Blood Spatter and You, Scrub Scrub Scrub Scrub Options

[hyzmarca]

Funny thing about fluids, blood in particular, is that they tend to strap everywhere when an open container (such as your bleeding head) is vigorously moved. And lets not even get into what happens when you're bludgeoning someone. You'd be amazed where the red stuff lands.

Close range fights are not clean affairs. It is extremely difficult to come out of one without blood all over you, and the walls, and the ceiling. It's one thing a lot of games gloss over, and perhaps for good reason. Your kung-fu master probably isn't going to punch someone out without getting blood on his clothes and your knife adept is going to be absolutely covered in gore and viscera after a major fight. When running around with holes in your body you'll be leaving blood in the oddest of places. When running past fallen guards you'll probably step in their congealing blood and leave tracks that anyone could follow.

Placing emphasis on exactly how messy bleeding wounds can be in real life does have the potential to make the players lose their lunches. Worse, it can bog down the game with cleaning efforts or make a getaway impossible (how many PCs plan to change clothes in the middle of a run?).

On the other hand, mess makes things more real. If dead enemies guards away like video game enemies, then they are video game enemies and should be treated as such. If you have to walk through a expanding pool of arterial blood to get to your objective then then they're more real, more human, their deaths matter just a little bit more to the player, if for no other reason than for being damned inconvenient. It changes the thought processes that go into playing the game and cold blooded murder becomes less acceptable, either because the PCs don't want to deal with the cleanup or because the players don't want to hear your stomach-turning descriptions of their wanton violence.

So, how do the GMs here deal with the mess that comes with fucking a person up, or being fucked up yourself?To you give lavish descriptions of walls and covered with fine droplets of the red stuff or do you just gloss it over?

And more importantly, does anyone have any recommendations for removing blood from a stucco ceiling? Any advice would be appreciated.