Keeping you players alive for dummies

[Varyon]

Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy is a cinematic switch you can activate that makes it so the opening volley of most enemies will always miss the PC's which can help keep them alive. You can use other cinematic switches, like Flesh Wounds, Melee Etiquette, etc to help here.

You may want to encourage traits like Hard to Kill, and even discourage traits like Hard to Subdue (which makes it more likely for the character to stay up and fighting until they hit various death thresholds, including the instant death threshold of -5xHP) if OpFor would be inclined to capture rather than kill (or even just run away after the fight's over).

You may wish to avoid bleeding rolls, and if you do use them then you won't want to use the rules from High Tech and Bio Tech that make severe wounds harder to patch up (in some cases calling for Surgery at a penalty) - if it just requires basic First Aid, then outside of the party all being knocked out and left for dead, bandaging them up to prevent further bleeding will keep them alive.

There's also an optional rule from High Tech that is often referred to as Blowthrough (I don't recall what it's actually called in the book, however). This caps the amount of Injury a Torso hit from a bullet can do, to 1xHP (so 10 for a character with HP 10, 13 for a character with HP 13, etc), although you use the full Injury rolled to determine bleeding (if not using bleeding, the cap is instead 2xHP; note this is a case where using the bleeding rules may well help your characters survive, if medical assistance is readily available). Many GM's who use this modify it so the cap applies to penetrating damage rather than Injury, so that a pi- attack can only deal half the character's HP in Injury, while pi++ can deal up to twice the character's HP in Injury (in both cases, penetrating damage is capped at the character's HP, then the WM - 0.5 for pi-, 1 for pi, 1.5 for pi+, and 2 for pi++ - is applied to that).

Do note that, without magical healing, the road to recovery may be a long one. "Western" implies TL 5 or TL 6. At TL 5, Treating Shock has a 50% chance of doing nothing beyond the 1 HP restored by bandaging; on average, it will restore a further 1 HP, for a total of 2. At TL 6, there's a 33% chance of it doing nothing beyond the 1 HP restored by bandaging; on average, it will restore 1.67 HP. So you're looking at between 2 and 3 HP restored by First Aid (if you get lucky, you can wind up with 4 or 5 HP restored, thanks to a critical success or rolling maximum HP restored). After that, characters will be restricted to bed rest if they want to restore more HP; without dedicated medical care, that's at best a bit under 1 HP per day. With medical care, your physician gets a roll every 2 days at TL 5 and every day at TL 6; success means you restore an additional 1 HP (critical success means 2 HP, but critical failure means -1 HP). So, overall, between natural healing and physician assistance, you're probably looking at an average of 1.5 HP per day at TL 5, 2.5 HP per day at TL 6.

One good option to speed things up is Very Rapid Healing; while Characters isn't explicit about this, it has since been clarified that this is meant to apply to all healing, not just your own recovery attempts. It means you restore twice as much HP as normal, cutting recovery time in half (unless you have high enough HP to already heal more rapidly - double at HP 20, triple at HP 30, etc - in which case it functions as though you simply had 10 more HP than you do, but I don't think that's something you're expecting to happen in your campaign). Note you can also have supernatural healing salves that grant Normal Regeneration (1 HP per hour for some amount of time) or similar without being as explicit as having people cast healing spells, and that will markedly cut down on downtime for healing. You could also let people roll for natural healing without bedrest, perhaps at -4 (as Rapid Healing grants a +4 to recovery rolls, that means having that or VRH lets you roll against straight HT each day to restore HP, even while on the move).

Crippling wounds can also result in a lot of downtime; both Rapid Healing and Very Rapid Healing will help a lot here, as both give a +4 when rolling to see how long a crippling wound will last; this will mean Lasting Crippling will be much rarer than Temporary, and the latter just requires you to get back up to full HP to regain use. They can also make Permanent Crippling less likely (if your HT is 12-15, as they boost it to 16+ and thus require an 18 for Critical Failure), and that can result in a character needing to retire from the campaign, which isn't all that different from death from the players' perspective.