I would assume that is German-only, kind of like who invented the printing press. (Hint: it was the Chinese)

On topic: I do believe this is a mistake and it needs to be errata'd. Although it would be cool to have a mainstream RPG that permanently cripples its characters (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
But, if that was the intent, then they should errata in a fat warning instead.

Gutenberg's contribution was the use of metal types in a quasi-industrial workflow. Which was indeed revolutionary, but is of course far less catchy than "he invented the printing press" (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)


But then it should be all characters, not everybody except X getting super regeneration powers.

Or for those who didn't catch it:

One-half times the largest number times the sum of the smallest plus the largest:

1/2 * max * (min + max)

Works for any series of numbers.

So now you can solve Real World Problems™ like "the sum of all numbers from 100 to 1000, not including 500 to 600"!

My god, you're a lifesaver! How can I ever repay you?!?

Let common sense prevail.

Let's say that this is an extended test.

What's to stop me from initiating a new extended test every day?

If it was a matrix search I could roll twice, then stop and start again if I so choose.

I can't see why I can't do this for healing as well.

I think it happens whether you want it to or not. I don't think you can decide not to heal because you feel a glitch coming on.

You could just get up out of bed and go skiing, then come back later. That day of not-resting resets your counters 8D

This is a semantics argument about RaW. I just want to know what in the RaW precludes anyone from restarting an extended test? Normally the down-side would be lost time trying to reach a threshold but as healing doesn't have a threshold then that side-effect wouldn't apply.



Exactly.

Can't you also apply your edge to the healing test anyway?

technically, retrying a test gives you a -2 penalty. though i think there's something about basically being able to avoid that if you take some time away from the task. other than that, nothing particularly prevents you from restarting an extended test.

that said, it's pretty unlikely that it was intended to function as an extended test in the first place, and by far the most reasonable approach is to treat it as a series of simple or success tests, because that's exactly what it is like.

Hmmm, even that you could argue. Re-trying implies that you failed the initial roll. Short of rolling 0 successes I'm not sure a heal test fails just because you didn't heal all the boxes of damage.

Using Edge in Extended Tests has never been clearly defined. I think that you can at least use it on one roll in an Extended Test. If you interpret that the limit of one Edge per Test does also mean one Edge per Extended Test (so only spending Edge on one single roll of the rolls of the Extended Test) is unclear.

For non-magicians I see no problem in behaving like an Extended Test with the cumulative -1 (as written here at several places it can't be a technically correct use of the term Extended Test, because it has no Threshhold, normal Extended Tests ignore how many hits you accumulated before you had no dice left, trying again is only if the threshhold is not reached, etc.). Just another thing in need of clarification.

For me, it's the reason why doctors and hospitals exist in the Shadowrun universe. If you heal with 2*Body per day every day everybody will heal sooner or later and all the autodocs and doctors in a clinic do, is making the process faster.
There are a lot of wounds, diseases and poisons that humans do not fully recover from and where you need to a doctor to recover from it in a way that you don't suffer any consequences from the wound, disease etc. If you don't have medical assistance you might suffer from scars, pains, impairment, organ damage that leave you body not operating with peak performance. And these consequences are expressed in damage boxes that are still there. But these are rare combinations of very low body and not having access to medical assistance and being seriously wounded, poisoned etc.

If not for magicians, we probably wouldn't discuss this, because Shadowrun characters will probably never encounter this problem, because they have First Aid/MedKit, Edge in the healing process, doctors and clinics.

The only problem is, that by the rules a magician would only have Edge, and that's too harsh if connected to a cumulative -1 natural healing roll.
I fix this with having First Aid/MedKits not helping with magical drain, but leaving medical assistance in the game for magical drain.
That means no recovery from magical drain within seconds and that a Body of 1 is not a healthy thing for a magician.

About the Trying Again of this (and other Tests): in other games rules for trying again mention, that you can try again without penalty if your skills got better or if circumstances change (like having better tools). This kind of thing is not mentioned in Trying Again in Shadowrun, but I would houserule it that way.
So if you tried natural healing and it didn't help, you go see a doctor (surprise) and get a new "Extended Test" without penalty and with the modifications by the doctors/gear's hits.

