Personal Injuries (Was Re: [UA] Secret Wound Point system)

[Stimson, Aaron]

Well, here goes...

I must be cursed.  Many of my most major wounds have been self-inflicted.  A
few, just in case you ever need to use this kind of description:

I've done a bit of bone breaking in my hands and feet.  Smashing fingers in
car doors hurts, but if left in there for any length of time they also
promote strong, throbbing pain, swelling, discoloration, gnawing pain that
makes concentrating hard, and any pressure at all causes fresh shooting pain
in the entire arm.  Depending on the finger, the pain can shoot up either
major muscle group in the forearm.  I've dropped 30 lb pipes on fingers, and
can confirm that the pain is the same.  When bone flakes break off, if the
flakes are small enough, the pain localizes in the area of the break, and
extreme shifts in weather cause that finger to ache dully, many many years
later.  Other ways to flake bone:  Kicking tether ball poles, having your
wrestling teacher come down directly on top of extended finger (that one
hurt!), getting nailed with a hammer.

Actual broken bones act differently:  I kicked a wall and snaped bones in my
feet clear in half.  I wasn't angry at the time, it was kind of a stupid
thing, don't ask.  Anyway, it hurt in the same kind of way that running into
a wall hurts, but the pain never went away.  It just kept hurting.  I walked
around on it for 8 days until I finally decided that pain like that was
probably a sign of something actually being wrong with my foot.  Upon
visiting the doctor, I discovered that I had snaped the 3rd metatarsil in my
foot.  Had it not been so clean a break, the bone might have shifted and
breached the skin.  Fortunately, the bone hadn't been jarred out of place
for the 8 days I walked on it without medical attention, mainly because the
amount of time I let pass meant that they would have had to rebreak it if it
didn't set right.  The most they can do with foot injuries like that is tell
you not to walk on it.

In college I had two other unique breaks.  One was while sparing with boffer
swords with a newbie.  He went berseker with a faux-longsword, and though I
blocked all his strikes with my two faux-short swords, he landed a number of
heavy strikes to my right thumb.  He was (I discovered later) a rather
unstable personality, and not one to invite into personal altercation, as he
sort of lost focus on the exercise in sheer enjoyment of agression.  The
result was, again, a sense of dull throbing pain that persisted.  For weeks.
And the development of new bumps at the knuckle, and a new line under the
ball of the thumb.  While a normal thumb has 1 tight crease (can be two
lines, but really close together) under the first knuckle, my broken and
rehealed thumb has a very wide crease.  There is no loss of strength, but it
does bend a little crooked.  Had I not recognized the pain and it's
implications, it could have healed far worse, and caused loss of strength or
bone integrity.  That second one is much worse.  It leads to frequent breaks
and injury.  Something to consider with PC's that get hurt a lot.

Thumbs can be babied along without much medical attention.  Ankles are a
different story.  I'm giving the moral here first:  If you break your ankle,
or think you've even hurt it, GET IT LOOKED AT BY A REAL DOCTOR!  If an
ankle breaks and heals wrong, you lose a lot.  I walk slower today, cannot
jump as high, and am more prone to tripping over my own right foot because
of breaking my ankle.  And it happend in a stupid fashion: I slid down a
dew-covered hill in such a way as to snap my ankle bone in half.  My break
was a rare form:  Most ankle breaks split the bone in the middle
(width-wise), require surgery to bring the two halves together, and are
impossible to walk on.   My break was length-wise.  Which meant that my body
weight kept the bone together, allowing me to walk, painfully, but at a much
reduced rate.  The pain was roughly equivalent to a sprained ankle, and it
swelled quickly.  The difference was immediate:  For sprains, applying cold
helps reduce the swelling.  Ice does nothing to reduce swelling for a break.
Serious sprains can cause bone misalignment, but breaks can cause loss of
strength and mobility if they heal inappropriately.  Sad thing is, it still
hurts in incliment weather, and when my foot gets twisted, the ankle aches
most.

