Given the fact that multiple injuries of the same severity do not ‘stack’ and instead upgrade to the next severity, I noticed that while sustaining an equal or greater injury is addressed, sustaining a lighter one is not.
If I have a character who has been shot in the hip by a heavy weapon, and they sustain a severe injury, does that mean that any subsequent injury, regardless of severity, will be automatically critical, even if they have no other injury (e.g. a roll to escape by way of ravine with partial success has them tumble away, sustaining minor injuries in the process)? Additionally, it seems that when one successfully performs Patch Up on anything less than a injury, does it merely remove the injury? Does it downgrade in the time between the patching and fully healing? Are there hard and fast rules for this or is it all jitsu ‘go with the narrative, man’?
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Lower injuries do not automatically roll up based on your highest Injury. If you take a Severe Injury and then a Minor Injury, you now have a Severe and a Minor Injury. The threat here is that as you fill up more and more Injury Slots, you will eventually hit a cascade event: all your slots except Critical will be full, and one shitty Minor Injury will slide aaaaaall the way up into the Critical Slot.
Secondly, what do you mean by ‘less than a injury’? Regardless, all healing times are cited on the healing cheat sheet page 60.
Minor Injuries recover in hours, or a few minutes with PU.
Major injuries recover in days, or a few hours with PU.
Severe will not recover until PU, and will then recover in a few days — or with an hour of surgery.
Critical will get worse, but can be stabilized with PU, and healed with hours upon hours upon hours of surgery.
I haven’t run this yet but my interpretation of the reading of the rules would be, given your example:
Character is suffering from severe trauma to hip.
They later fall badly down that ravine and suffer minor scuffs and bruises.
So now the character has:
Severe hip trauma and some Minor scuffs and bruises
As they continue their escape they encounter a security team with clubs. They finish off these guards but get bludgeoned a bit in the process and manage to suffer another Minor injury, ‘beaten’.
But the character is a bit weakened from their previous ordeals so the ‘minor scuffs and bruises’ combine with the ‘minor beaten’ and roll up to ‘Majorly Beaten Up’.
They limp back to their safe house or ship bleeding, in pain, and suffering from the Severe Hip Wound and the now Major Beaten Injuries and the lesser minor scrapes and scuffs.
If on the way to the safe house though they were shot in the back and suffered a major injury I think then you’d get a cascading effect from that. So the major would roll up to severe which would then roll up to Critical ‘Shot in the back’.
So at the end of the day this poor PC is suffering from minor scuffs and bruising from falling, is majorly beaten and sore from his run in with the security team, is limping from the severe gunshot wound to the hip and finally probably has internal bleeding and on the verge of shock from that critical gunshot wound to the back.
The damage is narrative but real. Here’s your reminder of how to act in the fiction:
your body is sore from the strain and beating you’ve recently endured, your hip is screaming in pain, you’re limping, and then you take a bullet to the back. You’re probably bleeding all over and can barely see through that swollen and bloody eye. You’re a real mess, onlookers gasp and point as you pass by and your leaving a bloody trail as you go.
What do you do?
Mechanically:
I would probably tack on a debility and in this case assign additional damage that comes in as appropriate.
Another minor injury or major? Mm I’d probably on a 6- for the Brace for Impact kill them off. On a success maybe they finally go unconscious.
Another severe or critical? They would need to totally negate the damage or they’re dead.
*Edit: Alfred Rudzki answered this much more succinctly in the time I was being wordy ha.
/syb
Injuries are empty slots. You fill in the slot for the relevant injury. If you can’t, you fill in the next highest slot.
If I had a severe injury and took a severe injury, that’d result in a Critical injury. If Brace dropped it to Major, I’d take a Major injury. If I take another Severe and dropped it to Major again, the Major slot would be full, as would Severe, so it’d be Critical.
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I am glad you posted that as I misunderstood the rules on this. Probably next revision ought to add a side bar.
What then becomes of a patched up injury? There’s a timeframe for which it can be healed as detailed, but once it’s healed does it merely go from is most severe to popping out of existence? If a severe injury gets patched up and a character sustains another severe injury, even though the first one has been patched up and had time to partially heal, does it still count as severe and upgrade the latest injury to critical?
Loren Leimer when it’s patched up, the slot is then empty, unless there are fictional changes. I’ve ruled a critical injury remain as a Major injury for the rest of the session due to a shoddy Patch Up roll, though.
When it’s patched up, it’s gone from the sheet. If events conspire in a session to suggest that injury’s lingering effects ought to be relevant, take it into consideration when narrating events.