Healing is an Extended Test.

You get -1dice every roll in an Extended Test:


So let's say a Mage has been overcasting for 5P Drain Damage. As many Mages he is not the the toughest guy and only has Body 2

So to heal the 5P drain he rests: 1. day he has 4d6 scores 1 hit; 2. day he has 3d6 and he scores 1 hit; 3. day he has 2d6 and no hit; 4 day he has 1d6 an scores another hit:

Now he has no dice left and still 2P Drain Damage left. Which he cannot heal anymore.

This doesn't just apply to Drain, it's any healing really.
My guess is this is just another "oopsie" that needs to be picked up in errata. I don't think the -1 die should apply to healing, there's no reason why the average (bod 3) persons healing gets slower every day then simply stops after a week (-6 die). They also stand a pretty high chance of critically glitching on day 5 and 6 too (2 and 1 die respectively).

I don't think, that the -1 is a mistake in natural healing. It is very well possible, that you have wounds or diseases that don't heal by just lying down for a few days.
That's why we have hospitals and doctors and medicine skill. For all "normal" wounds, diseases etc. it makes sense, that people with a weak constitution have problems to heal naturally even lighter wounds.
You only have to have Body 3 to have 6 dice in the Extended test. In a world without glitches and rolling average you would have 7 hits without medical assistance (better loose some hits by not rolling the last 4 rolls to avoid glitches, so the averages guy heals about 4 boxes just by resting; in the old times of SR2 3 boxes was called medium wound, 6 were serious, so I can live with an average guy having to go to doctor with a more than medium wound. (A body 4 guy has 8 dice, average no-glitching 12 hits, lose 3 hits for not rolling the last 4 rolls, means a guy with somewhat more than average constitution recovers from 9 boxes, from near bleeding to death, by just resting, no medical help at all)
(edit: corrected how many boxes to expect, had forgotten, that you get Body times two , not only Body)

But if we interpret the quote as "no medical assistance helps with magical drain", the drain damage does pose problems and I admit that.

I see only two ways out of this:
You get very literal and say that medicine is an enhancement of natural healing and you may use it and that the quoted sentence only explicitly excludes medkits (first aid) from helping you. So if you go into a hospital, they can help you there, but it will takes days. No first aid on the battlefield for magical drain.

or

You houserule that the natural healing test for drain is rolled ad infinitum without the -1, but other wounds still have it, because as I said it's not a bad thing that broken bones, a shot through the lung etc. don't heal completely by just resting.

how is natural healing an extended test?

if i rest for one day, i heal in that time. immediately. i'm not doing an extended test to heal X boxes of damage once i've completed the entire test, i'm making a test to heal Y boxes today (or this hour, for stun).

this does not describe an extended test, where you perform multiple tests and total your hits to see if you've reached the threshold. your results are on a per-test basis, and your success or failure in the previous hour/day has absolutely no impact on your success or failure in this hour/day.

Oh god this thread makes me think of a project I did at work.

It was for a product called Medihoney (which is basically pure raw honey, no really, just buy a jar, it's cheaper) that was intended for use on ulcers that weren't healing after two weeks. Whether or not the rules were intended to have that outcome or not, never-healing wounds do happen in real life.

The rules now support Stigmata. Woot!

Edit: You could also use Increase Body spells in a sustaining focus or have somebody else cast and sustain it to help with healing.

They do. But they are typically only affect pretty sick people. For example, severe long-term diabetics and elderly people with other major issues already. It's not at all common for young healthy people.

And those sickly or very elderly people have Body 1 or Body 2 and will have lasting problems if having been wounded severly and not having been treated at all.
Remember that somebody with Medicine will add on the average +1 die to the healing roll of the patient per 3 dice he has in Logic+Medicine. That helps a lot in healing normal damage and in my opinion should also help in healing magical drain. I think it's enough that Medkit's (and First Aid) don't count.

This right here.

The is not much to argue here: The Rules clearly state it is an Extended Test!

The problem is with Drain because everything else you can heal with first Aid, Magic etc. but Drain is only healed by Natural Recovery, everything else does not work.

But If you also look at the example on pg 207, we can see that the -1 per extended is NOT being applied.



On day 4 he scored 2 hits, if the -1 per ext test was being applied he wouldn't have even been able to roll 2 hits since he would have consumed all but 1 die just from the penalty. And we are assuming no edge or some other exploding dice since it doesn't make mention of it.

So Healing may be an exception to the normal rule for extended or the example is wrong. 50/50 I guess given the track record for stats to examples to date.

Personally I am inclined to think it is the exception. Extended test penalties were to reflect that if you didn't pick the lock on the first go after all that set up time it seems unlikely you will do it the second time and to just prevent someone from rolling and rolling until they get lucky.

Healing is just an ongoing process and the extended test was used to reflect that it simply takes time to heal.

And people wonder why some mages go looking at blood or green magics to divert that drain elsewhere......

Reminder:
When the rules and the example conflict, the rules take precedence.

well, it shouldn't be an extended test then. unless you know of other extended tests where every hit has an immediate effect.

And that's why we have an errata thread. :3

I've heard that some game companies expect that the writers and developer to actually understand the rules. Luckily there is no such stick in the mud attitude with CGL.

If they meant this to be a kind of Extended Test, they should have written, that is an Extended Test with a Threshhold of the damage the patient has and that in contrast to a normal Extended Test hits that you collect do count, even if you didn't reach the Threshhold.

Also as already quoted the example would be wrong and nobody thought of the consequences, if you connect a rule that says that natural healing cannot always heal somebody completely with a rule that says that magical drain only gets natural healing.