Other related pain things:  Being slashed is entirely different from being
stabbed.  Stabbing displaces flesh more roughly, and there is pressure as
well as sharp pain.  Slashing does not cause as much pain, but can cause
more superficial bleeding.  Usually, pain is very localized, and can feel
just like heat or cold.  Open air on a slash wound feels very cold, but the
heat of blood on colder segments of the body feels very warm.  Wetness can
often be the warning sign of a slash, rather than pain.  Those cuts are
usually very shallow.  Obviously, the more blunt the cutting impliment, the
more tearing and pain the person experiences.  Messing with jack knifes is a
stupid way to discover stuff like this.  Or riding way to close to chain
link fences (I'd really not want to be the person to come upon that bloody
segment of chain link fence...)

Getting hit in the head:  Despite the fact that head wounds bleed
atrociously, head impacts can be relatively painless, initially.  Having
been hit in the head by a peice of flying asphalt as a child, I remember a
jerking feeling, an immediate ringing in the ear, and warm numbness.  It was
other children who alerted me to my wound.  It wasn't until I touched the
area and my hand came away with blood that I started to feel the pain.  It
felt like a hot ball of pain, constant spiking, with the prickling numbness
aftershock of a wakening limb.  They needed to remove rock and stitch the
wound up.  Stitching feels like a breif prick, followed by a sick tugging
sensation, and, for head wounds, a slight whistling sound/sensation.
Depending on the stitching material, texture is very noticeable.  For wimpy
players, stitches should be some kind of violence check.  I know that
touching them often while the wound healed hardened me somewhat to my own
personal woundedness, but at first made me very squeemish.  

Passing out is relatively pleasant, in a macabre way.  The experience that
Greg described:

	It makes your vision get all black and fuzzy and you feel kind of
nauseous.

is the first segment of passing out.  The fuzzy feeling can often be
accompanied by a ringing of the ears.  Then the feeling of fuzziness (a lot
like white noise on TV) floods the head, and vision can completely black
out.  You feel nothing while you are unconscious.  Having passed out a
number of times (I'm needle phobic), I can confirm that often you have no
clue that anything is wrong.  The mind still functions perfectly fine,
without the aide of senses, and often there is no acknowledgement that
anything has happened.  I have distinct memories of one instance where I was
paying for a tuberculosis innoculation (I was teaching and it was required
to teach) and I was making out the check when I felt the rush of fuzzyness
and the darkness come on.  I moved towards the nearest chair, in hopes of
getting there first.  Then I was filling out the check, thinking about what
I was going to do after I left the doctors office, wondering about lunch,
remarking to myself about how long it was taking to fill out the check.
Then people were standing all around me, I was on the floor, and my head
hurt.  The mind can't handle the reality of being passed out, and usually
continues on with the activity occuring previously.  Extended periods of
unconciousness likely become more dreamlike, but I've never been out long
enough to know for certain.  Needless to say, I like to have players
roleplay periods of unconciousness, if possible, since they likely don't
recall they were knocked out, and why. 

Notes on pain - Some injuries don't feel as serious as they are.  People
like myself, who have built up a little tolerance to pain, can do stupid
things while not realizing they are injured.  This can actually lead to
medical complications.  An alternate method of hidden injury management is
to factor in skills and high attributes to mute otherwise important pain
signals.  Let the player know that their tough guy is injured.  Use
persistance of pain is a good hint to seriousness, but that guy with Take it
Like a Man: 65% may not realize that he's walking around on a broken bone,
flexing a broken finger, or dealing with internal bleeding that could be
deadly.  That is, until he takes off his clothes in the evening, and sees
that huge bruise and the tender, pink flesh around it.  Also, use common
sense:  If a bone breaks skin, no amount of Take it Like a Man is going to
make that seem less urgent.  Being disembowled is a similar case.  Once
things start slipping out of the body like that, you can't ignore it as a
trivial wound.

Aaron

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