So I've personally had both minor and major surgery. The minor was required (appendix getting ready to burst), and probably equivalent to a Moderate wound. The major was, in Shadowrun terms, elective (no guns or nothin'). But certainly they caused a Deadly wound in the process. IIRC I was out of the hospital in like 3 days for the appendix and a week for the other. I'd say I have a Body of 3-4, and probably a Willpower of 4. I don't know how typical my experience is, but I generally don't hear about people staying in Intensive Care more than a couple days, unless they're pretty old or we're talking about something that doesn't heal on the normal track (Cancer, etc.). Sheesh, you hear about people getting back to work in a week after quintouple bypass heart surgery, though they're probably a little groggy at the end of the day.

For a normal, pretty healthy person, I'm thinking the recovery times with hospitalization should be like a few days from Deadly to Serious (out of intensive care), a week Serious to Moderate (released from hospital), a week moderate to light (no special attention other than maybe a doctor's visit at the end) and a week light to perfect (again, with no special attention). If you have a chummer with Biotech who can boost some supplies from the vet, I'd say you can get Moderate to Light in a couple days.

Now fast-forward 60 years of medical technology.

I guess I'd like to see some pretty serious reduction in healing difficulty or times. It seems like an ER team should should have a huge impact on the time (divide by Biotech skill or something), and regular attention by a physician should too. Even "a guy with Biotech and some supplies" should make a big difference. I don't see why any wound with reasonable treatment should ever take more than 30 days (deadly) or a couple weeks (serious) to heal totally. Under SR3 I'd have 4 dice vs TN 8 just to start healing a deadly wound in less than 30 days -- that's less than 50% chance of a single success, so it easily could have taken several months for me just to get to Serious. And it wouldn't matter if my doctor/surgeon was world-renown or Bozo the Clown.

Remember, cutting-edge science today can print human cells from an inkjet-like printer (saw this on the BBC). With biotech and nanotech in the picture in 2070 (not to mention magic), we should be able to reassemble bones and organs in a jiffy, at least in the hospital.

Finally, I'll grant it'll be worse if you fail the deadly wound damage check and lose/need to regrow a limb or organ.

Just two points:
1) There is a difference between trauma surgery and therapeutic surgery, but the main thing is that healing times are based on the absolute maximum time it takes to heal, and as absolute maximums, the numbers are actually fairly conservative. Successes reduce the healing times by a significant amount (two successes HALVES the time). With proper care and a strong healthy body, you can reasonably expect 3 to 5 successes, if not more.
2) The abstract nature of damage in Shadowrun blurs the severity of injury. Who's to say that the equivalent of an S wound in SR would be a fatal wound IRL or even "just an M wound"? We don't know... we just know that D damage takes someone out of the action, so it's either a fatal wound or an incapacitating wound (both aren't established, and are actually contradictory depending on whether or not you use the rules in Man and Machine vs. just the BBB).

i'd actually say the rules are much too lenient. the first run my adept was in, he took S+3 during a major hodown. he was out of the hospital in something like 36 hours, completely healed.

O_o

That's damn fast, even with Quick Healing and all sorts of Adept Powers. Was Magic involved?

Was that the Chocolate Elemental episode, mfb? I just can't seem to keep track of all the times that Italy's taken S+3!

O_o ... chocolate ... ELEMENTAL? o_O

Seems like my hermetic character needs to make a quest to a certain metaplane ...

Wow, maybe I'm missing something. Serious Wound is base TN 8, With intensive care and attributes of 4-6 that's TN 4. So you'd need a body of 20 to get to the minimum of 48 hours to get from Serious to Moderate. Well, OK, let's say your body is 10, then I guess your TN is 2 and you get like 8 successes... I'll grant you that's pretty snappy. But I was considering attributes in the 4-6 range, where it seems most likely you'll get 2-3 successes making the Serious-> Moderate time one to two weeks. That's not too unreasonable, except that you were in Intensive Care for a week or two, which seems pretty unlikely. If you don't get Intensive Care, you're looking at TN 6 and maybe 1 success and three weeks to get from Serious to Moderate. *That* seems unreasonable, particularly for a character with Body 6 in 2070.

And Deadly wounds are much worse (best case TN of 6 for Body up to 6, how can you realistically get more than 2 successes?).

So perhaps the system is oriented to Troll healing.

Read the rules out of p133 of Man and Machine. A Doctor with a Biotech (Extended Care) skill of 6 gives a -4 modifier to healing. Lots of other fun modifiers there, too, for your perusal.

