I was just reading the section about first aid and came upon this: First aid may only be applied to each Wound once and is a Full Action by you and your patient.

What does it mean exactly? For example if a PC loses 3 wounds, after counting the TB and AP bonuses, does it mean I can only heal a single wound a single time? This dosen't make much sense to me, to be honest. Maybe it means that I can only treat a single location once per day/week/month? Does it mean that I can only put a single first aid on a single wound or a specific wounded location, like an arm? But what if this arm has been damaged in two different locations, for example hand and elbow?

As far as I get it, the rules for this mean that I can only treat a single wound once, not location like hand or leg, but a wound. If my PC fails the first aid test to this wound, then he can't heal it again (at all?). If my PC does manage the test, it means that the wound is treated, even if I've only managed to heal 3 out of 4 damage points. Am I right here?

Each wound can be treated once, and the rest must be healed through resting / extended care.

We play with first aid as patching up a wounded patient after combat, and once patched up you can no longer benefit from first aid until you have suffered more damage and then that new damage can be patched up. We do not keep track of every single wound or hit location, but I agree that if you read the text literally you could have that interpretation.

It just means that if you are wounded, you can only have 1 first aid test. Any wounds not healed at this time, are now considered Treated, and can't be healed by further 1st aid.

Darth Smeg said:

This.

If you really want to be specific about it, you can track how much damage you take from each individual 'injury' so that you can't end up healing more than you take with each individual application of first aid. ie: Starting at 10 wounds: you take 5 wounds, and then are healed 3 (total 8 wounds). you then take 1 wound. you are healed 3 (total 10 wounds). However, we've found that tracking this stuff is not generally worth it.

That is indeed the RAW.

If you after injury and subsequent First Aid still suffer 3 Wounds, these are now considered Treated. If you get into another "accident" and suffer additional Wounds, only these new injuries may be healed with a new First Aid test. You may not heal the 3 Treated Wounds, even if the new First Aid test would heal more wounds than the new injury.

As per your example, Joe has 10 Wounds. He is Damaged with 5 Wounds, then have these treated and recover 3 Wounds, for a new status of 8 Wounds, 2 Damage which are Treated. He then suffers another Wound, and now has 7 Wounds, 3 Damage of which 2 are Treated.

A new First Aid test is taken, which would Heal 3 Wounds, bringing him back to full health. However, 2 are already treated and are not affected by this test, so the First Aid test only heals 1 Wound, bringing him back to 8, with 2 Damage (Treated).

Clear?

To help with the book-keeping, we do the following. We use the fantastic Excel Character sheet, which produces check-boxes for your wound. When wounds are taken, we mark them with a single diagonal line. When healed, we erase the wounds that are healed, and complete the cross for those that are Treated.

The Example above would look like this:

[ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
No damage, 10 empty Wound boxes.

[/] [/] [/] [/] [/] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
5 Wounds taken, 5 boxes checked with "half crosses"

[X] [X] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
3 Wounds healed (and the boxes erased), the remaining 2 Wounds are Treated (and the crosses are completed)

[X] [X] [/] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
1 New wound taken.

[X] [X] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
Heal test heals 3, only the untreated wound is erased.

Darth Smeg said:

does this allow multiple healing instances, if you've eg. received like 10 wounds from 3 different hits, after the battle?

No, a single First Aid treats all damage received, and any wounds still left after this test are considered treated.

Only new wounds from new battles may be treated with further tests.

so let me get this straight:

if you don't heal last 3 hits in between, you can only heal once leaving you with 5-7 treated wounds?

if you go behind the corner and treat everytime after receiving a single hit, you can possibly heal all damage?

sounds "ballistic skill" to me… -.-

I advise using the advanced Medicae Rules outlined in the Inquisitor's Handbook.

PnPgamer said:

Not sure if I follow you here.

But no need to over-complicate things, the rules simply state that whenever you attempt a first-aid test, you treat all damage you have recieved, no matter from how many different bullets, cuts or falls. After this one single first-aid test, any wounds you do not heal are considered Treated, and may not be treated again.

If you healed all your damage, it's all fine and good. If you didn't, then you're stuck with those wounds until they heal naturally over time (or extended care or psychic means or whatever).

If you get hurt again, you may treat these new wounds (once), but the old already-treated damage may not be healed by this new first-aid test.

let me use an example:

PC gets 3 hits in a combat. the wounds from these 3 hits are 4,5 and 6, leaving him pretty banged, probably into critical wounds. He is allowed a single heal check which in this case would heal only 1 critical (if i remember correctly)

Lets say this same pc is a selfish *******, and goes behind a corner everytime he is wounded and treats himself and after that returns to battle. he has the talent that makes him always considered lightly wounded. lets assume int of 30. he heals 3 wounds everytime, and has lost only total of 6 wounds.

fair?

