Bruised and Broken Ribs

[ericthered]

Could broken ribs be viewed as a variant of having less than 1/3rd of HP?

[Kale]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Could broken ribs be viewed as a variant of having less than 1/3rd of HP?

Well it would certainly be a good explanation for the reduced move!
Wiped out on my bike a couple years ago and landed on my side on pavement. My ribs took about three months to heal, figure it was a mild fracture.

[JazzJedi]

From personal experience, I had two broken ribs from a bad fall and it took quite a bit of time to fully heal. But, I was still able to be active and basically get around. Heavy lifting hurt like hell, and even running hurt, but I could do it. I still did my job with only a few days off (and I'm a trumpet player, so lots of air compression, deep breathing, etc.). I couldn't breathe deeply, so I just took lots more shallow breaths. I also still managed to work out, albeit carefully. So maybe six weeks before I felt 100% at least in terms of physical capacity, and maybe twice that before all traces were gone.

My father broke three ribs in a ATV accident when he was 63 years old, and he is way tougher than me. He didn't miss a day of work and was a heavy-duty automotive technician. He called me a wimp when I complained about my broken ribs making trumpet playing hard.

Anyway, my point is that everyone has different tolerances for different types of pain. I seem to be able to handle tooth pain better than most people I know (and I've lost a few teeth from accidents), but I really can't handle pain to my feet very well -- ice baths and really cold water really hurt my feet! Weird, but nearly everyone I know has different pain experiences.

So I like that the game doesn't assume a low-ish pain threshold as the norm. It needs to err on the side of PCs being tough.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Thank you for the well wishes. I do not think that the partial injury rules do it justice though. I have torn tendons and popped ligaments before, in legs and arms, and I was much more functional than I am now.

I'm assuming you don't mean you were more functional in the limbs actually involved?

The way I see it is it's really hard to avoid moving you torso when engaging in a lot of actions*, but you can to an extant avoid using you injured limb by favouring the other (harder to do with legs in actions that require you to be upright but you can still let the other take the greater load).

I.e. in GURPS terms you can avoid the penalty for partial injury by not using that limb, but it's much harder to avoid using half you chest!

If I wanted to add extra rules effects of bruising all the ribs down one side I'd not only use the partial injury rules, but would also consider doubling the AP cost of actions to simulate not only how distracting it would be but how debilitating it would be to maintain acting with an injury that would mess with easy breathing.


(for those not using teh AP system, maybe make things cost FP, but FP isn't very granular so maybe every 3rd action costs a FP).


But that would be pretty grim'n'gritty even by my standards! PC's how can't act potentially aren't that much fun to play after all!


*and when we;re taking about ribs that includes breathing, especially if you talking about an entire side of ribs!

[Plane]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

bruising every rib on my right side after a bad fall, and I realized that GURPS did not reflect the sheer level of pain and suffering dealing with that type of injury.

Semantically since bruising happens to soft tissues like muscle rather than to bones, I would probably call it "bruised intercostals" or "bruised obliques" or something along those lines.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Ribs (-2): The ribs are meant to primary protect the vitals from attacks (a miss by one on an attack to the spine or the vitals instead hits the ribs). If a character takes more than HT/2 damage to their torso from a single attack, their ribs becomes crippled, causing them to suffer from severe pain until combat ends.

I think anyone going into the extreme detail of additional hit sub-locations (like MA137) is probably also going to use B420's Accumulated Wounds option :)

HT/2 sounds kinda 3eish and doesn't line up with 4e thresholds, did you mean more than HP/2?

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

After combat ends, they must make a HT roll.

Although this is in line with B422's "For battlefield injuries, roll at the end of combat", it's always seemed strange to me, like why not just roll when it happens?

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

On a successful HT roll, the ribs are only bruised ribs (temporarily crippled), and the pain is reduced to moderate pain until the injury heals.

On failed HT roll, the ribs are broken (lasting crippled), and the pain stays at severe pain until the injury heals.

On a critically failed roll, the ribs are shattered (permanently crippled), giving the character Chronic Pain (Agonizing; 1 hour; 12-).

One point of comparison worth making here is MA136's Torso thresholds.

Surpassing HP/2 damage only results in -2 DX -20% Basic Move.

Ribs are supposed to be protective, so it would seem strange that somehow hitting them causes more injury than hitting other sub-locations.

Perhaps more specifically might you be talking about the 2 lowermost (eleventh and twelfth) pairs of floating/false ribs which aren't connected to the sternum? They're the most delicate and easy to injure AFAIK.

I have some ideas below on how if we treated bones as separate internal structures (targeted after getting through 1 or 2 HP worth of meat) based on GURPS Magic stats for skeletons.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

While suffering from a crippled ribs, any intense physical activity increases the pain by one level (triggering the Chronic Pain roll if permanently crippled).

Would require clarification on what the threshold is for intense.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

IMO, the upper torso (Hit Locations 9-10) ought to get DR 1 vs. Crushing attacks due to the presence of the rib cage.

