The accidental death scenario is one reason to vary the Damage code randomly.

Another is the idea of wound shock and how unpredictable it is.

And using the variable Damage Code, a shooter's skill is still a factor because no matter the target's reaction to the wound, additional sucesses stage the damage normally.

And if you allow Dodge rules, it still becomes a contested matter of "who has the most successes".

-Siege

Like I said, it was just an idea and probably a bad one at that. I tried to think of a way to get around staging and whatnot but nothing really came.

Also, chances are you aren't shooting at anyone who has a skill less than 4 in their weapon so it would basically be highly skilled vs highly skilled.

If you've got a skill of 2 in your weapon and you're fighting the professional, you deserve to get your ass kicked on the basis of abject stupidity. You'd find out after he shoots you whether or not you can "take him" so if you're dumb enough to not run away well, it ain't gonna be pretty.

I also thought of something where it was a flat bonus, or perhaps even striated.

For example: Like you said, keep the dice rolls only don't totally forget about skill level. Just have act like a step function.

Skill 1 - 2 = +1D3 Power, +1D3 DL
Skill 3 - 4 = +2D3 power, +1D3 DL
Skill 5 - 6 = +2D3 power, +2D2 DL
Skill 7 - 8 = +3D2 power,, +2D2 DL
Skill 9 - 10 = +3D2 power, +3D2 DL
Skill 11 - 12 = +3D3 power, + 3D2 DL

Doesn't really work with the present system as it stands, but it would with my suggestion of increasing the life bar to add another DL into it.

Glancing, Light, Moderate, Serious, Deadly.

Maybe add a second to the mix, (G)lancing, (L)ight, (M)oderate, (S)erious, (T)erminal, (D)eadly

Gives you more breathing room. Say you double the Life bar to 20.

Perhaps something like:

Glancing (Grazed on the life bar) = 1 box
Light = 3 boxes
Moderate = 6 boxes
Serious = 12 boxes
Terminal = 15 boxes
Deadly = 20 boxes

This would give you more breathing room for caps placed on DL, and allow you to toy with base DL to make light pistols worthwhile.

I dunno. Its seriously re-tooling the system and this is all off the top of my head for the most part.

you know what would make the system realistic? bleeding rules. very few people die of a gunshot wound within three seconds of being shot--they die because a minute later, they've bled out their entire blood supply. random wound and power levels don't make sense, within the system; bleeding rules would.

Other than physiological and psychological shock (which probably shouldn't cause a lot of Deadly wounds), you've got the fact that there are several spots near the center of the chest of an adult human where a 0.5" hole won't be lethal, or even incapacitating, while the same hole 1" to one side would lead to death in 20 seconds or even immediate incapacitation in case of spinal injuries.

No matter how good a shot, you can't reliably get the human aorta and spine with one shot, but even the most incompetent shooter just might.

That might be something to consider but it would be awfully complicated. The question is "is this really fun?" if "yes" then go for it. If "no" it might not be worth the effort.

It makes sense to bleed to death, but you have to hit an artery. Vein just doesn't have the pressure.

Also, you'd need bleeding rates for all the damage levels, rates for hitting veins, arteries, organs, tissues, muscles, etc, etc.

You'd also need to figure out how this is is affecting the ease of use for the systems you hit.

Let's not forget bullet types and 'over-pentrating' like Raygun's site (I think) discusses.

Take a lot of work and would bog things down. Depends if you want totally realistic or not.

Frankly I think it would be something to apply after the gunfight if no medical treatment is available or what have you. Stopping blood-flow is laughably easy, but if you don't know how, and no one around you knows how, and the doc-wagon isn't able to get to you due to legality issues (IE: you're inside a corporate tower) well...blah.

What about magic? You'd have to figure it out for magic too. Surely there are spells to compress your arteries, or cause an embolism to move to your lung/heart and what have you.

However, you can be shot and rendered incapacitated.

While you're still technically alive, you can't do jack and happen to be bleeding out pdq.

