Wounds, arrows and bullet shots

It has come to my attention that very few people knows how a wound work and thus I will explain some of the most important facts of it.

1. Arrows.
When you get shot by an arrow you can't just take it out like it was nothing but a stick that has penetrated your skin, it is much more complicated then that. This is a link to a great simulator on how you would remove an arrow out of a legg.

The procedure varies on how deep the arrow would have penetrated the skin and the tip of the arrow, if it has gone trough all the way trough the [Insert body-part] but stopped half way, leaving the feathers on one side and the tip of the arrow on the other side, that means you have to cut of the feathers balancing the arrow and then den just drag it out as quickly as possible, taking hold on the tip of the arrow, not the balancing side. Remember to cover the wound also.

If the arrow have penetrated the skin but haven't gone all the way trough, your gonna have a bad time.
This is where things get complicated and you have to work fast, you would have to cut of the feathers that balances the Arrow so that you do minimal damage to the body, cut the arrow in half, if you have alcohol like whiskey or something like that now is the time to use it for now starts the bloody things, you would have to press or hammer the arrow until it reaches the other-side of the [Insert body-part], then take it out quickly using a clamp/pliers. Then it is recommended covering the wound before healing it, since blood would still flow out.


2. Bullet wounds.
Really simple to explain, before you start healing the wound you should TAKE THE DAMNED BULLET OUT!
If you start healing the wound before you take the bullet out it will be stuck in there for ever, I don't care how good you say you are just take that damned bullet out.

3. Regular wounds.
Now we might be living in a fantasy world where dragons exist and pandas can talk, but that doesn't mean wounds cant be infected once in a while, covering the wound with bandage or even leaf's can prevent this, if you have been in a cave and your leg or chest has been penetrated by a rock after you landed really hard on it chances are that the wound have been infected, especially if the cave is full of water and mushrooms.


Following these three things can lead to fun Roleplay both for the doctor and the patient, also hope someone would tell me more on these things and what more I can place in this post, increasing the little knowledge I have on Roleplaying doctors.

Odin with you all, Thorvald.

Going to use this thread to bring up Gahalla's old Violence is Dangerous guide, as a supplement to the points raised here.

One thing to keep in mind, on the infections bit, is to make sure to clean the wound. Something a lot of people don't do.

Also, while doing surgery, make sure to seal off the blood vessels and drain blood from cavities. You can't just open someone up and dig around without working to prevent further bloodloss.


Tbh, proper medical RP is so much more fun than magical healing. A lot more you can do with it when you're digging around in the flesh and guts.

A lot depends on arrowheads, but if there is to be a general rule I prefer the pushing through to the pulling back.

Generally broad headed Arrows are the ones we think of as arrow heads, quite often with barbs, think of them as general purpose arrowheads. Bodkins are more like a spike or bullet head for armour penetration but they will do less damage to the body. The thickness of the shape is really the key, thicker heads will cut the body up more but will have to move through more armour by virtue of their larger surface area.

A final point is that arrows do not fly in a straight line due to a phenominum called the archers paradox. At launch there is the maximum force acting on the arrow and it is pushing from the back, as such the arrow will flex an bend at the start of the flight, it will also fly in a slight barral roll rather than straight forward. As such at v close range arrows are not as good a weapon than you will think. After 5-10 m this will settle down and the arrow will fly much more true. If you are using indirect "fire" Clout archery as it is known then the arrow will lose speed in the air as it is given flight and will gain in speed as it falls.

Bullets do not have to be removed as such, other than the chance of shattered bones and blood loss (plus the spilling of stomach acid into the body, which is said to be the most painful of wounds) the danger is infection caused by the bullet bringing cloth into the wound and it going rotten inside of you. I would assume light is antiseptic however.

Hope this helps

I love this forum, always someone willing to help out.

Drustai wrote:Tbh, proper medical RP is so much more fun than magical healing. A lot more you can do with it when you're digging around in the flesh and guts.

I agree, but it is boring for the patient /screams in pain

>.>

TBH, when I'm a patient I find magical healing much more boring than physical healing.

Lexgrad wrote:Bullets do not have to be removed as such, other than the chance of shattered bones and blood loss (plus the spilling of stomach acid into the body, which is said to be the most painful of wounds) the danger is infection caused by the bullet bringing cloth into the wound and it going rotten inside of you.

This is true. A lot of times, bullets were/are left in because trying to dig around to find the bullet in the body (since they like to ricochet and bounce around) it will cause more damage than just leaving it in.

Well it depends on the patient, i do tend to heal in diffrent ways on my pala, holy light aside.

But if it's too boring for the patient and his emotes are hardly caring i don't need to care either :3

As always, my policy with these kind of things is that things to "plot ammount of damage", which will take a "plot ammount of time to heal when x ammount of plot is applied".

Sometimes I just don't feel like going trough the medical moments. Sometimes I do. When I don't feel like it, I wave the magical priestly wand and everything will be fine and dandy in the morning. If I do, I'll dress up in bandage, have surgery performed and walk with a limp for weeks.

Go with whatever is most fun to role-play with, I say. Just go with what's the most fun! Realism be damned. We've got magic to fix that shit, right? (Or not, if you don't want it fixed, which is cool too!)

A mix of magic and non-magic works best for me since I don't have an education in the medical field.

It also means the bloodiness of surgery can be fine tuned.

