The look, the feel..., The look of guns? Options

[Siege]

The accidental death scenario is one reason to vary the Damage code randomly.

Another is the idea of wound shock and how unpredictable it is.

And using the variable Damage Code, a shooter's skill is still a factor because no matter the target's reaction to the wound, additional sucesses stage the damage normally.

And if you allow Dodge rules, it still becomes a contested matter of "who has the most successes".

-Siege

[Cursedsoul]

Like I said, it was just an idea and probably a bad one at that. I tried to think of a way to get around staging and whatnot but nothing really came.

Also, chances are you aren't shooting at anyone who has a skill less than 4 in their weapon so it would basically be highly skilled vs highly skilled.

If you've got a skill of 2 in your weapon and you're fighting the professional, you deserve to get your ass kicked on the basis of abject stupidity. You'd find out after he shoots you whether or not you can "take him" so if you're dumb enough to not run away well, it ain't gonna be pretty.

I also thought of something where it was a flat bonus, or perhaps even striated.

For example: Like you said, keep the dice rolls only don't totally forget about skill level. Just have act like a step function.

Skill 1 - 2 = +1D3 Power, +1D3 DL
Skill 3 - 4 = +2D3 power, +1D3 DL
Skill 5 - 6 = +2D3 power, +2D2 DL
Skill 7 - 8 = +3D2 power,, +2D2 DL
Skill 9 - 10 = +3D2 power, +3D2 DL
Skill 11 - 12 = +3D3 power, + 3D2 DL

Doesn't really work with the present system as it stands, but it would with my suggestion of increasing the life bar to add another DL into it.

Glancing, Light, Moderate, Serious, Deadly.

Maybe add a second to the mix, (G)lancing, (L)ight, (M)oderate, (S)erious, (T)erminal, (D)eadly

Gives you more breathing room. Say you double the Life bar to 20.

Perhaps something like:

Glancing (Grazed on the life bar) = 1 box
Light = 3 boxes
Moderate = 6 boxes
Serious = 12 boxes
Terminal = 15 boxes
Deadly = 20 boxes

This would give you more breathing room for caps placed on DL, and allow you to toy with base DL to make light pistols worthwhile.

I dunno. Its seriously re-tooling the system and this is all off the top of my head for the most part.

[mfb]

you know what would make the system realistic? bleeding rules. very few people die of a gunshot wound within three seconds of being shot--they die because a minute later, they've bled out their entire blood supply. random wound and power levels don't make sense, within the system; bleeding rules would.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Other than physiological and psychological shock (which probably shouldn't cause a lot of Deadly wounds), you've got the fact that there are several spots near the center of the chest of an adult human where a 0.5" hole won't be lethal, or even incapacitating, while the same hole 1" to one side would lead to death in 20 seconds or even immediate incapacitation in case of spinal injuries.

No matter how good a shot, you can't reliably get the human aorta and spine with one shot, but even the most incompetent shooter just might.

[Cursedsoul]

That might be something to consider but it would be awfully complicated. The question is "is this really fun?" if "yes" then go for it. If "no" it might not be worth the effort.

It makes sense to bleed to death, but you have to hit an artery. Vein just doesn't have the pressure.

Also, you'd need bleeding rates for all the damage levels, rates for hitting veins, arteries, organs, tissues, muscles, etc, etc.

You'd also need to figure out how this is is affecting the ease of use for the systems you hit.

Let's not forget bullet types and 'over-pentrating' like Raygun's site (I think) discusses.

Take a lot of work and would bog things down. Depends if you want totally realistic or not.

Frankly I think it would be something to apply after the gunfight if no medical treatment is available or what have you. Stopping blood-flow is laughably easy, but if you don't know how, and no one around you knows how, and the doc-wagon isn't able to get to you due to legality issues (IE: you're inside a corporate tower) well...blah.

What about magic? You'd have to figure it out for magic too. Surely there are spells to compress your arteries, or cause an embolism to move to your lung/heart and what have you.

[Siege]

However, you can be shot and rendered incapacitated.

While you're still technically alive, you can't do jack and happen to be bleeding out pdq.

Any major artery hit will do that - s'why I always giggle when someone walks away with a thigh hit in a movie. Femoral artery, anyone?

A fast rule would be: upon receiving a "Deadly" wound, the character remains alive for Body in minutes, although incapacitated. For every two additional successes past "Deadly", reduce the time by 1 minute.

Of course, this would require progressive worsening of injuries rules - if you get hit with a Serious or Moderate, you won't be doing much of anything and the would will get worse on it's own without treatment.

Wow, we're just making all sorts of complicated today. :grinbig:

-Siege

Edit: Stopping bleeding can be easy, or not - depending on the nature of the wound and the amount of mess it made.

