Are both patient and healer required to remain stationary for the x-amount of combat turns that a healing test is slated to take (both First Aid and Magical Healing)?

Can all targets within a spell's area of effect defend against the spell or can they only resist damage (as in projectile blast)?

Does a magician who declares counterspelling on others forfeit taking any other action that combat turn or can he take action as per normal? Are there any negative modifiers for being in counterspelling-mode (as in sustaining spells)? If the answers are no and no, wouldn't it make sense for the mage to declare counterspelling for everyone all the time?

Mindprobe: Probe for one piece of info per complex action. Does the target only get one chance to resist the probing or once every combat turn?

Well...

First: Good question. The healing spell is touch and has to be sustained for a few rounds to become permanent. But to sustain no further contact should be required... also someone with deep wounds running around while getting healed. Should at least give some penalties or something. All those wounds breaking up again and such? GM-thing, i would say. I would like my healers to have to stay in contact and don't do much moving.

Second: Everyone resist anything. If it is an indirect combat spell anyone can dodge seperatly.

Third: No and no. Yes a magician should cover his whole team all the time when on a mission. It is just the thing of saying: Ah and yeah, COUNTERSPELLING for EVERYONE.

There are no penalties associated with either the mage or paitent moving around, and contact isn't required past the initial casting. The sustaining to make permanent can be done without contact (or LoS for that matter). The only penalty is the -2 that the mage takes for sustaining a spell (unless using a focus).

Like Storm said, everyone resists always. There is no 'target the weakest member to deny everyone else their defenses'.

Once again, Storm got it, no and no. There is no reason whatsoever for a mage to not be counterspelling the entire group.

No more saves for the person. The mage just has to sustain the spell and they can continue reading the person's mind indefinitely.

Thank you for your (very speedy) replies.

Some follow up questions/comments:

- Heavily wounded character running around before healing takes effect could perhaps add to the healing time by a factor of 1.5? I'll try that and see how it plays.

- Everyone in the area of effect resists both spell and damage, as I thought.
So secondary targets within the blast radius of say a grenade also get a chance to dodge the blast? The book isn't very clear on that.
What happens when the primary target successfully defends against the lobbed grenade but the attack roll is not a critical glitch (blows up in attackers hand)? Does this mean the grenade is a dud or that it's thrown clear out of everyone's vicinity?

- Counterspelling for everyone, all the time with no penalties or reduced actions means counterspelling technically isn't a skill but more akin to a shield spell with free sustain (albeit with a variable level of protection.)
Not the most exciting way to implement this in my opinion.

- No more saves for the hapless security guard, he just has to sit there and have his brain tapped for as long as the mage can stay awake? Damn that's harsh!
I would have thought that the target would have the same opportunity to shake off the spell as with Mental Manipulations: every Force Combat Turns Willpower &Cntr to reduce Spellcasting Hits (Escape from Grapple works the same way technically).
So basically the only recourse a mundane character has against Mindprobe is to search frantically for the source of the spell?

Feel free to adjust things like that Mindprobe to suit your group.

Just one more comment on counterspelling:
The declaration of counterspelling is a free action. So a magician can take other actions in his pass but he must spend a free action to activate counterspelling on any target other than himself.

To keep counterspelling active the protected target has to stay in the magicians line-of-sight. So, while there are no negative dicepool modifiers for sustaining counterspelling, the magician is surely handicapped, because he has to keep all protected targets in his field of vision. Usually this is the fact that keeps magicians at my table from declaring counterspelling "for everyone all the time".

The relevant rules are on page 185 SR4A in the first paragraph under "Spell Defense".


No, secondary targets don't get a dodge roll to defend against a grenade. <sarcasm> Why should this be similar to defending against, say, a fireball spell? After all, this is Shadowrun we are talking about </sarcasm>
By the way, you can even deny the primary target a dodge roll by targeting the patch of ground between his feet. The grenade attack roll is then treated as a success test.

-CJ

Off-topic: that really should be how grenades are targeted anyway. Someone's ability to wiggle isn't relevant for an explosion, and letting them dodge the attack really screws the already screwy scatter rules.

Just to address this part, the healing rules are quirky at the extreme cases.

Being on fire is only -3 dice. We had a group with a Trauma doc on the runners team, he was starting with a dicepool in the low to mid 20's to do first aid on gunshots. So if you were cybered all the way up, and a mage, and on fire, he was still rolling more than 10 dice to close up that gunshot.