I have a friend, who had a cold, that he ignored and after some weeks he had a pneumonia, that would have killed him, if he hadn't been in a hospital by then (after the symptoms got so bad, that he did go to the doctor).
And there are countless other stories about humans that don't fully recover, sometimes even with medical help. All of this wouldn't happen in a constant Body*2 healing world.

real life injuries do get to the point where you basically take permanent damage.

the majority of games don't model that in any way. mostly because it tends to be less fun, because realistically modelling injuries is time-consuming and tends to lead to replacing characters frequently. it makes for good realism, but generally makes for worse story telling; if you want to know about real life fighting and wars and such, you should probably take up reading the published journals of people who lived through those sorts of events, because games don't generally do a very good job of it, and that is typically by design.

Please don't misunderstand me: I don't want characters permanently injured and I know that I'm playing Shadowrun and not the "Dr. House RPG".

I just want to say, that I can understand why the devs built the cumulative -1 into the healing process: it makes you go to a doctor or a healer if you have low Body and/or bad luck and got a medium to serious wound. Not to do so seems strange to me.
But if they intentionally did put the -1 into the healing process, they made a lot of technical mistakes by using a wrong example, by using the words "Extended Tests", that by definition doesn't fit this natural healing process and they didn't consider the consequences it would have if connected to the new (new to SR5) rule, that only natural healing helps with magical drain.

If they had written something like
"healing is a series of simple Body*2 tests, where hits remove damage boxes. Each test takes a day and they have a cumulative -1. You may try again (with the normal -2 penalty) if you are not fully healed after having no dice left and if you get better medical assistance (from none to seeing a doctor, or from doctor to a better equipped clinic) you may try again without penalty."

and

"Magical Drain can only be healed by natural healing or medically assisted natural healing (taking days), but not by magical healing and not by First Aid/Medkit. Essentially healing magical drain will always take at least a day"

it would have been much better (I'm not a native speaker, so you can probably write this even clearer).

Augmentation had a big section on permanent injuries and crippling, so hopefully the 5th edition version will have something similar. Personally, I don't think we need unhealing damage in the vanilla rules, they're fine as an optional add on as they add complexity that isn't suitable to all game types.

I generally go with:
Is this rule going to be useful in the vast majority of games?
If yes, have it as a core rule.
If no, EG it doesn't fit into pink mohawk/mirror shades style games (EG permanent injury is not really suitable for a cinematic game), then have it as an optional rule for those games it does fit into.

Additionally I would have liked a clarification, if Stabilization is a form of healing (the bleeding stops after all) or not (no damage boxes removed). As there is no natural form of Stabilization (only First Aid or the spell helps) this creates a problem or not.

Connected with the "only natural healing for magical drain" rule, you get magician dying with only having one overflow box from drain (because there is no natural healing way to stabilize). His/her player can only helplessly observe how the character dies box by box, if Stabilization was ruled as a form of healing, as there is no natural form of Stabilization and the rules forbid First Aid or spells.

I don't think it's intended, but again it's not clarified.

I know it is always dangerous to speak of intention, but the intention of the slower-heal-for-drain rule seems to be to make Drain harsher and to prevent a magical perpetuum mobile where you basically Overcast, Heal, Overcast, Heal, etc. Or worse, Overcast, First Aid, Overcast, First Aid, ...

Now I don't think this has ever been so much of an issue as people were claiming it to be. (With the notable abuse of the Regeneration ability, which was really OP). Already, almost all healing methods take longer than an action and therefore your second overcast is much after the first one. Usually too long to affect the ongoing fight. There is the notable exception of a trauma patch, but that already has its special drawbacks. So, my personal OP is that it is unnecessary. But this is not my point, it is also a bad piece of rule-writing.

I think the slower-heal-for-drain rule causes more problems than it solves and in this way is similar to the only-one-attack-per-phase rule. It looks good and simple on paper, but the actual implementation is more complicated than intended. How do I differentiate between Drain damage and normal damage? Say, I have suffered from both, which heals first? What about the bookkeeping, do I make a star instead of a cross on the monitor? And then, of course, the problems mentioned in this thread.

