Deathwatch House Rules

I’m running a Deathwatch campaign for some of my friends. While I really love the Deathwatch system, there is a set of rules that have always bugged me about it – the Medicae rules. You see, to apply Medicae, you roll a skill roll and then heal your Intelligence bonus worth of Wounds from an ally. This is simple enough, but then it gets weird. At the end of each battle, you are treated as having one Injury worth the wounds you took in that battle (basically). You can only use Medicae once, against each “set” of battle-wounds. Whatever you don’t heal in that battle, goes into a category of treated, yet unhealed wounds, that my friends call “phantom wounds” that sticks around, unhealable, for a while. It’s really clunky, and it doesn’t heal enough. You could be taking some pretty nasty wounds from enemies – there’s tyranids out there doing like 1d10+18 damage with every normal, ordinary attack they make. And they can be making tons of attacks too.

Given that my friends and I dislike (and barely understand) these Medicae rules, and that we love the Space Marine video game, and the Dawn of War series, where Space Marines are more heroic and tough, we decided to house rule healing in Deathwatch to be more like these games, particularly Space Marine (the third person action game from Relic). Here’s the houserules I came up with, and which they approved of, and that we’ll be using in our game from now:

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