[Austere Emancipa...]

I still think basing the random damage on skill level is a bad idea, very bad, no matter how you do it. Like I said, a skilled shooter won't do more damage unless he actually hits better, and that's represented by rolling more successes.

Random wound levels do make sense, even within the system, because of the above. A person can just get lucky and kill someone immediately by accident with a 9mm pistol -- I would like for the rules to allow that. I did not implement such a thing myself (yet), because I couldn't think of an realistic, simple and logical way of doing so.

Guess what I scribbled at work today, mfb?

BLEEDING

Self-stabilize: BOD vs TN=4/5/6/12, single success stabilizes, that wound will not bleed. If a new wound is not self-stabilized, the rate of bleeding is based on the new wound level only.

Rate of bleeding:
L = BOD x 60 min
M = BOD x 20 min
S = BOD x 5 min
D = BOD x 1 CT

This probably looks a lot like something that was discussed in one of Arethusa's threads some time ago. Other things I worked on were Sudden Shock (for which I've probably done better house rules earlier in some thread), Ignoring Pain, a new way of ruling when unconsciousness occurs, and the new method of calculating damage caused by attacks and the staging to go with it that I already mentioned.

[Cursedsoul]

Worst comes to worst and you make a turniquette out of a rod and your shirt. Lose the limb, save the life.

Most times applying pressure to the artery and elevating will stop the flow of blood long enough for your platelets to work their magic (and it really is magic. I learned how complex blood clotting is in Anatomy and Physiology. Its so complex itsa winder it works at all my teacher said. :D) so you don't become ghoul food.

[mfb]

...or, you could simply apply the concept of staging to the bleeding rules, and skip all the medical nonsense. it's not like we sit down and figure out which bones might have been broken every time someone takes a hit; why would we apply that level of detail to bleeding?

and, yes, the most incompetent shooter just might, but the extreme likelihood is that he'll miss completely. the level of detail required to model such extremes of possibility aren't generally worth the returns.

edit: yes, that could also work, austere.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Just because you're introducing bleeding doesn't mean you suddenly have to know whether you hit an artery or not. That's silly. You can do bleeding in an abstract manner, such as the figures above. The rest is up to the GM (or the players, depending on style of play) to describe in a realistic and/or entertaining manner.

A Deadly + 1 Over-Deadly that is not self-stabilized might tear open several arteries leading to the lower body in the lower chest. A non-stabilized Serious might be an air-chest and significant bleeding through lesser veins. The "bleeding" from a Light wound might actually be more about infection than loss of blood.

[mfb]

indeed. maybe we could call it 'continuing damage' or something, just for the sake of clarity?

another thing is, armor could be made more useful. maybe something along the lines of adding the armor value to your body for the purpose of determing the time factor of the bleeding/continuing damage?

[Austere Emancipa...]

[mfb]

bah, you post too fast. edited my post above with a new idea.

[Cursedsoul]

Infections take hours to work themselves into the body and days to cause a ruckus. You'll probably get infected damn near immediately, but whether it turns into an infection or not depends on your immune system.

Seen it before? memory cells will notify the killer T cells and eat it right up. Variant? Depends. Similar enough to what's on file and it might be stoppable and never really turn into anything major.

Your body takes a week or so to manufacture a defense against something totally new if memory serves me right, so if you're able to beat it off, you're good to go. Its when your body fails to do this that we have a problem.

Bottom line is infection really isn't a factor unless its one of those really nasty biological plagues manufactured in a lab to instantly afflict the user.

Common cold may be bad ass, but its not that strong.

[edit] To mfb on the subject of armor [/edit]

Isn't that technically already in place? Armor makes it easier to resist the damaginge effect of the weapon, so the secondary effect of reducing the bleeding factor is evident.

You get shot with a shotgun. Serious wound. Armor made it possible for you to take a moderate wound. Your armor has already acted like a factor in bleeding by stopping enough of the punch to make it less traumatic.

[Siege]

The .45 flesh wound, eh?

I realize I'm expecting too much of the SR mechanic to adequately reflect all possible scenarios - and I'm sure the gun control advocates are happy that childhood-related fatalities have gone down in 2063. :grinbig:

-Siege

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Cursedsoul]

No, not really. Self-stabilizing is ENTIRELY different from clotting, which would be stabilization. I had an explanation but I decided it was too boring and sciency to interest anyone.

My disagreement is really the term your using and the # of rolls made and at what TN.

Self-stabilization is a crappy, generic term. Call it clotting because that's what stops bleeding. Fighting off disease is different and need a term for it. I'm too lazy to go look one up and can't remember any off the top of my head.