Same stuff happens with uber-body trolls and orcs, they heal from anything other than death in a day or 2, even under horrible conditions.

Remember that human average is 3 in a stat so their base healing roll is 6 dice. If they stay at home (-1 die), they only get to roll 5, which is 1 box healed per day if you buy successes.

Contrarywise, the Troll with a body of 9 starts with 18 dice. If he is living in an abandoned warehouse, that is on fire (-3), he will still be rolling 15 dice, which is 3 hits when buying successes (or almost a machine pistol wound). Each Day.

Why would you ever not be aiming for the floor (which gets no defense roll) somewhere vaguely near them anyway? Higher net hits that way. And getting it "right between their legs" isn't worth it even if you can since the grenade doesn't go off till your NEXT IP and they might get a chance to move before then.

Or have I misinterpreted some rules?

Oh my this is off topic indeed.



In my campaign there is essentially a house rule that if you have six or more boxes of damage after magical healing/first aid is attempted you NEED some kind of medical attention (visit a street doc, pay them 1,000 Nuyen, etc.) before you can begin natural healing.

That's my point.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure that the way my PC has been using his grenades has in fact been legal.

Alternatively, you may use a troll adept optimized for thrown weapons : if you stun the targe wih a grenade straight in his face, he cannot move away before it explode !

There are optional rules for healing in Augmentation. Stuff like, rolling BOD instead of BODx2 for natural healing. Broken limbs and worse when getting a glitch or critical glitch when soaking damage or healing, etc. It adds to the "post-lethality" of the game, when you need to get back on your feet ASAP because any minute now whomever is after you will find you.

Thanks all for the input again.

I'm considering letting any characters in projectile blast range that happen to be in full defense mode to take a 1d4 meter dive away from the epicentre.
I've run some simulations with my player's characters (starting level) and I keep wasting them.

Probably a very noob question: when are the healing points actually applied? A character who gets healed for 5 boxes gets them:
a. All at once on the spellcasting turn and then it's a matter of sustaining the spell.
b. One box per turn that the spell is sustained.
c. All at once after the spell has been sustained for 5 turns.

What happens when the sustained heal spell is disrupted before the 5 turns are up?
a. Patient regains all 5 boxes of healed damage.
b. Patient regains the number of boxes equal to the number of turns left when the spell got disrupted.

1d4 isn't very SR. How about (hits) meters on an Gymnastics + Agility Test? That's the RAW for a standing jump.

You're right that does make more sense.
Any answers on when to apply the healed boxes and what happens when a sustained heal gets disrupted?

I believe that technically they go on at the END of the healing time. (It is best to cast heal when you are not in the middle of combat.)

It's not a noob question at all, the way the spell work is not really explained. The Duration paragraph just says that a Permanent spell must be sustained for a short time after which it's effect become "natural" and no longer requires magic or concentration to maintain, which does not really help us here, but suggest that if the spell is dropped prematurely, the healing unravels and you're not healed at all.

While I'd suggest "All at once after sustaining duration" and "If spell is interrupted, no healing is done", this is a point you should discuss at your table beforehand and define the way you will use.

Also the sustaining duration is not 1 turn for each box healed, but (Drainx2) turns, minus 1 for each net hit used to make the spell quicker rather than more powerful.

Thanks for your reply Dahrken.



You mean just hits right, not net hits?

Tell me if I have this right. If the caster is attempting to heal 5 boxes of damage. She'll have to cast a force 5 spell and to be successfull needs 5 hits (not net hits).
This spell should have a Drain Value of: 2 (for force/2) + 3 (Damage Value -2) + 5 (for hits) = 10

Healing 5 boxes of damage then takes 20 combat turns?
Instead the caster can choose to use 4 hits, heal only 4 boxes of damage but for a reduced total of 19 turns, is that correct?

That doesn't make much sense to me. If she only wanted to heal 4 boxes, she could have cast a force 4 spell for a Drain Value of: 2 + 2 + 4 = 8 (=16 combat turns).

I must be reading something wrong.

Yes, I meant hits - since the roll is not opposed the notion of "net hits" is irrelevant .

If you use the optionnal rule where hits add extra Drain, then yes, this look utterly stupid. If not, it makes sense, you can choose to heall less but faster.