Ahh, got it. I missed that one.

i'm pretty sure we were just using the modifiers from SR3, actually. and, yeah, that was the chocolate elemental episode.

The rolling system tho is pretty realistic in the sense that there have been times where i healed from a bad wound quickly, and it's taken me longer to heal from weak stuff. I remember healing from surgery where i had to have some of my jaw cut away to remove super impacted, infected wisdom teeth in about a week(i had to go under general and the whole nine), but it took me about 3 weeks to heal from a kneecap injury wher i had to have it drained with a needle. Less trauma but for some reason it took two weeks longer.

As for the severity of the wounds, it's hard to tell. D could be deadly or incapacitating, depending on the self stabilize roll(if you make it, it's just incapacitating it seems. If not, you could die.)


How bad the wounds are, i look at in the case of modifers.

an L wound could mean anything from a bullet graze to maybe a fingertip being cut off, or a sprain.

an M wound could mean a shot to a non vital area, a fracture or bad sprain, something that would mean a '+2'. That aformentioned kneecap injury i had could have meant an M wound...i could barely walk that night, but i could as long as i gritted my teeth against the pain.

S is gettng up there, definate break of a bone...maybe a bad enough cut to cause some fraggin bad bleeding, something you need to bind up or cauterize, but not something that will bleed you out instantly. Or just some shots to some painful ass areas.

D is enough to put you out....severed artery, bad shots, terrible hits.

That's how I look at it. Though everyone might have differing opinions, I'd like to hear some of them.

But again, healing can be very varied i found. Hell, even with sickness...Ive gotten bad flu several times, and sometimes I whip myself back into shape quick, others I'm out for a couple weeks. A bad flu could definately count as a Serious wound equivalent...you are pretty helpless. A real bad flu can even put you at D if you are in bad shape.

For reference, I believe a severed limb is considered an S wound.

~J

Severed limb an S? That could bleed you out pretty quick though.

This is where it turns gray to me. Granted, some people can tie off a severed wound and start blasting away with a good hand...but if someone gets an arm lopped off, you can bleed to death in minutes(hence why I thought it was D...the stabilization that happens maybe means the wound gets closed).

Hmmm.....interesting thought tho. Well, if the books say that's an S, then I got respect for the folks of 2060 ill say that much

Keep in mind that most people in real life would usually seek hospital attention for an M wound. Most ordinary NPCs probably will do similar.

Can anyone with access to Man and Machine confirm or deny the severed-limb-is-S memory? I can't find it in SR3 and I want to make sure I'm not inventing rules.

~J

If the above is accurate, it'd be in Man and Machine.

~J

I know from personal in game experience that in the BBB a severed limb comes from when a character goes beyond D.

This happened to a guy in one of the games. He went beyond D (maybe even beyond D + Body in boxes). At some point he had to make a roll, he failed. It was then that I as the GM randomly rolled what happened. He lost an arm.

Didn't have M&M at the time, so I know it was from the BBB, just not what page(s).

There are rules for losing limbs and organs in SR3 (Damage and Healing, Deadly Wounds and Permanent Damage, pages 127 and 128), but there are extensions to this and additional damage and healing rules in Man and Machine.

~J

Also, a clean sever such as a sword cut would allow the arteries to self-seal. Provide you can assist with pressure applied properly, you won't bleed out, crushing or cutting along the artery however renders that defense mechanism useless. This is why suicide attempts with limb slashing have a low success rate, the arteries close themselves off.

I think the points been made somewhere in here already:

Isn't there going to be a difference between trauma injuries vs. medically induced injuries? Healing time and TN needed to treat them?

Yeah, recovery times in the hospital should be shortened. Recovery times in your doss or on a cot in some bodyshop should take the normal time listed. Unless your doss has some SOTA medical staff and gear to patch you up and give you those nice sponge baths I hear so much about.

On the topic of perspective, regardless of whether my remembered severed-limb statistic pans out, a Deadly wound is one that will kill an average human in twenty-seven seconds without immediate first aid.

I think most of those will leave you in the ICU for quite some time, all things considered.

~J

Yeah, instant deadly wound to me, in specifics means...

-Leg or arm torn off. Not a clean sever. Imagine getting arm stuck in a piece of machinery.

-Shot(s) to vital organs. A heart shot can instantly kill, sometimes you can make it...but its rare as hell.

-Large wound to body in general. IE, hit by car. Massive internal bleeding.

-Serious head trauma. IE, your head gets broken.

