Is anyone using the advanced healing/surgery rules from Augmentation (or Man and Machine for that matter)? Does it bog the game down into shittyville or does it actually add a bit of gritty flavor to the experience?

I have implemented them in my gaming group, but so far no one has needed them. I like the fact of adding in damage modifiers to your healing tests. It makes it a little less cartoony. I mean really 2-3 days bed rest to heal up your entire damage track? Puhlease!!

Even those rules are a far shot away from "realistic" - but there were limits to what I could do in that chapter. It's more "action movie" medicine than real medicine.

-Frank

My game is using the surgery rules. First thing that happened when the game started was me installing Muscle Toners into one of the other players.

Generally the guy with the cyber or bio is generally the cyber monkey is the one that doesn't take the damage. If you can't treat it by using a medicine, and heal then guess what? It is intensive care time. I think that's valid.

I honestly think that healing does a lot to make the game feel less gritty. If your team has a solid magician, and first aid you can expect to heal around 6+ boxes almost effortlessly. If you have armor and dodge vaguely comparable to the opposition that means that you can take a hit or two and it isn't really a big deal.
My main issue with this is that makes it hard to sweat the players without killing them. If a hardboiled detective get's shot and can't go to the hospital because people will be looking for them, that is a bad situation. My runners just think damn I really need to get back to the medic and cure my case of "I've-been-shot-half-to-death-eitus"

I'll settle for action movie medicine when the alternative is "Magic Healing!" and/or "I Can't Believe It's Not Magic (Healing)!"™.

Our next game is a straight cyberpunk (Blue Planet) game. The removal of magical healing should go a long way towards making injuries have actual consequences. At the same time, our current group is composed primarily of medical professionals so I think we would all welcome rules that are slightly more complex than "I roll a single test and suddenly the patient with dinner plate sized exit wounds gets better in 3 days."

If you could indulge myself and my group FrankTrollman, what are some of the deeper modifications to the healing system that were cut?

It gets really fun when you add the armor degradation optional rules with the healing optional rules of wound mods affecting the healing pool.

I have one pc in my home group that can throw down 20 + dice on a healing test due to gene mod, medkit, and other stuff. It is sick. I had to do something to moderate his pool aside from the typical first aid mods.

I am using the advanced healing rules (waiving details at times when it is important that the story moves forwards)

The session previous to last a couple runners in one group fell into overflow (one of them had to burn edge), were transported to safety by a party member NPC (failing the run) and were entered in the emergency ward where the medics tried to resucitate them.

They spent a month and a half in the hospital, the first week or so in a coma and, when they woke up; they had to foot the doctor's bill. 18000 nuyen per capita.

Cheers!

Max

We use wound penalties for healing, and the severe damage rules. It does go some way to make things a bit less absurd, although the only time we've ever had a PC in hospital more than three days was when a critical glitch on a stabilisation test led to the adept/face getting paralysed and in need of gene therapy. Cue two months off work and a 120,000 nuyen bill...

I use the man and machine rules to work out surgery costs and thats about it. The rest is just to flawed for my tastes. The real difference to my game is that the two main combat characters are clocking TN's of 10 and 11 for magical healing. The addition of a Ware' fixer (yes I know what does she turn into) to their contacts has been a hidden blessing for patching themselves up.