Quick question because from what I've been reading lately it appears my group may have been playing against RAW. When you are critically wounded and you have the talent that makes you always lightly wounded, do you still heal slowly while you have critical damage and then heal as lightly wounded for your wound levels?

For example, Guardsman Joe has 0/10 Wounds, 5 Critical - but he also is considered always Lightly Wounded - does first aid treat him as lightly wounded while he has critical damage? And will he heal x wounds per day as lightly wounded or as critically wounded?

The way I'd run it - it hasn't yet come up in game, so I haven't had to try it in practice yet - is to heal critical damage as normal, and then once the character has 0 critical damage, he counts as lightly wounded, with all the advantages that go with it. This is simply because being lightly/heavily wounded determines the rate and ease of regaining wounds... and critical damage isn't wounds, but rather something that must be dealt with before wounds are regained (under most circumstances).

I think thats the way I interpret it now that I understand critical damage and wounds aren't the same. It always seemed odd the way we were treating critical damage like wounds if someone had that talent. Our adept with Unnatural Int x2 was using first aid and healing people for 12 wounds(his int modifier). I'll bring this up with my group tomorrow.

RAW does suggest that he would heal as if lightly wounded even way down on critical. And intelligence bonus 12 gives some strange effects on it's own.

Also keep in mind that regaining wounds and getting out of critical damage does not mean you instantly grow a new ear, loose the sore ribs and fatigue or unmelt your face. It just means that despite your injuries you're not going to burst into flames from one more glancing hit with a lasgun. You're just functional and ready for another beating, not fully healed even if it's the same game mechanical effect.

In short, i'd allow it.

Graspar said:

Except that being Lightly Wounded primarily determines the speed and ease of recovering wounds... and Critical Damage isn't part of, or subtracted from, your wound score.

IMO, the situation is no different to having a TB of 8 and 15 wounds (being a situation in which no amount of wound loss can make you Heavily Injured, because Heavily Injured is when you've lost more wounds than twice your Toughness Bonus) - Critical Damage heals normally because it isn't wounds, but once you've recovered from your critical wounds (1 point per week with medical attention, nothing without medical attention), you're back on top form after a couple of weeks.

It never says the talent is only for wounds. All it says is "for healing purposes". Recovering critical damage is healing, no?

Graspar said:

And?

Damage and Critical Damage are two different things - they're healed separately (though you can't regain wounds until after all your Critical Damage is removed). Why should the state of Lightly Injured (which means you heal Damage at 1 wound/day or TB wounds/day with medical attention) affect Critical Damage (recovered at a rate of 1/week with medical attention, or not at all otherwise)?

Just as crucially, it's a huge advantage to include Critical Damage in the effects of the talent, because of the vast differences in the rate of healing. A character with the minimum required Toughness for Hardy removes Critical Damage at twenty-eight times the speed of a character with the same toughness but lacking that talent (with medical attention, a TB4 character removes 28 wounds in a week while lightly wounded, but can only recover 1 point of Critical Damage in the same amount of time).

While recovering from Critical Damage may not be limbs regrowing and so forth, it is still a long, arduous and difficult recovery for any character, particularly if they've suffered life-threatening injuries. First Aid can only restore one point (two, if the Medicae has the Master Chirurgeon talent), and the only way to remove critical damage faster than 2/week (with the Extended Care use of the Medicae skill) is through psychic powers and similarly supernatural methods. Recovering from Critical Damage seems, to me at least, to be approximately representative of healing broken bones and mangled (but not irreparably destroyed) limbs, and otherwise healing nonpermanent damage. If you apply Hardy to Critical Damage as well... then characters start healing broken limbs and fractured skulls in a week or less.

And, they are always considered lightly wounded for healing purposes. The book never distinguishes between recovering wounds and removing critical damage, it just says "removing damage" which would apply to both types, yes? So RAW states that for healing (which includes removing critical damage) you always play by the rules of lightly wounded, which state that you remove your TB in damage when resting a full day and the healers IB for first aid.

That's the way it's written. Stupid rules should be ignored but RAW is what it is, and I don't think it's stupid. It's an excellent way to run a combat heavy adventure without having to have the characters rest for months in between encounters.

And then, I think that playing it your way produces equally bad results even if realism is what you're after, the game simply isn't geared towards that. A very tough character with four critical damage has for example lost his eye or burned his hair off. By your rules they would require at least four weeks of remaining immobile under constant medical attention to recover from those horrific injuries and start healing naturally, at which point it's going to be another two or three stationary days under medical attention to get fully recovered.

Does that include regrowing your hair and is every doctor also a hairdresser in the grim darkness of the 41st millenium?

However, for some middle ground between healing very rapidly and healing very slowly, how about letting the hardy talent decrease how badly wounded you are one level, critically damaged becomes heavily damaged, it takes a full week to recover your TB damage and a toughness test to double it in case of medical attention. Who knows, perhaps the burned off hair can be recovered and styled in a week so that your superheated bone marrow don't turn you into a frag grenade the next time someone strikes you.

But personally I feel that if a character is very tough and by the rules as sapidly healing as a person with medical nanobots in his blood (autosanguine works by the same rules) it's better that they heal a broken leg in a week than the option that a disorienting blow to the head (critical one) takes a full week of medical attention to recover from, which would be the case even with the middle ground houserule.

