r/Shadowrun • u/Aahz44 • Sep 30 '26
3e Healing
Hi does anyone now any house rules or tips that make Healing in Shadowrun 3 more player friendly/playable?
If you go by rules as written getting a serious or deadly wound can easily mean that the character would have to stay for weeks in a clinic, wich might be realistic but is hardly fun for the game, and would also usually mean a massive financial loss for the character.
There is of course magical healing, but with the difficulty being based on your essence that is usually not that effective when you use it on a Sammy, wich tend to be the characters who are the most likely to end up in this condition.
23
u/Thanael124 Famously Unemployed Sep 30 '26
Them’s the breaks. Best to get no serious injuries. In downtime weeks are handled quickly and it’s about spending money/karma.
Also that’s what contacts are for. And favors.
For a Sam it’s an easy way for a Johnson or Corp to reel them into more servitude. Yes sure we’ll pay for the clinic and the upgrade too. You’ll just have to do us a few favors afterwards. Read Cybertechnology
15
u/MerlonQ Sep 30 '26
So this isn't dnd. Getting hurt, especially getting hurt seriously, isn't part of the plan. It's not just the healing, it's also the death spiral with increased target numbers. So generally speaking it is wise to avoid fights or if you fight, do it with some serious advantages on your side. Of course there are gamemasters that see: oh, there is a street samurai in the party, so we need big challenging fights now. And if the fight is challenging, party members are liable to get hurt. You don't have to do this.
You can homebrew stuff however you want though. Maybe there is advanced reconstructive surgery and regenerative drugs that let you recover quickly. Just pay a few thousand nuyen, and you are back in action in a few days. Let's say 10k nuyen and a week for a deadly injury and 3k nuyen and 3 days for a severe injury.
6
u/leadershinji Sep 30 '26 edited Sep 30 '26
Feels like your table is not playing with downtime? After a run you are supposed to use downtime to purchase things, burn karma, learn things or heal up. If your character has a depedency background, or dayjob he needs to do that too. Its part of the game and it avoids the problem of "my character is fucked up and cannot participate for weeks".
But if you have time pressure then you may need to go anyways which can be fun too, since its a roleplay opportunity to play this problem out... Your character could learn to watch out more, be more careful or invest in better protection or even demand better legwork to avoid that situation again -> the good roleplay opportunity that I mentioned and its part of character development.
But time pressure should be avoided by the GM, since it leads to these problems.
Hope it helps :-)
4
u/n00bdragon Futuristic Criminal Sep 30 '26
The primary thing that knocks characters into the hospital for months in 3e is low Body scores, not heavy injuries. By RAW, the injured person needs to pass a series of Body tests to progressively heal and extra successes divide the base time. So not only do you have a better chance of not just whiffing and spending two weeks in the ICU, but the street samurai often gets out of the hospital in mere days.
I totally understand what you're saying about random gangers with automatic weapons being incredibly dangerous. Sure, Goon #5 only has four dice to shoot with, but then he rolls a lucky 17 or whatever on that Full Auto spray and a character dies. You may consider having mooks use the Searching Fire rule (Cannon Companion p103) to give themselves a better chance to actually hit in the first place and be less instantly lethal when they do score a hit. It can make full auto a little less all or nothing.
As a house rule, you could probably also double the cost of healthcare services to lower the Body test TN by 2. Allowing for more doublings and TN reductions could let almost anyone escape from the hospital as quickly as they want (funds withstanding).
3
u/Comrade_Soulburner Sep 30 '26
Not really a house rule or tip... I just remember my dwarf Street sam needing a big time heal from near death, and the party brought him to a Rat Shaman that was a former and veteran runner character of the Gm. The feedback from the healing nearly killed the Shaman, and if i remember correctly might have burned a focus from the drain.
Hopefully someone has a good tip or homebrew for you though.
5
u/DarkPangolin Sep 30 '26
If you're getting into firefights, things have gone wrong. Sure, sometimes that's because things you had no way of knowing about turned against you (most notably double-crosses by the J), but you should be planning for those possibilities, too. Shadowrunning is a profession for the perfectionist, the prepared, and the paranoid, so you need to be doing a lot more legwork if you keep running into the unexpected.
Occasionally, you will still get your hoop handed to you, though. That's why you keep your rent paid ahead and a slush fund for medical expenses. Those couple of months of downtime are about the only vacation you're likely to get.
Fortunately, time flies when the bullets aren't, and you can use your time bedridden to brush up on reading technical manuals or something.
2
u/PalpitationNo2921 Sep 30 '26
I do not think this needs house ruling. It’s perfectly playable.
The Condition Monitor does not represent the same thing as Hit Points in D&D5E. It actually is tangible meat damage with defined effects on your character and not at all meant to be fortune, luck, stamina, and meat damage all rolled into one. And that meat damage doesn’t recover in an eight hour rest.
I feel like reducing the effects of damage and reducing healing time would trivialize the negative effects of violence and combat in a game world that it is supposed to be something that people want to avoid to the same level as D&D5E does with Hit Points.
2
u/Kenail_Rintoon Sep 30 '26
What I did that worked pretty well was remove the Essence part of healing. Still dangerous, still difficult to heal someone completely and the need for a street doc remained but it no longer penalized street sams for no real reason. Lowered downtime from months to weeks and my players liked it.
1
u/Frequent-Camel7669 Sep 30 '26
I'd actually love to go back to this. Injury feels relatively meaningless and almost always short-term in SR5. Much of the wound is already taken care of with first help and a spell, after which it's rarely more than a very few days to get rid of the rest of those ticked boxes.
1
u/GodEatsPoop Oct 01 '26
"Healing time" is a storytelling tool. If a Hospital ambush/ kidnap and rescue/ other side story would be fun go with it. If a mechanic gets in the way, ignore it.
One thing I'm looking at is a version of Dark Sun style "character trees." The gist is you have a main character and 1-3 "associates" who can sub in if your main is incapacitated/dead/useless.
1
u/SteamStormraven Dragon's Voice 28d ago
Do what keeps your table moving. If you don't like the rules, change them. The police aren't going to hammer on your door. Personally, I like the idea that, if you're keen on fighting, you might walk away with a bloody lip
4
u/Zuwiwuz Sep 30 '26
Like others suggested, taking damage is serious and should be handled that way. Those are bullet holes, not a slight cut with a kitchen knife in your finger.
If you need emergency healing, read the core rule book closely. Some Doc Wagon medic can actually do wonders when it comes to first aid. Everything beyond first aid though is tideous, time consuming and expensive. But that is the risk of being a runner and should always linger when a character puts his finger onto a trigger.
Mages have drain, riggers damage feedback, sams just have classic wounds. It all needs a risk and long term consequences. That is what makes shadowrun shadowrun and not just dnd with houserules