Any major artery hit will do that - s'why I always giggle when someone walks away with a thigh hit in a movie. Femoral artery, anyone?

A fast rule would be: upon receiving a "Deadly" wound, the character remains alive for Body in minutes, although incapacitated. For every two additional successes past "Deadly", reduce the time by 1 minute.

Of course, this would require progressive worsening of injuries rules - if you get hit with a Serious or Moderate, you won't be doing much of anything and the would will get worse on it's own without treatment.

Wow, we're just making all sorts of complicated today.

-Siege

Edit: Stopping bleeding can be easy, or not - depending on the nature of the wound and the amount of mess it made.

I still think basing the random damage on skill level is a bad idea, very bad, no matter how you do it. Like I said, a skilled shooter won't do more damage unless he actually hits better, and that's represented by rolling more successes.

Random wound levels do make sense, even within the system, because of the above. A person can just get lucky and kill someone immediately by accident with a 9mm pistol -- I would like for the rules to allow that. I did not implement such a thing myself (yet), because I couldn't think of an realistic, simple and logical way of doing so.

Guess what I scribbled at work today, mfb?

BLEEDING

Self-stabilize: BOD vs TN=4/5/6/12, single success stabilizes, that wound will not bleed. If a new wound is not self-stabilized, the rate of bleeding is based on the new wound level only.

Rate of bleeding:
L = BOD x 60 min
M = BOD x 20 min
S = BOD x 5 min
D = BOD x 1 CT

This probably looks a lot like something that was discussed in one of Arethusa's threads some time ago. Other things I worked on were Sudden Shock (for which I've probably done better house rules earlier in some thread), Ignoring Pain, a new way of ruling when unconsciousness occurs, and the new method of calculating damage caused by attacks and the staging to go with it that I already mentioned.

Worst comes to worst and you make a turniquette out of a rod and your shirt. Lose the limb, save the life.

Most times applying pressure to the artery and elevating will stop the flow of blood long enough for your platelets to work their magic (and it really is magic. I learned how complex blood clotting is in Anatomy and Physiology. Its so complex itsa winder it works at all my teacher said. ) so you don't become ghoul food.

...or, you could simply apply the concept of staging to the bleeding rules, and skip all the medical nonsense. it's not like we sit down and figure out which bones might have been broken every time someone takes a hit; why would we apply that level of detail to bleeding?

and, yes, the most incompetent shooter just might, but the extreme likelihood is that he'll miss completely. the level of detail required to model such extremes of possibility aren't generally worth the returns.

edit: yes, that could also work, austere.

Just because you're introducing bleeding doesn't mean you suddenly have to know whether you hit an artery or not. That's silly. You can do bleeding in an abstract manner, such as the figures above. The rest is up to the GM (or the players, depending on style of play) to describe in a realistic and/or entertaining manner.

A Deadly + 1 Over-Deadly that is not self-stabilized might tear open several arteries leading to the lower body in the lower chest. A non-stabilized Serious might be an air-chest and significant bleeding through lesser veins. The "bleeding" from a Light wound might actually be more about infection than loss of blood.

indeed. maybe we could call it 'continuing damage' or something, just for the sake of clarity?

another thing is, armor could be made more useful. maybe something along the lines of adding the armor value to your body for the purpose of determing the time factor of the bleeding/continuing damage?

bah, you post too fast. edited my post above with a new idea.

Infections take hours to work themselves into the body and days to cause a ruckus. You'll probably get infected damn near immediately, but whether it turns into an infection or not depends on your immune system.

Seen it before? memory cells will notify the killer T cells and eat it right up. Variant? Depends. Similar enough to what's on file and it might be stoppable and never really turn into anything major.

Your body takes a week or so to manufacture a defense against something totally new if memory serves me right, so if you're able to beat it off, you're good to go. Its when your body fails to do this that we have a problem.

Bottom line is infection really isn't a factor unless its one of those really nasty biological plagues manufactured in a lab to instantly afflict the user.

Common cold may be bad ass, but its not that strong.

