Under the Medicae skill description it says "First Aid may only be applied to each Wound once and is a Full Action by you and your patient." Does this mean that for every time a character has been hit a medicae test can be made? Or for the actual number of wounds they've taken? Because if a player can make a medicae test for each individual point of damage they've taken, it sounds really easy to just fully heal after every fight, but that's what the wording implies.

From a game-balance , as well as common sense stand point i interpret the "Wound" mentioned in the Medicae entry as "Each seperate instance where your body took damage".

For my taste the ruleterms "Wound" (as in the DH equivalent of Hitpoint) and the general language term "Wound" (as in instance where you were damaged) should have been seperated by another name for the DH-Hitpoint.

This was addressed in the Deathwatch Errata and FAQ:

Medicae (page 102): The following should be added to
the First Aid use of the Medicae Skill: “The First Aid use of the
Medicae Skill can be used to treat any number of untreated injuries with
a single Medicae Test. If successful, the Medicae Test removes damage
as detailed above. Once the Medicae Test is performed, the injuries are
treated (for better or worse) and cannot be treated with another First Aid
Test. They may be treated with an Extended Care Test.”

Question : How does Medicae skill’s First Aid option work
when multiple injuries are received and some are treated
successfully and others are treated unsuccessfully?

Answer : First Aid is applied to all Damage that the character
has taken and that has not been treated yet. A single application
of First Aid treats all Damage taken, even if it came from
multiple sources. If the First Aid was unsuccessful, or if it did
not restore all Damage, the player should note the remaining
Damage as being ‘Treated’ – thereafter it can only be treated
with Extended Care Medicae Option or natural healing. For
example: A Battle-Brother has 20 Wounds and is completely
uninjured. He suffers 10 Damage leaving him with 10
Wounds. First Aid is applied and heals 8 Damage, the Space
Marine now has 18 Wounds, and 2 points of Treated Damage.
The Space Marine suffers another 10 Damage leaving him
with 8 Wounds, 10 points of Untreated Damage, and 2 points
of Treated Damage. First Aid is applied and heals 12 Damage,
which would normally put the Space Marine right back up
to 20 Wounds; however, because 2 points of Damage have
already been treated, the Space Marine only heals 10 points
of Damage (that were Untreated) and now has 18 Wounds.
The Battle-Brother still has 2 points of Treated Damage that
have not been healed and would need to rely on Extended
Care or natural healing to recover these 2 points of Damage.

Darth Smeg said:

Wow. Am I reading this right? It seems to imply that even if someone gets injured in multiple separate instances during a fight, only one medicae test is allowed. So if the character takes 3 points of damage from getting stabbed, then 5 points from getting shot, then 2 from getting stabbed again, then after the fight the medicae guy comes up to heal him he is allowed one medicae check to treat all these wounds, but only heals 4 of them, the remaining 6 are treated and can only be healed by extended care. That's what that errata would imply.. but it seems a bit unfair especially if the character is heavily wounded, because then the one medicae test to treat all these injuires would only heal 1 point of damage.

DastardlyIceHole said:

You interpreted it correctly.

P.S.

Ask your party´s Psyker, i´m sure he can help out with one or the other Psy Power to get you right back up .....

In case you are worried about having too little healing, here is our player groups fav medicae option: Adept with Unnatural intelligence from the Sage Rank and a Good quality Cortex implant. With a simple medikit and a few well spent skill and int upgrades it will be nearly impossible to fail the medicae check, and on a success you will heal 15-18 wounds. If you are extremely lucky with the random parts of character generation you can even reach an int-bonus of 7, for a total of 21 wounds healed.

Medicae in this game is a mess.

There, I said it. In our campaign, we housed ruled it to act sort of like a potion in any hack and slash video games. You buy a medikit, and it can be used a number of times depending on it's quality. If you succeed the medicae test, you heal an amount of damage depending on the type and quality of the medikit used:

1. First Aid Kit: 3 uses, heals 1d5 + degrees of success
2. Basic Medic Kit: 6 uses, heals 1d5 + intelligence bonus + degrees of success, +10 medicae bonus when using it
3. Advanced Medic Kit: 8 uses, heals, heals 2d5 + intelligence bonus + degrees of success, +20 medicae bonus when using it.

The limited uses are based upon the fact that the individual parts inside the medic kit are spent, things like gause, anesthetic shots, needles and such. The basic kit includes a rudimentary diagnostics kits, that is reusable, so you can just replenish the expendable things in the kit. The advanced kit has an advanced diagnostics unit, as such it gives a better bonus.

Our party is combat heavy, in any combat situation we're dispatching upwards of 15 to 97 enemies (our record so far), and our combat sessions, the way we like to play them, can last for 5 to 6 sessions, and we get hit a lot during this time.

