I seriously don't get healing in this game.

Please, as you would a newb, explain to me how to use medicae to recover wounds, while in battle, using a medikit, and medicae mecadendrite.

I have +15 to Medicae. I have 7 Medikits on my.

The situation is as follows: My buddy is sitting there at -7 damage. Critical to the leg. Unconscious. I'm at 4 out of 15 wounds.

What do I do? what are my bonuses? what do I need to roll? does the medikit get "consumed" (think a potion from Diablo)? is it miraculously instantaneous? can I do it in combat?

I'm trying to minimize the instances of our psiker trying to heal people and slapping corruption or insanity on everyone >.>

Well, you make a Medicae roll which is Intelligence modified by training and relevant gear, +30 as far as I can tell (+20 from Medkit and +10 from Medicae Mechendrite)... dunno where you are getting the +15 from. If you succeed you heal 1 point of damage to the critically wounded guy, I suspect one to yourself (it sounds like you are heavily wounded at that point) but if you are still lightly wounded (or have Autosanguine) then you get your Intelligence bonus in wounds back. Fail by 3 degrees of success means anyone with wounds takes 1 point of damage and anyone on 0 or Critical damage must take a toughness test or die. After that you can only benefit from extended care, where you double the rate of natural healing.

Medikits are not consumable (though they have 6 doses of stimm that is consumable and needs to be repurchased separetely), though your GM may run it otherwise and I certainly could see a justification for it to be "used up" if the medikit is used heavily. First Aid requires a Full Action to carry out and can be done in Combat.

Well, first of all, nothing fancy, the +15 is +10 from Medicae advance, and +5 granted to me by the GM because I had to test the blood of each and every crew member of our Cobra class corvete (all 506 of them) in as short time as possible, because they came from a hive world infected by a virus that turned people into zombies, and then I had to check all food rations on board to see if they were infected by the virus (which spread through food poisoning and was placed in there on purpose, which is what we're trying to investigate right now, who did it).

So then, if I understand you correctly, the only way to get wounds back reliably in combat is through a psiker. Specially someone is already at critical wound condition.

Just as a curiosity, how many times per combat does your party go into critical damage, or take damage at all for that matter? It's no uncommon for our party to go into the negatives several times per combat encounter. Right now, for instance, my Tech Priest has one arm broken in 3 places, is unconscious, suffered from burns from a plastic explosive blast and is bleeding to death from a severe gash in the head, our ship's captain (and only one able to fly us out of there) has pretty much no face. A sword cut him from one side of the face to the other, like, from ear to ear. He lost his nose and part of his lips, and is right now blind. One of the guardsmen has a hole in his shoulder and leg (received a heavy bolter full auto burst and was lucky enough to get hit only twice), the psiker (who so far has been the only one keeping us alive through biomancy) is also severely injured, and our sniper assasin is out of ammo and needs to go into a room with a psiker to kill him in melee combat...

Of course that tends to happen after the whole security force of an entire settlement (outside the imperium I might add, in the outter edge of the galaxy) comes after you after the alarm is given.

I think we're up to (no kidding) 50 or so soldier kills, including people in carapace, rogue psikers, going against heavy bolters, krakk grenades...

I was just wondering, since I'm the only one with Medicae skill, how am I gonna heal all that, while we still have to deal with another squad of local law enforcement that is coming our way (in the ship that we need to steal to be able to get out of that mess after I recover the critically important things we came to search for).

And I "only" have 5 medikits left (because we thought they got completely consumed after a medicae test, even if it was a fail).

Speaking of which... what happens if I fail the Medicae test by less than 3 degrees? No heals? reduced heals? How long before I get to re-roll? What happens to the Stimm syringe if I fail the test? did I just "miss"? did it have no effect?

Healing in this game is wonky...

There is no quick way to recover wounds in combat besides from using psychic powers. I actually find that this is one of the greatest strengths of DH, it forces you to be creative.

Medicae is only really useful to stabilize someone dying or accelerating healing during the downtime between fighting when the acolytes are busy investigating.

If you´re onboard a starship right now there might be a simple way to kill all opposition and escape. Gather all acolytes and as many of the crew as you can on the bridge and seal the door. Then open all other doors, airlocks and cut life support to the rest of the ship. Your enemies (and unfortunate crew members) will either be sucked into space or freeze/suffocate to death. After all, very few survive the hazards of space and reentry into the atmosphere.

