All the talk here recently about hit locations has got me to wonder if we need a decapitation mechanic. I'm a big fan of FPS video games and I always felt that a game was better if it had mangling and decapitation because that's more realistic. It's actually less believable if you shoot someone in the head with a shotgun at close range or a .50 BMG rifle and you just get some generic ragdoll physics than if you got some form of gory head removal. (Or partial head removal, which Soldier of Fortune II accomplished admirably.) After all, one prominent feature of modern warfare is how indivdiuals tend to be mangled after being shot.

Having a decapitation/mangling mechanic would remove the need for the limb loss injury tables, although I suppose you could still have a simplified roll to see if Essence is lost or not, and you could still roll for attribute loss if you wanted to.

Without a decapitaiton/mangling mechanic I, as the GM, always feel a bit like a politician when describing the results of combat. Let's say that the player character gets a lot of successes with his Ruger Warhawk and manages to inflict a D wound on the corporate goon.

It would flow wonderfully if as the GM I could just say, "You level the Warhawk, and in an exhilirating moment of Zen, exhale and align the sights all in an instant, but you see only his eye, and then his head explodes, with fragments of bone and rapidly greying chunks of pink matter flying out the exit wound in the back to smear the wall with Pollackian grotesqueness."

But you're not allowed to say that by the rules unless the player has actually caused so much over-damage to the corporate goon that his condition monitor is filled and there are extra boxes inflicted in excess of the goon's body score. The distinction is important because the scene in the above paragraph requires that the goon be dead whereas according to the rules he's not actually dead until his condition monitor is full AND he's got overflow boxes exceeding his Body score. So, even using an assault cannon, it's very difficult to actually kill someone instantly and thus very difficult to have any situations where you can describe any graphic and dramatic injury.

I feel like a politician when describing injuries because I have to describe them in such a way that keeps them consistient with what the rules consider to be dead or not, which is not just a Deadly wound. Even a Deadly wound with two extra successes behind it could just be described as, "You hit him and he immediatley slumps to the ground with blood pumping from the wound." You can't even describe shattered limbs or trailing intestines because later on when you roll on the Deadly wound table he might end up losing a limb different from the one which you described as being hit. So in a sense the rules force you to make very generic statments that cannot be ascribed to any particular part of the body.

Now, what if we have a decapitation/mangling system which is piggybacking on one of the hit location systems which is have been described on these forums? We could know where someone was hit and immediately describe the severity of the hit, which would be quite dramatic. There would also be a greater need for people to buy cyberwear based on injury through limb loss, which would even give the cyberware more of a personal backstory to it, as opposed to "I have two cyberlimbs with strength 8 which are neatly matched and purchased at the same time for no particular reason although it's obviously calculated to make me better at melee combat." Characters could come up with bona fide war stories about how they lost their bits and pieces.

Here's my thoughts on how decapitation/mangling could happen:

1.) Piggyback it on your favorite hit location system
2.) If a limb is hit with a result that amounts to a Serious wound it is considered to be disabled. Two handed weapons cannot be used, so now there's a reason for a backup pistol. I suppose a disabled leg would give TN penalties for Athletics, reduce running rate, etc.
3.) If a limb is hit with a result that amounts to a Deadly wound it's been blown off and the blood loss which is contributing to your overflow boxes represents traumatic bleeding from the stump. Obviously a blown off limb is lost for the purposes of complications from Deadly wounds. Note that if the eye or head is hit with a Deadly wound that this results in the immediate death of the character, because otherwise it wouldn't really be believable. Hand of God in such a case allows for miraculous survival like that Ranger in Mogidishu who was shot in the forehead but survived.
4.) You might consider tying attribute loses to hit locations; the Body attribute might be harmed by Deadly shots to the torso, for example.

To give an example from another system, in Cyberpunk 2020 if any limb took more than 8 damage in a single hit, it was considered effectively ruinied, and we always interpeted that as knocked off if that was appropriate to the weapon.

Actually grunts only have one damage track and no overflow boxes...at least in SR4. So if you fill all ten boxes in one shot then yes that could happen and be within the rules, as the grunt is dead then.

I just describe the shot, if it had a huge amount of damage.

Sometimes, it is a head hit, with most of the otherside of the head gone
Sometimes it is a heart hit, with the appropriate hole in the torso

If it is an automatic weapon, the description changes a bit.

