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[5.3] Death
When your Current Health falls below zero and reaches the negative of your
Max Health (your character's Mortality Limit), you are dead. For
example, if your Max Health is 20, you would die if your Current Health ever
dropped to -20 or lower. Well, truthfully, what has happened is that the
character's heart and breathing have stopped (cardiac arrest). The good news
is that your character doesn't suffer any more bleeding damage while their
heart is not beating! Little consolation.
[5.3.1] Resuscitation
Anyone trained in medicine can attempt CPR to restart the
person's heart. To do so requires a skill check in Medicine: General.
The difficulty of this roll is the number of combat (3 second) rounds
since the character's heart stopped plus the points below the Mortality
Limit the Current Health has fallen. To continue the example used above,
one round after the character's Current Health falls to -21, a doctor
would have a difficulty of -2 to resuscitate. One round later, it would
be -3. After that, -4, and so on. Medical equipment, such as a
defibrilator, will add bonuses to resuscitation rolls. See Section 6.8: Medical Equipment for
more details.
When a person is resuscitated, he or she returns to a
comatose state. If they were in a coma before cardiac arrest, they will
suffer from whatever bleeding existed. If they were not, their bleeding
is affected as if they had just fallen into a coma (see Section 5.2: Coma).
After being resuscitated, a character's Current Health will
be lower than their Mortality Limit. In this condition, any additional
points of Health lost will again bring a person into cardiac arrest once
again. This includes damage caused by bleeding or injury. When their
Current Health raises above their Mortality Limit, they will again suffer
damage normally.
[5.3.2] Loose Change
The doctors can attempt resuscitation as many times as they
like, but the penalties continue to build up, making the skill checks
harder and harder as time passes. Eventually, after enough time and
failures, you'll just have to face the fact that your character is toast.
The only thing to do now is to go through his pockets and search for loose
change.
At least in the standard rules, that is.
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