First, a music video to watch while you contemplate the things set forth in this thread: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLzrRAs8fdc...feature=related

With the possible exception of Twilight 2000 I don't believe that I've ever encountered any RPG or RPG-style video game that handles injury in a fully realistic manner. It is always very quick and easy to make a full recovery from serious injuries such as gunshot wounds, stab wounds, or broken legs. This is because it's probably a fair statement that the majority of gamers would rather have their character get quickly back into the action of the game instead of leaving play due to a limb permanently lost or having to take a year off for physical therapy to get back to the level of physical ability he or she used to be at. The gaming fast track recovery can be represented by anything from Cure Light Wounds to picking up and immediately using a first aid kit with your feet in a FPS to Jagged Alliance 2's healing taking place in terms of hours or days rather than months.

At the same time, though, quick and simple recovery from injury really does end up circumventing a bunch of pretty interesting real world issues. In the first place, it kind of eliminates the idea of logistical strain created on a group of people due to needing to care for lots of wounded. So in a game or RPG that is emphasizing strategy on various levels you lose that level of logistical strategy that tracking the long term injuries of casualties could create. Secondly, it eliminates the possibility to have an interesting medical system in your game, if you're interested in that sort of thing. If long term injury were handled in a detailed and realistic manner you could determine things like whether or not a bone was damaged, whether or not infection has set in, the sorts of procedures that would be required in a certain situation to stabilize someone, and perhaps even the details of field hospital management. Perhaps these things don't necessarily appeal to the general public as a whole as much as heroic firefights do, but I must not be the only person who thinks this sort of thing could be interesting to think about in the context of a RPG.

In light of this, I'd propose the idea that more detailed or realistic injury systems in RPGs could be implemented if the gameplay changed so that instead of each player having only one character, each player would have a roster of characters ready to go, kind of like the Paranoia "six pack". The characters in the roster would all be related or somehow linked to each other such that if one of them died or had to return home either permanently or for an extended period of time due to serious injuries the next character in the lineup would step up in the first character's place. So for example if we were playing some kind of medieval campaign I might have a roster of a knight, the knight's brother, and then maybe the knight's brother's faithful squire, or something like that. As each character got taken out of action as a player I could quickly and painlessly just switch to the next character sheet. This would eliminate the problems associated with someone's one and only character being out of action for a long time upon being injured and would in so doing enable more detail devoted to injury, healing, and logistics.

I recall one video game with a detailed injury system: Deus. It came with a full medkit that you could use, realistically, to treat the damage the best you could... from bandaging to amputation including various drugs, antidotes and so on. Maybe some other (quicker) means of healing came later, but it was really hard since each battle could end up with your character being unable to do anything.

I also recall seeing a D20 handbook for realistic medieval injury and healing... The big drawback was that the D20 isn't the best to handle such things.

I can see a few problems with the pack of character: players won't get involved as much with character he know he'll loose soon and the characters will tend to be much more generic. It works in Paranoia since they're all clones (and dangerous mutant commies) anyway. There's also the problem that the replacement character might not be inserted easily, forcing the player to wait until he can join again.

I'd rather play the same character... Even if he's wounded, he'll be able to do a few things and it can be interesting to have to play a wounded/crippled character. I guess it'd totally change the way the player deals with combat. No more rushing towards that goblin horde because "the worst they can do is take a few HP, nothing a healing spell can solve.", a sudden increase in the use of missile weapons... Could be interesting.

You need to play Blue Planet and use their extended injury tables. Have you ever wanted to know if that injury busted your clavicle, created arterial bleeding, and left part of your form arm attached by a few tendons? Now you can . I think it's available in the "Files" section of the Yahoo group.

As much as I'd love to do a game with realistic injuries I'm not sure if I can integrate that as a fun mechanism outside of a group of medical fetishist such as myself. I do try and include injuries as a gameplay element when I think it adds to the experience, I just don't think I should be doing it for every combat.

I'm currently designing my own system and it has a full chapter on healing (and how much it sucks without having 2050 technology or super magic - and while the system could take such things, the default setting is either 1890 or 1980, little or no magic). I don't address physical therapy, however, but you can acquire permanent physical or mental flaws.

While I understand having a few months of downtime for healing could break the flow of the game (and clearly would mean you have to plan a lot more for your missions and are more likely to have to simply abandon unsuccessfully), it isn't something insurmountable game-wise. Ars Magica required characters regularly take of months of time to write spells, so groups would either have multiple characters, or would just have months of downtime you zoom through. But no, not great for Conan-esque scenes of simply wading through enemies.

I was thinking about the single character with time delay thing the other day.

I was thinking about how cool it would be if there were a Deus Ex style game set in the present day where the main character was supposed to go in Shadowrunner-style and influence current day events by breaking into buildings, stealing information, assassinating key people, etc. In the interests of immersion, I'd handle injury in a realistic fashion, so basically injuries would take the character out of action for months at a time after missions if he were injured. The way I'd handle that in the context of a video game is that I'd have a whole roster of missions that would take place on a certain schedule. Therefore a player who always completed each mission uninjured would have the chance to play all the missions and thereby affect the ending of the game more. A player who got injured all the time would have less opportunities to take on missions and thus would have a more modest impact on the ending of the game.

I suppose that such an approach could work even better for table top RPGs. If the player characters are going to be out of commission for X months the GM doesn't even need to have a roster of every concievable mission set up. He can just only create the ones that the players would be ready to take and on top of that the impact of the players' actions or lack thereof upon the game world would be much more nuanced.

My system is based on a game I ran with my wife, and that problem basically did come up. Things were happening and when they went on missions or did detective work to figure out WHAT exactly is going on, but she had to decide which things she would investigate (and risk injury) and which things she would let pass. Since there were a lot of red herrings, she felt it kept the world very real and exciting. Later on though she teamed up with people who had magical healing, which reduced the heal time from months to days.