Mormoran said:

If you fail by less than 3 degress of success there is no healing. Re-rolling? Depends on what rules you are using. You get to treat each "wound" once. If a wound is not healed (or only partial healing occurred) you have to leave it to natural healing and extended care. Now, what you define as a wound matters a lot for this. FFG seem to have ruled that "wound" refers to the "Wounds" that a character has, so once you have had a heal attempt (or a successful heal that doesn't remove all damage) you cannot further benefit from first aid healing until you receive more damage and then you can only heal wounds up to the level you were at before the damage (ie if you had 3 wounds remaining untreated from a previous attempt and suffer another 3 wounds you could only heal those 3 new wounds, leaving you still with 3 damage). There is some stuff in the Black Industries material (Core Rulebook, Inquisitor's Handbook, Purge the Unclean and Disciples of the Dark Gods) which may suggest that a "wound" (as far as Black Industries were concerned) is every discrete time you take damage or possibly every type of damage you have taken (ie Energy, Rending, Impact and Explosive) counts as a seperate "wound". Each one of those (ie every "time" you have taken damage or every type of damage) can only be treated once. This... well requires a lot of bookkeeping but allows more wounds to be healed (but can easily still leave you with left over untreated wounds) and is combined with more to the healing system which makes some wounds harder or easier to treat than others.

Apart from this all you have is natural healing and extended care. Dark heresy is not a system where rapid healing is expected (unlike Deathwatch, where the combination of Fate Point spam and the apothecary can lead to a huge number of wounds healed every session).

Personally I would say I would regard it to be a very bad sign if a Dark heresy Party went into criticals halfway through a mission. This is bad news, as unlike Space Marines they cannot jump back quickly (In Deathwatch I have seen someone hitting Criticals almost every fight... but by the next one they are almost at full strength again). In a final fight of a mission it is probably fine as there is no worrying about "the next fight" and damage will probably be healed in down time before the next mission.

Mormoran said:

Do you know that damage do not substract from hit points right?

A Space marine have a determinate number of hit points. For example 20 this is the quantity of damage he can support without penalties.

You add damage always! For example at the start you have 0 damage of 20. An enemy hits you for 5 points of damage, now you have 5 of 20 damage.

When current hit points exceeds total hit points you begin to roll at critical tables and keep adding damage.

You can have 50 of 20 damage, a bleeding arm, a broken leg and a internal hemorrage.

Healing substracts damage from actual hit points. I hope my explanation was clear. My english isn't so good as i would. You can read all of this explained at rulebook.

Cya!

@Elronhir

First, thats quite a bit of a thread necro. Second, alot of what you said is just plain wrong.

Since this is the dark heresy board, I'm going to assume the players are not space marines. So its more likely to have 10 wounds instead of 20.

Also, you don't "roll" on critical damage. You start to take critical damage past 0 wounds, and each time your crit damage changes, you suffer the effect as per the write up for that value on the crit damage table.

In other words, say you're at 10 wounds, and for now, lets ignore the effects of TB/AP for damage reduction. From 10 you take 10 wounds right off, putting you at 0, no critical damage. After that, you take 3 wounds to the arm, putting you at 3 critical damage, and suffering from the effect of 3 crit damage on the arm, for whatever damage type. Next, you take 2 damage to the body, putting you at 5 crit, and suffering the crit 5 effect for the body of that damage type.

At the OP, I'm fairly certain the question has mostly been answered. It does sound like the game was in a very rough position for the players.

Generally though, it would be most effective to have the psyker heal first, followed by a medicae (for these instances first aid) check. This increases the possibility of not being heavily wounded when benefiting from first aid. Medkits are not consumed per test, but should probably be restocked between game sessions. In your case it sounds like quite a few tests were being made (hopefully the GM was abstracting alot of that).

Generally, all bonuses stack unless the book says they don't, up to a max of +60 to the test. So technically, you make your medicae(int) test, plus bonuses, and the patient heals your int bonus in wounds (if they're lightly wounded), or 1 if heavily wounded or critically wounded. There are talents to mitigate this, but read that as per the talents you have. Once first aid has been applied, it cannot be applied again to those particular wounds. This means its best to perform first aid as often as possible, to minimize the effects of eventually failing a medicae test. Technically, it is a full round action to perform first aid, but as a GM, I wouldn't allow it in combat.

Generally, the best thing is to not get hit, use cover. This game can be brutal, gotta play smart. If the enemies are still overwhelming you, it sounds like you're in over your head. Dark Heresy is made more for investigation and smaller scale fighting if you ask me.