Also don't forget that the Drain of Heal is not based on the Force of the spell, but on the number of boxes of damage of the target.

Okay, looks like you've got something wrong here...

Let's see: You want to heal a person with 5 boxes of physical damage. The drain for this spell is than 3 (damage value 5 - 2 = 3). Therefore you will need to sustain the spell for 6 combat turn to make it permanent.
Note that the Heal spell is a big exception in that the force of the spell is no factor in drain calculation. I don't know why you add +5 (for hits) to the drain. IIRC that is an optional rule that is to be used exclusively with direct combat spells.
Also note that, if the target has 10 boxes of physical damage, the drain value would be 8 (damage value 10 - 2 = , even if you are still trying to heal 5 boxes of damage with a force 5 spell. Accordingly, you would need to sustain it for 16 combat turns to become permanent.
Although I know that a lot of people houserule heal drain to be calculated from the amount of damage that is tried to be healed and not the actual amount of damage the target has.

-CJ

I believe that in the FAQ it talks about this not working. You still choose one person and he tries to get out of the way.

Yeah, the optional rules are OK, but really for "normal" people the existing rules and modifiers work fine. Its just when you add in the high body metas that the system starts to break down. And if you apply the optional rules to people with a body of 2-3, you start to see some real problems recovering from injuries.

Shouldn't those people be going to hospitals, or at least streetdocs with medical equipment that helps in the recovery process.

And Body 8+ Trolls are preternaturally tough and robust. They have what I call "rapid healing" effectively. It's not regen, but it's darn close.

No, Neraph. It specifically says it does work, as of course it logically would.

So, one way to read this is that any mobile target has to be attacked with an Opposed Test; the way I read it is that you can certainly aim at a location (Success Test), but you can't say 'I aim at Thug-1 by throwing the grenade at the ground where he is'. Instead, you have to say, 'I aim at the middle of the room', and hope that you get him.

You shouldn't be able to 'dodge' a grenade.
You should be allowed to default to a full run action in a direction away from the grenade, and pray you can move fast enough

Correct, someone with body of 2 living in "street" conditions gets to roll zero dice to heal without outside intervention. The problem is that people with a body of 2 probably don't have health coverage and therefore get no medical attention, or at least they get bad care (skill 1), so they take forever to heal up.

This is a problem why? (from a rules point of view)

He isn't the problem, its the 8 body troll who takes an Assault cannon round to the chest (say 12 boxes of unresisted damage). He received medical attention from a very gifted doctor, and he can be fully healed in 1 day.....fully healed...1 day.

Grenades are always a tricky thing to model, since it's an attack on the area you occupy, not on you per se, so defense works differently than with sword swings or bullets or Powerballs.

I look at ranged defense this way: in combat, everyone is constantly dipping, weaving and positioning to present the least possible target area; a skilled/trained/nimble combatant will be better at the split-second reactions this requires to avoid firearm and projectile attacks. This is represented by your base Reaction normally, and a Full Defense action means you're focusing on this, concentrating more on your posture, positioning and direction instead of attacking or doing anything else, so you add your Dodge skill. (Gymnastics dodge is jumping/flipping around for a more cinematic version of the same thing, natch.)
None of that has anything to do with a small object falling at your feet and filling the area with shrapnel; at the very most you could angle your body to take most of the hit on armor, but "dodging" an explosion generally involves *being somewhere else* when it goes off. Some of this is handled by the timer and giving a chance for people to make move actions; a wired-up sammy could have enough actions to drop his gun, pick up the grenade, and toss it back before it explodes, but it's not satisfying to most players if there's *no* involvement on their part (probably why RAW allows an opposing dodge roll).

How I resolve it is reusing the game's scatter mechanic; if the grenade is targeted straight at a character or their space, and the unopposed attack roll would place it there with 1 m or less scatter (ie, the grenade actually reaches their space that character rolls their Reaction (plus Unarmed or Melee skill on full defense) against the opponent's original attack roll; any net hits are expressed in meters of scatter away from the targeted character, rolled seperately on the scatter table. So, the targeted character hit the grenade with a kick or knocked it with their gun-butt or something, and it's a bit further away, giving them some survivability, but it's more realistic than somehow one's dodge ability making a grenade magically bounce back into the opponent's face when by scatter rules it shouldn't have come near the target in the first place.
I don't like giving extra movement to characters when it's not their turns; it makes things messy. For most grenades you have a couple of seconds to try to move before the attacker's initiative pass comes back up, of course with airbursts you rarely get the opportunity to defend at all.
All this tends to make grenades a bit more lethal, especially with liberal use of the Chunky Salsa blast-channeling rules. Moral of the story? Know the terrain, use cover, don't get out in the open! Works well against both 'nades and Fireballs.