As a regular lurker on a board where I see threads, "Does the game break, when I don't use reagents?", where people bother to ask the advice of, say 10 people for their personal house rules, I really shake my head about rule writers, who clearly did not use the same kind of foresight. Where was the thread for "Does the game break, if I introduce reagents?" or "How do I avoid mages negating Drain through healing? - Is disallowing un-natural healing the way to go?" or "Limiting hits - a way to mitigate excessive DP?". I am not saying that rule-writing should be democratic, but at least it prevents these Oops-moments of unintended consequences. It is free advice and I seriously doubt you could be sued for copyright infringement or people not buying the books, because they did not like where the discussion was leading. I myself have bought two rulebooks, I will probably never use, just to see who's rules made the final cut (my favourites did in both cases).

You think a Teamwork test could be used in this situation, Drain healing?
There is no skill involved just the attribute. But a high body assistant can make the difference...

That same quote is also used by the Seamstress Union..... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

I rather think it is quite deliberate and appropriate. The -1 to an extended test means that certain things - like catching a blast of buckshot to the chest with little armor on - simply cannot be healed with a bit of rest, some chicken noodle soy soup, and two aspirin. They require no-joke medical treatment (and yes, you could say that even medical treatment would still leave a cripple in this case come reality, but no one pretends SR is all that realistic)

We have established that there is in fact, no "no-joke medical treatment" way to heal drain in the setting. By extension if you ever injure yourself severely enough, yes , you are SoL, for life. And this is a good thing. Because anything that brings the fear of self-destruction into magic can only help. Right now, mages, unless they happen to meet odds so bad that winning the lotto is more likely, can use their magic with near impunity. Even if you get a bad 5-6P on an absurd overcast of devastation (given an average soak pool of 11, the implication is 10 drain for that, which means eye-wateringly powerful casts or summons), no big deal unless it happened to be in the middle of a firefight that you also happened not to win as a result of the mega-cast.

This way, guess what? That F8 spirit that seemed like a great solution and is more valuable than the entire team? BOOM. Permanent consequences, hope you didn't like that character. Besides being mechanically appropriate, it suits the idea that magic is dangerous, scary, and can bite the head off of those who delve too deep, all of which causes the canon to have mages act more restrained rather than slinging spells around willy nilly, confident that that 3S is not going to feel like a hook form tyson, 5P is not going to be a broken rib on your body, but merely a check on your paper that will rest off.

and meanwhile getting shot by a pistol will typically only take less than a minute with a good medkit to completely heal from if you had decent armour in the first place. yup, sure does sound like they were trying for realistic effects from injuries.

Well, considering that the average damage RW from getting shot in the chest with a pistol with body armor is a bruise that doesn't seem too out of scale.

Also Shadowrun is a game, not a simulation. While a game does not need to be fun, this one is supposed to. Permanent injury may promise some sort of "realism" but it doesn't strike me as a "good" or fun game-mechanic. The healing thing, as worded, is sort of defying the game-systems of SR5. Not very elegant.

really? you can make the entire effects of a large bruise go away with a first aid kit in 15-30 seconds? no more soreness, no swelling, no stiffness, no discomfort, nothing at all?

this even presumes it actually is roughly equivalent to a bruise. it might not be stun damage, after all, which would make it a closer equivalent to getting stabbed with a knife. you know a lot of people who can be treated in 15 seconds for a knife wound and no longer have any of the effects of that wound mean anything? no blood loss, no continued bleeding due to not resting the wound, etc?

this is not a realistic way to handle injuries. taking permanent damage is certainly realistic, but there is nothing about this system that suggests to me they even remotely intend for that level of realism.

Agreed. SR ist not even realistic on the fluff side of things and the crunch is far into the abstract territory. That being said, permanent damage would be viable, it just doesn't fit the style of the core rules. It also does not make sense from a gamist point of view, which appears to be the main approach of SR.

My guess is, that they wanted to make medical attention "necessary" for tougher wounds and either missed or misjudged the consequences. So, I'll settle for it being a design flaw. The rules, handling health, do no mention or cover the possibility of permanent damage. In fact it is not even implied, exept for mentioning, that you may need medical attention to fully heal.

So while "First Aid" and "Heal" don't help with drain (and rightfully so) I do see, that medical attention ("Medicine") can be sought to help. Also I would always rule, that if you get stuck on a wound, you can alway seek out more medical attention. Maybe that another treatment or a better doctor can help... a specialist maybe. In the end even the most complicated wounds will find treatment in 2075, but it may well come at a price. Maybe that I missed that part somewhere in the rules... but so far I fear, they are simply not quite covering it.