Unfortunately, a sloppy use of a defined term like Extended Test, a wrong example and a not thinking through the consequences of two rules connecting seems to be quite possible with Shadowrun.

I personally have no problem with Body 1 and Body 2 characters not being able to heal to complete health without medical assistance and/or Edge and/or magical healing.
But then you have to rule, the only Medkits do not affect magical drain, but medical assistance that takes days does help.

Here is some longish guesstimations how a system with Extended Tests natural healing works:

(I call the last 2 rolls of an Extended Test (only 1 and 2 dice) Very Dangerous Dice and the last 4 (4,3,2,1 dice) Dangerous Dice because of their high critical glitch chance.

1 Body : the patient is very old and/or frail and/or sick, can roll only the Very Dangerous Dice and has only 3 percent to heal 3 boxes, never more. On the average he will have 1 box healed, but probably lower because of the high critglitch chance (I think it's about 27%), where he will be worse after healing, because of the 1D3 critglitch damage boxes.

2 Body: low constitution, can only roll the Dangerous Dice, with extremely low probability, but possible (about 1 in 60000) the patient has all dice hits and heals 10 boxes (shot within 1 box of instant death, first aid only stabilized and he then fully heals just by resting 4 days) , on the average he will heal 3 boxes, or less, if he is leaving the Very Dangerous Dice aside, because he doesn't want to risk critglitch)

3 Body: average constitution, can leave the Dangerous Dice aside, if he wants, and has still 5+6 dice left. Heals about 4 boxes when not using the Dangerous Dice and up to 7 when using them, probability of being worse after healing is very low

4 Body: some better than average constitution, can heal about 9 boxes (26 dice) without the Dangerous Dice, more if he risks them. This guy has a high probability to come back fully healed from being shot, stabbed, poisoned to within one box of damage of instant death, and all he has to do is rest 8 days.

5 Body: very fit, without the Dangerous Dice the patient has 45 dice to heal with 15 boxes on the average. Being shot to near instant death with 15 boxes of damage he can normally heal them all by lying on his couch for 10 days.

For those with Body 2 and more they might add the Try again rule, that allows a test to be repeated with -2. In essence this would be adding the stuff you would have had, if your Body was one lower in the list above. For people with Body 1 this is of course impossible, for Body 2 it's very risky to go another round with -2 and for Body 3 it begins to be interesting.

If you add somebody with Logic+Medicine this helper gives +1 die for the patients natural healing per 3 dice he has in Logic + Medicine. In a way this means, that per 6 dice in the helpers Logic+Medicine the patient heals as if he had one Body more.
So if you have a beginning doctor with Logic 3 and Medicine 3 help the Body 1 patient, you can look up the result what happens to the Body 2 person. If the doctor is very good with 12 dice (like Logic 4 and Medicine the Body 1 patient behaves like Body 3 and can fully recover from a lot of punishment even though he is very old/frail/sick. If you have one of the best doctors in the world with 18 dice (Logic 6 + Cerebral Booster 3 + 9 Medicine) the Body 1 person heals/recovers like Body 4, so he can come back from 9 boxes of damage (as near to instant death, as he could be) to full health. But only with the very best doc.

This all is leaving gear boni aside which a fully equipped hospital may give (don't know the SR5 rules for these yet). You probably need the boni from the Medkit/Autodoc/Hospital to counter patient's implants and/or being a magician.

So if somebody with Body 1 or Body 2 get hurt they cannot fully recover without medical assistance. I have no problem with that. These are not stigmata, but rather a limping, a damaged organ, that could not be fully repaired, scars that still hurt etc.

In world where you just have to rest for x days to heal anything, no matter how bad, what do doctors do? Why are there still hospitals?

By the way, putting together these thoughts, another problem occured to me, if one says that the mage cannot use any medical assistance: do Trauma Patches work? If they don't work and First Aid is not allowed, mage who are bleeding to death will never saved. According to the rules, a character with Overflow can only be stabilized by outside sources and so people can say that this is not natural healing and so Stabilization would be a no-go for magical drain.
Of course I don't share this opinion, but the door for this interpretation is open.

Man, this is SR5. They don't expect the rules to even be able to be found within the document, much less make sense when you find 'em.

So... does this permanent damage include permanent stun if you're really unlucky or whatever?

Mages with Body+Will of 4 have a lot of problems, but yes, being forbidden from using an aspirin (Medkit) against against your Stun magical drain seems to strange effects and I would houserule Medkit back in for Stun. I don't know if one will ever see mage, that has so little willpower, that he won't be able recover from his Stun, but in that case a Medkit should help.

Even BOD 4 means you only roll 10 dice total, i.e. ~3 hits on average...

Sengir--It's a Body x 2 test
8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 -- 36 dice, 12 hits on average

I would think that a magician physically draining herself unconscious would not be able to be revived. There's one caveat: does stabilization count as healing? Perhaps a magician can be stabilized but can only use natural means to get out of her coma.

Do the dice from the quick healing adept power count as magical healing? It says it is magical in the power description. Do the dice from an increase attribute (body) spell count as magical healing? Does any medical help whatsoever count as not being of the body's natural healing abilities? There's also a quick healer quality that I think does count as natural. That's a great one for awakened characters.

Right, my bad. But please don't tell me you calculate dice totals like that

Quick, give me the sum of all numbers from 1 to 100, inclusive!

(That was actually the plot for an Adam's Family episode: they had 24 hours to figure it out and kept messing up. Eventually they figured out a shortcut.)

100*101*1/2 = 50 * 101 = 5050. Did nobody have the story with young Gauss in school?

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
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"


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.....

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.