these state you heal as if lightly wounded. How does this effect critical damage? In fact how does first aid work period in terms of critical damage. do you heal as if from zero but keep the critical damage or do you remove critical damge first.

Always assumed that ALL wounds are considered Light for the purposes of healing. Of course, you would still suffer the side effects of critical damage, but you would heal up much faster. So, if you have 15 wounds, you take 20 but you have Hardy, if someone uses Medicae on you, you regain INT bonus wounds, as if you were lightly wounded, starting from the critical first.

I asked via e-mail the same question and Macharias is correct. Hardy and autosang are some of the best talents out there.

Would you mind adding the email rely that you got to the Errata thread?

Wait, so your telling me you can heal crit damage?

From what I understand, you still retain the crit damage, but heal normal wounds as per lightly wounded.

ie: You're on 0 Wounds, 3 crit damage. You have hardy and get treated. You now have (say) 8 wounds, but still 3 levels of crit damage.

From my understanding of the rules damage is always healed from critical wounds on up it is the reason critically wounded characters heal so slow (moving from critically to heavily and finally lightly wounded). Skipping the critical wounds that could kill a patient to address lesser wounds that don't threaten his life is idiotic and this method of application is never mentioned to my knowledge.

The whole reason hardy and autosanguine are so useful is it allows you to actually heal critical and heavy damage effectively; otherwise your characters are going to be out of commission for much longer periods of time.

Is first aid going to replace limbs lost to critical damage? No.

Is first aid going to remove permanent ability damage? No.

Is first aid going to get your player stabalized, and ready to return to medical facilities for limb replacement? Yes.

Is first aid going to allow your player who has take a few minor critical effects to redeploy quickly? Yes.

The short answer is there are few talents as useful as Hardy and Autosanguine for keeping your character up and running. When your character takes damage as they tend to do there are only a few things you can do about it. Mitigate it through armour, toughness, and true grit or heal it. Hardy and Autosanguine lets you say reguardless of the damage the character has taken they are always treated as lightly wounded as far as healing is concerned.

The effects are explained in two different ways one the character's constitution is such that he can rebound from damage quickly. The other that his body is filled with tiny machines that go about repairing damage to his body automatically. In addition to being treated as lightly wounded his body naturally recovers additional wounds per day.

So in effect if a pc is critical wounded you heal thier wounds as if they are Heaviliy wounded, meaning only 1 wound back? What about a pc with 12 toughness and only 22 wounds, is it either lightly wounded of critically wounded for him?

Tunnelhckrat said:

No. That character gets" INT bonus" back on a Medicae roll. For the purposes of HEALING, the distinctions of "lightly wounded" "heavily wounded" and "critically wounded" do not apply to them. In the course of taking damage, the character may lose all their wounds and start taking Critical damage. And if they do, then they suffer the regular consequences of that critical damage (lost limbs, ability damage, blood loss, etc.). As soon as any type of healing comes into the picture, however, you ignore the fact that they are Heavily or Critically wounded. Here's an example (I would have used the numbers you provided above, but I can't make heads of tails of it, so here goes):

Marine Bob has 20 Wounds, and the Hardy Talent. He and his kill team drop down into a nest of Orkz and it starts to go really badly for them. He takes 17 wounds from attacks and one of his battle brother buddies (Int bonus of 5) uses some Medicae on him. Marine Bob gains 5 wounds and now has 8 left (20-17=3; 3+5=8). Next round comes around and it's not going any better. This time, he takes 13 levels of Impact damage to his leg and is brought down to 5 levels of Critical damage. As per the DW book, Bob immediately suffers the following effects: "A powerful impact causes micro fractures in the target’s bones, inflicting considerable agony. The target’s Agility is reduced by –20 for 1d10 Rounds and he takes 1d5 levels of Fatigue." Again his battle brother buddy is nearby and applies some Medicae (Int bonus 5) to that wound. Bob regains54 wounds and will be considered to be at 0 wounds if he suffers any additional damage. However, he continues to suffer the other effects of his most recent wound (the -20 agility for 1d10 round and the 1d5 fatigue).

As the Talents describes: a character is ALWAYS considered lightly wounded when HEALING damage.

Hope this helps clarify things for you.

argh. typo. Obviously, it should say "Bob regains 5 wounds" and not "Bob regains54 wounds..."

The question is, "When you are at Critical 5 and get healed by 5, do you get 5 Wounds back, or are you at Critical 0?"

