One thing I have been wondering about is unusual cyberwear malfunctions GMs come up with.

One of my favorite is this past weekend. The group got together and, unusually, I was trying out a decker. Among us was Nirvana (female elf street sam with the vindictive flaw), Nerble (male human mage with a custom flaw that meant every once in awhile he'd grope the nearest woman; name comes from the sound he made when Nirvana broke his jaw last), Timmy (troll street same with a strange flaw of failing dexterity rolls near wells), and Ooga Booga (dwarf rigger, long story behind name).

We were inside a corp building and Nerble had just gotten a little too grabby again, so Nirvana was in the process of beating him unconcious. This, naturally, made enough noise to attract the guards, who had a nasty habbit of carrying tazers, which allowed them to torture the prisoners before parting them out to street docs and body farms. Two guards come in, hit Timmy before he can react, and much to everyone's surprise manage to (combined) throw him into Deadly range. Then Nirvana, without breaking stride, shoots both guards in the forehead with her Pred 3 and goes back to beating Nerble.

After managing to convince her to let Nerble stay concious enough to heal Timmy, and Nerble to crawl over (in spite of the four bruised ribs) and heal Timmy, Timmy gets the joy of not being numbered amoung the dead, and Nerble passes out with four boxes of physical and a full stun bar. Nirvana is naturally unhappy that she doesn't get to finish the beating, but does nothing to my character for it.

Timmy wakes up, sees his gun on the floor, and the following happens.

Timmy: I try to grab my gun.
GM: Cyberwear malfunction. You slap your face instead.
Timmy: Ouch! I try to grab my gun again.
GM: Same thing happens.
Timmy: Drek! I know! I try to slap my face!
GM: You succeed.
Timmy: Frag it!

That is your GM screwing you. There is nothing canon to support that.

I had some bad Wired Reflexes 3 one time. Every time the 3 dice, contributed by the cyberware toward my initiative, rolled 15 or higher my character would fall to the ground convulsing for a Turn. The following Turn he'd lay still. On the third turn he could roll initiative as usual. This bad cyberware was simply the result of things that had happened in-game.

But boy is it fun! Reminds me of that far side cartoon with the brain surgeons.

It sounds to me like the GM getting back at the players who wasted his time fighting amongst eachother.

Unless, of course, the GM was playing to the abstract nature of the SR game system and simply said "Whoa, staged up to deadly? That's a headshot sure enough...".
YMMV

Sure it does, you just get a really gool scar to talk about at all the high society parties.

That kind of depends on how big the hole in the head is, neh?
People can be shot in the head without being shot dead. (That doesn't mean it happens often, but still...)

Indeed, technically, a headshot "called shot" will not necessarily do deadly damage. So a "called shot to the head" (to stage damage up a level) doesn't necessarily meet those requirements either (by your definition).

That, however, is a whole different can of worms...

Sometimes, getting shot in the head results in a face lift, and a talking car.

Nothing has yet exceeded the Nephritic Screen's shadowtalk in Shadowtech for the ultimate in cyberware embarassment.

Impromptu dental surgery?

I can't recall where I read it, but something similar happened IRL.

A plainclothes police officer, armed with the department-standard .38 Special snubnose (i.e., it had a 2" barrel) revolver, fires at a perp at such close range that he can clearly see the muzzle flashes of his weapon reflecting off of the surface of the other guy's eyeballs, and hits him at least once.

The criminal not only survived, but was sitting up and talking by the time the EMTs arrived to treat his wound(s).

--Foreigner

Depends on your Combat Pool.

As a note from across the pond in a not so recent news item (2002 this happened)
a builder fell in a building sight and impales her head upon a 1 inche thick iron pole just behind the temple (it struck her just below the edge of the hard hat) clean through to a foot out the other side of her head. Fire crews had to be called to cut the bar down so she could be taken to hospital, after some careful surgery it was removed. She was awake through the whole thing save for the surgery itself.

Also, last week. A man went to his dentist because he had incredible tooth ache. X-rays showed a six inche nail going up through his jaw, passing just behind his eye and into his skull. Seems he`d shot himsefl accidentally with a nail gun he`d been working with a few days before and somehow hadnt noticed.

scarey stuff

I heard that one too, it missed one of the eyes by only 2 centimeters I think.