[edit] To mfb on the subject of armor [/edit]

Isn't that technically already in place? Armor makes it easier to resist the damaginge effect of the weapon, so the secondary effect of reducing the bleeding factor is evident.

You get shot with a shotgun. Serious wound. Armor made it possible for you to take a moderate wound. Your armor has already acted like a factor in bleeding by stopping enough of the punch to make it less traumatic.

The .45 flesh wound, eh?

I realize I'm expecting too much of the SR mechanic to adequately reflect all possible scenarios - and I'm sure the gun control advocates are happy that childhood-related fatalities have gone down in 2063.

-Siege

No, not really. Self-stabilizing is ENTIRELY different from clotting, which would be stabilization. I had an explanation but I decided it was too boring and sciency to interest anyone.

My disagreement is really the term your using and the # of rolls made and at what TN.

Self-stabilization is a crappy, generic term. Call it clotting because that's what stops bleeding. Fighting off disease is different and need a term for it. I'm too lazy to go look one up and can't remember any off the top of my head.

TN to clot is a lot easier than it will be to fight an infection, of course not a lot of pathogens will be terribly deadly anyways.

I don't like the way your clotting TNs suggest how they'd work. Sure it makes sense to be harder to clot a deadly wound than a light, but the difficult doesn't change THAT much. That's more like if you tried to do it all in one go, which the body doesn't have to do.

A better way would be to keep track of the total number of different wounds incurred and clot off of that.

For example. You take 3 moderates and a light. You go into deadly. You would then have to clot 3 moderates and a light. Instead of rolling that shitty TN of 12, you'd roll 5, 5, 5 and 4. Not bad at all.

The body will probably realize in short order that it doesn't have the ability to clot everything. It'll probably clot the most life threatening first and the easiest last.

You could probably just say your body can clot (body) boxes in damage before it has to spend some time manufacturing new platelets. Probably a combat turn per box or whatever.

I only know a bit above the basics and blood clotting is MASSIVELY COMPLICATED soooo yeah. I suggest you simply clot each incurred wound. This also applies to over deadly. Took 2 serious wounds? Roll to clot two serious wounds.

I would say if you fail the initial clotting check to plug it, you'd look at the successes and compare it to the lower level wounds.

Say the TN is 6. I roll 4 body and get 4, 4, 3, 2. I would clot a light wound, taking away a box, and turning that into a moderate wound for when I try to clot it again in a short while.

This could all be horrendously wrong, but I know a TN of 12 isn't right period. Not unless you took an assault cannon to the chest and sustained that deadly damage in one shot.

Yeah well, emphasis on boring. I got like, 1/2 way through and then decided it was rather unnecessary to boot.

three M's and and L means you've been shot three times and stabbed once. sure, there are some people who can survive that, but most people are going to bleed to death from that kind of damage. i think TN 12 is about right.

TN 12 is not right. You didn't take A SINGLE DEADLY WOUND. You took THREE MODERATES AND A LIGHT. YOU HAVE TO HEAL THREE MODERATES AND A LIGHT.

See the point? Its a helluva lot easier to repair 3 bullet holes and a stabwound than it is to stop the bleeding from the 3x3 hole through your chest caused by the deadly wound from that fraggin' missile.

Your body isn't repairing everything at once, it will repair what it can handle, and just because it can't do it in the span of a few seconds doesn't mean it can't ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever do it.

Is that any clearer?

Actually for SR it's not. You have a wound level that determines your wound. When healing it's the would level that determines time. The actual whatever made up that would level is more or less irrelevant.

Actually it does make sense because there are no canon rules to cover this.

I'm not disputing total healing time. I'm explaining that the initial clotting so you don't bleed to death isn't really a function of total damage level, rather than what comprises it.

It would also make more sense to you I think if you did this everytime you got wounded. This way you would never have to clot for anything more than you were just hit for.

Just assume that the body will start clotting the instant puncture is achieved (which happens IRL) and finish that job first unless something life-threatening happens, at which point it would probably drop that and try to patch up the other wound.