Graspar said:

Except that they are referred to separately. Wound loss and recovery is referred to as Damage (capitalised, as it's a specific mechanical term), while criticals are referred to as Critical Damage. This can be seen in the Healer minor psychic power, and the Regenerate and Seal Wounds biomancy powers (where both are referred to distinctly - in the case of Seal Wounds, the text specifically states "This power can remove Critical Damage as well as normal Damage", emphasis mine, suggesting that they're seperate matters under most circumstances). Similarly, the Critically Wounded state is reliant on the character having taken Critical Damage (a distinct term from Damage), and the Medicae skill refers to the ability to remove Critical Damage seperately from the ability to remove Damage. As far as I can tell, the two are distinct mechanisms working side-by-side.

As for the long-durations of healing Critical Damage... the lighter Criticals can be dealt with as a result of first aid (which can remove 1 point of Critical Damage, two if the medic has Master Chirurgeon), but any Critical Damage of 3+ cover significant burns (Energy), broken bones (Impact), major lacerations (Explosive and Rending), rather than just being dazed (where there might still be lingering effects, if a medic doesn't look you over after the fight).

And, personally, I don't see a problem with long stretches of downtime. That's a deliberate choice I've made regaring my campaign, and it works fine - allowing for longer-term character development (they actually have the time to train and develop contacts and do all those things that a group that hops from mission-to-mission over a course of weeks wouldn't reasonably have time to accomplish). It also means that my group don't consider a medic to be something so utterly essential that they'd never leave their HQ without one... one would be useful, but it isn't of immense importance.

I see a problem with long stretches of downtime, if by long stretches you mean a week to heal burnt hair without a master chiurgeon. If they get hurt in a skirmish with cultists, get some burnt hair and need a week to recover when they even have talents to speed healing that's a huge problem.

Two points of critical damage is, as you stated, very minor. Energy has it as blinded and confused for one round, should you really need a master chiurgeon to recover from that in less than a week if the character is tricked out for rapid healing? That way lies seal wounds after every skirmish.

There are problems on both sides, but to each his own etc.

Do you see any problems with counting critically wounded characters as heavily wounded if they have the right talent? It'll still take a week of extended rest to heal any critical damage and the talent actually comes into play when you are injured for real and not just for wounds.

Graspar said:

When I talk about long stretches of downtime, I mean months, not weeks. Some of that is spent healing.

As it is, the "hair loss" critical is still a serious injury - it's a blast of heat and energy sufficient to render a human entirely bald in moments, which would invariably come with tissue damage as well as the stated case of high-speed alopecia. It isn't the hair that's being "healed" - it's the injuries that caused the hair loss that are taking a few weeks to heal. With such an injury, the character may even be bald and burn-scarred permanently.

Graspar said:

As I said before - though perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear - a Master Chirurgeon can remove two points of Critical Damage as first aid . That's minutes, not days.

Beyond that, rapid healing is one thing... but Acolytes are still human (essentially).

For me, those fast-healing talents deal first, foremost and only with minor injuries (anything that isn't Critical Damage - indeed, the description for the Autosanguine talent states that "your implants repair minor injuries"). The cuts, scrapes, bruises, grazes and flesh wounds of little consequence... not broken limbs, cracked ribs, fractured skulls and the consequences of extremity loss. Recuperating from that sort of serious injury is, IMO, only a short distance from out-and-out regeneration (it may well be possible using extremely advanced medical equipment, but the rules don't assume those), especially when you consider that, if Lightly Wounded rates could be applied to Critical Damage then any half-decent Medicae can completely heal a broken limb in minutes.

Graspar said:

It's a matter of how you conceptualise it. For me, healing Critical Damage is dealing with the long-term lingering effects of injury. A character with Critical Damage 1 might well be concussed or otherwise sufficiently battered that strenuous activity is inadvisable without being checked out by a Medicae, while a character with Critical Damage 7 has been on the verge of death and may well be confined to a bed for the next month or two.#

Thus, the way I am and will be ruling these talents is as follows: the character removes Damage (not Critical Damage) as if lightly wounded, and all Medicae tests to treat him with First Aid use the Lightly Wounded modifiers for their damage type, as shown on page 233 of the Inquisitor's Handbook.

I can't see the healing of critical damage being effected by fast healing talents unless they are given seperate sections describing custom faster healing rates for critical injuries. Applying faster healing talents equally to both normal damage and critical doesn't work well IMO.

It just start to wonder at which point an official statement is made to an RQ? For sure, a lot of questions might be cleared easy... but sometimes, something "binding" would be nice.

Gregorius21778 said:

I also requests an official statement

Would be great to know more about many of the talents if they can be used in other ways as stated too, though that is a diffrent question in itself ^.^

Just use the Healing psychic ability. That works wonders.

Wilfred Owen said:

Yeah I admit it is a great ability along with the dull pain power...

Wilfred Owen said:

Yup that seems to work the best. Answer me this please: characters never drop below 0 wounds correct? There are no negative wounds like in D&D, which my group moved to DH from, so we had a hard time getting acclimated at first. If that is the way it works, what is critical damage considered? If a player takes 3 critical damage, is he still sitting at 0 wounds for purposes of healing or is he considered -3 wounds?

We have agreed that a player never goes below 0 wounds and critical damage isnt actually a wound level between 1 and 10. Those numbers are just for purposes of issuing the severity of damage and are only a reference point, not an actual number to be healed from. Critical damages are just effects that have their own rules on how they are healed like fatigue, blood loss, and stunning. Yes this might sound confusing or even ridiculous to some players but the rules for wounds and critical damage arent terribly clear, even in the addendum, so we used our own interpretation and it works fairly well.

We also dont stack crits, like a punch to the head shouldn't aggravate the bullet hole in your shin. Crits only stack if another wound is applied to the same location. House rules yes, but this makes alot more sense and keeps things simple.