How to avoid killing your player characters as GM

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

Someone mentioned keeping limbs in and always rolling randomized limb damage (maybe keeping the head off the list? ) It was a really interesting idea considering the kind of campaign I'm doing.

I'm not a huge fan of rolling random hit locations for a variety of reasons (it's often only an edge case where hitting a limb is worse than hitting the torso, the former is typically better, and it gives a chance at hitting a high-value target like the neck or skull, as well as unarmored locations, all at a +0 to hit), but statistically I believe it does indeed improve survivability, at least if OpFor is using weapons that will reliably punch right through your torso armor. But try telling that to the PC who just got his head blown off by what would have been only a Major Wound if it hit him in the chest (as you note, leaving head - specifically the Skull - off the list will help; if you want to, treat any such result as a Torso hit with a bit of a damage bonus, so it's still a bad thing to get hit there but not quite as horrible as a bullet to the brain).

It is arguably problematic that grazing (~minimum damage) hits to limbs (and elsewhere) are rather unlikely (and become markedly more unlikely the higher the base damage, as the more dice you roll the closer to average you tend to be). One idea I had, inspired largely by lwcamps' Variable Blow-Through idea, is to replace the damage roll with a 1d roll that determines hit placement; a 1 represents basically perfect shot placement (the Eye on a headshot, the Vitals on a Torso hit, the bone on a limb hit, etc), a 6 represents a grazing hit, and the others are somewhere in-between (roughly speaking, 1 is going to do around minimum damage, 2 is going to go a bit deeper but cause below-average damage, 3 and 4 are going to deal around average damage, 5 is a serious hit that will deal above-average damage, and 6 is going to be around maximum damage). With something like that, even something firing .50 BMG has a decent chance of a grazing hit (although at 6dx2 damage, even minimum damage is going to cripple pretty much any human's arm, and either tear off or at least upgrade that crippling to permanent*).

Originally Posted by Colonel__Klink

In my setting the limbs getting blown off can be interesting flavor. It gives humans a reason to visit the ripper doc and at the very least buy a five finger discount (hur hur) arm that works... mostly till they get more cash. Vampires well they just use 5 blood points and they can regrow a completely obliterated limb.

It would pose a problem for players who want to be human mages in setting as I wanted it to be that if you delve into cybernetics too much magery is beyond you but instead you become a "technomancer" able to hack better than anyone with a deck.

The obvious option for human mages would be some sort of regrowth spell. Failing that, perhaps they can get a cloned arm grown in a vat and attach that to replace their lost limb - no cybernetics to interfere with magic, the body recognizes it as "Self" (it would be grown from your own cells), and a setting with advanced cybernetics has probably figured out how to grow and "re"attach cloned limbs (cyborgs go for chrome for the enhancements; it may also be cheaper and/or faster to go for cybernetics).