Healing Tests -- Concern/Confused Options

[blakkie]

[Coasini]

wagnern: My main concern is just finding a way to slow natural and unaided healing..

[wagnern]

Ah. Sometimes people on these forums are a bit over the top for realistic and gritty.

[Spider]

Maybe...

But then again, healing 10 box of damage (a death wound for most of the human) in less than a week is really far from gritty and realistic. They should have been a little more carefull about the rules.

-SPider

[blakkie]

10 boxes doesn't kill even gimp metahumans, although Body (1) and (2) are at that point unconciousness, or in a more general sense incapacited beyond being able to precieve or act since the abstract nature of game damage doesn't always translate well.

Being that messed up today usually means a sizable hospital/bed stay, depending on the situation. Crushed pelvis for example would likely be someone at the edge of death. But as already mentioned the medical advances in just the last couple decades have drastically reduced healing times. Terrel Owens, whatever your opinion of him, was able to have his busted angle bolted back together and operate at an elite (although arguable reduced for him) level. It wasn't that long ago that he not only wouldn't have made it back for that game, he would have been fortunate to EVER made it back.

Now imagine what kind of things are going on in the typical trama and recovery medical facility when other branches of medicine are routinely implanting foriegn custom modified organs and tissue, cybernetic replacements and aids, who knows what with nanites in the 5 years since SOTA 64/65.

Plus there is the idea is that Orcs/Trolls are bad ass healers, above and beyond the highest human standards that we are used to.

EDIT: A bit low overall in times? Perhaps, but not amazingly so. I'd much rather an error on the side of NOT having a player sitting herself and PC out for a month of game time because something went sideways.

P.S. Remember that when healing you can Glitch and slow down the healing a fair amount, or Critical Glitch and if at the edge just flat out die.

[Spider]

Just reading the "using medecine section" on page 242 of the rulebook, that's a test your doctor should made to heal you... interesting if your street doc score let's say 4 hit on his roll. You got +4 on every healing test afterward (for that set of wound) so the good old 6 body troll roll something like 18 dices - modifiers for healing his wounds and one hit heal one box.

Even 11 boxes of damage won't hold him that long in the hospital. He'll get out of coma, and start running. That section of the book as a dragonball feeling on it.
-Spider

[Dashifen]

And that's a problem why? I agree with blakkie. I hated having to artificially advance the timeline of my games by a month every time someone took a round to the chest -- especially if you were running a game concurrent to major metaplot involvement and didn't have an easily flexible timeframe. And I hate having someone make a new character to play during the month that their "main" character is healing.

Call it a liberal amount of drugs, call it nanite healers that knit wounds back together, call it cybernetic replacement parts that are removed or dissolve similar to stitches do today, call it whatever you like, but I see no probably with somoene getting the crap beat out of them and then getting up after a week or so of healing and starting to work again.

You want gritty realism, then make sure those damage boxes aren't just damage boxes. Someone gets hit in the arm -- make the arm not work. Sure, the physical damage heals up in a week, but what about the nerve damage or the damage to tendons causing stiffness and pain for the rest of the character's life. Get shot for 7+ boxes in one hit? Maybe that blows your arm clean off, or takes your leg and mangles it. You might heal up the physical damage (after some surgery and a cyberleg) in a week but now they're stuck with a cyberleg.

Yes, abstract damage is not gritty nor is it terribly realistic. But, I have a somewhat hard time understanding why so many people have a problem with realism in a game that sports elves, dwarves, trolls, orks, magic, dragons, spirits, paracritters, etc.

Edit: sorry, ranted there a bit. didn't mean to be so confrontational.

[blakkie]

Yes, the wonders of modern medicine and an incredibly fit body! :) They get to use all sorts of bleeding edge kewlio drugs and gadgets on your Troll buddy too because he doesn't have any cyber/bio to get in the way or awakened or techno skills to worry about damaging.

[blakkie]

[Rotbart van Dain...]

I suppose that's grit.

Realism is more like: "Hey, we live in a three-dimensional world - so realistic combat should be based on vectors. That would allow us to incorporate magic seamlessly - using complex vectors. Everything less is just dumbed down."

[blakkie]

Ah. So grit is the pain in the ass for the PC. Realism is the pain in the ass for the players.

