Hello all. If the answer is in the book please just point me to it, but I haven't found it yet.

As a GM I can foresee certain situations where the PCs are wounded, not near medical aid, the spellcaster with all the healing spells is unconscious/dead, and they're bleeding out. While their wounds don't represent a full Physical Condition Monitor it's obvious they're in trouble.

How would you handle that? Perhaps a Body test to see how many more boxes to add to their Condition Monitor over a certain time period? Leave it purely to the GM to state after 30 minutes they have to check another box? Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

I was thinking of handling this with an awfully complicated wound/healing rules but most of the time, I just do it on the fly, depending on the wound the PC received and what he's trying to do.

I had great fun when a PC who had been seriously hit in the arm decided to shoot his super warhawk stating that "it's ok, that's only -3 dice !". He has a new arm now.

For the complicated rules, it goes like this :
the negative dice pool modifier applies to general actions, but a specific modifier applies to action made with the concerned limb. For example, a PC who got 5 boxes of damage in the left arm will have a -1 modifier to all his action but a -3 to the actions made with the left arm.

Each "set of wound" of more than 3 cases requires a body+first aid (number of boxes/3 round down) check. Straining the damaged limb lead to negative modifiers, nursing it add positive modifiers. If the PC fails, add 1 box of damage per missing hit. If the PC succeed with 2 net hits or more, the bleeding stops. Using first aid also stops the bleeding.

I haven't tried it much, so it might suck. It also requires more dice rolls and that's not a really good thing either.

Since SR's damage is abstract, and the rate you bleed out really depends on your wound, it's really up to the GM to make an on the spot call for whatever is dramatically appropriate. If it was my game, I would start adding a box of stun damage every few minutes as the character feels weak and woozy. Eventually they'll pass out, and die.

Doesn't the continual increase in penalty already reflect this?

first, lemme talk about what rules you shouldn't try to use. you shouldn't try to use periodic damage, because everyone will forget about it. you, as GM, have too much on your plate as it is to remember to roll for extra damage every round or two. your players won't remember because it's a negative effect, and people tend to have trouble remembering things that are bad for them.

the solution i would use involves reworking the damage system somewhat. i'm going to speak in general terms because this solution can be applied to lots of different games.

basically, cut the amount of health characters have in half. you can do this by doubling the amount of damage weapons do, or actually halving the amount of health. next, change what it means to have 0 health: rather than being dead, 0 health means you're seriously hurt and are going to be rendered incapable of acting by your wounds.

characters at 0 health can make some sort of toughness/willpower/whatever roll every round in order to keep acting, fighting on despite their wounds. at 0 health, this roll should be pretty easy. the more health you lose, the harder the roll should be. fail a roll, and you pass out/curl up and hide/whatever.

et voila. players will remember the roll because if they don't roll, they can't act at all. you don't have to track continuing damage, but you still get 'ongoing' effects because you're always in danger of being incapacitated by your wounds.

not as simple as just knocking off boxes or hp down to 0, but it a) makes okay real-world sense, and b) is easier to track than continuing damage.

I generally avoid the issue because generally speaking somebody should have a medkit or something similar which would be capable of clotting wounds that are less then outright deadly (if their heart just had a round go through it they're going to need pickling by a trauma patch).

I mean I work around some biomed people and in addition to the nifty endoscopic cauterizers we have today they're working on speedy plasma cauterizers and protean nanopowder coagulation type things. By 2070 even those should be outdated and preventing someone from bleeding out is likely similar to spraying the wound down with WD40.

If you want to add flavor make sure that players know they at least need to carry coagulation stuff on them. Then you only need bleed out rules in very special circumstances.

There are rules rather close to bleeding rule in the BBB. Though it only really applies when you take enough damage to knock you unconscious.

But similar rules could apply, say on a glitch during damage resistance tests. Which happens more often than you might think. At that point, you can do various injury effects like broken limbs, serious concussions, excessive bleeding(one additional box every Body rounds or passes, dunno if I'd have it be stun or physical), and so on. Or you could roll body and armor separately to increase the likelihood of injury effects. You can also more easily apply effects to armor in this way, reducing effectiveness on a glitch and outright destroying it on critical glitches.

I'd hate to see what happens on a critical glitch with body though...

I don't use this for various reasons, but I can easily see why someone would want to.