First aid is not a combat action, its narrative time, i.e. it takes a few minutes to complete.

A combat round is 5 seconds.

That player is signing out of the fight after the first hit, leaving his buddies to handle the rest.

In our game, the medic can use his skill to prevent blood loss and stabilize critically wounded players in combat, and after combat he can then apply first aid to see if he can heal one or more wounds depending on the damage taken and wound level (btw. Hardy is an extremely good talent).

Although after the psyker got his heal ability the medic has arguable much less to do…

The rules in the book are actually a bit unclear what 1 "wound" means. If you read the damage system carefully you actually take "damage" rather than "wounds" and "wounds" are just a measure of how much damage you can take (though the wording of Fate Point healing then talks about healing wounds, just to confuse matters). This means that based on the core book alone , it is unclear whether it means "each wound" means "each point of damage" or "each instance of damage you have taken from a single hit" (which could be multiple points of damage).

However, my group, and most people I have noticed on the forum, play it as Darth Smeg described. I think there may have even been an official ruling on the matter on those lines (whether it made it to the errata or not I am not sure).

You could play it as each "wound" as being each individual instance of damage, but it adds a great deal of book keeping.

The Inquisitor's Handbook has optional rules which involve tracking the different types of damage (rather than individual instances of damage, or just treating all damage as one big blob), which can be treated seperately, but different types are more difficult to heal than others (I think Impact is the easiest, followed by either Energy or Rending (and then the other one, and then most difficult being Explosive). I have actually never used the rules, as it creates slight oddities and is more complicated than we could be bothered with. The main oddity is that if you have a good Medicae skill, it often could be better to be wounded by various different types of damage then the same amount of damage from one type. At the lower levels of ability the penalties for certain damage types do make the multiple healing possibilities not really an issue (and actually could be a needed second chance for a rubbish healing roll), but at higher levels of ability a -10 hear or there really isn't that much of an issue.

or go with the much easier healing rules from only war.

borithan said:

Sort of. It was detailed in the Errata for Deathwatch, which uses the same rules.

vogue69 said:

could someone give me a rough idea of how healing works in Only War?

In only war you can recieve maximum one first aid every 24 hours - provided you are not in extended care.

First aid is a full action and can thus be used in combat if you wish (it doesn't state so clearly, but that is how I interpret it).

My group in a very lucky group of level 4, medium armour and medium weaponry. They rarely get at critical level, the psycher has only the basic heal. But they use extensively the fate points to heal themselves. And as we play 5 hours per session, they always have plenty of fate point to heal themselves at the and of the evening. Therefore they don"t need much healing (except some psycher healing for emergency during a fight, beeing very carefull not to do it too often in order to avoid corruption). As we have rarely more than one fight per game session (investigation takes time), and as they most of them have many fate points, they use one for the initiative, then the rest for healing.

Personnaly, I find it annoying that wounds can be healed this way (but my players like it, then…). I start thinking increqsing the number of opponent (but not too much, cos I don't want the fights to be too long) and increase the level of the ennemis. A little bit of challenge and fear from my players is sometimes welcome.

I know this is old as hell but it interested me and these boards don't seem all that busy.

I interperate the rules totally differently.

First aid may only be applied to each Wound once and is a Full Action by you and your patient.

The key word here is each. Second key thing is that WOUND is singular not plural. That means each wound is counted as a seperate First Aid roll. Each one taking a full action. Not only this but each wound individually must be treated and can not be treated by First Aid from anyone again. So if you take additional damage you could treat those but not the previous wounds that have already been treated.

It makes sense to me, wounds are not all willy nilly let me heal up 3 wounds by using one First Aid roll. No First Aid is just a stop gap to prevent you from utter domination like when the character is at 0. It literially is FIRST aid and is not something you would waste to many rounds doing as this represents your characters extreme effort to bandage the character.

Outside of combat ya I would just apply it en masse to everything, in the middle of combat where each round counts as what 3 seconds? No.

This would require a lot of book keeping though.

You would need to keep track of the magnitude of each wound received in a fight, and then test 1st aid against each one.

It's a lot of book keeping, and a lot of dice rolls.

If that's the sort of "realism" that makes you happy, then go for it.

Personally I don't feel it adds to my enjoyment of the game. On the contrary, it just adds "chore" to what should be just fun.