HEALTH

A character’s HEALTH score is a measure of her physical and mental condition. The lower a character’s HEALTH score, the closer to unconsciousness and death that character is. Any attack can cause damage, and this damage is deducted directly from the target’s Health score. When HEALTH is zero or lower, the character is unconscious and in danger of death.

Zero HEALTH

When a character is reduced to zero HEALTH or lower, he immediately forms a countdown dice pool equal in size to her ENDURANCE dice pool. This dice pool represents the clock ticking down as he slides towards death. Every time his turn comes around, he throws the dice pool once. Any dice which come up 6 get removed from the pool. When he has no dice left, he dies.

Each time an unconscious character takes additional damage, one die is removed from the dice pool. The amount of damage does not make any difference.

Recovery

Once per day, typically after a night’s sleep, a character may spend one hour to recover HEALTH. The amount recovered is equal to one roll of her END dice pool.

HEALTH can also be recovered in other ways. Certain drugs and career exploits can grant the ability to heal other creatures or regain one’s own HEALTH.

First Aid

When a character is at zero HEALTH or less, anybody can attempt to perform emergency healing (first aid). First aid is applied to a patient which has been reduced to zero HEALTH or lower, and takes two actions. To perform emergency healing, simply make a LOG check (with dice pool contributions from relevant skills and equipment) equal to the negative HEALTH value of the patient (with a minimum difficulty of Routine [10]). If successful, the patient is stabilized and the death pool stops ticking. The patient will, of course, still be at negative HEALTH at this point, and some way to restore HEALTH will be required.

Any further damage that day restarts the death countdown at the point where it was stabilized. Characters can receive frst aid multiple times per day, but the size of the countdown pool does not reset until they have had a full night's rest.