Does resuscitation bring a character back from the dead? If a character has a DocWagon contract which grants a free resuscitation, and DocWagon is able to get to the character in quick fashion, can DocWagon bring the character back to life after an attack takes him of her to "dead".

-~GitM

Well, Edge burning can be used to justify damn near anything, but aside from that, dead is dead. Even if you do burn Edge, it's good for the ol' suspension of disbelief if you hand wave the whole flatlining business away rather than let the character pull a Lazarus. I'd count resuscitation as simply pulling a character out of overflow and stabilizing.

resuscitation is basically what you see on a medical drama when the heart monitor goes *beep* and half a dozen people rush in. in SR, that would basically be the same as stabilization.

That's what i consider. As a GM i'd allow it for a short time AFTER overflow is up and the character is dead(most folks can stay dead for a couple of minutes before brain death). Every minute longer and perhaps i'd give a -1 to Mental attributes each minute until THOSE are gone. I recall there were no hard or fast rules for this.

To be safe, i'd call Docwagon if someone goes down in a bad way so they get there; even better, i'd whip out the medkit and hope our runner with Biotech can stabilize them before they go.

I think the resuscitation rules in SR are a little goofy, I mean you die way too quickly for any ambulance service to work. If you don't have friends ready to stabilize you in 10-30 seconds you're dead.

In RL it can take minutes to bleed to death. On the other hand, in RL first aid usually isn't enough to recuscitate someone, just enough to keep them alive until the ambulance shows up (which is hopefully in a matter of minutes).

Different attacks cause different damage; even if it's considered 'D' damage. For instance, if you eat a point-blank PAC shot to the chest, without armor, no dodge, and the attacker gets 8 net successes, you're probably a head, legs, and arms afterward. Sorry to say but that one's going to take some work to come back on.

But it's been known that taking a nasty shot to the stomach is a painful...and slow way to go. If someone eats a D(no overflow) blast of an SMG burst or something to the gut, i'd say they aren't dead...yet. They are probably mercifully unconsious, but bleeding out. (Mr. Orange comes to mind, but i'd argue that was a-under the old rules-Serious plus some wound.) Again, SR doesn't totally copy reality, but some things should be somewhat accurate, and there's plenty of reports of a gut-shot being survived after bleeding out for awhile. They probably could survive longer than someone who had their femoral artery cut(known for bleeding someone out FAST.) However, the artery strike could be tied off, burned, or something by someone iwth the first aid skill; to me, that would mean ''Stabilized'', and they'd still need help, of course. Hell, under SR rules someone getting their hand chopped off probably wouldn't be a Deadly wound, but if you let it go you will probably bleed out.

I guess if i had to describe ''Needs Resuscitation'', it would be someone who indeed flatlined(went to the end of their overflow). But in SR rules, that's 'dead', and i don't recall where the rules are...because you can't resuscitate someone who isn't dead. You stabilize them to PREVENT the need for resuscitation. I probably missed the rule(it happens).

But yeah, FriendoftheDark, you do tend to die rather fast, regardless of the type of injury. I understand putting charts of injuries tend to clog stuff up(Wrist Artery Slash=bleed out in X time, Femoral Slash=bleed out in X time, arm cut off, etc, could get to be a pain in the ass), so im thinking it's better up to each individual GM to perhaps make the call as they see fit. That's what weve done. But i dont see a problem with slowing some of those processes. Ive seen large injury charts before and they make my head hurt.

Oh, Dork. Oops.

That actually sounds like a nice plan; it's dangerous, but people(including enemies!) still have a fighting chance when they should, but it doesn't get crazy when the trolls are taking ground zero nukes. Too much damage is too much damage, but it's surprising sometimes what people can live through(this is where the ol Edge comes into play.) And even though they take damage slower; they still need help or they WILL bleed out eventually if they don't self stabilize.

...tell me about it. Fortunately the team's mage was able to get to my character in time. Coulda used that 25,000 elsewhere too.

hmm, nothing of that kind in SR2, so unless it was introduced in some SR2 equipment book, its from SR1...

