Hi folks,

Got in a bit of a pickle with one of my players the other day.

He was trying to apply First Aid during combat. He'd successfully stabilised the patient, who had Body 4 and had taken 11 boxes of damage (thus being in Overflow and not healthy at all). On pg. 242, BBB, it says:



In his next IP, he wanted to shoot one of the bad guys. My ruling was that he couldn't, because all his attention was taken up trying to heal his team-mate. Although I realise that, as a GM, I can do whatever the hell I like, I'd rather it was RAW unless I've agreed with the group beforehand that it won't be. So, under RAW, are you totally pre-occupied for all the eleven Combat Turns (in the example above) or can you do other stuff? Would an Attention Coprocessor (from Augmentation) make any difference?

Thanks.

Yeah, there's nothing on p.242 that says the player can't interrupt the task and return to it... but on p.58 (under "Interruptions") the BBB says:



...so it's really your call.

Healing the wounds of a comrade takes all the effort his char can give, so the rounds he spends shooting don´t count towards healing.

I would suggest rolling the First Aid test after all required combat turns have passed. That way you a) know if distraction modifiers are appropiate, and b) avoid "I moved, he moved, he has to reroll" shenanigans after bad rolls.

Thanks, both. The quote from pg 58 is really helpful, and I like the idea about rolling at the end rather than at the beginning. Cheers!

what he said ^^

As noted, "Using the First Aid skill is a Complex Action, and takes a number of Combat Turns equal to the amount of damage the character is attempting to heal."

"A Complex Action requires concentration and/or finesse. Only one Complex Action is possible per Action Phase. A character who wishes to take a Complex Action may also take a Free Action that Action Phase, but no Simple Actions are possible."

By strict RAW, that means that all you can do (other than Free Actions) for a number of Combat Turns is treat the wound.

Note though that First Aid does not require multiple Initiative Passes per turn to work, so in some ways it is like an Extended Test. Based on that I would allow (as a house rule) a medic to take one Simple Action—in place of their Free Action—during each of their extra Initiative Passes, ruling that the actions they are not getting are enough to maintain the First Aid in progress.

So, in my games, a medic with multiple IPs would be able to return fire while treating a wound.

So, the medic takes a bandage out of the first aid kit, drops it for a second, draws a gun, fires, puts the gun down, picks up the bandage again, lays it on the wound, picks up the gun and fires again... sounds to me like not very effective first aid.

I've taken Red Cross first aid training. I think it could easily take thirty-three seconds of uninterrupted, continous attention to do first aid on someone badly hurt. You'd generally be better off securing the area first and then giving the patient your full attention, or trusting someone else to handle the fighting while you treat the patient, than juggling back and forth between your medkit and your handgun.

On another hand, perhaps it should take a number of IPs, rather than a number of turns, and the initiative-boosted medic works faster, in which case paramedics would be tempted to take Cram... well, medics getting addicted to uppers is not exactly inconceivable.

Under my house-ruled interpretation above, No. The medic spends the first pass of each turn using both hands to treat the patient, then for the rest of their passes that turn they may use one hand to maintain the patient (hold bandage etc. it is an abstract system), and do a simple actions with the other.

If you let go of the wound entirely, you would be stopping the first aid, and get normal actions, but then would have to restart first aid from scratch.

Personally, i'd rule that it still take the relevent number of turns and that you can't do anything else. Giving medical attention is tricky work and being hyped up on cyber/magic wouldn't help, it takes care and precision, if anything trying to do it quickly would mak it riskier. It also requires your full attention, because you don't have time to think about something else if someone is bleeding out in front of you.

On a (sort of) related note, with extended tests relating to aquiring gear, how much time is the character considered to be spending, on a daily basis, networking, chasing up leads etc, trying to get the item requested? Is there any limit on the number of items that can be tested for at anyone time, or can a character simply search for anything and everything them want, all the time.

I figure this is just down to the gm, and I plan to limit the character to only testing for a couple of things at a time, anything more would begin to inhibit other activities as tried to locate the numerous pieces of gear he wants.

My groups have usually ruled that item acquisition takes up most (or all) the character's time until the item shows up, just for balance purposes. The player can abandon the extended test to acquire the item and just go through a fixer or dealer contact instead, if it looks like it's going to take too long to find the item personally or if the character needs to free up his time to do other legwork.

The RAW doesn't really specify whether item acquisition is an exclusive action, so it's really up to the GM to decide how much the character can do, and my groups have generally agreed that letting a high Charisma/high Negotiation type hit the streets and track down as many simultaneous purchases as he wants is a bit unbalancing. That kind of thing is the realm of the fixer or the arms dealer.

By RAW it takes just as long for a unmodified mundane medic as it takes for a medic with maxed out move-by-wire. I don't have a problem with that, blood only clots so fast, etc. But it seems very reasonable to me that the second medic could still do some limited number of simple actions without abandoning the first aid action.

Of course anther position would be that First Aid should take a number of Complex Actions rather than a number of Combat Turns.