Per the sourcebook:

The maximum damage healable with the First Aid skill is equal
to the skill’s 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.

Is this just the First Aid skill, or does it include any specializations?

Specializations are subsets of the main Skill, so the limitation applies.

Specialisations are Die Pool bonusses, and do not actually affect the rating of the skill.

OK, my answer only applied to half the question, sorry. So, to expand on my answer, a specialization is a subset of the main Skill when determining what can be done. So, the "once only" and "not after magical healing" also apply to a function covered by the specialization. _Pax._ is quite right that specializations do not modify the Skill rating directly, and so do not affect the maximum damage healable.

One thing that is messed up about the first aid rules is how medkits are treated. If you have the first aid skill, you get the medkit rating as a bonus to your dice pool. If you don't have the first aid skill, you use the medkit's rating in place of it. In other words, someone who is completely unskilled can potentially heal more boxes of damage than someone with a low first aid skill, even if the latter is rolling a few more dice for the test.

Personally, I would house rule it that you use either your own skill or the medkit rating, whichever is higher, to determine how many boxes of damage that you can heal. Otherwise, either get the first aid skill at a high rating, or don't get it at all.

I'd never noticed this limitation, and frankly I find it kind of absurd and out of place. What other skill limits how successful you can be with it based on the skill rating itself?

~Umi

First aid is one of those skills, which is quite dependand on interpretation.
What is set of wounds? All the damage you have at that point?
What does ist mean, can only be applyed once to each set of wounds?
4 boxes of damage->first aid(heal 2)->2 boxes of damage->getting shot at(for 3 additional boxes of damage)->Can you heal? Do you need to wait untill the 2 "old" boxes have healed ?
Whats the matter if you have two hits with 3 points of damage each?

Depending on how you run it first aid goes form usless unless maxed out to extremly usefull.

Personally I'd handle it like the Autopicker: it's a bonus to the Skill Rating if you have it, or it replaces the skill rating, if you don't.

...which would be RAW. Lolwut?

No, Tanegar, not a *DP mod*, but an actual Skill Rating bonus. So that the 'max boxes' actually goes up for the 'skilled' person. However, the Modified Skill Rating rules would stop this from having a large effect at the lower levels: you'd need Skill 4 before you break even with the unskilled+Medkit 6 guy. Hmm.

I dunno if the Autopicker itself actually makes sense, though.

By RAW, the autopicker gives a dice pool bonus if you have the skill. I wouldn't change it to a skill bonus, because the aforementioned modified skill rating rules would give it the same problem that the first aid kit has. Namely, that a low skill would be worse than no skill at all. With no skill, you get all 6 dice replacing your own skill. With a skill of 2, you would only be able to get a +1 from it, so you would be rolling 3 dice less than the person who doesn't have the skill at all.

Yeah, neither way is very useful, in this case.

How I did it at my table is a "set" of wounds is damage from 1 attack. Easiest way to track this is have the players mark their boxes differently per set. So if a Sam got hit for 3 boxes, then 5 boxes, then 2 boxes that would b3 3 "sets" of wounds. And might be marked " / / /" for the first, " * * * * *" for the second, and " - -" for the last. First aid can be used on each. Worked well for the 3+ years my campaign ran.

The difference with the Autopicker is that your ability to succeed at an attempt to open a lock is not restricted by your Locksmith skill rating. It's just flat bonus dice that apply even if you have no skill in Locksmith.

~Umi

Yeah, Jareth. I think everyone *does* know what a 'set of wounds' is… except for the SR4 game mechanic. It has no idea. To track 'sets of wounds', you basically have to keep a little journal separately: "Took 3P from punch. Took 5S from taser." And then there's a little column next to it: "Healed (2/3). First Aid (5/5)." Yes, it's annoying and kind of silly, but that's what happens when a no-hit-location, HP-pool system tries to have its cake and eat it too.

