Hey guys-

First off, just wanted to say hello. I've been lurking on the forums for a while reading up on different rules and all. I've yet to play my first game, but have a few friends who are interested in me GM'ing, so I'm trying to get up to speed.

Anyway, I was working out the healing mechanics and I came across something I felt was strange. When out of an encounter, my players will likely be in a position of having a couple days of downtime to recover wounds, but without the benefit of Bacta tanks. At first I thought this would be an interesting situation to put them, but now I'm not sure.

They will likely have a Medpac or two. Normally, this would make healing fairly slow if you go simply on Medicine checks. However, the description for the Medpac says it has built in Stimpacks.

From a rules standpoint...isn't more effective to just use unlimited Stimpacks from the Medpac on everyone and heal 15 wounds a day on each player? It says a bacta tank only heals a wound every 2 hours...assuming you're running on a 24 hour day, that's only 12 wounds, and only for one character no less.

Does this sound right to you guys? Should I nerf the unlimited Stims somehow, or just let it ride?

I'd like to know if any of you have run into a similar situation

The game's healing rules have perplexed me almost from the start, so I feel your pain.

However, note the text on medpacs that reads

"In addition, the internal stim storage grants the user the equivalent of one stimpack per scene (although the GM can rule the device has run out of stims if the supplies are used continuously.)

So, the GM can cut that off if the players use it too frequently.

"unlimited" is relative, in this case, I think. Even the book says for the GM to produce a number of stims that seems reasonable. in this case, unlimited means "however many the GM deems appropriate"

I plan on having overused stims create a mental addiction to them.

Well, I'm part of the general consensus. Only problem with making the stims "run out" is now you're dealing with a tangible item in relative terms. I'm really not a fan of the "you can use this item sometimes, but only when I feel like it" approach. How is a doctor unable to just look inside the kit and see how many are there? My players are going to be on a strict equipment budget, and this like this makes it hard to manage.

I wish they hadn't included the stim thing at all. I'd much prefer a more effective healing mechanic, like heal 2 wounds for every success or something.

I hate to do it on a game I haven't properly played yet, but sounds like it's house rule time.

I just ignore the stimpack generation ability. I feel that it's just part of the med kit and is used in general healing of wounds when the med kit is used.

I'd house rule that once a certain amount of time has passed since receiving the wound(s), stimpacks would no longer be useful. They're meant to be immediate emergency aid, not something you take two of before bed and call your doctor in the morning.

Well, I'm part of the general consensus. Only problem with making the stims "run out" is now you're dealing with a tangible item in relative terms. I'm really not a fan of the "you can use this item sometimes, but only when I feel like it" approach. How is a doctor unable to just look inside the kit and see how many are there? My players are going to be on a strict equipment budget, and this like this makes it hard to manage.

It's not that the character(s) *can't* look inside the kit to see how many there are.

It's that they didn't, thus they get surprised when they discover they've run through the stims in the kit.

If, on the other hand, they did think to check how many stims the medpac had 'on board' then you (the GM) simply tell them there's X stims left in the kit, and when they run through that, it's done until they've had a chance to refill/refresh the kit.

And a stims don't take care of critical injuries. Accumulating *those* is what makes combat risky for PCs.

I don't have an issue with quickly healing of wounds. I like the critical injuries to be the ongoing injuries that you need bacta for.

I would probably say you get one sit oak use per time you were injured. Wow, autocorrect. One stim pack per injury.

For example, you get shot twice, you can benefit from stim pack twice.

I dont like the healing either. My players have already used healing patches for the droid and stimpacks to recover fully a lot. Its too easy to heal and way to hard to die in this game. Making dying hard isnt so bad, but greivous injuries should be just that. Not a simple stimpack away from being well again.

Don't forget that wounds are meant to be cuts, minor burns and bruises. The crits are meant to reflect permenanent damage. Stim packs will help the characters push through any pain barriers but narratively 'wounds' needs to be toned down from its usual meaning.

I really don't have a problem with the healing of woulds quickly simply because how quickly they can add up to in a fight. Plus you are limited to how many stimpacks you can use per day. The really deadly part of this game are the critical wounds. That is also where the bacta tank's real use comes in. While it doesn't heal woulds that fast it is the best way to get rid of crit wounds.

I think the game would become much less fun if it were harder to heal woulds.

I'm not trying to kill the PC's. I even hold off on crits if I don't think there is a good reason. I don't play to beat the players. I play to tell a story with them and have fun.

Stim packs are like 4e D&D healing surges. Quick healing to keep the story going.