He's a freaking troll?
His Body score is 3x higher than the average human.
He is 1.4x more robust than the most robust human in the world.
Maybe the problem is the gifted doctor multiplier. By my reconning, if he's rolling 8 dice for healing. He's probably only healing 2-3 boxes a day. That's not entirely out of band, given that he's a Troll.

But the troll should be rolling
Body x 2= 16
+ Doc first aid of 6 (including a specialization)
+medkit of 6
= 28 dice

So he is healing down to maybe 2-3 boxes of damage off of a 12 box wound in 1 day, and thats where the system starts to break. He goes from having his entire physical track filled to maybe not even having a wound penalty overnight.

Optional Rule in Augmentation changes it to Body not Body x 2.

So now he's down to rolling 20 dice.
Also, isn't the max he can heal limited by the First Aid skill being used on him?
So should not that example look like:
Body 8
+ First Aid 6
+ Medkit 6
= 20 dice
6 Successes, 6 Max hits?
So now he goes from 12 to 6 Boxes.

Well, you can only be First Aid'd once, right? Then it's back to natural healing.

I wish I had Augmentation with me at work, so I could read the exact wording.

Well, the way it should be run IMO (if going by previous editions for guidance and the SR4 rules as written) was like so...

Permanent Spells are just like Sustained Spells except after a certain time, they become permanent without any additional effort on the part of the caster.

Thus, Permanent spell effects go into effect immediately upon completion of casting just like any other spell with a duration other than instant. That said, just like a sustained spell... those effects are only present while the spell is sustained (until it goes permanent). Causing a sustained spell to drop makes the effects go away. Causing a Permanent spell in its sustained phase will make the effects go away.

Breaking the concentration holding a heal spell in place will cause those wounds to re-appear. This means combat is a bad place to be healing someone unless you are able to spend enough hits to make it go permanent quickly.

It was also a reason for my runners in earlier editions to make a ranged Heal spell. Made it a bit safer for the caster and the recipient.

Combat medicine isn't supposed to be safe.

I had a combat Medic.

One of his primary spells? Physical Barrier

Medicine group at 4
Heal
Detox
Physical Barrier
a few R6 medkits
And of course, Sustaining Foci. Cast Physical Barrier, shunt it off, cast heal, shunt it off. Move on.

The target is aware of being probed. A useful Mind Probe is almost always cast at a force that makes it easy to spot the source. The target is free to take actions, such as saying to his buddies, "Hey someone is reading my mind." or pressing the Panic Button and calling in a bunch of astral mages to start astrally tracking the source of illegal magic.

Yep we use them on my campaign. Just bod not bod X2 for wounds to heal and glitch crit glitch on damage roles leads to heavy wounds. Had a street sam Get his leg blown out on a run a couple of weeks ago. He decided to have it replaced with chrome rather than wait for a cloned limb to be gown.

That's if you consider 0 boxes of damage to equate to "fully healed". From a crunch perspective that's perfectly true, but it's a heavily abstracted system and I wouldn't tell the player he was fit as a fiddle. The wound would remain visible for weeks or months, the scarring would be atrocious and for a good while after the surgery the character would be feeling aches, twinges and shortnesses of breath. Having a clean condition monitor is only relevant to game mechanics. The character may be able to do everything as well as he could before, but most people will notice he's in discomfort and it's RAW to impose non-RAW situational modifiers (especially for social interactions) so it's only a one-day-problem if you let it be so.

Other than that, yeah he's a "freaking troll" (well put sabs) and medicine is six decades on from the present day – I'd expect the technological advancements to have made patching up a metahuman a remarkably similar process to fixing a drone. Probably exactly the same where cyberware is concerned ...

On the subject of optional healing rules, I especially like to include wound modifiers so that heavier wounds take disproportionately longer and are more likely to require professional attention.