Just get a REAL medic with skill 10 and 30 dice to roll for first aid. Then, you don't need to worry about the mechanics, just heal everything everytime

Except in SR4, there's no such thing as a skill rating of 10, without going very edge case. In which case, ti's not "a real medic", it's "the best medic that has lived, or ever will". Wee slight tiny difference, there.

I was going to respond to that, and noticed your ninja edit about edge cases when the new reply tab opened. Gotcha!

However, slightly on topic: My best friend played a mystic adept in our last game. His goal was to be the best doctor he possibly could, and I believe he could drop over 40-50 dice on a Medicine test with the proper preperation. His normal First Aid was pretty amazing too, and what that didn't fix, Heal did or spirits of man with Heal.

On DS that IS a real medic.

If the system worked, we wouldn't have to break it so bad, now would we?

~Umi

No, the REAL medics are the ones who can have both Medicine and First Aid 10 each(or more) starting out the door.

Yeah Yera, but a lot of people tend to over-complicate things. That's why I mentioned the little trick on different marks for different wounds. Doesn't really matter what caused it, just mark it different.

True, should have been included in the base rules, but what else is new?

The point here is, that this would make first aid a the skill of a skill. I mean you would mostly be able to heal from close to dead to perfect condition in under 5 min.

The point is that would work fine if you would locate damage on the characer. So you would have wounds on your arms, legs, chest, head and guts.

@Shortstraw
Nope. The dumpshock-medic is probably a full mage with the biotech group. Assensing to help with diseases and mage in general to get the extra punch. It is better to miss out on 3 points of skill raiting. (And I guess most would not consider to bring up a skill to 7 naturally, anyway)

For First Aid skill 10 is in fact useful, because every skill level counts for the heal cap. That's why you need to be (Mystic) Adept.

Pax, actually the "best medic of all time" would have to be a nosferatu as well for the +2 to Logic

Or a Great Dragon.

Possession Task Spirits, actually

...of level \infty?

Name one RP game that couldn't be broken.

Wizards D&D 4th Ed...
GAG!!! J/K...

*Runs and washes hands after typing such foul blasphemy*

Well, I disagree. The point is, that even with first aid 6 you would need 8 hits to really hit the cap, translating into 24 dice.

Now to add insult to unjury most of the modifiers are negativ. (Essence loss, target is a mage and the environment modifiers are also negativ)

Well, now. With no modifications and logic 6 you will hit the cap (Skill6+spec2+ attribut 10+medipack 6 = 24 dice)
Yeah, some good rolls could be reduced, true. But it won't be really hurting you. But this changes as soon as you take a look at the modifiers. There you can easy get up to -4 or -6...

And striktly going after the rules, only healing one set of injuries at a time it is quite unlikely to find more than 6 points of damage anyway...

Minimus, the four-page (originally one-page) RPG system created by Ken Burnside of Ad Astra games, and freely distributable per the author's wishes.

Our mage will not heal in combat, so we run a "set of wounds" as any wounds that you have acquired since the last time you were magically healed. Typically this is after each combat.

This is the way I run it as well, but Irion is right in that the BBB doesn't define what a "set of wounds" actually is. He and Fogarn could argue that a "set" would be the total of all the wounds taken in a single combat, or any other definition of "set" they choose.

To me, the reason the devs used "set of wounds" rather than "wound" (less word count, easier syntax) was to stop munchkins trying to argue that a burst fire/claw rake wound was actually 10 small bullet wounds or 4 separate gashes or whatever, but you could extrapolate the devs RAI to mean "per combat" or (like Fogarn) "between magical healings". YMMV, but I would argue that your (and my) position is the most logical.

I am not sure LOG 10 is quite as common as you are suggesting, but in broad strokes you are right - there are a lot of negative mods to reduce the DP and (depending on your definition of a "set of wounds"), in a lot of cases one set will not be more than 3 boxes or so.