The distinction matters, as in the first case, any hit under 6 Wounds has no effect on you apart from losing the Wounds, whereas the second implies that any damage you'll take next is Critical, too.

And that is not very clear, to tell the truth. I would say the latter, as it seems to me that Critical Wounds can be healed, which would imply that they are, in fact "negative Wounds", but I don't recall any clear statement on that point.

I have always played it that Critical Wounds are essentially negative wounds.There are very specific times when you do heal wounds before Critical Damage (and so can have wounds left but also have -4 criticals or something), but I can't remember them at the moment. I think when you burn a Fate point to stand up with 1d5 wounds after dying (from Ascension but we also use it in Deathwatch).

So yeah, hardy and autosanguine are amazingly useful. Still find it a bit daft that the Apothecary gets both at rank 1, as Autosanguine makes hardy useless (ok, if the apothecary uses Prosanguine and fluffs it leaving him without the benefit of either talent, maybe).

Stormast said:

Like borithan, my group has always assumed - based on your example of being at Crit 5 and being healed by 5 - that this would bring you to Crit 0. It seems more complicated than is worth it to start keeping track of different wound tracks and we've felt that there was nothing ambiguous about either the Autosanguine or Hardy Talents. The issue never came up in our group, anyhow, so before I saw any discussion on the point, it seemed self-evident to me. And in play (which is where this matters most, in the end) treating Critical damage as "negative wound levels" has always seemed the most expedient way of doing it.

Are you correct that Critical damage is never explicitly called "negative wounds"? I guess so. I don't remember it stated in any event. But in our interpretation of the rules, the "thermometer" model of wound ranks seemed both to be the easiest and the most natural assumption. In fact, the explanation of healing Critical damage on p.262 seems pretty clearly to favour our interpretation:

"A character is Critically Damaged whenever he has taken Damage in excess of his Wounds. Critical Damage does not heal on its own—it requires medical attention. With rest and medical attention, a character removes 1 point of Critical Damage per week. After all Critical Damage has been removed, a character becomes Heavily Damaged instead."

This seems to suggest that before a character can heal "regularl" damage, they need to have healed all of their critical damage first, with the difference that the Autosanguine and Hardy Talents allow you to treat the character as Lightly Wounded for the purpose of healing (ie: for the amount of damage healed).

Either way you want to look at it, they're amazing talents.

Here's the way I run it. Given how much damage gets dished out, both by and to the Kill-team, it has worked well so far.

Let's assume we're talking about Brother Meat-Shield (20 Wounds, TB 8) and an Apothecary Brother Heal-Bot (Int 50, Enhance Healing ability, narthecium and other Apothecary gear).

Okay, say a fight happens. Brother Meat-Shield gets hit once for 15 Wounds and again for 10. That's two wounds leaving him with 0 Wounds and 5 Critical Damage.

Brother Heal-Bot goes to help. There are two injuries that can be treated. Right now, Brother Meat-Shield has Critical Damage and thus would be healed at the Critically Damaged rate. Brother Heal-Bot could try to heal the first injury (15 Wounds) but he would only heal 2 + 1d5. Seeing that he needs to get rid of that Critical Damage, he attempts to heal the second wound that was received. He rolls a 3 on his 1d5 and thus heals 5 damage, removing all of the Critical Damage and leaving Brother Meat-Shield only lightly damaged (the narthecium means he won't be heavily damaged until he takes more than 24 Wounds).

Brother Meat-Shield now has taken 20 Wounds (15 untreated, 5 treated) and is just lightly damaged. Brother Heal-Bot treats the first injury and again rolls a 3, thus healing 13 damage. All of Brother Meat-Shield's wounds have now been treated leaving him with 13 of 20 Wounds for the next fight.

If Brother Meat-Shield had Hardy or Autosanguine, then he would be healed as if Lightly Damaged at all times and all of the damage from the second hit would have been healed since Brother Heal-Bot would have healed 10 + 1d5 rather than 2 + 1d5.

Macharias the Mendicant said:

It would, but that's not great for gameplay, where a crit early on (or even a result on the mission setback table) can basically ruin someone's entire mission, because they're on crit level 5, with 0 wounds and with FP the only way to recover from them.

We opted for an approach that made the game more enjoyable to those who had taken critical damage.

Thing is, this interpretation tends to make Hardy and Autosanguine over powered. Especially as not everyone gets easy access to them. And I play a Techmarine, so I shouldn't complain

But that's just my opinion here.