It seems like SR4's damage overflow rules are a bit harsh - losing one wound level every [Body] turns and having [Body] points of overflow basically means that someone lasts [Body] x [Body] turns from 'dying' to 'dead', or [Body] x [Body] x 3 seconds. I know people sustain fatal-if-untreated injuries a LOT more often than that, and manage to last quite a bit longer before receiving treatment.

Any ideas?

Shrug. And some people instantly die when dealt a lethal wound, without hanging around 'in overflow' at all. Since combat doesn't last all that long, the whole thing doesn't seem to be a problem, at least to me. It isn't all that difficult to stabilize someone to stop them from dying due to overflow damage, even in the heat of battle.

i think one problem is that many "deadly if untreated" wounds are stuff could probably register as a couple of boxes under max.

but sr rules have never really had anything on non-maxed damage being dangerous in the long run.

thing is that we humans have a habit of going into shock more often then the sr rules allow for. but there is no hard and fast "this is how long anyone will last with wound type x". sometimes it just takes the brain a very long time to get the message, and will keep the body going well beyond what one would expect.

Combat, bleeding, and first aid are incredibly short in duration under Shadowrun rules. It's a fundamental problem with setting the combat round length to the minimum times people achieve. So in the real world you can shoot four people with a semi automatic pistol in 3 seconds. In actual firefights, this basically never happens, but it is possible. So the game sets that as the standard time frame, and then everything takes an unrealistically short amount of time.

-Frank

I think Fortune hit the nail here. If it took a more realistic amount of time to die then that would effectively be infinite time in SR combat terms because a combat round is so short.

But you do track time out of combat as well... if "stabilisation" took the bleed interval out to minutes and the First Aid check to stop it completely had an interval of minutes, you'd still have the HTRT inbound.

I'd have to say it depends...

If you filled your track from one rifle shot that destroyed your aorta just above or below the heart, 27 seconds is rather optimistic.

Major internal bleeding seems to take a little longer, and several nasty flesh wounds longer still.

And of course, with a shot to the brain stem, 27 sec is about 27 sec too long.

So, it depends...

No, those are examples of Dead Right There. There is no treatment or stabilization possible from having you brain blown apart or your heart destroyed.

basically a wound that fills your track and your overflow in one go...

I like this idea, make it Body x Body minutes per box, and Stabilization takes 1 minute (it currently 1 combat turn right?). Perhaps even go another step, and first aid / healing takes 1 minute per box.

This would definatly add a very lethal feel to the game, and you would probably end up with downed runners being left behind. Since taking 10 minutes to get the person up and mobile is quite a significant amount of time. I love it.

And even so, the cause of death by anything less than actual brain damage, can, in theory, be delayed by making sure the brain receives enough oxygen and whatever else it needs.

Perhaps by slapping on a trauma collar or a batch of special nanites, or something.

The rest of the body can "keep" for much longer. Especially when the technology available allows pretty fundamental replacements of not only damaged parts, but destroyed parts too.

My basic rule of thumb is, if you "bleed out", you can burn an edge point and stay alive but you're hospitalized. But if you take a shotgun blast to the chest that goes three to five points into the "gray zone" (post-overflow damage) automatically you're toast.

Use cover, fools!

Harsh. Edge points burnt like that should save your ass. It's what they're for. If the damage would have killed you stone dead on the spot, you just "somehow" took less damage than that and hey presto, your teamies get to stabilise you and haul your dead weight out so you can't be forced to rat on them.

But yes, cover is your friend.

Someone could go from unconscious to dead in 27 seconds, give or take, if an artery were opened and bleeding were not controlled.

On this note there's one rule that a lot of people seem to ignore in my limited experience that is somewhat relevant here.

If you want to stand up while wounded you need to make a
Body +Willpower (2), and wound modifiers play into that.

Also if you take (body) boxes of damage or more at once you automatically fall down.


So when a regular corp guard takes 6 boxes of damage they will be thrown to the ground and will tend to lie there and call to mama.

Personally, for the system to make sense a "deadly" wound is one that puts you down immediately, because that's the game effect. So either it's something like a round that glances the spine or a major central artery or you just rule that a number of lesser shots have caused the person to go into shock. Those things could cause you to bleed out fast (and shock can just kill you). Personally I'd rather the time were longer or maybe more random.

hmm, i admit, those two elements had slipped my mind

I heartily approve of this, and will be shamelessly stealing it for my games.



This also is overlooked, and important. Another important thing to remember is that glitches on damage resistance tests matter, folks.

Perhaps by applying a Trauma Patch or using a MedKit, pretty much as it is done in SR4.

If RAW, what page?

If damage taken exceeds your body, you are knocked down.

Also, I do agree bleeding out times are far to quick. Hits that are instant-kills are those that do enough damage to exceed the target's overflow in a single hit - has nothing to do with bleeding times.

I propose a house rule:
When in Physical Damage Overflow, you take an additional box of damage every Body minutes (or Body x 5).
Severe Wounds optional rule - Augmentation: Add the possibility of hitting an artery or other rapid-death location. If hit, reduce bleeding time to an additional box of damage every Body combat turns (RAW times).
Increase stabilization & healing with First Aid to minutes (or minutes x 5). This time can be reduced to combat turns by taking a -4 (or more) penalty to your test.

I actually run the game that if you bled out from overflow(brainstem shots, heads or hearts exploding naturally don't go here), you STILL had a chance with resuscitation. But i play it that you get around 2 minutes past your last overflow box going if you want the best chance at being zapped back(i mean, you need a defibulator or someone with a goddamned high medical skill doing CPR.). You get the natural Body roll(i have to figure an SR4 Threshold, this was SR3), Edge could help(or, well, you probably could just blow the edge point. but if you have 0 at the moment...), and you'll be in the ICU for awhile and in pretty damned crappy shape, but I believe you could get someone back from a flatline(people do it in real life.)

