What do the various damage levels mean?, Let's share our opinions Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Forgive me if this issue has been brought up before. I did a search on "damage" and nothing obvious came up.

What do the various wound levels mean to you in terms of what they would correspond to in real life?

Here is my take on things...

Light Wound - this is what you get when someone shoots you with a 9mm round. You get a bloody hole in you but you are relatively unlikely to die. Anything less than this amount of damage is so small so as not to register on the shadowrun damage system. So, if you scrape your knee or someone claws your face and draws blood, it dosen't actually register until the damage reaches the level of a relatively low key gunshot wound.

This ties in with the low Power of hold-out pistols, i.e. 4 L. Most people would have to be shot a couple of times at least with, like, a .25 in order to get blood loss and shock comparable to a 9mm plinking. That's why hold out pistols don't actually succeed in doing an L wound a lot of the time.


Medium Wound - this is like a wound from a .45 which not only makes a bloody hole and temporary cavity but also shatters some of your bone structure. The actual structural damage of your body is the big defining characteristic between L and M wounds.


Serious Wound - this is for all intents and purposes something that incapacitates you. Grenades and shotgun blasts do S damage. Usually, if someone is exploded on by a grenade, or eats a shotgun blast, they're done. Limbs sometimes come off. A character who still keeps operating with an S wound is like a crawling crushed roach. Once I read "We Were Soldiers Once And Young", which was a book filled with firsthand accounts of the Vietnam war. One person described in the book was someone who was so badly wounded that he couldn't move. He was just this bleeding mangled mess and he was propped up against a wall. But he was still doing his best to help his comrades by operating the radio. In the same way, a character with an S wound is continuing only by sheer hardcore force of will. Most NPCs I would consider defeated with an S wound, much like most people who get part of their leg blown off by a hand grenade would be considered defeated under most circumstances.

Deadly Wound - this is something that can actually gib you. For example, in real life, a shotgun loaded with 00 shot that is fired into you at close range may sever your limbs. A shotgun loaded with shot in Shadowrun fired on an unarmored person at close range has a D damage code, so D damage code represents things that literally tear you apart. Using a 50 caliber machine gun on human bodies tends to tear them into moist confetti very quickly, so that's why HMGs have D damage codes when fired in anything but single shot mode. The way I see it, the difference between an S wound and a D wound is that the D wound has physical destruction of the body to the extent that no amount of willpower can make any further use of the body in combat; you're so torn up you can't even just lie on the ground and fire your weapon listlessly. The way I interpret it, the only reason that characters ever recover from D wounds is because medical technology is so advanced that tremendous reconstruction of the human body is possible.