Topic: Healing injuries in heat of combat, and stunned rounds

[DangerMan]

Picture a young adventurer recieving a hard blow to his arm during combat. Critical says arm is broken (compund), and he get X rounds of stun.

Luckily, his good friend, a high level cleric, decides to heal his broken arm the next round, with immediate effect.

Will he still have to suffer the X rounds of stun, or is the stunning removed along with the healing of the broken arm?

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

The stun remains.

While the injury that caused the stun may have been removed, the injury caused a secondary, or indirect effect (the stun), and removing the injury does not remove the secondary effect.

Any maneuver penalties from the broken arm, however, would immediately disappear, since those penalties are a direct effect of the injury.

[JohnK]

While the injury that caused the stun may have been removed, the injury caused a secondary, or indirect effect (the stun), and removing the injury does not remove the secondary effect.

I agree with Razyr.
If we assume that the stun comes from the disorientation affecting the central nervous system due to unexpected shock and pain from the blow, the healing of the broken arm does not have any immediate effect on the brain.
What is the definition of stunning?
Is it a daze? Or a temporary loss of consciousness(for milisec maybe) and then disorientation?

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

What is the definition of stunning?
Is it a daze? Or a temporary loss of consciousness(for milisec maybe) and then disorientation?

Stunning is essentially heavy disorientation, as a stunned character is sometimes allowed to continue to parry (depending upon the severity of the stun), and may attempt other actions, but at a minus.

Heck, it could be argued that the sudden, instant healing of a painful broken bone might cause additional stunning (from the sudden absence of pain.. hehe).  (personally, I would not recommend such)

[DangerMan]

So, beeing stunned is a mental state, which once it is afflicted is detached from the physical injury which caused it?

It seems weird to me, that one should stumble about for another 40 seconds after the injury causing the wound is completely healed (physically). What ever mental impression (awe, surprise etc) left by the recent blow to the arm would IMO be offset by the fact that there's a morning star-wielding mad man trying to kill you 5 feet in front of you.

[JohnK]

What ever mental impression (awe, surprise etc) left by the recent blow to the arm would IMO be offset by the fact that there's a morning star-wielding mad man trying to kill you 5 feet in front of you.

If that was the case then the mere fact of something life-threatening taking place in the environment could negate the stunnning (or even penalties for injuries) in every situation? But that s why self control skills are used for.
A mental state is somethong IMO important, something physical taking place in the brain and in RM mechanics I think it cannot just disappear from force of will (unless the GM thinks otherwise)

[DangerMan]

If that was the case then the mere fact of something life-threatening taking place in the environment could negate the stunnning (or even penalties for injuries) in every situation?

Of course not. I always reasoned the rounds of stun was caused by "O heck, my leg is shattered!". When/if my leg is suddenly un-shattered, to me it makes no sense that the same amount of stun is in effect.

[Marc R]

Don't forget that while the body is a machine, it's also electrical and chemical.

Two police officers get into a shoot out with a suspect, who is killed, one officer gets the tip of his pinky shot off, despite the fact his partner tourniqueted the finger with a shoelace, the officer slipped into shock and died.

That's blood sugar at work, your body gobbling all of it up then vapor locking when it runs out. (hence the treatment for shock resembles what you get after giving blood, calm them, warm them, and get them to eat a cookie and some juice).

Over stimulation of the Vegas nerve can cause cardiac arrest. . .because you can short out an electromechanical system.

Similarly, you can be knocked spinning or unconscious by pain, like say a crushed hand can knock you unconscious, despite it not being your head/brain directly effected. Pain in a toe can make you vomit, despite your digestive system being remote from the toe.

So if say someone smashes your leg with a mace, all sorts of nerves over fire into your brain with pain signals, and your glands dump loads of hormones into your system. (including insulin which causes the shock above)

You get a magical fix on the bone, muscle and skin damage to the leg. . .your body and brain might still be tilting on the electrochemical storm the injury set off. . . .

Flipping the logic the other direction, a taser/stungun stuns/scrambles your bio-electrical systems while causing minimal injury, and many drugs and chemicals can do the same to your biochemical systems. Stun and shock are your body doing the same thing to itself, via nerve impulses and hormones.

Consider how, just after a fight, even if you sustain no injuries, you often get the shakes, nausea or lightheadedness. . .that's your body reacting as it starts damping out all the electrical activity, and filtering off all those hormones. . .they don't merely vanish in an instant, they linger a while. . .It's magical healing, so it's hard to apply real life logic to it, but in real life, having a shattered femur suddenly made whole might shut off the pain signals and hormone production, but it wouldn't instantly clear their effects from the body. . .the unstunning magics would seem to do so.

[DangerMan]

Consider how, just after a fight, even if you sustain no injuries, you often get the shakes, nausea or lightheadedness. . .

Thats true.. Happened to me last week

Over stimulation of the Vegas nerve can cause cardiac arrest. . .because you can short out an electromechanical system.

What are you LordMiller, a RPG-wiz and a trained physician? Put this way it makes more sense, though.