We have also ignored the lightly wounded and heavily wounded rules, though we still use the critical damage rules.

It feels a lot more action packed and fast paced our way, imo.

Wow those medkits do more healing then Seal Wounds psychic power, how much do the medkits sell for?

Ah, perfect. I will use the one medicae test treating all the wounds then, since that seems the most deadly. We're bringing the game I'm GMing to an end so I am going to try and kill as many people off as possible. This will make it much easier.

Phi6891 said:

Umm 50, 200 and 400 thrones iirc.

Up until very very recently we didn't have a psiker in our party, so we had to rely solely on medicae for in-combat healing, so we kinda had to adapt it to be more "diablo potion like" if we wanted to do any kind of exciting combat.

And our psiker wants to go for divination, so I don't see that changing for a while.

Mormoran said:

Pretty sure Seal Wounds is a generic power that any psyker can just have.

KommissarK said:

It's a Biomancy power.

There is a minor power that lets you heal, but it is nowhere near as overpowered as this one

Mormoran said:

OMG that is really expensive for medkits. You guys must buy the First Aid Kits by the dozen because they're the cheapest, otherwise your GM must throw thrones at you guys like crazy. I'm use to healing being a scarce resource and thrones also being a scarce too. Usually we find our gear from combat, if it wasn't destroyed in the fight or if we are lucky on our search rolls.

And Darth Smeg is right on Seal Wounds being a Biomancy power and Healer being a minor psychic power, and if done right you can use Seal Wounds an unlimited amount with only a 10% chance for psychic phenomena for each usage or 0% chance when you get the Psychic Supremacy talent, this is assuming that your casting it on one power die and focusing on the Biomancy discipline, but you can only use Healer on each PC once for ever 6 hour period.

The official general rules are that each point of damage can only be "treated" once, and you can only have more First Aid when you take more damage. The Inquisitor's Handbook has additional rules (which require much more bookkeeping), which allow each damage type to be treated once (so Rending, Energy, Impact etc). It requires more work, and can get harsher as it gives differing penalties depending on the damage type (Impact actually gets a bonus to Medicae, Energy is +0, and Rending and Explosive have penalties to healing). It also strikes me as being even odder than the current rules.

You could of course track each seperate hit's damage and then allow treatment of each one, but that isn't in the rules.

Here are a few houserules that makes it possible to play a long dungeonbashing adventure where people get successively worse for wear, without having to resort to killing people off in a single fight to make it exciting.

After a fight each character can benefit from only one (not neccessarily successful) healing attempt, regardless of the number of sources that delt damage.
Each nights rest, a character recieves one wound from natural healing and may benefit from one (not neccessarily successful) healing attempt. (This only works if there is a good reason for the party to move on quickly)
A healing attempt is made by medicae, it heals the users int-bonus _without_ benefitting from unnatural intelligence, and an extra +1 point for each rate of success.

Apart from this, you can benefit from the Healer psychic power as often as you like (we don't use Seal Wounds, regenerate is available for use on the biomancer herself). On a success, you will heal the casters WP-bonus _without_ benefitting from unnatural WP, and an extra +1 point for each overbleed.
Each time you are healed by the psychic power, your body gets a little more tainted by the powers of chaos. To indicate this you accumulate a "tainted" score. After a successful heal you gain one corruption point for each point of "tainted" you already have, and then you increase your "tainted" by one. This means that you can benefit from Healer once wihtout bad side-effects. The second time you benefit from Healer, you will gain one corruption point. The fifth time you benefit from Healer you will gain four corruption points (for a total of 10 corruption recieved so far). And so forth... So, extensive warphealing will cause mutations and a fall to the lure of chaos. Rember that the Emperor loves a martyr and wants you to bleed for him! This "tainted"-score is reset to zero during extended downtime between chapters.

You can also, of course, heal by spending fatepoints. If you do, you recieve your toughnessbonus in wounds. A maximum of one fatepoint may be spent per combat round, no matter what it is spent for. If a combat drags on over several sessions worth of play, no fatepoints are restored until the combat is over.

If you are on a -2 critical and recieve 5 points of healing you will end up on +3 wounds. If you are on much worse critical damage, any successful healing will _at_least_ reset you to 0 wounds and fix any damage that is less than a lost limb (or similar nastiness...). If you have lost a limb you will be stabilized but not regain the use of your limb through anything less than replacements.

Burning a fatepoint will let you restore a lost limb (it wasn't as bad as it looked...)

I think that's all the houserules we needed to keep Dead Stars interesting :-)

Oh, comments and suggestions are of course welcome.