-Massive spinal damage. Severed cord totally usually means instant death if it's high enough.

-Certain poisons. Large doses of cyanide, arsenic(tho small doses, people can live thru), certain snake venom. Other nastier stuff.

-Ebola.

Im sure there are more out there....

Depends. A wounded major vein will kill you in less time (bleed you to death), but IF treated properly, and IF you make it, you won't need weeks in intensive care. However, a gut shot (avoiding the pancreas, and messing up the intestines) will keep you busy for a LONG time, even though technically, it may well be less lethal than a torn aorta - like, S wound level. A bone.piercing shot will keep you grounded for months, but may only be rated as low as M.

Yeah, with the abstract nature of the damage system in SR 1~3 it's tough to gauge how long somehting should take and what that L/M/S/D actually means to the body in question. There also aren't rules for bleeding to death from a M wound, but left alone, untreated and basically ignored, any wound has some potential to kill you. (I'd consider most scratches that scab over, etc. to merely be stun for intents and purposes)

Once you hit ten boxes of Physical, you continue to accumulate Physical at a rate equal to one box per (Body) turns. You die when you reach D+Body boxes of damage. Hence, someone at D with Body 3 will take three combat turns to accumulate one box and three boxes to die, so nine combat turns or twenty-seven seconds.

~J

I figured it was something like that, but I was curious about the hard number of 27. Now I'm not. And in re-reading I noticed the "average human" a bit less than in passing and it all makes sense.

Does anybody have access to RL info about average healing times for different types of injuries?

I think the worst injury I've ever gotten was getting a leg bent over backwards at the knee joint (tore off the ACL and MCL). Hurt like hell, but I could still hobble around afterward (M wound?). After surgery I wasn't off crutches for something like 6 weeks.

Average hospital stays for gunshot wound trauma after 1990 is between 8 to 11 days (if the patient survives, of course), depending on what study you read. This varies greatly depending on the type and severity of injury, and the proximity of health care services. This doesn't include cases that turn critical, like infection or sepsis (common after bowel injuries) or an undetected pancreas laceration.

First of all - the amount of time you spend in the hospital has nothing to do with how healed you are - or how much longer it takes you to heal once you're out.

I spent a week in the hospital getting shot with antibiotics four times a day when my appendix burst on the operating table, and I was completely recovered two weeks after I was out. On the other hand, I spent less than 24 hours in the hospital for a serious knee surgery, but it took me months to heal fully after that one.

All that the length of the hospital stay reflects is how long it takes the patient to reach a stable and non-life threatening condition, from which he can be expected to recover on his own.

That being said, SR healing times tend to be fairly generous at all levels - I've limped longer in real life after a bad tackle than it takes most people in SR to recover from a light gunshot wound... That's pretty damn fast.

i never roll per box. i take one roll and apply to each box at a given level, then reroll when the modifiers change (when the wound drops a level, basically).

psh. what do books know? i've got the delicious, candy-coated scars that prove them wrong!

Of course, the errata and mfb's personal experience are not mutually exclusive. The original Aztec recipies for their chocolate drink do not resemble candy in any shape or form. They used pepers and chili poweders so potent as to induce halucinegenic effects.

I personally allowed for Limb severing under the Called shot for Special Effect rules. lowers the damage done, but you get an added effect. Never had a runner use it though, they just preferred to kill them humanely, rather than mutilate them (unless thatwas their schtick and then they wanted it slow, painful and personal)

took the severed limb thing once, was a double blind game and i took a barret round blind shot, yes he did make the roll, took the hit to keep fighting just lost my left arm and got knocked back into the hallway, played dead while sec guards came running up and started getting cut off at the knees. somehow i had not only stepped over a monofiliment trip wire, but gotten blasted over it by the barret shot, when the sec guards realized they werent gonna get in the room by the doorway, i started blasting them with 3 round burst from my shotgun in the back driving them into the mono-tripwire, when i finally ran out of ammo, (it was a 50 round clip), i pulled out that famous line of desperation from Aliens, pulled the pin on a HE grenade and let it go.....the GM said they didnt need a coroners wagon, just a mop bucket.

you recall incorrectly. first aid stabilizes deadly wounds. it doesn't bring them down to S.

Dang. I thought that might be the case, hence the disclaimer.

My rules-fu is not as strong as it once was.

Must be the lack of anyone who will GM for me. Hopefully SR4 will fix that.

twisting butterfly rules-fu will always fall before my prune-eating weasle style.