already, but my weak-sause search-fu skills could not find anything on this.

As I understand it, the rules are any wounds above twice your toughness bonus mean you are heavily wounded unless you have Hardy or Autosanguine. The Narthecium raises this to three times your toughness bonus before becoming heavily wounded.

How does Unnatural Toughness figure into this?

I read it that (assuming a toughness bonus of 4), at 13 wounds you are considered heavily wounded.

It's for healing. Let me set up an example. If you have a toughness of 40, with unnatural toughness, your toughness bonus is 8. You are Lightly Damaged if you suffer 16 (2x your TB) wounds or less. When treated with a Narthecium you'd be considered Lightly Damaged if you took up to 24 (3x your TB) wounds or less.

To me that seems broken.

That means that your average marine (Toughness bonus 4[8]) will rarely ever be heavily wounded. Even at Rank 1 with a critical he's lightly wounded. Unless you are a Storm Warden, max wounds at Rank 1 are 23 wounds. Granted after the critical(s) have been taken care of he is considered to have treated wounds and can only heal normally at that point, or by spending fate points.

It's the crazy awesome healing ability of Space Marines at work. Literally darn near anything that doesn't outright kill a Space Marine will heal in short order if attended by an Apothecary.

In a game focused around action would you really want your character or players (if you are the GM) to be at a low wound level all the time? It was made that way so that a character could regain his health quickly and get back into combat. Look at DH and RT, they are weaker (wound-wise at the least) but they make up for it by not focusing on combat all the time. Many of the DH sessions I've had were talking, investigating, etc. The few times we did fight straight up even I as the close combat heavy hitter (tank) could only take 16 wounds before I started my crit table.

Well, Malice, like Muzzy said it's because the Spess Marhines are so awesome they get to heal so good. The Narthecium, which you could rule only works on Space Marines, is no more broken than the regular 2x TB for Lightly Damaged. Considering all Marines have Unnatural Toughness, a staring character will be able to take 12-20 wounds before becoming Heavily Damaged. That makes Talents like Hardy and Autosanguine sort of redundant. Talents like those are only handy if you don't have an Apothecary in your Kill Team or if you someone have a huge amount of wounds. They also might be useful for the Apothecary. Can he use the Narthecium or the Medicae skills on himself?

Lucrosium Malice said:

For what it's worth, the healing capabilities of the Apothecary combined with the Marine's natural resilience is one of the few things that have kept my groups from burning through all of their fate. Though I also rule that your toughness bonus only affects light versus heavy damage; the critical wounds descriptor indicates that once you take damage in excess of your wounds you're critically injured, it doesn't take toughness into account.

As for healing themselves, I allow it with penalties based on their wound state and depending on the nature of the wound (specifically criticals, like if their arm is missing), starting with a "Difficult" (-10).

Well, I guess it all makes sense. I only asked because I am now playing an apothecary in one of our games. I never payed attention to the rules before.

That being said I could see the minus being added depending on the severity of the wound.

Only thing is no one is there to heal me, hence the reason I took Autosanguine. I could see testing medicae off my skill (as long as I am conscious) without the narthecium bonus by asking a battle brother to "fix me up." Sort of a tell them what to do while looking at the wounds, aka Ronin .