For anyone who doesn't like the "whatever the GM wants approach", then just give a hard number. Okay, so the medpack comes with 5 one-time use stims, boom.

I believe the full medpack is supposed to generate stimpacks. I guess then the total it can hold and the rate of replentishing the stimpacks are still up to the gm

remember that this system is a narrative system. the medpac states that it can issue 1 stim pack per scene. if you think of your game session as a movie, it would be a terribly boring movie to have scene after scene after scene of the hero being injected with a stimpack.

so post battle, doctor robot opens his med kit and jams a stim pac into your character, doctor robot then performs a medecine check to reduce your characters wounds and strain.

then the scene ends. the next scene better not be one of doctor robot injecting your character again, cos that movie sucks.

The important part of a MedKit's stim packs is that it gives one stim pack per scene. I'm AFB right now so I can't give the book's definition of a scene, but it seems to me like a few days on a ship is probably one scene. The "set" (in movie terms) hasn't changed, no major plot movements or transitionshave occurred, I would rule that you are still in the same scene, so you only have the one stimpack.

You could make the argument that once you have some sleep and the next morning you go digging through the MedKIT you managed to find find another stim pack.

If you need a justification for the "infinite stim packs" you can flavor it any number of ways. Sure there are a load of them in that MedKit, but you've been out on the galaxy enough to know that you can't use them all up at once, you got to make your budget stretch, and only use those things for emergencies.

This is an approach I've used before in other games I run. I never have my players keep up with rations and ammo in my D&D games, we all just assume that the players are experienced enough adventurers that they would know to pick up those things at every conveneint stop. I've talked with them about it, and they realize that if it's ever thematically approapriot (walking through a wasteland for days, fighting waves of monesters in a drawn out war, or something like that), then I'll them know that their supplies are running thin. At that point I might make them start keeping up with their stuff, but even then my players and I end up forgetting.

New zombie Beat me to it.

I picture the stimpacks that come from the medpac to be like the chemistry set from Fallout 3. It makes the stimpacks but only at the rate of one per scene (or per day, if I want a specific in-game time). One free dose per day is hardly going to be abusive.

Edit: I don't allow the 'free stimpack' to be removed from the medpac, and if the resevoir isn't empty, the kit won't distill another dose. IOW, these freebies can't be stockpiled or distributed.

If my players only heal from stims, I might add a Stim obligation to each of them. I also might add a minor critical injury called "Battered Up" That does nothing negative besides it counting as a Critical Injury, just symoblizing that their cuts and scrapes haven't been truly healed beyond the accelerating healing agents given to you by the stims. I mean, that's great and all, but dropping to near 0 wounds over and over again and only taking stims with no proper medical care or bacta immersion might not be good for their health.

I think that fast healing from stimpacks is a feature, not a bug. So long as you can afford the 25 credits each, go for it, but this is a game where the GM is encouraged to "keep the players hungry" so the group popping stimpacks is going to lack for other resources over time.

As someone else mentioned, the stimpacks are only for healing one's wounds back up. Critical Injuries remain in place even if they've been fully healed in terms of wounds from the inflicting attack, and the time limit on the ongoing effect has run out. It means that a character may seem otherwise healthy, but risks another critical hit roll at +10 (or more) until they've received the appropriate medical treatment or rolled a successful resilience check.

The idea is stimpacks can keep you standing, but there's no quick way around healing from a critical injury. That still takes time. It mentions specifically that stimpacks have no effect on critical injuries.

Bacta tanks are much more effective in helping characters recover from critical injury. Natural rest can potentially heal one critical injury per week. Medicine is one check for each critical injury once per week. Bacta tanks allow a resilience check to heal a critical injury once every 24 hours. So combined medicine checks and bacta tanks are what are needed for someone who's been badly shot up.

I think I'm not going to allow my players to use the stimpack portion of the kit unless they roll lots of advantages or a triumph on the medicine check. If I remember correctly, I think the book states it has a stimpack-equivalent, not an actual stimpack.

Since a triumph is only likely to come from a doctor-like character doing a Med check, I think the effect would be easy to explain narratively.

I think I'm not going to allow my players to use the stimpack portion of the kit unless they roll lots of advantages or a triumph on the medicine check. If I remember correctly, I think the book states it has a stimpack-equivalent, not an actual stimpack.

Since a triumph is only likely to come from a doctor-like character doing a Med check, I think the effect would be easy to explain narratively.

if you wanted to do this, you could say that a necessary med check, or enough advantages gives the person the ability to use the materials inside to make a stimpack. like, he has to mix the proper ingredients and put it into an injector.