I house ruled that the Apocethary can use a full round to heal someone who is not giving up their full round to be healed but he will always treat them as being heavily damaged. Remember that a wound can only be attended to once so using this option can nerf a characters max hit points for the rest of the mission.
I'm not saying everyone should play this way but it works for my group and gives the healer some options.
Ciphias said:
I mean every soldier in the world is trained on basic first aid (ok, they are not as though as marines) and space marines are the elite of the elite and they are valuable...a loss of a battle brother takes a great ammount of time and resources to compensate. In the "standart chapters" apothecary are with every major combat force but kill teams are on their own, without the backup of a larger force and they are sent to even greater dangers than "standart" marines.
In my opinion medicae should at least availiable as a untrained skill for Deathwatch Marines.
Although it has to be said that RL =/= DW.
Guy gets hit with a bullet to leg:
RL: Ohmygodmylegisshottopieces! Oh, please God do not let me die! ... ****, Doc, how bad I'm hit? Not bad? I know you are lying, you just try to comfort me. I feel cold. Can't feel my leg. This is bad ... Doc, can you check if everything else is okay? [continue this for 15 minutes untill medevac can land] ... [enter level 2 surgigal hospital and spend 3 hours in surgery and 2 days in bed] ... [get shipped back to home for two months of recover]
DW: Right-o. Only 10 wounds left. Maybe someone can give me some medicae-love? [5 minutes later] Great, now I got 14 wounds left. I'm good to go.
telagos said:
I'm not saying everyone should play this way but it works for my group and gives the healer some options.
I think that the healer should have the option of saying "You want me to run around spending all my time in fights healing you and playing cleric while you do the cool stuff, but you can't be arsed to stop glory-boying it for a single goddam combat round while I do it, and want to whine about doing so? Screw you, I'm going to play an assault marine too, and you can bleed for all I care, you ingrate."
You can also have the PCs requisition one of those Medikit from RT: no need to have the medicae skill to use, and you get a +20 to your roll to boot; plus since Marines are tall and big and all, that would fit in a normal belt pouch.
Umm... that wouldn't work on a Space Marine though. The point of the arthesium is that it caters to Astartes physiology.
Why not?
The only real difference is that bandages and other ways to stop bleeding aren't very useful. That and something that can actually quickly deal with an Astartes's physiology, because it's not exactly easy to open one up...
I think it would work, as long as it was modified to better fit the tough bodies of the Astartes.
Astartes physiology is radically different to a mortals. The book outright points out that many human drugs would only serve to pollute their blood. It's not just a case of measuring doses, you need substances designed with Astartes in mind hence the narcthecium.
If it worked, why wouldn't every Apothecary carry one?