Balance questions about First aid+magic+medicine, Regenerating egg shells with science Options

[Stunball]

I was looking through the main book and have come across many questions regarding healing in the shadows.

1) Page 242 says First aid may not be applied to a target who has been magically healed.
*Is this also reverse in that a you can't heal a wound already treated with first aid?
I would think so to limit only one success to box effect on wounded guys.
*If not is there a game balance reason for this?
with both methods employed you get (Spellcasting + magic + first aid + logic + obligatory Medkit 6) die pool of healing. Thats massive.
*Are people intended to just bounce back like that?
*Why is this simply an order of operations limiter?
If they were both intended to work together most would use first aid first anyway because healing magic has higher drain if you do it first.

2) Why does the best medical technology possible in 2070 (its as good at healing as Shaq is at basketball) man portable, as available as a 40oz, and only cost 600 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) ?
*When a single BP can get you eight why are there rules for 1-5?
*Why are there no acknowledgments to non portable technology in the cost of hospital stays?
As best as I can tell in 2070 hospitals are just rooms with abed and a medkit in them.

3)If I have no skill in first aid and a medkit my pool is (Logic -1) + Medkit 6 and my max wounds healed is 6
If I have 1 skill in first aid and no medkit my pool is logic + skill 1 - 3 for no tools and my max wounds healed is 1
*If I have 1 skill in first aid and a medkit my pool is logic + skill 1 + medkit 6 is my max wounds healed 1 or 6?

4) *What are the prices of narcotics on page 248?
*Are they found anywhere?
*Do you have price recommendations?

Thank you for your responces.

[Speed Wraith]

4) *What are the prices of narcotics on page 248?
*Are they found anywhere?
*Do you have price recommendations?

Thank you for your responces.

Laugh, that opens the doors to so many jokes...

I haven't found where you can't apply first-aid to a patient before applying magical healing. In fact, as near as my group and I can tell, following first-aid you hit with magical, if there are still problems afterwards, take it to your local street doc for some surgery (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) But I don't have my book in front of me so I don't want to speculate specifically.

The most important aspect of balance in healing is that it is a lengthy process and medics aren't given the same leeway in a firefight as they expect today. There is a reason that Doc Wagon has HRTs afterall and that is because the docs get shot at too. Magical healing takes a long damned time (during combat) to be effective.

[Sombranox]

1) I've always treated them as exclusive. Can't magically heal what's been treated mundanely and vice versa. That said, I don't remember anywhere actually stating this.

2) I wouldn't call medkits the best technology available. They can turn someone into an EMT when necessary maybe, but I think the expanded medical information in the back Augmentations gives a lot of other options to actual medical care. The fact remains, a medkit used by an untrained person is a lot less effective than one used by a trained one. I haven't really looked that much at those Augmentation rules though, so it may be that they're little better than a medkit.

3) For the first, just as a note, I don't think you take a -1 to Logic. "If the character is untrained, she can still make the test using her own attribute and the device’s rating in place of her skill." is the quote from BBB 244 that has always led me to that assumption. That aside, the second example is right. Joys of having no medical supplies. For most wounds taken in SR, there's not a lot you can do to actually help the person live without the right gear. Then again, at my table, I've lowered the modifier to -1 or -2 when using improvised gear, even just applying rags to stop bleeding.

As to that third example. It's twisted, but by the rules, since the medkit becomes a dice pool modifier instead of the "skill", it would be capped at the natural skill of 1 I think. But since I tend to wave off crap like that, I'd have said it was capped at the combined rating of the skill and the medkit, thereby emphasizing that one used by a trained sort is much better than an untrained.

4) I think they're only listed in the back of Arsenal since I can't find them in the errata or anywhere else.

Hopefully I won't get beat down for copying them here for you, but here's the avail/cost for each

Bliss 3R/15
Cram 2R/10
Jazz 2R/75
Kamikaze 4R/100
Long Haul --/50
Nitro 2R/50
Novacoke 2R/10
Psyche --/200
Zen 4R/5

Deepweed 8F/400 *edit since I forgot this one*

And yes, drugs are fairly cheap and easily available. And you can get fake permits for them. Why anyone would be allowed to claim "medical" use of Nitro I'll never know.

[Glyph]

You can apply first aid before magical healing, but not magical healing before first aid. It was this way in SR3, too.

Look at it this way - first aid is cleaning up and sewing shut wounds, while magic is brute force healing them - bringing the edges of the wound together, scabbing it up, etc. If a wound is already closed up, then the magical healing has less work to do. But you can't use first aid after magic, because that would be like trying to sew up a wound that has already scabbed up and halfway healed.

[Muspellsheimr]

I was looking through the main book and have come across many questions regarding healing in the shadows.

1) Page 242 says First aid may not be applied to a target who has been magically healed.
*Is this also reverse in that a you can't heal a wound already treated with first aid?
I would think so to limit only one success to box effect on wounded guys.
*If not is there a game balance reason for this?
with both methods employed you get (Spellcasting + magic + first aid + logic + obligatory Medkit 6) die pool of healing. Thats massive.
*Are people intended to just bounce back like that?
*Why is this simply an order of operations limiter?
If they were both intended to work together most would use first aid first anyway because healing magic has higher drain if you do it first.