"life-threatening" meaning you got pushed to deadly.

If you're under that much pressure to resist damage incurred to your body well, chances are none of this will matter because you're probably dead meat anyways.

A Deadly Wound has to be lethal for the average adult human in 30 seconds. This means hemorrhaging on a scale which is only possible if you rip open one (or more) of the large arteries in the thorax, AFAIK. The likelihood of one of those clotting over within those 30 seconds seems almost nonexistant to me.

A Deadly Wound does not have to be a huge hole. A puny .22LR can tear a 1cm hole in the aorta, which will probably kill you in short order. 6 successes with an 8M Assault Rifle could take out both the brachiocephalic and (right) subclavian arteries, and anything within 2" of where those branch.

I do agree, however, that it would make more sense to roll and calculate the Bleeding one wound at a time, not based on the total wound level. Any problems here arise from the way SR handles damage to begin with. If the GM decides to start keeping track of single wounds, there's no trouble.

I don't get your problem with the terminology. But it goes to explain why there are so many silly, even more generic terms in RPGs. Let's go with mfb's Continuous Damage and Stopping Continuous Damage By Yourself, then. Better?

i don't think you caught that, cursedsoul. you've been shot three times, and also stabbed. that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to take longer to clot, but it does mean that you're probably going to die before your body has a chance to start the clotting process. it's a pain in the neck to track individual wounds, and it's also easily possible that your various wounds are complicating each other, so it makes more sense to just stack them all together for purposes of continuing damage than it does to keep track of every nick and scratch you take.

Do you know when clotting actually starts IRL? IMMEDIATELY. Just puncture occurs the body begins clotting. Its seriously that god damn fast.

And how is it a pain in the neck to track individual wounds? Seriously, explain this to me. Can't you simply make a mark above the line in pencil checking off the wounds you've incurred?

Example: Billy Bob gets stabbed 3 times for a light wound every time and shot once for a moderate.

Paul Player marks off above Light on the monitor 3 times, and once for moderate.

It would be that simple. If you don't want to wear a hole in the paper over time, just get like, a coin and stack'em. Piece of paper, a dice, whatever you want.

As for complications? That's probably not going to happen unless they're all in the same general area. "Chest" doesn't really cut it but if you were the GM and wanted to rule that all chest wounds complicate each other I'd probably buy it.

External bleeding isn't the problem. Its the internal that'll kill you. You can band-aid that stab-wound, you can't band-aid your stomach.

I think we're all forgetting what these wound levels tend to represent too. Its not "I got hit with a serious wound, resist" its "I got hit with a serious wound AFTER I resisted"

So if I take a light wound that means they missed organs, arteries, etc, etc. All I got was dinged. Not all that hard to fix that.

Took a moderate? That needs to be controlled fairly soon, but its still not a HUGE deal. You may have taken damage to an artery, a cluster of veins, whatever you want to attribute "moderate" to.

Took a Serious? That's when the shit's hit the fan. If after you resist the attack you STILL take a serious you have just taken a large amount of damage to at least one key organ and the wound itself has caused a shitload of other problems to boot. Your so called complications.

Moderate wound ain't complicating much of anything. Anything ABOVE that and YES, complications are in order BUT THATS WHAT THE WOUND LEVEL INDICATES. At least to me.

Deadly means you just took so much trauma your brain overloads and you pass out, falling into comatose land. Your body might be able to fix itself in time if the danger of bleeding out is taken care of, but like I said. IF YOU TAKE A DEADLY WOUND YOURE PROBABLY SCREWED ANYWAYS.

I'm talking physical, not stun by the way just to make 100% sure. A stun wound will cause bruising (bleeding that's under the skin and clotted there as well), swelling (dialation of blood vessels and stuff like pain receptors in the area, as well as increased blood flow bringing platelets to the scene of the damage) and whatnot.

Take enough of that and you'll die, hence getting beat to death.