TN to clot is a lot easier than it will be to fight an infection, of course not a lot of pathogens will be terribly deadly anyways.

I don't like the way your clotting TNs suggest how they'd work. Sure it makes sense to be harder to clot a deadly wound than a light, but the difficult doesn't change THAT much. That's more like if you tried to do it all in one go, which the body doesn't have to do.

A better way would be to keep track of the total number of different wounds incurred and clot off of that.

For example. You take 3 moderates and a light. You go into deadly. You would then have to clot 3 moderates and a light. Instead of rolling that shitty TN of 12, you'd roll 5, 5, 5 and 4. Not bad at all.

The body will probably realize in short order that it doesn't have the ability to clot everything. It'll probably clot the most life threatening first and the easiest last.

You could probably just say your body can clot (body) boxes in damage before it has to spend some time manufacturing new platelets. Probably a combat turn per box or whatever.

I only know a bit above the basics and blood clotting is MASSIVELY COMPLICATED soooo yeah. I suggest you simply clot each incurred wound. This also applies to over deadly. Took 2 serious wounds? Roll to clot two serious wounds.

I would say if you fail the initial clotting check to plug it, you'd look at the successes and compare it to the lower level wounds.

Say the TN is 6. I roll 4 body and get 4, 4, 3, 2. I would clot a light wound, taking away a box, and turning that into a moderate wound for when I try to clot it again in a short while.

This could all be horrendously wrong, but I know a TN of 12 isn't right period. Not unless you took an assault cannon to the chest and sustained that deadly damage in one shot.

[KillaJ]

[Cursedsoul]

Yeah well, emphasis on boring. I got like, 1/2 way through and then decided it was rather unnecessary to boot.

[mfb]

three M's and and L means you've been shot three times and stabbed once. sure, there are some people who can survive that, but most people are going to bleed to death from that kind of damage. i think TN 12 is about right.

[Cursedsoul]

TN 12 is not right. You didn't take A SINGLE DEADLY WOUND. You took THREE MODERATES AND A LIGHT. YOU HAVE TO HEAL THREE MODERATES AND A LIGHT.

See the point? Its a helluva lot easier to repair 3 bullet holes and a stabwound than it is to stop the bleeding from the 3x3 hole through your chest caused by the deadly wound from that fraggin' missile.

Your body isn't repairing everything at once, it will repair what it can handle, and just because it can't do it in the span of a few seconds doesn't mean it can't ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever do it.

Is that any clearer? :)

[BitBasher]

Actually for SR it's not. You have a wound level that determines your wound. When healing it's the would level that determines time. The actual whatever made up that would level is more or less irrelevant.

[Cursedsoul]

Actually it does make sense because there are no canon rules to cover this.

I'm not disputing total healing time. I'm explaining that the initial clotting so you don't bleed to death isn't really a function of total damage level, rather than what comprises it.

It would also make more sense to you I think if you did this everytime you got wounded. This way you would never have to clot for anything more than you were just hit for.

Just assume that the body will start clotting the instant puncture is achieved (which happens IRL) and finish that job first unless something life-threatening happens, at which point it would probably drop that and try to patch up the other wound.

"life-threatening" meaning you got pushed to deadly.

If you're under that much pressure to resist damage incurred to your body well, chances are none of this will matter because you're probably dead meat anyways.

[Austere Emancipa...]

A Deadly Wound has to be lethal for the average adult human in 30 seconds. This means hemorrhaging on a scale which is only possible if you rip open one (or more) of the large arteries in the thorax, AFAIK. The likelihood of one of those clotting over within those 30 seconds seems almost nonexistant to me.

A Deadly Wound does not have to be a huge hole. A puny .22LR can tear a 1cm hole in the aorta, which will probably kill you in short order. 6 successes with an 8M Assault Rifle could take out both the brachiocephalic and (right) subclavian arteries, and anything within 2" of where those branch.

I do agree, however, that it would make more sense to roll and calculate the Bleeding one wound at a time, not based on the total wound level. Any problems here arise from the way SR handles damage to begin with. If the GM decides to start keeping track of single wounds, there's no trouble.

I don't get your problem with the terminology. But it goes to explain why there are so many silly, even more generic terms in RPGs. Let's go with mfb's Continuous Damage and Stopping Continuous Damage By Yourself, then. Better?

[mfb]

i don't think you caught that, cursedsoul. you've been shot three times, and also stabbed. that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to take longer to clot, but it does mean that you're probably going to die before your body has a chance to start the clotting process. it's a pain in the neck to track individual wounds, and it's also easily possible that your various wounds are complicating each other, so it makes more sense to just stack them all together for purposes of continuing damage than it does to keep track of every nick and scratch you take.