Do we need a decapitation mechanic?, Taking inspiration from video games Options

[Wounded Ronin]

All the talk here recently about hit locations has got me to wonder if we need a decapitation mechanic. I'm a big fan of FPS video games and I always felt that a game was better if it had mangling and decapitation because that's more realistic. It's actually less believable if you shoot someone in the head with a shotgun at close range or a .50 BMG rifle and you just get some generic ragdoll physics than if you got some form of gory head removal. (Or partial head removal, which Soldier of Fortune II accomplished admirably.) After all, one prominent feature of modern warfare is how indivdiuals tend to be mangled after being shot.

Having a decapitation/mangling mechanic would remove the need for the limb loss injury tables, although I suppose you could still have a simplified roll to see if Essence is lost or not, and you could still roll for attribute loss if you wanted to.

Without a decapitaiton/mangling mechanic I, as the GM, always feel a bit like a politician when describing the results of combat. Let's say that the player character gets a lot of successes with his Ruger Warhawk and manages to inflict a D wound on the corporate goon.

It would flow wonderfully if as the GM I could just say, "You level the Warhawk, and in an exhilirating moment of Zen, exhale and align the sights all in an instant, but you see only his eye, and then his head explodes, with fragments of bone and rapidly greying chunks of pink matter flying out the exit wound in the back to smear the wall with Pollackian grotesqueness."

But you're not allowed to say that by the rules unless the player has actually caused so much over-damage to the corporate goon that his condition monitor is filled and there are extra boxes inflicted in excess of the goon's body score. The distinction is important because the scene in the above paragraph requires that the goon be dead whereas according to the rules he's not actually dead until his condition monitor is full AND he's got overflow boxes exceeding his Body score. So, even using an assault cannon, it's very difficult to actually kill someone instantly and thus very difficult to have any situations where you can describe any graphic and dramatic injury.

I feel like a politician when describing injuries because I have to describe them in such a way that keeps them consistient with what the rules consider to be dead or not, which is not just a Deadly wound. Even a Deadly wound with two extra successes behind it could just be described as, "You hit him and he immediatley slumps to the ground with blood pumping from the wound." You can't even describe shattered limbs or trailing intestines because later on when you roll on the Deadly wound table he might end up losing a limb different from the one which you described as being hit. So in a sense the rules force you to make very generic statments that cannot be ascribed to any particular part of the body.

Now, what if we have a decapitation/mangling system which is piggybacking on one of the hit location systems which is have been described on these forums? We could know where someone was hit and immediately describe the severity of the hit, which would be quite dramatic. There would also be a greater need for people to buy cyberwear based on injury through limb loss, which would even give the cyberware more of a personal backstory to it, as opposed to "I have two cyberlimbs with strength 8 which are neatly matched and purchased at the same time for no particular reason although it's obviously calculated to make me better at melee combat." Characters could come up with bona fide war stories about how they lost their bits and pieces.

Here's my thoughts on how decapitation/mangling could happen:

1.) Piggyback it on your favorite hit location system
2.) If a limb is hit with a result that amounts to a Serious wound it is considered to be disabled. Two handed weapons cannot be used, so now there's a reason for a backup pistol. I suppose a disabled leg would give TN penalties for Athletics, reduce running rate, etc.
3.) If a limb is hit with a result that amounts to a Deadly wound it's been blown off and the blood loss which is contributing to your overflow boxes represents traumatic bleeding from the stump. Obviously a blown off limb is lost for the purposes of complications from Deadly wounds. Note that if the eye or head is hit with a Deadly wound that this results in the immediate death of the character, because otherwise it wouldn't really be believable. Hand of God in such a case allows for miraculous survival like that Ranger in Mogidishu who was shot in the forehead but survived.
4.) You might consider tying attribute loses to hit locations; the Body attribute might be harmed by Deadly shots to the torso, for example.