Hi,

Is First Aid too powerful?

I have an Adept in the party with an Intelligence bonus of 5, Medicae +10 and Master Chirgeon, in combination with a Med-Kit you have an average 90% of succeeding his check and healing 5 wounds on a lightly wounded character and 2 wounds otherwise.

This is my parties tactic and its starting to annoy the hell out of me...

Guardsman:
16 wounds total, TB 4

The guardsman is down to 3 wounds because of two nasty hits.
He spends a Fate Point for an average of 3 wound recovery and the psyker uses psychic healing for another 3 average.
Now he is lightly wounded....the Adept tends the two hits and recovers another 10 wounds...

The guardsman now completely healed... :S

My solution:

I've started to note down how much damage they received from each attack and cap the amount of first aid heals per hit so if one hit inflicted 7 wounds and the other 3 the two applications of first aid can heal the 3 wounds but the 7 wound hit cannot be healed completely (IB 5).

I also stopped telling my players how much damage they received, I give a little indication and tells them if they are lightly, heavily or critically wounded.

Any furthur ideas?

The thresholds for becoming Heavily Wounded and healing to Lightly Wounded aren't the same. Heavily Wounded occurs when you've taken more than TB x2 damage, I believe. Once you're that injured, though, you need to heal to under your TB in damage taken (so 3 wounds missing or better for a 4 TB Guardsman) before they count as Lightly Wounded. Unless they have the Hardy Talent, of course, in which case they're always Lightly Wounded.

That said, First Aid is very powerful. It makes a skilled Medicae an invaluable asset to a cell of acolytes. One group of mine has a dedicated Chirurgeon and there's no doubt in my mind that she saved lives and ensured the acolytes were able to complete their mission. There's limits to it (must be used very soon after the injury is sustained, can only heal up to the number of wounds lost to that attack, often suffers a penalty to the roll due to damage type/severity) but it beats the snot out of a psyker manifesting the Healer power every 6 hours. It also takes a reasonable investment of XP to become a highly skilled Medicae. In the earlier ranks this will mean that you'll have to specialise towards that skill and at higher ranks you'll be competing with the Seal Wounds power and threats so terrible that a little First Aid won't make your acolytes invulnerable.

The way i handle it is quite simple. When a Medicae renders First Aid, they can only do such once per patent. Once it's done, that's all the first aid that will ever help them, period. I don't go in for the whole, one check per wound suffered or any of that. That's just way too much paperwork and book-keeping. I figure that if someone's going to render medical aid to someone else, then they're going to cover everything and not just bandage up a gash in the head when his leg stump is still bleeding. One roll, all inclusive, everything they've ever suffered, with a max of double Int bonus for lightly wounded or two points for all other states period. First aid can not be used on the subject again until they're wounded again and then it will be an all inclusive roll no matter how many times they're wounded again. The other methods presented in DH and IH just seem like too big of a pain in the ass to keep up with.

Santiago said:

Thing is, that's his job - denying him that interferes with a noteworthy part of the character's abilities, and once he hits the top ranks and gets Unnatural Intelligence (x2), he'll be even better at it (mainly because of the one-step improvement in difficulty on all Int-based skill tests)

The big thing to remember is that wound loss, especially when lightly wounded, does not represent debilitating injury. It'll be painful, uncomfortable and it might take a few days to heal by itself (or a few weeks, if it's anything significant), but it's not all that severe. A Fate Point spent to restore wounds may as well be retconning the severity of an injury ("Oh, that? It was just a flesh wound."). Psychic healing is unnatural in its own right... and if, after all that, a character is only left with a few cuts, scrapes and bruises, then why shouldn't a skilled Medicae be able to patch him up sufficiently that he can keep fighting regardless (those cuts and such are still there, but after treatment, they're beyond consideration, much as a papercut wouldn't be a significant enough injury to even warrant a single wound's worth of damage).

It's Critical damage that the players should be worried about. That isn't wounds, and thus can't be restored as such (remember, Critical Damage increases when a character takes damage beyond 0... he does not go into negative wounds; the difference ensures that effects that heal wounds cannot so easily restore Critical Damage). If they're not Critically Injured, then it isn't a huge deal, IMO, that they're able to patch themselves up effectively and get back in the fight... they weren't, afterall, that badly injured to begin with.

That said, the time within which First Aid can be performed is important in my game - if it's more than twice the Medicae's intelligence bonus in minutes after the injury was sustained, all the Medicae can do is stabilise serious wounds, as by that point, it's too late for fully effective first aid.

As for the First Aid by discrete injury rules... an easy limiter is that no injury can be healed for more wounds than the injury caused in the first place. If a character takes 4 wounds from an autogun and 3 more from a lasgun, then the Medicae's Intelligence Bonus of 5 still won't let him heal more than 4 wounds from that autogun shot or 3 from that lasgun burn, and injuries from previous fights (which are, by any standard, too old for First Aid) can't be healed in that time.

The guardsman is down to 3 wounds because of two nasty hits.
He spends a Fate Point for an average of 3 wound recovery and the psyker uses psychic healing for another 3 average.
Now he is lightly wounded....the Adept tends the two hits and recovers another 10 wounds...

The guardsman now completely healed... :S

And has spent a fate point as well as risked a phenomena roll.
The first aid seems to be the smallest problem there, apart from the fact that I'd deal with it the same way as Graver: Until they're hurt again, you can first aid someone once only.

Its not even close to too powerful.

I personally dont let First Aid to work after psychic healing, as it alters the physical nature of the wound and therefore the way First Aid would be used to treat the wound. I would allows First Aid to go first and then psychic healing, but not vice versa.

Second, if that is the way the players are playing it, then they are not role playing but ROLL playing and I would have this reflect in XP awards.