Clarification: B552 is torso on a 9-10, groin on 11 but LT100 changed that to "chest" on 9-10, "abdomen" on 11, introducing a random chance to hit the vitals (previously absent) as abdomen sub-location with LT armor re-introducing a chance to hit groin as abdomen sub-location.

I like the idea, though we could possibly explore DR 2 since when we look at skeletons (M152) they basically have 2 DR everywhere, except perhaps for spine where I guess RAW they would add 2 DR to the basic 3 DR it gets to have 5 DR on the spine?

Skeletons have 1 less ST (and thus 1 less HP) meaning if we viewed them as skeleton approximation, we could perhaps define bones of limbs as a separate object as the meat of limbs? So as to distinguish between a soft-tissue crippling and a hard-tissue crippling as different tiers.

This can help balance out the added vulnerability of using Accumulated Wounds: it's a big vulnerability to soft tissue (0 DR) but your bones beneath (2 DR) can shrug off a lot of abuse to prevent broken bones. However once the DR is surpassed, there is less HP to deplete to reach cripple thresholds.

There is a tradition of vitals being targetable at -3 that needs to be maintained, but perhaps we could assume that (much like targeting the skull at -7) this assumes frontal attacks, where we know the ribs have the biggest gap.

For rear attacks, perhaps we could consider the ribs to provide complete cover to the vitals, although you could use the "chinks" rule (requiring an impaling, piercing or tight-beam burning attack) to halve the DR by taking a penalty to hit.

It seems wrong that you can't use a cutting attack to cut between the ribs, so maybe that could be allowed at a huge additional penalty, since it would be super-tricky to slice at exactly the correct angle.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Likewise, injuries which inflict more than 1/2 HP ought to require a HT roll, modified by HPT or LPT, to avoid Moderate Pain until the injury heals.

Even after a location is crippled, I think the basic rule of suffering more than 1/2 HP in injury causing a Major Wound still applies, which already involves HT rolls to avoid knockdown.

The 'pain' levels don't seem to kick in much with HP loss (you need to do special stuff to trigger them, like attacking to try and create pain instead of HP loss) which is why I'm glad Cole's "Conditional Injury" system in Pyramid 3/120 introduced a blend of the systems.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Increase pain levels by one for injuries which mostly involve the skin, such as burn or corrosive attacks.

Pg 32 actually has notes for burning/corrosion injuries giving a +2 to Severity for calculating pain effects for injuries in general, not sure if the ribs in particular would have that more than burning your hand/face/etc.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Plane

Semantically since bruising happens to soft tissues like muscle rather than to bones, I would probably call it "bruised intercostals" or "bruised obliques" or something along those lines.
..

Pedantically, a bruise is (generally) a contusion and bones can suffer contusions just as soft tissue, although the muscles in the rib cage can do so as well :-)

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Pedantically, a bruise is (generally) a contusion and bones can suffer contusions just as soft tissue, although the muscles in the rib cage can do so as well :-)

Good point, I sometimes forget how alive bones actually are (I blame skeletons!).

LT71 actually mentions "Bone is fragile when dry" so I wouldn't give them Fragile (Brittle) like Skeletons. Not sure which way to go on if bones ought to have Fragile: Crushing like skeletons.

Definitely not disadvantages like Fragile (Unnatural) + Unhealing or advantages like Injury Tolerance (No Blood) or Immunity to Metabolic Hazards (ie leukemia)

Based on the idea of giving all bones 2 DR like the skull (ie our "skeleton" is actually a separate character with its own HP that we carry as Payload?), actually bruising them could be the loss of HP when you surpass the DR?

Or, on another level (though both approaches could be merged) if skeleton/bone DR had HP of it's own according to the Damage to Armor rules (LTC2:W&Wp25) you could assign HP based on bone mass where bones (armor) are themselves protected at half the DR they protect things with.

So in that case the ribcage/skull, though protecting the vitals/brain at DR 2 (need 3 damage to injure the organs) are themselves protected at DR 1 (requiring 2 damage to injure the bones)

If doing that, then getting worn down by 2-dmg attacks (if reducing mass-based HP below 1/3) halves the original DR from 2 to 1, meaning while it still provides some protection to vitals/brain, it no longer enjoys DR for its own protection.

The only difference with the "falls off" thing (failing HT rolls at HP 0) is that bone won't completely fall off your body since it's contained in a sack of skin. You would need to have grevious damage to your dermis for detached ribs or skull fragments to actually fly free of your body.

If we had to stat dermis (skin), I'd say it would act like DR1 flexible armor (ie "diffuse" per DTA rules) with HP 1 over various locations, providing automatic cover to all of them except when it falls off.

Skin being diffuse basically doesn't matter when you only assign it 1 HP (B380 even 1 HP is all you need to lose the DR) but it does affect the cover DR it provides.

