Hello all,

The developers have posted their weekly update! Please use this thread if you wish to discuss its contents.

Thank you for your continued support.

 Love the Sound Constitution update and the Common Lore update.


So this will be the fifth week in a row I will keep at it: VARIABLE SETTINGS FOR LASGUN AND PISTOLS!!! (please)

The changes made seem reasonable but its mostly stuff that I wouldn't have noticed as something that needs fixing. Two things I'd really like to see within this beta.

• Variable Lasgun Settings
• Vehicle rebalancing

The latter one is hugely important since right now most imperial vehicles are nigh indestructible even with powerful anti tank weapons (see link in my signature).

Yes, huzzah for the new Sound Constitutions and Common Lore.

However, I'm not sure what I think of the medicae changes. Those are big.

I'm not sure if it was done to clarify the rules or to make them more lenient. I really dislike the 24 hour timer on first aid. It seems a bit too gamey. I feel any new wound should be able to have first aid performed on it. I can see why they put in the 24 hour timer though, since now it can be performed each day (although extended care is more effective).

I do like that they seem to heal faster, as that was a real session killer sometimes. Still, it feels a bit too effective. "You were nearly chopped in half soldier, but we got you all stapled back together and you should be good to go in 20 minutes."

Not bad, not bad.  Love the Sound Constitution change, and Sanctioned Psykers getting their Best Craftsmanship staff.

I agree with the others on Variable Setting Lasguns, however.  And I still would very, VERY much like the Storm Trooper to get Common Craftsmanship Storm Trooper Carapace either instead of or as a second option to Good Craftsmanship Light Carapace.

I'd like to see Medicae rules address the issue of someone besides the casualty treating the Blood Loss critical. Because it is possible to have someone else help bandage you, but the rules seem to fail to address that possibility.

 Vehicle changes that have been discussed at length need to happen. They're just too hard to take out.

Variable Lasgun settings. Potentially add Pen rating to the humble lasgun and frag grenade.

Storm Trooper is largely inefficient and currently is optimized for melee combat. Consider swapping Offence for Finesse, or dropping Weapon Skill for Leadership or Perception or something. He also needs his armor back.

Also throwing in my usual request for Valkyrie and Tauros stats. 

Plushy said:

I believe HMBC (who wrote the Vehicle rules) said that that wouldn't happen, due to having to keep the size of that section down.

Plus, wouldn't the Valkyrie then require the aircraft rules to be included?

MILLANDSON said:

They have to leave something for the supplements after all.

We need to rejigger the Master Chirurgen talent now that Heavily Wounded no longer requires a long narrative halt to heal; that was sort of all that Talent did, after all, and my group's Medic decided not to buy it now specifically because it's no longer needed with the alterations to healing.

That said, thank you for the alterations to healing. It's going to help the Medic a lot that getting knocked down to Heavily Wounded doesn't turn First Aid into a simple band-aid now, and as a GM, I am going to have a much easier time now that I don't have to make a PC take weeks to recover if they take a heavy hit. It might've been realistic, but it was very narratively inconvenient!

Also, it would seem the usefulness of Hardy has been decreased. Perhaps it should be made a tier 2 talent now? All it seems to do now is remove a -10 penalty for the medicae check.

Musclewizard said:

Musclewizard said:

This, very yes. I thought the BC system was a good step forward. It lacked a bit of actual oomph though; cost way too high for what little extra it gave, even if/when combined with stuff like an overcharge pack. The basic settings of Las weapons are effectively 'high efficiency' or 'low' setting, what you use on grots or when you need to give suppression a few hours.

Was rather surprised to see it removed instead of boosted up a bit. Gotta at least make Las a proper choice instead of wholly ineffective against so much, ya know?

I've got to say, the medicae changes are puzzling. First Aid being almost equally effective unless the patient is deep into the criticals and the 24 hour cooldown totally changes its utility. Why would anyone bother with Extended Rest now unless they're outright crippled, given that First Aid takes a few minutes to perform at most and can be used every day? There's a lower chance of success, sure, but even a vaguely experienced medicae can potentially get someone back on their feet in a day or two. After two sessions of play my group's medic has an effective Medicae skill of 68 (Int 48, Medicae +10, Master Chirurgeon) which is boosted up to 88 if the Medi-Kit is used. Why heal 1 wound a day (or 2 with a Master Chirurgeon watching over you) when you can recover much quicker with a good First Aid roll or two?

The medi-kit itself needs to be addressed as well. As is it provides a flat +20 bonus to all medicae tests. I've personally been only allowing this bonus for First Aid, but if it affects extended care then the aforementioned medic will be unable to fail an extended care test unless he rolls a critical failure (or I impose situational penalties). Furthermore, once he picks up the Medica Auxilia comrade talent he can treat a potentially unlimited number of patients without penalty. That last issue has been in there since the beta first came out and the matter of when the Medica-Kit's bonus applies has been a bugbear since Dark Heresy but as it is Medicae is very, very powerful now.

I'm not sure why these changes were needed. First Aid was already very useful to begin with, allowing minor wounds to be patched up with relative ease while being unable to completely remedy heavy and critical injuries. Some form of clear limit on First Aid's usage was definitely needed, but the 24 hour cooldown seems artificial and impedes Extended Care's utility. The system I was using is that any individual can only have First Aid performed on them once until they're wounded again, and even then First Aid can only mend the wounds caused by that new source of damage. The utility of Master Chirurgeon has also been impacted, though it's still a useful talent, though Hardy is now far less useful. While the squad is out in the field becoming Heavily Injured is simply no longer that big a deal.

Snidesworth said:

Probably because that's a lot of data to track for each player (whether each individual Wound they have is normal, damaged, or "treated") and makes treating injuries a lot more math-heavy than it needs to be. In general the system has been moving to be more streamlined in general, and this seems a step in the same direction. It might need to be refined more, but in general I prefer a system like this over one where you need to be tracking each individual wound for each individual player.

No need to treat each individual wound, just keep track of when the patient was last treated and how much damage they've taken since then. Example:

Parker gets shot in the chest twice with a lasgun, the shots dealing 2 and 3 damage respectively for a total of 5 points of damage. Jericho attempts to patch him up but fails; those wounds remain. Later on Parker is struck by a piece of shrapnel from a frag grenade that deals 2 damage to him. This time Jericho  passes his First Aid test when he treats Parker's injures and heals those two wounds. Even though Jericho's Intelligence Bonus is 4 he can't recover the wounds he failed to treat earlier. He'll have to resort to Extended Care to mend those injuries.

If he fails, none of his patients improve beyond their natural rate
of healing. Further, he must choose a number of patients under his care
equal to his Degrees of Failure, starting with the most gravely injured
(first from among those who are Critically Damaged, then those who
are Heavily Damaged, and then finally those who are only Lightly
Damaged). Each of these patients must make a Challenging (+0)
Toughness Test or suffer one point of Damage per Degree of Failure,
not reduced my Armour or Toughness. If this results in any Critical
Damage, the patient dies.”

So… fail by just one DoS and it's very likely that one of your critical patients dies since you have to choose them first? The safest recourse would then be to allow Critical patients to heal on their own as there's no chance of their condition worsening.

Could someone make a table of how people heal with and without medical care right now? I think I've lost overview…

Aaaand throwing another voice into Variable Lasguns and Common Storm Trooper Carapace.