Two quick questions about Wound Threshold and healing -

1) I've been thinking of rolling on the critical injury table when someone surpasses their Wound Threshold, regardless of whether it's triggered by the attack. I think this shows it's a more serious wound and will have some longer lasting effects.

2) When one character is healing another, what are the time parameters on that? If one character only has 5 wounds left, can the medic just keep healing him until he's better? Is there a limit to how many times you can heal in 24 hours, or does healing take a certain amount of time? I see rules about how many points can be healed, but not how often they can do it.

Considering it would take characters a significant amount of time to heal on their own or require a bacta tank, I'd like to set down some rules with my medic that the badly injured Wookie can't be completely healed in a 10 hour flight. What interpretations are you using?

1) This would be according to the rules. On page 141 of the Beta rulebook, the text describing Critical Injuries begins wth the following lines:

A particularly dangerous type of wound is a Critical Injury. Critical Injury is often the result of a critical hit from an attack during combat, but characters can also suffer them from exceeding their wound threshold or through other means.

2) A medicine check can occur once per encounter. Natural Rest allows a character to recover one wound per night of rest and potentially one critical wound per week of rest (resilience check). A Bacta Tank allows recovery of one wound every two hours (unless the character is incapacitated) and potentially one critical injury every 24 hours. All of these rules can be found on page 143 of the Beta Book.

You will likely have multiple encounters in one day, which gives the medic more opportunities to heal; however, it also creates more opportunities to collect more wounds.

Farsox said:

Thanks, but I'm mostly wondering about out of encounter healing - is it assumed the medic can work on the character if the characters have free time?

For example, the wookie in my group took 15 wounds and has 5 left. The session ended and in the next session they will be flying in hyperspace for 12 hours. How many wounds can the medic heal using just his conventional med pac? All of them? Is there some sort of '2 wounds per every 2 hours' rule?

Think of using a medkit as first aid or emergency surgery. If someone gets stabbed then you get out your medkit and make a medicine check to clean, stitch, and bandage the wound. You can't really repeat that process again the next day. Patients don't like it when you rip out their stitches and sew them up again just for fun. Instead characters need natural rest or the healing powers of bacta or stimpacks to kick their immune systems and cell regeneration into overdrive.

Blue Dog said:

Blue Dog said:

That is entirely up to you mate. A lot of the rules are left abstract so GM's can interupt them how they like. You can say that 12 hours time is about the same as a full night's rest and allow 1 would to heal for natural rest(assuming he is sleeping) and one medical check to recover any additional wounds. Or you could allow 2-3 medicine checks in a12 hour period.

Really it all depends on how you want the game to feel. Do you want combat to be realistic and gritty, giving the players a real sence of danger, and limit the amounts of checks, thus making combat more impactful. Or you can go the DnD route and make healing and damage suffered trivial and allowing players to make lots of attempt to recover health. Think about how you want your universe to feel for the players, also consider that you have a medic PC, and how he will feel about the restrictions you set for healing checks.

Also don't forget that Medpacks contain an interal stim storage, that grant one stimpack per scene(up to you how many that equates to!)

Personally I prefer the more realistic approach. I play in a Pathfinder group, and one player(long time DnD'er) always caries a wand of cure light wounds with 50 charges, so after every fight he sits there and rolls to recover his wounds back. I don't personally enjoy that, and only rely on magical healing via spells, but to each their own.

Blue Dog said:

The way that I interpreted it was that you could do a medicine check to heal another character once per encounter. Period. That means that between encounters, you can attempt to heal the character once. This makes a lot of sense to me. Once the medic has done his thing (cleaning, treating and/or dressing the wounds), there isn't much more he can do, except let the character heal by getting some much needed rest. During the next encounter, the wounded character would be exerting himself again to the point of potentially stretching/tearing his bandages or even getting wounded again. At that point, the medic could attempt to repatch his previous work or heal new wounds.

Farsox said:

I am with you there. I feel the rules say nothing about how many times you can attempt to heal, etc. between encounters or while in your ship travelling ten hours to another planet because they inversly state that you do a heal check/attempt once at the end of the encounter. And thats it. if you have several enconters then as per the rules the Medic player can run around the battlefield providing medical assistance and stabilising his party and then thats it. As said above, its now up to each individuals immune system and body to recover.

Reason why I see the rules indicate what is the characters healing process after suffering wounds if they take rest for a period of time and how it works per day, etc. and then obviously if this is aided by a bacta tank. (Note to self, install a bacta tank in my ship)

If you have a player character that has devoted his stats to be a medic you could house rule that his medical assistance during rest provides for recovery of 2 wounds per night of healing instead of the 1 indicated in the book.

Take the approach of "Yes but" instead of the D20 systems which is "No but" in your GMing addudication and you will be fine. This is really what the game concept is all about with Star Wars EotE.

The only thing dubious about the "per encounter" rule is if a character takes no damage in the encounter, eg: Encounter 1 a character takes 10 wounds and is healed 2; Encounter 2 a character takes no wounds, but is healed for 3? I think I'd run it that only new wounds can be healed. Thoughts?

whafrog said:

I think that I would allow it, and I briefly mentioned my reasoning for this in my last post. Narratively, you can say that, even though the character didn't take on any new wounds, he did exert himself during the encounter. This might lead to breaking or stretching any bandages/stitches that were applied before, offering the medic the opportunity to repair his previous work. Sure, it's not that realistic for him to be able to do that much healing during this process, but it is a way to justify giving the medic more of a purpose.

On the other hand, I would totally understand if you didn't want to allow it. You just might wind up with a medic who is feeling a little bit useless.

Farsox said:

Agree with Farsox. If you have a player that is placing his training and experience into a medic type (even to the level of battlefield surgeon) then I would also allow for that medic to heal players even if in that encounter they didnt suffer any wounds. Just gives him/her a sense of worth and your other players will no doubt be looking after that character.

Its still nowhere near a DnD style healing system. Players may very well still have to spend some days in total rest to recover though that is perfectly plausible and narratively you can throw some other events/plot twists during that period as well.

Just keep on applying the "Yes but…" rule and you will be fine and your players should have great enjoyment out of this system.

DVeight said:

Ah, the "yes but…". I keep forgetting So my answer would be to say "yes", but maybe increase the difficulty of healing wounds from previous encounters…

As a long-time gamer (I remember the old D&D pamphlet rules), it's hard to express how refreshing "yes but" is, and how hard to remember in the session. A friend of mine is GMing a fantasy tale, and I'm realizing that his default answer is "no" to almost everything that is slightly outside the boundaries of a skill or spell or …whatever. That's how we've always played. I need to change these guys' mindsets, asap, so thanks for the reminder.