[Marc R]

Nah, but I did take first aid and I watch a lot of Discovery Channel. . .

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

So, beeing stunned is a mental state, which once it is afflicted is detached from the physical injury which caused it?

Sorry, that is not what I meant to imply. While stunning does have an effect that could be considered to be "mental" in nature, that does not mean that the stun itself is a "mental effect".

Using the term "heavy disorientation" was meant as more of a simple, short-hand method of describing the effect of being stunned, not as a definition of what stunning is.

As for what a "stun" is, that would be a much more complex explanation, I think, as a person who is stunned loses some motor function (physical effect, reflected in the penalties to action), they are also quite likely disoriented to a point as well, but it is not nothing but disorientation, because they are still allowed to take actions, in a limited fashion. Sorry again, but I am not going to try and fully define either.

The point that I was trying to make above is simpler though. The broken arm, in the example you gave, was the major part of the injury. Any maneuver penalties would have been directly tied to the break in the arm, the stuns would be tied to receiving the injury itself, not what the injury is (i.e. a secondary effect).

Therefore, unless said spell specified that it healed the "full critical", it would only heal what is specified by the spell (the broken arm) and any effects directly caused by the break (the maneuver penalty), it would not get rid of secondary effects (the stun).

And the spell you mentioned was only to heal the broken arm, not the full critical, thus the stuns would remain (along with any other effects from the critical not directly tied to the broken arm).

[JohnK]

Although we don't use, in our campaign, healing spells that instantly and miraculously treat major wounds, this is an interesting discussion.

As far as i can remember pain is produced through electrochemical signals in the thalamus of the mid-brain, so from a reductionist point of view, pain is something purely physical obeying to laws or phusics and chemistry. But most RM campaigns IMO are not set in reductionistic Universe. They leave a space for a purely psychic reality intervening in our body (as most of the religions in our real life world). That lets the GM a space for whatever speculations he desires to do and depends on him how much of real world assumptions he intends to use. Over-introducing rules that try to resemble real life may vanish the magic from rpg's.

Also most of the healing spells in RM are categorized depending on the body system that they have effect on. So an "instant bone fracture repair" from "bone law" has effect only on the bones (bone minerals, collagen fibers and many other materials) and not on the nerve fibers trasmitting pain to the brain. So, if someone likes being realistic, the pain would endure despite the healing of the bone, because of the severed nerve endings that innervate the periosteum (the part of the bone that aches). Complicated!

More complicating is that pain is one of the factors for sustaining Shock and although the bone would have healed (or the artery got magically stitched or whatever) the enduring pain may (in GM discretion) sustain the penalties introduced by tha wound, due to shock or disability.

So nerve damage plays an important role in most of the severe wounds, something that is introduced into rolemaster in the chapter about healing (in GM Law or RMSS, i don t remember...). And healing of nerve damage mostly needs magic healing because our capacity to heal nerve damage is slow or impossible sometimes...

[providence13]

next on Discovery, "Ask a GM".

I always thought that the stun came off when the wound is healed, too. Interesting..

[markc]

  IMO there is no way to remove the stun without healing the stun. ie in my game even if you healed all the damage done, the broken bone, the nerve penalties then you would also have to remove the stun with spells. That is a lot to heal in one round.
 MDC

[kevinmccollum]

So, this 17th+ level cleric (one high enough to do what is indicated in the scenario) heals the break. And the character with the injury doesn't have an herb/skill to function through the stun?

Unless it is a Healer, who transfers the entire wound, (stun included) he would still be stunned.

[Right Wing Wacko]

Stun...
That's what stun relief spells/herbs are for...
See, the way I look at it, you have herbs that heal, say, bone, and some others that heal muscle. Also, there are herbs that relieve stun. Thus, at our table, stun is something that needs to be treated separately.

*shrug*
Just sayin'...

Oh, also, at our table, if the crit says broken arm, then a mend bone spell/herb will heal it. If the crit says nerve damage, then that is what needs healed. We try not to read too much more into the crits...

[Arioch]

Yeah, I do as RWW does: stun is just a status for us and you need an effect removing that status to heal it.
Description of what cause the status (disorientation, pain, wathever) changes depending on the situation.

[RandalThor]

Remember, there are 2 skills to help the character deal with stun:

Stun Maneuvering, which helps lessen the stun modifier, and Stun Removal, which is used to get rid of stun rounds altogether. These are instances when a mental action is used to get rid of physiological effects ("mind over matter").

But, I generally rule that if the spell is high enough level (20+) it is likely get rid of all the effects of the critical. Though the caster has to be very high level in order to cast the spell in a single action, in a single round. Not likely in the above scenario - and it will open the cleric up to attacks as his attention is diverted in casting the spell.

[Dark Schneider]

In game terms, each wound must be healed as separate wound, you can apply your own house rules (like, "if stun is because the arm broken, then I remove stun if arm is healed"), but IMO it is recommended to play in game terms all you can for easiness.

As said, the stun can be because many reasons, like the shock or trauma of the blow (nerve system), not because the arm itself.