I don't know if you can really apply bleeding rules to stun damage. Its internal bleeding, but its controlled and limited to the area the damage was incurred at so...yeah.

I already keep a pretty good track of the individual wounds the PCs and important NPCs receive in combat, it's not a problem for me. But most SR players do seem to hate the idea of adding any complication to the combat rules. Realism is certainly not a valid reason to add such complication for about 99% of people on this forum. Thus you have to be very careful, and I remembered from several earlier threads that suggesting people to keep track of individual wounds is not a good idea around here.

by "dinged" I was kind of hoping you'd understand that what I meant was basically along the lines of what you described, you're hit, you're bleeding, it ain't gonna kill you unless you're a total idiot and don't treat it.

You can die of a papercut. Any breech of your body's defenses can be life-threatening. Chances are the papercut isn't going to do much more than make you go "ow! Dammit!" and that's it, but you never know.

And you have to remember the scope of this conversation. To MY understanding we're talking immediately following the cut and like, the next 5 or 10 minutes after that.

You NEVER MENTIONED AFTER THE FIREFIGHT. What you said I agree with absolutely. It makes no sense that your condition won't worsen.

If you had asked me about that I would say the chance to worsen after the fact is a definite for anything moderate or above.

I would say up to 5 boxes could reasonably be healed by taking it easy and applying basic first aid. Anything higher than that and you need medical treatment. Sure 5 boxes isn't "serious" but its still HALF YOUR LIFE BAR. I never really liked the fact that I can be just a smidge below serious and not suffer the TNs for it. Sure as a player I love it, but that's the cheese dick approach. I want it to be sorta realistic, not annoying so, but enough to be "ooh I got shot. This isn't good." everytime I do get hit.

All we were discussing was clotting after getting shot. The chance to NOT bleed to death ON THE SPOT. Complications aren't going to occur within that timeframe unless the wounds are all in the same area or you've just taken like, a serious wound all in one go. Everything I said before.

SO like I just said, the timeframe I'm talking about is like, 10 minutes maximum after you've been hit. Enough time to stop the loss of our precious blood and hopefully be getting the frag out of dodge.

Trying to HEAL is different than clotting. You NEED A GOD DAMN DOCTOR. First aid will do it to a point, but unless you have someone looking after your wounds who knows what they're doing (or is using magic...but that's cheating. ) you're probably suffering some sort of (semi)permanent damage.

At the very least you're out of commission for MUCH longer trying to heal it without medical attention. The body can perform miracles of healing, but they aren't all that fast.

And keep in mind all of this doesn't need to be applied EVERY TIME. Make the judgement call of "Is this really worth it?" A lot of times I don't see how this would be overly useful. Every once in a while use the rules for creating that sense of life hanging by a thread, or making the runners have to think on their feet, or what have you.

I would probably apply this stuff to serious and deadly wounds because then it would matter. I'm sure a LOT of people say "oh I took a serious, but its only +3TN, I can still throw grenades and kill them" when instead they need to be thinking "oh shit I just got holed big time. I need to get my ass to safety and hope I make it to the street doc with enough time and cred to spare otherwise I'm going to be up the creek without a paddle"

I for one have been guilty of that reasoning (I blame it on Fallout's miracle drug toting stimpacks. 1 HP? No sweat! Stimpack'll make you good as new! ) but I try to go for the second one when I can.

I've had almost no experience playing these games due to no friends, no money, conflicting times, etc, etc. Thus I sadly don't get the kind of exposure I need to be that good RPer.

I didn't read anything but the TNs because I didn't feel like getting bogged down in math, which I now abhor because whatever retard decided I needed to know it obviously made physical love to mathbooks on a daily basis and so had to appease it because obviously the math books were the dominant force.

Algebra 1 is the absolute god damn limit for useful applications. Special jobs like engineering require it. Everything else, doesn't.

Urgh. I hate shitheads who decide things without thinking. If it were optional, fine. College won't be much better but at least I get to choose my courses after Freshman year and 1/2way into my sophomore one. FSC starts earlier with its major requirements if what they told us at orientation was true.