Your fears of First Aid being overpowered are unnecessary though - the time it takes is one helluva limitation, especially in the archetypical corporate run where you 1) do not want to be a sitting duck while you heal up, and 2) you are generally on a time limitation, because once shots are fired chances are the alert has been raised and the minutes are ticking down before the HTRT/police arrive in force. As always YMMV.

Meanwhile, the magical option is superior in every way. As usual.

~Umi

@Midas
It is not, which is quite of the point. Even with such a high logic, you still do not really hit the cap regulary. Yes, if you get nanoware to boost logic-skill test and maybe some cyberware things start to look a bit different. But then you have to consider the negative modifers...


Come on. Instant heal during combat would be quite overpowered. Yeah, I know some RPGs have it. True. But they are mostly limited in the amount of heals per day.
It is still a great thing, if 10 min of "downtime" lead to a completly healed party.

The magical option also takes time, and is not always easy if the wound is nasty and/or the subject has low essence. But yeah, a combination of first aid and magical healing from competent practicioners (when the PCs get a chance to hole up somewhere for a while) should get most walking wounded back to almost new most times ...

TWERPS, as long as you stick to the 1st edition basic rules, (or is that rule?)

Wait, do people actually let spirits have skill ratings above six just for the luls?

D02, the system that knows no limits.

Now I'm considering that on every run, we need to setup an area to fall back to inside the site that has an adequate kill zone setup in order to stop to heal....

Yeah, time to go Arch Angel on those corp mercs!

Quick question, dont have my books because I'm at work but, with the medkit/autopicker question. If you didnt have the skill, and therefore were substituting the rating for your skill...wouldnt you still be defaulting techincally? thus taking away a die and raising the threshold by 1? If not, I think that would be a fair way to rule it, because who knows, that might be morphine in the little syringe, or it might be insulin....

@StealthSigma
Jesus.... Not telling you should do it while under fire or retreat to the center of enemy territory... Jesus...
Most runs do not consist of one scene. There are more likely: Get the datachip from Person A. Person A got ambushed as you were meeting him to get the datachip. You fought off the attackers. The datachip is the launch frequenz for some nasty weapons. Go and check out whats happening to those weapons... Or something along this line...

If you got it down to street lifestyle it is probably protecting one workinggirl/boy and find out that a rival gang graped another one. Now you need to handle that problem.
First aid + heal lets you deal with each problem fully healed up...

Yes, if you play it like an computer RPG it is not that usefull.
"Help me, the serial rapist/sadistic killer has taken my sister we must hurry to find her. Worry not, we are on our way.... What was it? Right I wanted to write a spell forumla, Jimmy wanted to get some new cyberware oh and we need to sort our inventar and mod our weapons... And yeah they could need some evaluating too... We will take care of that an then go rescue your sister..." If something like that has no consequences well, then yes first aid is not that great...


@LurkerOutThere
Raw, they have.

that....that is pure win that is....

Well, by the rules, a Spirit with Force above 6 has Skills above 6. *shrug*
That said, we rarely see spirits above Force 6... It is just too dangerous to summon/bind them at our table.

Yes, if you do not actually have the skill, and are using a Medkit, you are indeed defaulting. And should suffer the consequences of said action (Lost die, increased Threshold).

But if you are using the rating of the medkit as your skill, you have the skill. Otherwise you could make the same argument for skillwires.

Skillwires are a completely different Animal, though.

I know it's technically the rules TJ, i've always just felt it's a stupid oversite. Why would a spirit/sprite not be bound by the same rules that binds pretty much everyone else in the setting.

~magic~

And

Magic lets you break the 6 hardcap anyway.(on skills AND attributes) If adept powers can do it with magic, why can't being made entirely of the stuff?

Its kinda like asking why spirits can go over an agility of 7! They're totally not elves! Only elves can do that!

And pixies. And Feathered Drakes. And Vampires. And Nosferatu. And some shifters.