Some general injury and bleeding houserules: looking for feedback

[tfaal]

Hey y'all, I've been tossing around some houserules on bleeding and injury for a little while, and wanted to see what you guys and gals thought.

These are a bit bookkeeper-ish. Of course, you'll need to keep track of your HP and bleeding, but you'll also need to keep track of injury and bleeding for each of your limbs and extremities. You'll only need these to know when a limb has been crippled, and when it can't bleed any faster, so it's mostly just a matter of writing them down. There are no new rolls, but your bleeding rolls now take a bit more time, since they can deal extra damage based on your margin of failure. This is bound to be a bit cumbersome, but it's the only way to allow deep wounds to bleed profusely.

*The injury of each limb is tracked independently, as per Accumulated Wounds, B420. Unlike the standard rules, injuries to limbs and extremities do not affect a character's hit points. Having all your arms and legs will make you bleed out pretty quick, and will definitely put you out of a fight, but it will not kill you instantly.

*Bleeding is mostly how it's described on B420. Bleeding is not tracked on a per-wound basis: instead, totals from all wounds are added into the character's bleeding score. Any score other than 0 requires a roll against HT every minute at -1 per 5 points of bleeding injury. The results of this roll are as described in Basic, but you lose 1 extra hit point for every 5 points by which you fail the roll. Critical failures and successes have no special effect. Injuries to the eyes, neck, skull, and vitals cause 2 points of bleeding per point of injury.

*Injuries to limbs add to the limb's bleeding total. This total is capped at the amount of cutting damage required to sever the limb: twice its crippling threshold. The bleeding totals from all of your limbs add to your body's total bleeding.

Example 1: I take two cuts to my arm. The first attack causes 5 injury, the second causes 10. This adds up to 15, but that would exceed the arm's maximum bleeding of 12. I record 12 as the arm's bleeding total, and add twelve to my global bleeding total. I don't need to record the arm's injury total anymore, since the second strike crippled it.

Example 2: Both my arms get cut off by two sword strikes. Regardless of how much injury either attack did, each of my arms now has a bleeding score of 12, and my total bleeding score is 24. I now make my bleeding rolls against HT-4.

*Obviously, wounds to extremities bleed too. However, there are two caps involved now: a wounded hand can never bleed more than a severed hand, and no combination of wounds to the hand and arm can bleed more than a severed arm. In order to game that, extremities do not directly affect the body's bleeding total. When you take a wound to a hand or foot, record its bleeding score, capped at the sever threshold, as normal. However, do not apply this to the body's bleeding total. Instead, apply as much of it as you can to the limb's bleeding total, then apply that to the body's bleeding.

Example: I am an average, uninjured person, and arm takes a 7 point wound. I record this as the arm's bleeding score, and apply it to my total bleeding, which is now 7. Later in the same combat, I take a 8 point wound which severs my hand. I write down 8 as the hand's bleeding score, but I don't apply it to my total bleeding yet. Instead, I apply it to the arm's bleeding score, which rises to its cap of 12. Now my total bleeding rises to accommodate this new figure; I now have a total bleeding of 12, and I make my HT rolls at -2.

And that should be the whole shebang. I realize it's a bit of a headache once you get to extremities. I'm considering removing those hit locations as separate entities: If you target someone's foot, it will cripple at >HP/3, and you'll deal with the DR of whatever boots your target is wearing, but otherwise, it's identical to an attack to the leg.

I might also wiggle my numbers on the bleeding penalties and margins of failure, mostly so that a severed limb will always kill you without medical attention. I was thinking that -1 for every 4 points of bleeding, and an extra point of damage for every 4 points of failure would be pretty good.

[gjc8]

Originally Posted by tfaal

*The injury of each limb is tracked independently, as per Accumulated Wounds, B420. Unlike the standard rules, injuries to limbs and extremities do not affect a character's hit points. Having all your arms and legs will make you bleed out pretty quick, and will definitely put you out of a fight, but it will not kill you instantly.

OK, can't kill you I can see. But can't knock you out? Losing ALL your limbs might put you out of a fight, but losing just one wouldn't necessarily, and that combined with some damage elsewhere could, in the regular rules, put you at less than 0 hp and rapidly unconscious.

[tfaal]

That's true. Here's my take on it:

Immediate collapse is always a tricky problem, because there aren't many reliable biological causes for it, but at the same time, it's the goal of most martial arts, and the end result of most combat in fiction. However, if we're being realistic, a cut to the arm is a fairly simple case. Excluding surrender, there are only a few factors that could cause a victim to topple over and stop fighting: pain, psychological "fainting", and blood loss. Of those, only blood loss will cause actual lasting unconsciousness. I figured that the Knockdown and Stunning roll from a major wound would be sufficient for pain and psychological collapse.