Err anyways I also didn't bother figuring out the times simply because clotting doesn't take hours. It takes minutes.

Resisting disease is another roll altogether and so massively complicated that it makes little sense to go anywhere beyond a simple roll, and then only when you got shot and decided to roll around in nuclear waste for a few hours.

Healing process itself is yet another roll altogether and that takes days regardless of what wound it is. A papercut still heals over the course of a few days, a stab wound much longer, a gunshot potentially longer than that depending on if it penetrates straight through, knocks around, or gets lodged somewhere where it shouldn't.

A bullet alone isn't going to just sit there and complicate things unless its not removed, and then only after a few days. Of course if its lodged in like, a muscle or an organ it'll probably do damage in short order, but that's a serious wound or better which would already require medical attention if I were in command of anything at all. Yes, I'd argue the GM even if I were a player.

Moderate wound will probably give you +1TN to all actions involving <blank> if not removed, worsening over time. Its certainly not going to be in the time it takes to heal a moderate wound by yourself.

I'm not trying to pretend to possess a doctorate in medicine, but even taking an anatomy+physiology course gives me enough know-how to slap the writers of these rules with a fish.

I figured "Body times 60 minutes" was basic enough math for any SR player or GM, since you already have to figure out things like Essence costs of different grades of cyberware.

Why? It doesn't really hurt you that bad. A .22 LR can easily do it, and it would allow you to function even better than most other examples of Light Wounds I can think of would. I mean, taking this in your gut would have to be a Light Wound, and that would probably hurt a whole lot more.

A Light wound turns an average task (4) into a nontrivial task (5). On three dice, that's a drop of an expected success and a half to a single success.

That's not minor.

~J

It's minor compared to a moderate or a serious!

I've been thinking about this for a while. Wouldn't blood loss be sort of a stun type wound? A body will pass out from blood loss before it dies. Perhaps you could make players resist stun wounds every minute or so from untreated wounds. Say a L wound might be 4 or 5L Stun every minute. An M wound could be 4 or 5M Stun every minute; etc. It would eventually overflow into physical and kill someone who didn't get their wound treated, but it wouldn't interfere with combat. It could add tension as the team races their comrade to the clinic with a new check every minute. You could increase the power and the time if once a minute is too much. It even makes sense that the damage level starts to increase after significant overflow damage. When you've bled that much, clotting gets harder. Would this work?

Be sure to give your Otoku some first aid for those nasty paper-cuts. "Oh no, I'm going to die in 14 minutes!"

There was a minor thread about the size of shotguns.

I give you the Remington 870 MCS.

Check out the "breaching weapon." Since it uses the same components as the standard shotgun, I'd imagine you could still load it with slugs or shot and have a functional weapon, although the range would absolutely bite.

-Siege

I thought the aorta was instant death in 8 seconds (what my teacher said) but wasn't overly sure of that.

As far as first aid goes I know you hadn't mentioned it so don't get the feeling i was trying to yell at you. I just wanted to bring it up. Sorry if it seemed like I was being an asshole as that's definitely not my intention.

What I hate about SR's damage is the fact that there are no hit locations and loss of functions for getting shot here, there, and everywhere.

A shot to the stomach will incapacitate all but the toughest SOBs (we'll call them your runner). They'll be on the ground holding their gut and whining like a baby because it REALLY HURTS from what I've gathered.

Kidney will do the same thing. You are on the floor and really unable to do much more than bleed to death. I think if its black you're a goner, I dunno I'm basing that off of what I saw in a Lethal Weapon Movie.

Lung's probably the best bet for a serious wound that you can still function with. You can run, skip, and jump but it'll be painful and not a good idea.

Doesn't Raygun's site have some rules for shock? SR needs that too because what you said, the blowing off of a limb (what I've been thinking a serious wound would entail if you got hit in a limb) is probably going to you know, distract the hell out of you.

