Was pondering the various "WAAAAAHHHH" threads about SR4A, and the number crunching going on with overcasting.
In particular, I got to thinking that one of the big problems here is the way you can just heal away physical damage, making overcasting less scary than it should be.
Considered various "First aid can't heal drain" fixes, and then found myself thinking "Wait a minute, the problem here is how first aid works".
How often have you found yourself wishing a hit would exceed your armour, because you could just heal away the pysical damage?
The problem here is that first aid is based on a "make it better" mechanic, whereas the systems for dealing with stun damage just make it go away for a while. The practical realities of combat first aid are actually less about making it better, and more about stopping it getting worse.
Now, of course, for us to import that reality into Shadowrun, wounds have to get worse. Luckily, this is something a lot of people have been complaining about anyway, so we're solving a few problems with one rule here.
How do we include wound degredation without it being hideously complicated? Easy. Use the knockdown mechanic.
Any hit which deals a number of boxes of damage (after soak) equal to or greater than the target's body causes knockdown. Now we simply add to that a rule which says that if the attack dealt physical damage, the target is now bleeding.
A bleeding target takes 1 box of unresisted stun damage each round (at the start of their action on the first pass, for easy book keeping) until they are patched up.
To stop bleeding, the person doing First Aid makes a roll, needing a Threshold of 2. We'll say it takes two complex actions.
For simplicities sake, I'm going to say that additional hits causing bleeding (let's call them Serious Wounds) will not add to the rate of blood loss, but will add +1 to the First Aid threshold for each Serious Wound taken, after the first, and an extra complex action to the time taken (obviously if you want your game to be really hardcore, go ahead and have each Serious Wound add another point of stun damage per round as well, and perhaps even have the medic treat each serious wound separately).
Naturally Platelet Factories and that blood circuit thingy will no longer reduce physical damage from wounds. Instead they cause the character to stop bleeding immediately (obviously the target does actually lose some blood, but we're factoring that into the initial damage from the attack. The whole "sucking chest wound" scenario is what they prevent). This makes them work nicely as a "No first aid for me, I'm a street sam" mechanic, for all the lone soldiers out there.
Mechanics wise, we're on pretty solid ground here in terms of playability. Just add a small track next to your Stun and Physical, labelled Serious Wounds. Put a tick on the track each time you take a serious wound. It's not hard, because it happens whenever you take knockdown from physical damage.
What does this rule achieve?
- Since stun damage can be ameliorated with slap patches, it is now considerably less scary than physical damage, which has no cure during combat.
- Wounded characters now have a risk of actually dying if untreated. This deals with a lot of the problems of wounded npcs just sort of sitting around not bothered much by it.
- Since a few bandaids will no longer wish away that physical drain, overcasting becomes slightly less attractive (not a fix, but a complement to other fixes).
This does make First Aid slightly less attractive in terms of raw effect, but still no less vital. In the end, you need a few first aid kits around, because bleeding to death really sucks.
As it stands, I'm leaving magical healing as is. It's freaking magic, so it makes sense that people actually get up going "Wow, I feel so much better". Sooner or later I'll stat up a really cheap "Close Wounds" spell that just stops bleeding. As for Heal: I figure if the mage heals one box of physical damage from the wound that caused the bleeding, that bleeding stops (since magic, like all healing, treats each wound seperately). So if you've taken two serious wounds, you'd have to get healed twice before you stopped bleeding.
Obviously you could always decide to make magical healing less spectacular, by saying that it just functions as a magical version of First Aid. Whatever works for your game.
Anyway, have fun with this, or just ignore it. Whatever works for you.