B408 gives merely 1/4 cover DR to Homogenous objects, it's probably that or worse for Diffuse ones. As long as you give skin less than 4 HP it shouldn't matter unless you do something like fractional cover DR (decimalling instead of rounding).

If a fixed HP of 1 for skin seems wrong (for stuff like giants) then it could be some kind of formula like dividing half overall HP (consider it split front/back) by the hit location penalty rounded down, so extremities could have 1 HP of skin per side and limbs could have 2 HP of skin per side for a 10 HP person.

DR1 isn't too generous for skin-as-armor, when you realize that this means skin itself is protected at DR0 (using DTA rules) and that by assigning only an HP of 1, a single point of damage reduces it below 1/3 HP, meaning it no longer provides DR after suffering that, essentially making it work like Ablative DR.

Using LT104's guideline (light leather, pigskin) this could be DR that only works against cutting attacks, but indefinitely enhanced to "rawhide" status so it also protects against impaling, except your skin is naturally oily so you don't have to worry about water damage, and you don't need tanning to prevent decomposition since the skin is alive and won't decompose.

Separate treatment of skin as a meat-bag for all your parts gives a means by which you can have stuff like "blading" happen (a cut along the forehead/skull to draw blood) at 1-2 damage without reaching the 3 DR threshold at which penetrating damage gets a x4 wound multiplier against the brain. You're reducing the HP of the skin rather than the HP of the person.

Treating skin/bone as objects with their own HP could still apply rules like shock/pain to the person though, and also their healing could sap HP from the same healing-pool, assuming you had to split up HP recovery to different locations rather than simultaneous co-enjoyment of HP restoration.

The one exception would be fractional armor divisors perhaps. I'm not sure what order to use that with the DR reduction in Damage to Armor rules...

B274 for example has 0.5 divisor, so DR 1 is treated like DR 2, meaning that under DTA proposal, healthy skin HP is still protected by DR 1 against whips, but once it was reduced below 1/3 HP the -1 penalty reduces it to DR 0.

Or a similar situation for (B272) wooden stakes or (LT92) Fowling Piece ammo.

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Still have back pain from an injury I took... over two decades ago.

[namada]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

So, I recently discovered a new experience in pain and suffering after bruising every rib on my right side after a bad fall, and I realized that GURPS did not reflect the sheer level of pain and suffering dealing with that type of injury. I think that I have come up with an appropriate rule to reflect the experience.

...for some people, in some circumstances.

My dad broke 2 of his ribs and couldn't even sit up in bed. I tried to carry him to my truck to take him to the hospital so that he could get treated, but we had to call an ambulance because he was that much dead weight in my arms - I just couldn't do it by myself, and he couldn't help at all.

On the other hand, I went to get a physical for a job and told my doc I'd never had a broken bone before, because as far as I knew, I hadn't. So, after the x-rays were done, he said, "come here," and sure enough - 2 broken ribs, obviously visible in the x-ray. I never even knew it happened.

So, yay for variable damage, or something...

[Keampe]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

So, I recently discovered a new experience in pain and suffering after bruising every rib on my right side after a bad fall, and I realized that GURPS did not reflect the sheer level of pain and suffering dealing with that type of injury. I think that I have come up with an appropriate rule to reflect the experience.

Ribs (-2): The ribs are meant to primary protect the vitals from attacks (a miss by one on an attack to the spine or the vitals instead hits the ribs). If a character takes more than HT/2 damage to their torso from a single attack, their ribs becomes crippled, causing them to suffer from severe pain until combat ends. After combat ends, they must make a HT roll.

On a successful HT roll, the ribs are only bruised ribs (temporarily crippled), and the pain is reduced to moderate pain until the injury heals. On failed HT roll, the ribs are broken (lasting crippled), and the pain stays at severe pain until the injury heals. On a critically failed roll, the ribs are shattered (permanently crippled), giving the character Chronic Pain (Agonizing; 1 hour; 12-). While suffering from a crippled ribs, any intense physical activity increases the pain by one level (triggering the Chronic Pain roll if permanently crippled).

Sorry for the minor necro, but I think I've come around to your thinking on this.

I was looking at the injury rules and had the realization that a major wound to the limb results in that limb being crippled, possibly long term, but that there is no such crippling effect from head or torso injuries. It seems to me that a long term crippling injury to the torso would be a pretty good description of broken ribs.

My thought is that you don't really need the extra location. Any major injury to the torso (location 9-10) should have that be a possibility. The abdomen has it's own nastiness in Low Tech and the skull has it's own in Martial arts.

My own would be something like: A major injury (over HP/2) to the torso results in the equivalent of Bad Back (pg 123) and Unfit (pg160). If the injury was over HP both results are the more severe versions for half the recovery period and the less severe for the remainder.

This is not actually a Bad Back of course, but the in game effects would be the same - including the chance of injuring yourself further should you fail a roll.

Anyway, you you're healing well!
- Shane