Bleeding to death while unconscious

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Beowulfenator

So in the example above I roll vs HT-3 (and later HT-4, and HT-5) 60 times before the poor guy gets to wake up?

IIRC (and I might not) Kromm said only the HP lost to injury count for the bleeding penalty, don't count the HP lost bleeding itself for the HT roll penalty.

Also that's only 60 rolls if you never roll a critical success or 3 successes in a row. The odds of never rolling a critical success for 60 rolls with HT 10 are 32.58%, (That doesn't account for 3 successes either)

Originally Posted by Beowulfenator

So, 1HP a day for normal conditions?

You get one HT roll per day, with HT 10 and no medical treatment you will make 50% of those so it will take an average of 60 days to recover.

[Beowulfenator]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

You get one HT roll per day, with HT 10 and no medical treatment you will make 50% of those so it will take an avereage of 60 days to recover.

Oh yea, I totally forgot that he recovers only on HT checks, not just 1 HP a day flat...

[alaph]

Originally Posted by Beowulfenator

So, 1HP a day for normal conditions? Over a month of rest, right?

No. Well, not if left for dead as it were. He wouldn't heal at all and in fact would begin to die of dehydration, and starvation.

In order to gain the 1 HP a day you need adequate rest and food (or nutrients, a saline bag would aid against dehydration and various electrolyte bags or feed bags could stave off malnutrition but I digress)

Now what could happen is said adventurer gets knocked to -3xHT, then stabilizes into unconsciousness. Later that night a roving Bedouin scoops him up and has one of his wives tend to the adventurer until he recovers enough to leave on his on a month later...that would make for some awesome RPing actually...

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Beowulfenator

OK, so... Bleeding checks get progressively worse with lost HP, -1 for each full 5 HP lost.

But not progressively worse with lost HP lost to bleeding. IIRC.

Originally Posted by Beowulfenator

But checks to die or not and checks to fall unconscious or not are vs unmodified HT. Right?

Dying rolls don't, consciousness rolls do:
-1XHP -1
-2XHP -2
-3XHP -3
-4XHP -4

[mlangsdorf]

I wrote a tiny C program to handle bleeding rolls and used it on a handful of test battles. My experience is that if you're knocked out of combat by going to 0 or worse, have HT10 to HT12, and are left unattended, there's roughly 30-50% chance of dying, either from immediate blood loss or from failing the HT roll to recover after being driven into -1xHP or worse territory by the blood loss before it stopped.

Obviously, that's highly variable and a given individual's chances are going to depend on specific circumstances. But the guys who take an arrow to the heart and bleed out in a few minutes seem to be roughly balanced by the guys who took an axe to the face, collapsed with positive HP remaining, and stopped bleeding almost immediately.

[lexington]

I wonder if it would be realistic for an unconscious person to bleed more slowly since they're less active than even a relaxed conscious person.

[alaph]

Originally Posted by lexington

I wonder if it would be realistic for an unconscious person to bleed more slowly since they're less active than even a relaxed conscious person.

Depends on the size of the bleed. The body will start to stem the flow of blood on its own as soon as the bleeding starts. Jagged wounds heal quicker than razor sharp ones as the blood begins to form an internal bandage. Smaller wounds naturally heal faster as well.

If blood loss becomes significant enough to throw the person into hypovolemic shock then you are in poor poor shape indeed.

Incidentally not every gunshot wound causes bleeding (at least externally). Honestly I would think that there are too many variables to make this plausibly modeled by any game realistically, you can get close but a survey of real wounds through out history would frustrate any mathematical system you came up with that fit inside a GURPS book IMHO.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by lexington

I wonder if it would be realistic for an unconscious person to bleed more slowly since they're less active than even a relaxed conscious person.

Well, if you're unconscious due to loss of blood you will bleed slower, but that's because you have less blood left to lose.

[Ts_]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I wrote a tiny C program to handle bleeding rolls and used it on a handful of test battles. My experience is that if you're knocked out of combat by going to 0 or worse, have HT10 to HT12, and are left unattended, there's roughly 30-50% chance of dying, either from immediate blood loss or from failing the HT roll to recover after being driven into -1xHP or worse territory by the blood loss before it stopped.

You beat me to it ... I did a few simulations with a bleeding wound with a -1 modifier.

An average 10 HT, 10 HP guy simply bleeds away and finally fails a death check around 30-50% of the time, depending on at what HP he is when the bleeding starts, of course. When he starts bleeding at -6 HP, that's pretty exactly 50%, but bleeding from 0 HP kills him only in 30% of the cases.
HT 11 changes that to 25% and 10% death chance.
HT 12 yields 10% and 1.5%.
HT 9, however, dies 75% and 60% of the time ...

With a -2 bleeding wound, the results are a lot more deadly for all characters.

I didn't include the chance to wake up in there, because it is not clear, how that would help ... However, it would have mattered in less than 0.3% of the simulations, in which people were neither dead nor stabilized after 60 bleeding checks.

Regards,
Ts

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

IIRC (and I might not) Kromm said only the HP lost to injury count for the bleeding penalty, don't count the HP lost bleeding itself for the HT roll penalty.

You remember correctly. It's HP lost to physical injury that count. Bleeding isn't physical injury. Neither are disease, poison, Deathtouch spells, etc. If you use the bleeding rules, you have to bin all HP loss into bleeding and non-bleeding categories – and if you use various optional rules, you must further note individual bleeding wounds by location.