If he is stabilized, gotten medical attention or been magically healed and is fully recovered - apparently he can re-enter combat without any problems. Remember that the Deadly wound triggers checks for permanent damage.

Maybe you now have a problem with the recovery rules?

Another solution, do the double tap. Attack once inflicting a wound, then make another attack, inflicting another Deadly wound in rapid succession that also fills all the overflow boxes.

Actually from some freak instances here and there and now fairly often in Iraq they're finding out that nasty head trauma can be recovered from. The kind where significant amounts of brain matter have been ejected from the skull. You just half to keep on of the two halves pretty well intact and keep the brain stem bits.

Tht would be a fun way to describe losing a point in a mental atribute, possibly quickness as well.

Anyway stuff like that is probably why they abstracted hit locations in SR4. You can be quite colorful with torso hits and it's easy to fit the rules.

If I got shot through the head and survived, I'd have them put a metal tube in through the hole so people can see right through it. Just to show how badass I am.




-karma

Actually, a human being can survive having half of his or her cerebrum removed and such a procedure is often preformed on children with certain forms of epilepsy.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_..._16/ai_53349823

What's to describe about shooting someone?

A light wound and they stagger a bit but keep going. A serious wound, they collapse in a heap, holding their wound and screaming their head off in pain. A deadly wound: they collapse in a heap, thrash around a little, maybe, until the death rattle stills them.

Sometimes you might get someone who keeps going after a serious or even deadly wound, but that would be rare. What you won't get is that stuff from the video games where they go flying all over the place. Then again, realistic descriptions of wounds tend to freak players out after a while, so maybe the game descriptions are best.

For far as limb mangling and such, that should be a risk from deadly wounds, like it was in some of the older materials. Lacking tables and all that, I would say it would be the GM's call based on what they were hit with. A close range shotgun hit or grenade blast coudl very well damage a limb so badly it would be lost. Hits froma light pistol, probably not.

1) I don't give my goons damage overflow unless I feel like it. If a guy takes a Deadly wound, the goon is dead. As the GM, you're allowed to do that, since it adds color. The only reason damage overload really exists is for PCs to have a change to keep a character when things have gone terribly wrong. It isn't really made for NPCs.

2) I determine the location the character is hit whenever I want. I wrote about this on the Hit Locations thread. Again, the PCs don't care whether the dead guard is due for a cyberlimb or an artificial liver. They just care if they hit or not. For PCs with Serious wounds, I'll roll on the 'what you lost' chart in the healing section basically right when they take the damage.

3) Yeah, with bleeding out I assume characters patch themselves up. I will warn them, when the fifteen seconds of combat are over, that they are bleeding heavily. I haven't had a character yet who didn't have what he required to patch the wound (a basic medkit) and I assume said medkits have everything required to easily stabilize a character. Beyond that I don't push it, because no one wants to play a game where a Moderate wound will basically kill you during a long run.

4) I do allow severe brain damage and decapitation for 'coup de grace' (keep in mind, by the rules, a shot like that is basically already a TN of 2, even if you don't have laser sights or anything else, so unless you're a parapalegic shooting with a derringer, you're basically guaranteed to get the guy to deadly pretty quick.)

I actually always use damage overflow with goons, since actually killing people tends to lead to more payback (you swiped a prototype and got it to the Johnson, the hit corp doesn't have a financial reason to come after you now, you kill a bunch of guards, a couple saraimen and the bosses secretary and now it's personal).

Anyway remember that when there is some overdamage the person will be dying in seconds. And not just "no heartbeat dying" they're talking about brain death. And in real life it takes a pretty dramatic wound to actually acheive that. In fact from viewing people executed by the guillotine

http://www.metaphor.dk/guillotine/Pages/30sec.html (though there is plenty of other stuff like that out in the net)

it might not even be unreasonable to have full/partial decapitations. Especially if you're willing to allow a trauma patch applied to the head stump to be an effective means of keeping someone alive (it might be, especially with nanotech and all that).

Not only does this give you a bit more free reign in decapitating goons and NPCs, but for shock value you could have some Yakuzza hitman decapitate one of the PCs with a katana or some such if he does enough damage that the PCs only have a few seconds to get the trauma patch on.