*Correct
*There is no rules (RAW) against applying First Aid after magical healing. As for limiting successes, I am not sure what you mean, but First Aid takes a full combat turn (RAW) per box of damage healed, with limits you point out below. It also requires a threshold 2 test to stabalise, and each hit above those two heals one point.
*Most likely an oversight by the developers. I would strongly suggest house-ruling it that they are mutually exclusive, or can each be applied once, regardless of order.
*

The basic Shadowrun rules opt for fast recovery times from injury in the interest of getting characters back in the game.

2) Why does the best medical technology possible in 2070 (its as good at healing as Shaq is at basketball) man portable, as available as a 40oz, and only cost 600 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) ?
*When a single BP can get you eight why are there rules for 1-5?
*Why are there no acknowledgments to non portable technology in the cost of hospital stays?
As best as I can tell in 2070 hospitals are just rooms with abed and a medkit in them.

*It is not the best medical tech available. A medical shop (Augmentation) is treated as a Rating 8 medkit when used for first aid. A medical facility is treated as Rating 10. You also cannot perform implantation, trauma surgery, etc. with a medkit.
*As it would be highly unlikely for a runner to carry around a Rating 1-5, they are for GM use (aka NPC's)
*Review the Advanced Medtech section of Augmentation.

3)If I have no skill in first aid and a medkit my pool is (Logic -1) + Medkit 6 and my max wounds healed is 6
If I have 1 skill in first aid and no medkit my pool is logic + skill 1 - 3 for no tools and my max wounds healed is 1
*If I have 1 skill in first aid and a medkit my pool is logic + skill 1 + medkit 6 is my max wounds healed 1 or 6?

Medkit replaces your skill if untrained, so you do not suffer defaulting modifier.
Correct
Max wounds healed (RAW) is 1. Max wounds healed (common sense) is [Skill or Rating, whichever is higher] or [Skill + Rating]

4) *What are the prices of narcotics on page 248?
*Are they found anywhere?
*Do you have price recommendations?

4) I think they're only listed in the back of Arsenal since I can't find them in the errata or anywhere else.

Hopefully I won't get beat down for copying them here for you, but here's the avail/cost for each

The cost tables are found in BBB 329. And, as of the fifth printing, your listed costs are correct, except Jazz, which has 'blank' availability and a cost of 2R...

[Stunball]

*There is no rules (RAW) against applying First Aid after magical healing.

Page 242 Main book, under: Using first aid.

The maximum damage healable with the first aid skill is equal to the skills rating. first aid may only be applied to a character once (for that set of wounds), and it may not be applied if the character has been magically healed.

Muspellsheimr said: (sorry I haven't gotten used to the quote system on this board.)
As for limiting successes, I am not sure what you mean, but First Aid takes a full combat turn (RAW) per box of damage healed, with limits you point out below. It also requires a threshold 2 test to stabalise, and each hit above those two heals one point.

What I meant (looking back I used crappy sentence structure my bad) was both first aid and magic turn successes directly into healed damage boxes. For the most part you can expect around 6 boxes healed from each. Either from hard limits(your medkit rating) or the increased risk of pyrrhic drain(magic) that means your standard wound you just brush off with a spell or first aid but anything beyond 6 wounds and you will likely need medicine to take care of. If you let them stack (in any order mind you) now the reasonable limit is 12 boxes of instant* healing. Thats deaths door for anyone with a body of 3.

*Ok it isn't instant. It takes 36 seconds for first aid and another 36 seconds for the magic to become permanent but 72 seconds is practically instant given medicine has a interval of 24 hours.

It seams to me that the medicine rules mean no one with 600 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) to their name will remain injured more than a week. I can handle that. It keeps the game moving. My question is if you let magical healing and First Aid stack wont medicine me totally obsolete as a skill? (ok body 20 trolls with will to live may still want it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif) )

[Fortune]

It's nowhere near as easy as you make it out to be to get those 6 hits on the Spellcasting test and eight hits on the First Aid test with any kind of regularity.

[Muspellsheimr]

Page 242 Main book, under: Using first aid.

The maximum damage healable with the first aid skill is equal to the skills rating. first aid may only be applied to a character once (for that set of wounds), and it may not be applied if the character has been magically healed.

Correct. I simply got the order mixed up. Again...

You can apply magical healing after first aid, but not vice versa. The order has fucked me over several times - last time just a few weeks ago. Which is why I think it should be removed, or make them mutually exclusive.

As for healing 6 points with first aid, you need a dice pool of 24 to do that with any regularity. For magic, you need a dice pool of 18 (+1 per point of subject's essence loss) to regularly heal 6 points. That is not an easy thing to achieve. I am currently playing a very specialized healing mage, and I average about 4 points healed with each.

There's also another recent thread here, called something like "27 seconds to death - how realistic is it" (sorry, to lazy to find a link for you) that has some suggestions for alternate first aid healing times & bleeding out times.