Medpacs (and what irks me about them)

[Wajeb Deb Kaadeb]

Medpacs


There's something that irks me about medpacs, and maybe I need someone like Whill or some other in the know person to set me straight.

The time to use a medpac is one combat round. Five seconds.



Now, looking at the pic of the medpac above, it looks to be just a small, portable first aid kit.

When someone is injured, you've got to re-position the patient sometimes, in order to best dress his wound. Maybe you need to cut or tear clothing away from the wound.

Once you see the wound, you've got diagnose the cause. And, you've got to select the right drugs to use and so forth.

The medpac comes with a little diagnostic computer, but certainly that takes some time to use! Heck, just pulling it out of the case, maneuvering it in your hand, and getting it above the wound that you'l have to scan (so that the unit can diagnose) will take more than five or ten seconds right there!

Yet, the game allows recovery (one step up the damage table) after a single medpac use of one round. In five seconds, a wound is treated.

If the roll is missed, then it can certainly be attempted again. So, if a character has Technical 2D, and has 2D placed into the Medical skill, then the character is operating at 4D. We're talking patient prep and repositioning, selecting and pulling things from the medpack to apply them. Use the medpack's scanner--all this in FIVE SECDONDS!

Shouldn't the time to use a medpac be longer?

[Urban Spaceman]

A bugbear of mine too. We had a bit of a chat about it here http://www.rancorpit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3835&highlight=medpack (and probably some other places too).
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[Zarn]

I'm thinking stims and autoinjectors for having anything take five seconds. Maybe that first application lasts something like 15 minutes, and you need to actually use all the other stuff in the medpac to keep the result.

[Kytross]

Or a sliding scale. Stunned to normal is 1 round. Wounded to stunned is 3 rounds or so.

Just spitballing here

[garhkal]

[Wajeb Deb Kaadeb]

Just prepping the patient (turning him over, getting at the wound, opening and retrieving stuff from the medpack, initializing the diagnostic device) should take a minimum of 1-2 rounds (5-10 seconds) but probably more.

One you're ready, you've got to diagnose with the scanner for 1-6 rounds (5-30 seconds).

Even if the drugs do take effect immediately upon injection, it should take a minimum of 2 rounds, but more like 5 rounds (30 seconds) before any healing starts.

In fact, that's a good, round number. If a medpac is to be used, it takes 5 rounds to prep before a roll is made to heal the character.

[thedemonapostle]

my group seemed to have a more realistic approach at handling this. we had to get to the character, get the medpac out, and begin treating the injuries according to severity. the main difference being that we treated each injury individually and that took time. and in our games this took several minutes, not seconds. so i would say that it would take 1 round to BEGIN treating the injured character and go from there depending on the injury type/setting/etc.
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[garhkal]

Wow.. For once it seems we are all in agreement, the 'times are off' for it only taking 1 combat round (5 seconds) to use a med pack.. EGADS. Alert the press!
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[Wajeb Deb Kaadeb]

Yeah, I'd say several minutes to tens of minutes for more serious wounds is not too much to ask for a field dressing.

[Whill]

[griff]

As a gamemaster I have change the time to use into game term categories. Round segment, round, encounter, sence, and episode. Shooting a blaster once takes a round segment (any skill that can be performed more then once in a Round, a single use takes a segment of that round.) One round time to use any skill that takes a whole round to use (brawling). Encounter a skill that takes a few minutes usually an enteraction with a NPC (bargain, con). Sence time to use is where the sence is dedicated to this action (all repair skills, first aid/ medpac use.) Other skills can be performed within the Sence but have MAPs incurred. Episode time to use would be major repair work on ships and "engineering" and other long use skills.
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[Wajeb Deb Kaadeb]

[garhkal]

That's what i was thinkinig.. 4 rounds (20 seconds) to bring someone from MW to incap, 3 to go from incap to wound 2, 2 rounds to go from wound 2 to wound 1, and again from wound 1 to fully healled, still means its taking LESS than a full minute to fully heal someone up.. That's 11 total rounds, equating to 55 seconds.. Still way to fast imo..
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[Bren]

I think it's best to ask what sort of outcome are you looking for and why? As regards treatment time do you want...

(1) medpac treatment to be similar to time for treatment of real world military field medics, civilian first responders, and ER staff?
(2) to avoid PCs popping up in the middle of combat after only 1 round of treatment?
(3) to increase the number of PCs incapacitated or dead in your game?
(4) the required treatment time to be unknown to the healer before they start treatment (like it often is in our reality)?
(5) to better match the WEG description of medpacs and how they work?
(6) something completely different?

I'm frankly not very concerned with (1). I want (2), and I don't want (3). I kind of like the idea of (4) because it adds dramatic choices. The healer has to decide whether to try healing their friends without knowing if they will have the time to get the job done. But for (4) I want the method used to be simple to implement. Which leads me to want a time required that is longer than one round, but is not pegged to some time that will often prevent a PC from being healed to the point that they can be helped away from a skirmish when the heroes are losing.

One simple option would be for the GM to secretly roll 1d6 for the number of rounds required for treatment. We could add in the idea of serious wounds taking longer by adding to the difficulty. Say +1 round for every increase in wound status above unconscious or stunned. If we use Whill's numbers we get

1D rounds - returning a character to consciousness and/or removing all stun effects
1D6+1 rounds - healing from wounded to no wound status, and healing from wounded twice to wounded
1D6+2 rounds - healing from incapacitated to wounded twice
1D6+3 rounds - healing from mortally wounded to incapacitated. (Normally this is done after stabilizing the patient.) If we like we could use the usual conversion of pips to dice and turn 1D6+3 into 2D6.

In any case the healer has to spend the number of rounds that the GM rolled or no healing occurs. (GM's option as to whether interruption of treatment counts as use of the medpac.)

An option would be to allow the healer to use hasty treatment (like the rules for repair or astrogation) by halving their First Aid and decreasing the time for healing. Since my goal would be to avoid dead PCs I'd probably allow success at half skill level to decrease the time back down to a single round or two or just enough time to temporarily patch the person up so the party can leave the scene of action.

[Wajeb Deb Kaadeb]

I'm OK with Star Wars med tech being extreme, with nothing compared to the real world. After all, Luke healed pretty damn quick after his hand was chopped off.

Part of it for me is how the medpacs are described. They're first aid kids, with a scanner to tell you what to do. It takes time to use that scanner, and then apply whatever aid the scanner says to do.

I'd feel differently if a medpac as a little droid brain that you flip open and then just slap onto the wound or near it. The droid would do all the work, thinking and acting much faster than a human could. Injecting stuff, crawling over the wound, laying down liquid bandage that hardens in the air. Stuff like that.