Injured PC's.

Olivia Chase · Injured PC's.

I know, I'm naughty, not being a ref and all but a thought has occurred to me (run now).

We have had in the past various alien widgets in the game so should a character be taken out of play due to injury, they can get up again and continue the weekend. I can understand this, you pay your £50 - £60 and if you end up on -3 on the Friday night it can be a pain. However the realisation came that I know of no other system that can cut such slack without 'magical' healing.

This is not a fantasy system, we don't have 'clerics' so some amount of realism needs to occur.

If you are shot in the gut, it should, and will bloody well hurt and it makes sense for the character to have to recover from it. If you take away the pain, you take away the threat and the fear, and thus the game loses some of it's edge.

So what to do? I have three suggestions we could possibly put to a player who has the misfortune to end up on minus body (particularly on -3 and below as drugs can keep -2 and above hobbling).

1) The player RP's the injury (if conscious) all weekend happy to be fed tea by the medics and engage in character based stuff. They get their feats and downtimes as usual.

2) The player can crew the remainder of the event, knowing his 'character' is being cared for IC. The character will still get all feats and downtimes for the event.

3) The player has a second or 'back up' character which can be played instead while the primary character is recovering. In this case the new character gets the feats for the days they are played (unless already allocated to the primary character that day) but the downtime must be split between the two characters, as the player wishes. This is based on Sinergy, where it works quite well.

Would this help?

Meyrick

It's a difficult balancing act, there's no doubt about that. We do want to want to maintain an edge to the game, but I'm firmly against the idea of laying people up for the whole of a (relatively) short IC event. While crewing is certainly fun (and much welcomed), it's only a slight improvement in the view of many players.

Of the three suggestions, a secondary character seems the most workable. For normal open access events, it should be fine, but we need to consider what to do during the closed environment games we have seen. In cases where the players are trapped on alien worlds unable to escape, I think we would just have to assume secondary characters are off on patrol or digging latrines when they are not 'on camera'. In certain circumstances, their use might have to be prohibitted.

Harry Font

its par for the course

if you get hammered on the first night then tough

2nd character comes into play

harsh i know but to allow any other option would infer that you could go all rambo staright away and still get to play

Theo

Another possible idea is that medics could, by means of medicines, strapping and liberal doses of drugs, provide some form of 'temporary body'. So players could get up and do their thing again (usual vitality rules apply?) but, of course, should they get any further body damage this just adds straight on to their 'true body' and they could be in serious trouble.

Its like being able to fight on at up to -10. Dangerous, sure, but some people just can't help themselves...

Its a Second Chance Saloon basically.

Olivia Chase