I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think/describe in your games.

Basically what sorts of wounds qualify as deadly(that's filling up your physical damage track for you SR4ers)

Personally I consider a "deadly" wound to be one that would reasonably incapacitate someone immediatly or nearly so. It would have to be something that causes a massive amount of blood loss resulting to a drop in blood pressure leading to unconsciousness or a wound to something that hitting it causes the target to stop functining rapidly.

So for example if someone took someone else down with a single shot from a heavy pistol I would describe the shot as cracking through a sternum or tearing through a throat.

If it took them 3 shots with the pistol that added up to a deadly wound I would probably describe hits to the lungs causing both to eventually collapse(the final shot taking out the "good" lung explaining why they now go down).

In SR3, just plain Deadly for me means either class IV hemorrhage or serious damage to the CNS. The former would generally be caused in the scope of a gunfight either by a severed major artery in the torso or massive internal damage to an organ like the liver or to an area with a large amount of blood vessels, such as a shotgun wound to the abdomen. The latter might be caused by a penetrating wound of the spine or brain, but without causing irreversible damage on a wide scale.

Lots of overdamage would be severing just about all the blood flow between the heart and the brain (ie. destroyed heart or severed arteries from the aorta to the subclavians and carotids) or widespread irrepairable damage to the CNS.

Penetrating wounds of the lungs, guts, or generally anywhere in the thorax without causing massive blood loss or damage to the CNS would be Serious at most. If it doesn't physically incapacitate you and fast (ie. well within a minute), it can't be Deadly.

I would expand on what Austere Emancipator has to say to make the point that anyone having sustained such a wound is very likely still concious (at least for a little while) but is well beyond being cabable of doing anything other than screaming, flopping around in pain, or bleeding.

I used to describe the levels of wound to my players as follows:

Light Wound:
Shot through the arm, or just winged in the fleshy bits. It's painful, but not particularly bad. Can probobly be fixed with some neosporin and bandages.

Moderate Wound:
Shot to a major muscle or mild damage to an organ. Possibly a broken bone. Hurts bad, and will need some kind of medical attention, but can probobly be taken care of at a well equipped clinic.

Serious Wound:
Major arterial or veinous bleeding, sucking chest wound, shattered bone, possibly significant damage to an organ. Will require a trip to the emergency room, and most likely surgery.

Deadly:
See what Austere Emancipator said.

A few past threads that deal with this issue.

If it comes up that a player wants detailed wound descriptions, then I usually base it on what caused the wound. A stun bolt that causes a mod wound would get a different description than a GSW that caused one, etc. So it depends on the in game situation. I also don't tend to get too detailed even when I'm giving details, because frankly I'm not an ER doc and neither are my players.