A few weeks ago, I got to thinking about how The Last Gasp interacts with Conditional Injury when it comes to the pain of wounds in TLG and how that turns into a nightmare with a conditional injury system like CI. That got me to thinking today, when I was brainstorming some Combination options with my players. How does bleeding in CI work? Well, the short answer, is it doesn't; which is fine, Douglas has said it himself! CI is a thought experiment after all. So, I got to thinking: how could you make bleeding work in CI and keep it conditional?
Well, duh, use the Last Gasp! Joking, but what I do already meshes great with The Last Gasp's long-term fatigue system. Instead of using what CI suggests originally, which is losing maximum Fatigue and treating each location as its own wound with slightly unclear rules, I devised my own rules not long ago, which in my opinion, fixes a lot of the issues with Bleeding in CI. For this, you will need to ignore "Deadly Fatigue", present on Py. #3/120, p. 33.
So, how does it work? Well, it is simple. When you get hit with a cutting, piercing, or impaling attack, it bleeds. I opt to not roll against HT to see if it bleeds or not as long as it is a wound that would cause significant bleeding, but you are free to. It is easier to assume getting cut or stabbed makes you bleed. When a wound bleeds (in either 60-second, 30-second, or 2-second intervals, depending on location), roll an HT check. On a fail, you lose 1 FP. On a success, nothing happens. You can see where this is going; see B420 for the old system. Replace any mention of HP there with FP, and instead use the penalty for bleeding rolls present on Py. #3/120, p. 33. If you are using my remapped system, the modifier is instead HT + 7 - Severity.
Once you hit zero FP, the fun begins! Mark down the negative FP for the purpose of recovery later on, and so you can determine the wound for the next step. Once you start taking negative, find the absolute value of the negative FP you have taken as a wound for your entire body. Once you reach a Severity +0 (or Sev. 7 in my remapped scale, if you are playing in my games), you die. Wounds taken like this do not give pain; instead, you just take the FP loss and modify attributes accordingly. It is pretty simple, in my humble opinion, and is significantly less prone to situations where you do tons of record keeping.
Now, how does this interact with The Last Gasp's long-term fatigue? Well, it does already. It gives you recovery times for your lost blood, attribute modifiers for having lost a lot of blood, and any extra rules. As a note, when recovering the lost FP, also modify the blood loss wound, to show your blood replenishing. I think there is probably an easier fix to this (other than ignoring bleeding) that I might not see, but we will have to wait for Mission X to see what Douglas has cooking on the topic of bleeding and blood loss.
As always, questions or comments are always welcome; I am always looking to improve my systems and rules that I am cooking up, as I actually use these every week, so fixing issues is always extremely important to me. I can also clarify why I chose certain thresholds here, if needed. If you have your own fix, let me know! I am interested in seeing other people's takes on this. Now, finally, here are two quick and dirty examples below, using both my remapped scale and the original scale:
Example A: Darius the Daring just got shot in the neck; oh no! This comes out to a Severity 7 (Sev-0) wound. He makes an HT check for bleeding, adding a -1 penalty for piercing damage. His HT is 10, meaning his target is 9. He rolls an 11, failing. He bleeds. He continues to bleed for three minutes, critically failing two checks and failing one. His critical fail costs him 4 FP. At the end of his bout of bleeding, he takes 6 FP damage, meaning he has a -30%* reduction to his attributes. No wound is obtained here.
*: Note, I use a percentage reduction to all attributes instead of a flat modifier. If you are using the original article as written, this is instead a -3. Personally, the percentage maps better, but it is your choice, as everything in GURPS is.
Example B: Benjor is getting attacked by a Draug, and gets a deep slash across his chest. This comes out to a Severity 8 (+1) wound. Benjor has HT 10. He makes an HT check for bleeding, with a -2 for bleeding and a -1 from the wound severity. He fails, meaning he is bleeding. This bleeding is fast as well, with 30-second intervals. When he manages to have it treated, he has bled for four minutes, and made eight checks. One critically failed, one succeeded, and six failed. His critical failure came out to 6 points of FP damage. This means he took 12 points of FP damage. He takes a Severity 2 (-4)** wound from this!
**: Note, it has been a long time since I have used stock Conditional Injury's Robustness Threshold system, so I might have messed something up here, but the general idea still gets across.