...I think maybe my college game group carried it over from 1st ed. That was almost a decade and a half ago so the memory is kind of fuzzy.

I don't specifically recall anything of that nature included in SR1 either.

I have an interesting idea for a house rule some people might want to use:
to simulate death coming rather slowly, have a character role unaugmented body to resist each point of overflow damage. Don't allow hits to be bought. High body characters would then take much longer to fill up their overflow tracks. Unfortuantely there body affects this in 3 ways [# of dice, # of overflow boxes, & ammount of time between tests] causing there to be a large gap between how fast body 1 characters would die[3-9 seconds after a deadly wound (right?)] and body 10 trolls[they need to fail 10, 10 dice tests against a threshold of 1, with an interval between tests of 30 seconds].

There are many kinds of dead, in reality, the definition of medically dead will keep changing based on the what medicine believes it has a chance of bringing someone back from.

What about leaving overflow as is but not specifying ANY particular Dead is Dead threshold? Instead, you end up with pretty much unlimited overflow representing escalating levels of self destruction and decomposition.

With existing limitations on treatment options (the once limit on first aid and magic), past a certain point, even if stabalized, they will never recover. But it leaves open crazy measures like deoxyginating their system, cooling it down to a bit above freezing and lopping their body off. Or doing a mindscan and a dump into a clone (think Hardwired).

You can still have dead is dead as the result of incontestable destruction of their brain, being projected for too long, or the result of a critical glitch on a natural healing check will in overflow. And for the most part, people will effectively hit dead long before they 'dead is dead' stages, just because heroic means aren't available.

Of course, to go along with that, you may want to have partial stabilization, where bleed out can be staged to longer durations even if you fail to stop it completely. Another option is mechanisms for pausing/slowing bleed out (which represents far more than just blood loss) via continuous mechanisms like CPR and heart lung machines, where someone isn't taking more damage, but isn't truly stable and would start taking damage again as soon as there was a break in the intervention.

is it now that someone should point to the advanced medical rules in augmentation?

I think for the GM the answer is practically any NPC can be revived in some manner if the plot desires it. If the PCs did not dispatch the NPC in some appallingly permanent manner (burn the body to ashes, put it through a meat grinder or some such) cybertechnology and biotechnology holds the potential for that character to come back.

And even if the PCs HAVE killed the NPC in some appallingly permanent manner Magic still hold the potential to bring the NPC back in some fashion, possibly as a ghost/free spirit. Heck with a combination of technology and magic it might be possible for the dead NPCs ghost to inhabit a cloned body of the original!

---

For PCs I think resurrection is more flavor text than anything else. There is no in game point where a character has died aside from reaching enough overflow boxes that they are permanently gone. (Unless of course the Hand of God is invoked). If it is important for some reason you could consider 'death' to happen when the player fills up his physical damage boxes. This could be your criteria for deciding if DocWagon charges them extra for example.

There is the interesting point that the brain cell death isn't caused directly by lack of O2, it's caused by a complex chain of events that seems like it could be interrupted. So a person could bleed out and get recovered 100% with treatment way past the point that you'd be a vegetable now.

Per some recent articles I've read over the past several months, it's not so much oxygen deprivation that kills you (though it certainly doesn't help you). It's the sudden return of oxygen to the cells that causes them to up and die en masse when you return the body to "normal" operation.

Apparently in low oxygen states, the body will suspend many of its activities in an effort to stave off death. This has a nice medical effect of allowing really dangerous surgeries to be performed with a decent time window rather than just a couple of minutes. It's why some surgeries are done with the patient's body temp lowered a few degrees (which makes the body enter into suspended animation type state).

so basically its kinda like a dehydrated man dying from to much water?
or maybe a druggie thats been trying to break, and ends up setting a to high dose as the body isnt used to it any more?

In the game I run the dying character who is brought back to life is resuscitated do to burning a permanent edge. IE: If Oppie Longnose the Street Samurai gets blasted to the negatives and his overflow passes his body attribute...call a hearse. If however he burns a permanent edge, he is stabilized at that damage box until someone offers first aid of some sort.