Over 2 minutes though, we ruled it was possible-with severe minuses-and mental problems, like lowered mental attributes and mental flaws, signifying the braindamage that would happen. After 5 minutes, it was a nogo.

It's a barely used rule, to be honest. And i mean i think we saw it used ONCE in our time of playing. Usually, the people either take such spectacular damage they are a crater in the ground or they are stabilized via spell or some item before they bleed out(or, again, the blow the Edge nowadays).

I have used this house rule already. It means first aid is a thing done outside combat, which is just fine by me. Combined with the damage rules from Augmentation you can still bleed to death in seconds if you take bad enough damage and fail your edge roll (i.e. out of luck).

That just warms my heart.

I love my 7 body on my orc.

First question already answerd (137)

As to the second



It can be fun to use the supressive fire rules against a swarm of goons and watch them splay all over the ground.

What's RAW again?

Rules as written.

Aha! Thanks. One of these days, someone should make a sticky with all the acronyms and jargon used around here.

Bite your tongue, then all the Newbs would understand us and we wouldn't be l33t anymore.

Pah, I say.

When my father hunted grizzly bear in Alaska, he found himself just under 200 yards from a 8 foot tall, 8 foot armspan grizzly, while armed with a .338 Win Mag bolt-action rifle that SR4 would likely classify as one of the high-DV "sport rifles." He aimed his shot into the armpit of the animal from the side, and fired. His hunting partner and spotter immediately told him to "keep shooting keep shooting keep shooting..."

He ran through the 4 other rounds he had in the rifle, and hand-chambered and fired two more before the grizzly fell about 60 yards from him, dead. Grizzlies can move over 30 miles an hour... those seven shots were fired in under 15 seconds.

While they were skinning and taking the meat from the bear, my father (a vascular surgeon by trade) examined the internal organs to figure out why his first shot hadn't killed the animal... and found, in fact, that it had.

The six rounds he fired after that first, while they struck and did noticeable amounts of damage, didn't hit it in places that would kill in a short period of time. That first shot entered exactly where he'd put it, under the armpit from the side, went between two ribs, fragmented, and shredded the top of both lungs, the heart, and most of the upper aortic artery, essentially destroying the bear's ability to feed fresh oxygen to it's blood, and to pump blood to it's body and brain. Despite essentially having it's entire cardiovascular system shut down, the bear was able to rush over a hundred yards towards it's attacker before shock and/or brain hypoxia caught up with it, and it died.

Shadowrun 4's damage system is abstracted from reality, but pretty functional in a gameplay environment. Major hemorrhages (like those associated with massive trauma to the femoral or carotid arteries) can be fatal in very short order in the field, but proper application of hemorrhage control and IV fluids can stabilize these injuries so that a patient can make it to the hospital, and hopefully survive the day... one possible interpretation of the Hand of God rule. A wound doesn't have to be immediately lethal (grey matter all over the parking lot, for example) to kill you in very, very short order... patients who manage to get a dissected aorta during a rollover car accident promptly dump a lethal amount of their blood into their thoracic cavity and die. It's not instantaneous, by any means... but when your heart is pumping directly into a large, useless space, unconciousness and death are only seconds or minutes away.

an interesting development in first response medicine is that doctors are finding that the sudden jolt from a defibulator is just as likely to kill you as it is to save you. its much easier to put someone on ice, and slowly work thier heart back into motion later. in less than a decade we should start to see EMTs running around with cryo-injectors instead of AEDs. in shadowrun, i'd suspect that technology would have progressed enough that a single shot could inject a quick hibernation & nanostabilizer mix into the wounded person, and with a little bit of first aid (plug up major wounds, CPR) all but instantly fatal wounds could be survivable.

Shrike30 wins this thread.

In response to Shrike, on a subject related to his post & unrelated to this thread:

The US changed it's standard issue firearms for a higher caliber because of the Filipino warriors (users and creators of Arnis De Mano, Kali, Escrima, etc). I forget which war. The lower caliber weapons were sufficient to kill the warriors before they reached the soldiers, but not capable of stopping the warrior from reaching the soldier and killing him as well, despite already being dead. The higher caliber was selected for it's ability to knock a target down, stopping the charge.

i suspect either option is built into the medikit of 2070

That was the plan. I'm told that it didn't really help much, as the .45 wasn't really that much more effective than the .38 in stopping drug crazed fanatics. But that isn't want the mythology says and all...

And the physics behind "knock down" are clearly not there. If you can shoot the gun without getting knocked on your ass how is it going to knock down someone? Particularly if they are rushing you. It's all doing enough damage that you convince their body to shut down or otherwise convincing their mind that they need to stop attacking you.

Pistols of any reasonable caliber are really pretty ineffectual tools for personal self-defense, but they are much more convenient to carry around when you are not expecting a fight than a 12 gauge pump shotgun.

never mind...

"A pistol is what you use to fight your way back to the rifle you never should have left in the first place" as the saying goes...

Daier Mune: Where did you read about this? It doesn't seem to me that AEDs are going anywhere any time soon, but I'm curious.

And Shrike30 did a great job explaining sudden traumatic death. The only think I would add is the idea of decompensation. The body has some pretty amazing mechanisms to compensate for loss of blood, hypoxia, etc. but usually when people die suddenly from trauma its because those mechanisms either cease to function (decompensation) or actively contribute to the cause of death (like when your heart beats harder and faster while pumping blood into the pericardium in cardiac tamponade- just causes the pressure to build faster leading to death).

y'know, i'm not certain where i read about that now. i want to say that i read it in a Discovery, or some other science journal. it was at least a year ago.