EDIT: This new found clarity is bringing back some baaaad AD&D memories. I remember having our 2nd level characters get into a fight with some kobolds in a tight cave. The whole session was a mass of 3D trig of the DM trying to figure out who could shot arrows at whom. The 3 hour session ended before the battle. I missed the next week's game, but apparently not much, because the same damn kobold battle was still running when i got back the week after! :eek: Of course our PCs being weak were pretty beat up after having faced a pack of kobolds that were apparently paying a lot better attention in Grade 9 Math than me. ;)

The area where we were had multiple entrances that we didn't feel we could secure. So we left the cave entrance to regroup and heal in relative safety. Next session we came back and the same cave entrance was full up again of the same damn kobolds.

At that point i went on sabatical till the next GM rotated in, but apparently it went downhill from there judging both from what other players grumbled and from the fact that this suppositily 2 to 3 session mini-adventure turned into a 6 month campaign with a working title of The Kobold Cave That Made Baby Jesus Claw His Eyes Out.

P.S. This was not with my current group, and none of the current group was the GM in question.

[Dashifen]

:rotfl:

[Coasini]

The point of my complaint wasn't the healing times where doctors were involved, honestly. I've got a house ruling now that I'm using that I'm satisfied with.

My concern was that there was no reason whatsoever to ever visit a doctor. You healed ultra-fast on your own. I just wanted it so that people who got shot up would have to fork over some money in order to get the speedy recovery. It is the natural healing I'm concerned with, not the doctor healing.

[Dashifen]

[Coasini]

Well, I apply wound modifiers as normal (one for every 3 boxes of damage), as well as cyberware and location penalties from the healing table, to the natural healing roll. Minimum of 1 die.

Also, if they lose all of their boxes of health and are at overdamage, they get only one die to roll.

It gives enough encouragement to see a doctor or use an autodoc, who can easily get them patched up in 4-5 days, since they don't want to risk taking extra damage on rolling a 1, which would be an automatic critical glitch.

[Phantom Runner]

Ok, so after reading the Healing a First Aid rules on page 242 I realized that there were several things I didn't like about the. With a little search-fu I found the perfect thread as I see many others didn't like the rules either.

So here are some specific complaints and ideas:

Complaint 1:
Willpower + Body for Stun
Body x 2 for Physical

Ok, aside from the very obvious huge bennefit for Trolls I have a problem with this because it leaves out something that the devs specifically put in to describe a person overal health and "holistic wellbeing" -- Essence.

[Azralon]

Essence represents spiritual well-being, not physical. While this or that religion will tell you that it's your soul that heals your flesh, Shadowrun says that it's your physique (Body) and your ability to endure pain (Willpower) that gets you back on your feet faster.

Metaphysics takes a backseat role to biology in that for every 2 points of Essence lost, you lose 1 die on your healing test. So you already have your wish in that Essence directly affects how quickly you recover. It's just a 2:1 ratio of effectiveness compared to your Body attribute.

Don't sweat having trolls with tremendous bounceback capacity; it's their job to be tough. If it makes you feel better, think of them as D&D trolls with massively toned-down regeneration.

[Phantom Runner]

[Azralon]

Long-standing SR convention equates Essence with a person's spirit, soul, lifeforce, or whatever else you want to call your metaphysical "self." I won't disagree that SR4 has changed some conventions from the previous editions.

Let me ask you this, though: Why distinguish between Body and Essence at all, per your definitions?

And feel free to come up with whatever house rules or (re)interpretations you want. I'm trying to speak within the RAW (present and past).

[Azralon]

Oh, on trolls:

Each point of Body someone gets equates to .5 more Physical boxes they can withstand before dropping. Also, each point of Body someone gets equates to .66 more Physical boxes they can, on average, heal per day.

My point there is that it takes only slightly less time for a troll to fully recover from a filled Physical meter as it does an equivalent human. The troll has a much greater capacity to withstand damage, but really his healing rate isn't comparatively accelerated on a percentage basis.

Ironically enough, under SR4, First Aid and magical healing are proportionately less effective on a troll than anyone else. Proportionately.

[Phantom Runner]

[Azralon]

[Azralon]

[Phantom Runner]

[Eyeless Blond]

Huh. And here I thought it was a terrific idea to use Bod+Ess for physical healing and Will+Ess for Stun healing:

-It solves the problem of trolls rolling 18-24 dice for healing outside a hospital, but the high-Bod trolls still have a distinct advantage over ordinary humans.
-It integrates Essence into the actual healing test itself rather than adding it in after the fact.
-It makes Essence more important to healing, which I always thought it should be.

I really do hate to get all metaphysical and crap, because afterward noone believes that I'm a chemist, but even today there is documented proof that things like prayer really do increase the chances of someone surviving major illnesses and surgery. I'm not sure that all of those effects can be simply linked to willpower; maybe Essence has something to do with it?