HEALTH is a measure of how healthy a character or creature is.  The lower the score, the closer to death you are.

When you are struck by a weapon or fall from a height, you take damage which lowers your HEALTH score. If your HEALTH score is 20 and you take 5 damage, your HEALTH score drops to 15. When your HEALTH score reaches zero or below, you are unconscious and at risk of death.

Critical Hits

When an attack is made, if triple-sixes are rolled and the attack hits then a critical hit takes place and the target gains a condition.  The condition is dependent on the type of damage the attack does.

Regaining Health

Once per day a character may spend one hour to recover HEALTH.  Roll an END dice pool and regain that much HEALTH.

Zero HEALTH

At zero HEALTH or lower you are unconscious.

An unconscious character forms a slow dice pool equal to his END 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 comes up 6 gets removed from the pool. When he has no dice left, he dies.

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

Emergency Healing & First Aid

Anybody can attempt to apply emergency first-aid in the field, although a character can only benefit from it once per day. This is simply a LOG check (with any skill or equipment bonuses - medicine for most, engineering or robotics for androids). Applying emergency first-aid takes two actions (a full combat turn). Emergency first aid restores a character to 1 HEALTH and stabilizes the death dice pool. The difficulty of the check is equal to the negative value of the patient's HEALTH score, although it has a minimum difficulty of Routine [10].

Some careers grant exploits which alter the way medical attention works, either in terms of the amount healed or the number of actions required to perform it. For example, some medical careers grant exploits which allow a character to heal 1d6 HEALTH as a single action.

No character can benefit from a given source or type of healing more than once per day.