Was it ever decided that the people who wrote these rules knew nothing of what they were doing, or did we give them a medal of merit for trying? Seems to me fools of the highest order had their hands in this but I don't want to be throwing around insults that aren't warranted.

I'd like to say "you're an idiot. have a medal of merit." and walk away shaking my head.

Talking about the overalls, namely combat. They can get away with Magic and Matrix because they don't exist in the lives of most everyone living today, and from what I've seen they work nicely. Same thing about throwing around insults without merit applies to compliments.

...yeah I've just changed the subject. You wanna make somethin' of it?

On aorta, and other blood loss stuff. Your brain can survive 15+ seconds without an supply of oxygen (read: blood) to it. This means your heart and explode, and you'll still be able to get your shots off if you're not overly distracted.

Additionally, for every wound that destroys function primarily through pain, remember that adrenaline, while generally incapable of making you a steely, painless mass-murderering rambo, will serve to dull the effects of the wound for some time.

If your heart explodes you spasm and die.

The brain also lasts MUCH longer without O2. I believe its 3 minutes or so without food (blood, oxygen, whatever other nutrients it makes use of) until brain damage occurs, but the brain is still alive and kicking. I think your organs and whatnot can survive for like, 6 hours and then they die.

I saw a movie on my A+P class (we saw a LOT of movies actually) and it covered organ legging. Part of it had some specs on organ donors and I know that organs will survive for hours before death. We're talking like, car crash victim or something dies. So long as the organs are in tact (duh) they can be salvaged.

That's without being put on ice or anything. Ice slows down their metabolic functions so they last longer (not sure how much). Definitely long enough for the heart-lung machine (invented in the 70's or 80's I think) to be hooked up to them. Rather fascinating stuff, I hope I have time to take more classes like that in college at some point.

Adrenaline may help you ignore the effects of a wound, but it sure as hell isn't 100%. Its more like you got shot in the arm but don't notice it because you're hella pissed off (like on the plane in Con Air).

You get shot in the kidney and you're still more or less incapacitated.

Adrenaline isn't the only thing your body does in a crisis either. The Sympathetic nervous system will dialate/constrict blood vessels, shunt blood supply to unnecessary functions (example: you're running away from a mugger so your body turns off your digestive system and pours the excess into your muscles), and of course release adrenaline.

I think it does some other stuff too, but I can't remember. That's the gyst of it though. Parasympathetic makes sure you feel it a day later though. Next day you'll be fine, but the day after you're gonna feel like a truck hit you, backed up, and parked on your body.

Doesn't require that much to cause a "crisis" either. A big test will set it off, late night studying, basically anything above the normal rigors of your life will qualify. I'm pretty sure its controlled too, not like "oh I'm running for 1/2 an hour on a treadmill so I'll just pour all the adrenaline I can find into the body."

So anyways, Adrenaline would basically function at a moderate wound and cease to be of any real value once you get to serious, which is basically "oops I lost my arm" or "oh damn, there goes my large intestine and a good chunk of the small one too." Because at that point you're so badly screwed up your body isn't going to be functioning terribly well.

Yeah, I read in this book on Getting into Medical school (I originally wanted to be a doctor but decided the beaurocracy would kill me and my chances of actually making it through the grueling workload and being accepted were too low to bother) that almost everything you "need" to become a doctor is horsecrap as most of it's useless to the profession but somehow required for the major.

Whoever designed these major requirements needs a boot to the head. "liberal arts" my ass. When would that EVER be useful? I fail at college and rely on the uber 1337 liberal arts background to work as a custodian (not to insult them. I actually admire them quite a lot) or a fast food shmuck at Mc.Dumbasses?

The argument is that the courses are designed to teach you how to think critically and analyze things, not that it trains you for a profession; that's the job of a vocational school. Whether or not that has merit is up for debate; I've seen cases in which it certainly appears to, and cases in which it most certainly does not (usually when a Postmodernistic Philosophy teacher or somesuch gets their role confused and thinks they're teaching something that will be critical in and of itself).

~J