I'm dying as fast as I can!, Don't rush me! Options

[Arethusa]

It's pretty obvious that the time it takes to die in SR is ridiculously fast and ridiculously reliable. Even the strongest troll can't last a minute on the ground in the best of circumstances, and there's no way you'll ever take a shot to the gut and spend three days barely conscious, dying in a ditch.

To my knowledge, this hasn't been tackled anywhere else, so here's my suggestion: roll 2d6 on taking a wound and apply the result to a chart that varies from canon's death speed (which I guess models losing a limb and blowing a couple arteries) to spending the next half week vacationing in your local ditch, averages in the middle. The chart would only deal in the amount of time it takes to accrue another box of overflow, tuned to allowing a body 4 person to die over the course of many days on an extremely (kind of) fortuitous roll.

Descriptions are left up the GM. If he possesses the medical knowledge to know that a solid torso hit can punch through your intestines and graze your stomach before slipping perilously close to your spine on its way out, resulting in slow but steady and largely unstaunchable blood loss, massive but stable drop in blood pressure, blood poisoning as a result of those punctured intestines and stomach, infection, extreme pain, and intermittent consciousness— more power to him. If the GM does not know that a Deadly wound to the leg could graze your femoral artery, shatter your femur, and cause physiological shock and significant blood loss as a result of broad trauma to a lot of generally not significant blood vessels— it doesn't matter. All he has to do is give times to death and very general descriptions, making the system flexible and scalable to the GM's knowledge of general medecine.

And, yes, this will be a part of Canon Revision. Any thoughts?

[edit]

Should also note that there will be an inclusion of incapacitation with consciousness, which basically allows you to take actions at the GM's apporval— very, very slowly, and very, very badly. Also, may include Willpower and Body checks to stay or become conscious.

This post has been edited by Arethusa: May 10 2004, 04:00 PM