Peacekeeper_b said:

This is a perfectly common compromise in many systems where you have advanced medics and "magic" (Shadowrun comes to mind). You have psychic healing, or you have medical. The two don't work in tandem.

 Well it seems your players have found a clever way of restoring their wounds ... why would it need to be fixed? If you think they're not having a hard enough time, just power up the opposition.

TheFlatline said:

In SR you can use both magical and mundane healing, as long as it is done in the right order (mundane first I believe). I see no problem with this at all, after all the system is pretty hard on healing rules and getting hurt early on a mission could otherwise make you miss out on the whole adventure because you must spend 2 weeks in a hospital!

Besides geting all that Medicae is a heavy investment which should pay off. Using lesser healers can actually cause death by itself if they fail badly enough!

Friend of the Dork said:

In regards to ShadowRun, you are correct in the limitations, but have it backwords.  Magical healing must be performed first, as modern medicine in the genre interferes with the proper flow of mana recquired for healing magics.  

Also, the minor psychic power Healer can backfire if used on the same subject more than once every 6 hours.  The Biomancy power Seal Wounds can be used more often, poentially heals a greater amount of damage, and can even be used on more than one injured person per manifestation.

I really see little reason to overly limit the use of the Medicae skill for treating injuries in the game, it already has a significant amount applied.

-=Brother Praetus=-

Just wait until your adept gets unnatural intelligence for even more healing.

One thing to remember about first aid is that it takes up a full action of the medic and the patient. Meaning that when you deal first aid it means that two characters are unable to fight or move for a round. This could easily cause problems if done at a bad time.

Brother Praetus said:

Yeah you're probably right about that, although my point stands and i agree with you.

Brother Praetus said:

You're right, that's what I was heading at, but worded poorly.

However, to the original poster, there used to be a term in D&D. You may have heard of it. "Geek the mage first". I suggest a similar strategy, one that the Japenese employed to great effect in WW2. "Geek the medic first". You should already be targeting the psyker as soon as he starts to manifest anyway. If the adept or whomever pulls out his first aid kit, drop him! A wounded medic is demoralizing, AND hits the "enemy" where it hurts. If all else fails, flip a damn frag grenade into the cover they all retreated into and let them boogy with that. Keep the pressure up, and don't give them the ability to heal if you can help it until *after* the battle. Even then, if you had bullets whizzing all over the place, wouldn't that be an added difficulty to the task?

I'd also rule that periodically, your medikit would run out. After all, 95% of anything in a medikit is consumable. If a character never actually checks his medikit supplies, I might start imposing a 5 or 10% cumulative chance every time he uses his medikit that eventually he reaches for it only to find there's no bandages or synthskin left. After all, 150 credits for infinate medical supplies seems hardly realistic. It's kind of a dirty trick, and it's only good once, but it'll put the fear of god into the players for that one encounter.

Also, you could rule that in order to be worked on, the target must be in complete cover, or else can't take any actions for one full turn without interrupting the medic and making him start over again. The idea that someone could run up, patch you up in 2-3 seconds, and all the while you're in the midst of combat, attacking and parrying, is idiotic. You are making the adept drop his weapons in combat and fish out his medikit too, aren't you? At least a half round action if the kit is sitting on his belt, and probably a round or two if it's in a backpack or something.

I can think of plenty of in-game ways to screw with players and teach them that a firefight is not a good place to start surgery. I'd start with modifiers and build from there. Aside from that, it's probably too late to do this, your players would bitch and complain, but there is only one mention of how long a medicae test takes. That's staunching blood loss. If/when something like this comes up, I might rule that it takes significantly longer than 5 seconds to open up a medikit, find the proper package you're looking for, rip it open, find the worst wound on the injured person, and apply the patch. And that's if the injury is bared, no armor or clothes are in the way, and pretty much ideal conditions. In fact, I'm going to say that realistically, you're looking at 30 seconds or so in a high-stress firefight environment, or 6 full rounds game time. I'd let degrees of success take that down potentially, but I don't see healing someone a third of their life in 5 seconds. Just no.

I suspect we could use some clarification and errata potentially from FFG. I might mail them over this.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Aside from opening with a spent Fate Point I don't see where the players are working the angles here.  There can be no doubt that people whom have used both psykic and medical healing would realize one order works better than the other and be certain to utilize that knowledge.  A character is injured, what else should the pcs be doing but trying to keep one another up and functioning?  Why punish them for that?

If it is a matter of them never taking combat seriously enough because they go an a healing daisy chain every time one of them starts to feel sick, then use heavier firepower or limit them a bit.  Be very strict about the fact that an effective effort to use a heal skill is going to take two-three people out of operation.  You might also rule that in the middle of combat a serious patch job isn't possible and allow the pc to only heal half the normal wounds under that kind of circumstance.  But do not punish the character for being good at what he does - taking away his ability to effectively use his skill will make him less useful than the other pcs at that level ... which is entirely unfair.

So, no one is applying a "While under fire" penalty to applying first aid in a combat situation. I would think that performing first aid while in combat would be difficult at best, if actually taking fire then i'm sure it would be VERY difficult, bare in mind that the Pinning rules do not apply any penalty (RAW) to actions not Ballistic Skill related.

This will reduce the amount of successful healing done in a combat situation, as well as increase the risk of fragging it up and causing more harm than good.

Also, i'm of the opinion of applying the healing order as follows

First aid, "un-natural" healing, extended care.

If unnatural healing is applied first then all it heals is what would of been fixed by first aid, leaving first aid nothing to do. This is how i applied it in my SR3 games.

I'd say first-aid before psyker healing, and only 1 first aid attempt per person.