Pain threshold- how wounds that do not cause brain or organ damage or bleeding can still be a cause for concern

Hello all! This suggestion deals with something I like to call a pain threshold which when reached causes unconsciousness, and is seperate from health.

This system means that taking a single gunshot wound that could cause internal bleeding could still not be enough to make you pass out, but a series of kicks and punches could, while probably not inflicting serious damage still render you helpless.

This also makes non-lethal means viable, and could, via rolls, determine the results of violent interrogations.

I propose such a pain threshold be linked to one’s endurance, and be influenced by cyber/bio-ware and/or specialized training/perks.

How it works, in my brain is, each wound inflicted has varying pain values, along with damage values, that accumulate, upto a value of 100 by default, with endurance affecting the maximum, and cyber/bioware increasing said maximum. Once this value is reached, the person passes out, and from there on, provided their attacker is close to them, and decides to continue attacking, all damage automatically becomes brain damage.

Recovery is as follows- assuming for the sake of discussion that the threshold is 100,it could reduce on its own rapidly, provided there’s no further damage, to 80 at which the person regains consciousness. Then from 80 to 40, the reduction is slower, but not too slow, say 15 to 20 minutes, faster with treatments like painkillers.

From 40 to 0 happens only with full treatment of the offending wounds.

I further propose, that unlike health, pain cannot be diagnosed by the attending doctor. As discussed in a previously posted topic dealing with signs and symptoms, pain is a symptom reported by the patient, not a sign observed by the doctor.

Therefore,the patient in question should be able to discern what their pain is like upon typing ‘Health’,and upon the doctor’s prompting,report the same to them, so that the doctor can prescribe/administer the appropriate therapy. We have this in medical practise IRL where patients are asked to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10.

Not going to go into too much detail but: in the future, a patient’s reporting of pain could be a way to tell if there’s something seriously wrong, especially if their injuries are internal, and they seem outwardly fine, and superficial examinations reveal nothing, and no scanners are on hand to examine their insides.

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The pain threshold is definitely a solid idea of the patient communicating to medical personnel about how bad the pain is from the perspective of the patient as you said because only they can feel the pain. With organs and such eventually coming into play, each of them could contribute differently to signs and symptoms with each presenting differently and effecting the patient differently. For example how internal bleeding in the abdomen can make a person’s stomach distended and the patient could be guarded, maybe there are lines of texts for the degree of damage getting worse. Like for example if you’ve been punched in the stomach it might start as discomfort, but repeated strikes of blunt trauma cause you to drop to your knees in a fetal position in pain. The organ system as a whole could get very complicated depending on how in depth you want to delve, and perhaps it would be a good idea to stick to the major organs such as the cardiovascular system or heart lungs and brain.

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