With all the talk about the few Phineas Gages, we easily forget the fact that something like 99.5% of the people who get objects of significant size rammed through their skulls die outright and can never be brought back (ie. you can maybe put them on life support machines but they're braindead).

Just the facts:
Part 2: Prognosis in penetrating brain injury. Journal of Trauma-Injury Infection & Critical Care. 51(2 Suppl):S44-86, 2001 Aug.

If you can get the wounded to an ER and to surgery, your chances are better than 99.5%. In a battlefield (or street) situation, this isn't always feasible, of course, which is why the current mortality rate that includes "Dead on Arrival" or "Dead at the Scene" is 93% (note: This number includes civilian suicides, which is overwhelmingly the majority of civilian PBIs). For patients admitted to neurosurgery (after the year 1990), the mortality rate is between 35 to 57% depending on which study you look at. However, favorable recovery for civilians who make it to surgery is 74%.

The rate of favorable recovery is higher for military penetrating brain injuries, due to the type of injuries and hospital procedures involving penetrating brain injuries. Reported mortality for penetrating brain injury during WW II and Vietnam is approximately 30%.

Erdogan E. Izci Y. Gonul E. Timurkaynak E. Ventricular injury following cranial gunshot wounds: clinical study. Military Medicine. 169(9):691-5, 2004 Sep.

Fatality rate: 32.8% among the studied patients. Ventricular injury is among the worst of gunshot wounds to the head, as it causes significant hemorrhage and edema.

Sources/links please? I ask because I'd like to read them. I work for the local PD here and my experience talking to the folks that are directly involved in situations like this is wholly at odds with your statistics.

I think what the stats are saying is that if you get shot in the head just outside a trauma center you have 99.5% chance of living, but otherwise (which I suspect is almost always) your dead 93% of the time.

That doesn't speak too highly for surviving a gunshot wound to the head.

What it says is, if you're shot and get near-immediate medical attention, you have a 35% chance of dieing, doesn't say not brain dead, just not dead dead.

Since I'm not interested enough in the subject matter to spend $20.00+ on the full article, I'm just going by the abstract, but it seems that the 32.8% figure is for patients who were alive on arrival, since I suppose you don't do "surgical treatment" on dead people. First counting off the 93% who are dead before they get treatment, the fatality rate rises to 95.3% -- although admittedly the high rate of suicides might skew the statistic since it might take quite a while before they're even found, let alone gotten into a hospital.

And while it would seem logical that ventricular injuries are some of the most serious, the abstract says "Ventricular injury is a poor prognostic factor for penetrating cranial gunshot wounds." Do you happen to have the whole article, or are you just going on the abstract too?

As for the Prognosis... article in JTIICC (which is available as a PDF here, it has a number of other interesting statistics as well.

In 5 separate studies of a total of 464 patients with penetrating brain injuries from gunshots in different areas of the world from 1979 to 1990, of the patients who were alive when committed to the hospital and received surgical treatment, 64.5% died of their injuries. These are from the same studies that showed mortality rates of up to 93% when prehospital deaths were included. In 20 different studies, the overall mortality rate was 88% including prehospital death, and percentage of unfavorable outcome (moderate or serious disability or "vegetable state") was 97%.

In the military, low-velocity shrapnel is by far the main cause of penetrating brain injury, and thus the mortality rates are far lower. In one reported injury series of 435 patients from the Iran-Iraq war, 82% of the injuries were from shrapnel. In another series from the Lebanon area in 1982-1985, gunshot-PBIs were found to have a 86% higher mortality rate than shrapnel-PBIs. In the Iran-Iraq war series there was only a 17% mortality rate for admitted patients, but the mean time to admission was 49 hours.

Perforating PBI (through-and-through, entry and exit wounds) had a much higher mortality rate in the one series where it was compared to penetrating PBI (enters but does not leave, entry wound only). The odds ratio of death between perforating and penetrating or tangential (projectile glanced off skull, pieces of skull in brain) was 3.06 in this series.

Another interesting point: nobody seems to have done a thorough research on whether the caliber of the weapon which caused the injury has a significant effect on the mortality of the PBI. Maybe they are smart enough to realize that the bigger the wound cavity the more lethal it is without any further research?

Man you would not believe the stuff you can find if you do a PubMed search for "penetrating brain injury animal model".

Check this out!!

Fine, then you just change the conclusion to "All other things being equal, a bigger hole through a terrorist's skull is more likely to kill him or her than a smaller hole."