I don't know how I'd feel about a PC bringing back his fellow's head with a trauma patch over the stump, expecting the doctor to somehow be able to save it. I mean, what do I roll on the wound table?

Actually the doctor could get a new body cloned up. Maybe if you used two patches you could keep the body stable too.

That could just be an option of you ever roll for int loss or those kind of results if you're using the tables.

For people in SR4 or not using tables I'd say it's within the bounds of GM licence. I mean you should somehow describe a wound traumatic enough to cause brain death in a matter of seconds in left untreated by impressive efforts. A couple rounds to the lungs aren't going to do that. You'd need organs spilling out or something like that.

With modern medicine those things are all fixable. Probably even with medkits, definitly with a trauma room, and I'd rule them stabalizable with a trauma patch (which it really does make more sense to apply to the arteries in the head as opposed to or in addition to the heart.)

The technology to keep brains alive in jars does exist in Shadowrun. It is canon, it just isn't common.
If you have a brain-jar on hand, decapitation should be survivable. However, it is important to understand that brain-jars are plot devices not standard shadowrunner equipment. They're for guys like Hitler.

A brain in a jar thing is different. That is for keeping someone awake and fuctioning. I think the idea behind a trauma patch is that it pumps the tissues full of something that keeps them oxygenated and alive for a while despite total blood loss (since is you've been ripped up bad enough to need one you've probably bled out before you have to be in a hospital).

Blood loss would be the real problem with decapitation. Within 4 minutes without oxygenated blood, the brain will die. The only way I could really see around that would be a Stabilize spell and then maybe. The machinery to keep a severed head alive would be very rare indeed and so the characters probably would not be able to find one in time.

A trauma patch is probably a cocktail of anticoagulants, pain killers and drugs to slow the metabolism to help the victim last longer. It probably doesn't have an oxygenation content because that would be fairly high volume.

There's a piece of cyber I always wanted to introduce in one of my games: emergency life support receptacles.

You put valves and shunts on the major blood vessels in the neck. (connected to emergency shutoff valves in any minor ones, to prevent blood loss) The shunts don't protrude outside the body, but are buried under the skin - you can tell where the openings are either by using a medical scanner of some kind, or because of tatooed markings. (customer's choice) The shunts are designed so that, if someone is bleeding to death or their heart has stopped, you simply take a canister containing a high-performance blood substitute, unroll a couple of needle-tipped tubes connected to it, stick the needles into the neck in the marked areas (they're flexible and are funneled into the right spot by the implants, so you don't need to worry about the angle - just stick them straight into the right 1/2" wide ciricle of skin), have them lock in place, turn on the pump to get the fluid moving, and keep the brain alive.

Alternately, you could have a bulky but flexible collar containing the pump, the injectors and a reservoir of the blood substitute, snap it around someone's neck after making sure the "this side OUT" decal is outside, and hit the "run" button to have it do the same thing as described above.

Or even implant the whole thing permanently, if a metahuman body could hold it.

I believe I have that cyber in my CP2020 'conversion' list! I was going to put it in my next post

As a short response to the question in the title: No, we do not "need" it. If anyone wants one, they're free to add it. However, any mechanic for the removal of an individual's head, especially if its in any way random, will eventually be used against the players. And players are not going to be happy when you kill their characters on some random dice roll. Which means that either you let them die and cackle maniacally as their heads explode, or you fudge the dice rolls so that it never happens to them, which is, IMHO, cheating. Your players do enough of that on their own behalf, you don't need to help em.

All in all, no need. Massive damage can just be described as "your head explodes." Hell, you hit em with a sniper rifle with a called shot at +4 DV, or also a long burst, it's fairly easy to fill both their physical and overflow tracks. This is perma-death, and can easily be described as a headshot.

trauma patches must be applied over the wounded character's heart. so you couldn't patch a severed head regardless.

I didn't include the decentralized heart (since I didn't think it made sense in SR where we have no location damage rules). If you really, really love it and ask me nice enough, I'll reconsider it though!

Well I feel a need to chime in and agree that I really don't want to see a decapitation mechanic (If I really want to describe some random goon as having their head shot clean off by your hand-cannon then by the Gods, I'll do so reguardless of what the rules say.) and to add that although you are of course free to do whatever you want in your games, but I try to keep away from pretty much anything 'inspired' by FPSers.