I mostly do things the way Thelos just mentioned. Depends a lot on the situation.

I remember having the exact same conversation in a different thread actually.

A few fun things to know about wounds irl, to make it easier I'm assuming the injured part of the body in question is a leg or arm:

1. Removing arrows/daggers/shrapnel that are stuck in a wound will often make the wound bleed more, as the foreign body has kept some of it back.

2. Raise the bleeding limb to a greater height than the injured person's heart to lessen the bleeding.

3. Keep the injured person warm. Cold people bleed more. Their blood just won't coagulate properly.

4. To stop a bleeding with bandages, they need to be wrapped tightly! Basicly the pressure applied by the bandage to the surface of the wound needs to be greater than the pressure applied from the blood within.

5. Once you've stopped a bleeding, do not remove the bandages in the first 48 hours, not even to clean the wound. Most wounds would unless complications arise close themselves allright during that time, and a closed wound prevents infections more efficiently than a clean open one.

6. Infected wounds won't heal properly before the infection is gone.

7. Bleeding naturally is worse when arteries are involved. Once you lose enough blood, your blood pressure can't keep up due to the too low amount of blood. This leads to fun stuff like organ failure, unconsciousness and death.... Basicly, if this starts happening and the dying toon wants to live, use proper magical healing. I find that more plausible within the setting than modern style rush infusions.

8. If the bandages get visibly bloody on the outside, they are most likely bleeding through. Try again, but better. They won't work like that, even if they'll look cooler.

9. Wounds with some sort of cavity (exit holes from modern bullets leave such, and a high number of other things could make them in our fantasy setting): HEALING. The surgical procedures involved would make poor RP unless the person typing them works as a real life surgeon. First aid for this would be stuffing the cavity tightly with LOADS of bandages, this stuffing needs to apply great pressure to the tissue all around. Apply bandages on top of this again.

10. RPing anything medical at all is boring if the patient isn't involved actively. Likewise, RPing a healer is way boring if the injured person doesn't at least try to RP out their injuries, symptoms and the healing process a little. If you can't be arsed with that, don't get hurt in the first place, you're gonna waste some healer's time IC and leave everyone bored and frustrated.

TLDR: Stick to reading 1-5 or so.

ADDITION:
Basicly, to keep a person alive you just need to keep him/her breathing and circulated. Keep airways open, treat all chest injuries, make sure he/she don't bleed out and you're good.

I'll leave this here http://www.defiasrp.com/t6725-useful-link-for-combat-role-play

But yeah i agree with most here. My only more medic/healer oriented is my Paladin, even tho she can use the light, i do apply limitations and try to apply as much physical things in it.

A mix of magic and non-magic works best for me since I don't have an education in the medical field.

Same really for me, I also ICly say how long one must rest or so, but i do make kind of guesses or so, but so far I didn't have any complaints.

I do everything with magic.

I've payed two major healing characters: Scuzy, a Paladin, and Jahzeem, a Witch Doctor.

Scuzy would do everything with prayer, and think surgery and the like dangerous practices for the faithless. I found it a lot more interesting to role-play then surgery because it's more fantastical, and requires more imagination.

When there's a bullet in the wound, it has to be removed, of course, but who says it can't be removed magically? Why does the light, or other healing magic, have to be a dumb point-this-at-wound-and-it-heals-shut easy fix? It's all about creative emoting, and surgery doesn't strike me as very creative. Unless you're a mage-- A mage doing surgery with arcane magic, -that- is something I'd like to see.

As for Jahzeem, he fixed most things by applying more violence first, then applying a healing salve and giving them a pat on the bum. For the really severe cases there's the mystical art of voodoo, with which you can do.... Anythig! I've done things like fixing an orcs teeth by replacing them with wooden replicas and turning them into real teeth through spirit-mojo-hojo-juju. I've even gone as far as to "swap wouds" through an intricate ritual. A troll can recover from injuries that would kill most other races, there's some fun to be had there.



Conclusion: If you think magical healing is more boring then surgery, you're doing it wrong.

I personally believe any priest, druid or shaman doing extensive and advanced surgery is breaking with blizzard lore. Leave that stuff to the crazy goblins and the inventive gnomes. You have your faith at your disposal. use it, and be creative with it.



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Thelos wrote:As always, my policy with these kind of things is that things to "plot ammount of damage", which will take a "plot ammount of time to heal when x ammount of plot is applied".

Amen, brother! Preach it! All hail the plot, the one true deity!

erwtenpeller wrote:Unless you're a mage-- A mage doing surgery with arcane magic, -that- is something I'd like to see.

Necromancy is arcane magic, and I do that all the time.

I remember one time using shadow magic to disintegrate the bullet inside of someone once, instead of pulling it out. <.<

Conclusion: If you think magical healing is more boring then surgery, you're doing it wrong.

I personally believe any priest, druid or shaman doing extensive and advanced surgery is breaking with blizzard lore. Leave that stuff to the crazy goblins and the inventive gnomes. You have your faith at your disposal. use it, and be creative with it.

Nothing wrong with combining both. Dru uses extensive physical prep-work, then relies on alchemical and magical methods of sealing and recovery. Plus the occasional use of magical emergency stabilizers for when things go bad (like the one time Skarain went into shock from blood loss, Dru grabbed a heart from her reagent pack, held it over her, and crushed it between her fingers, letting the blood fall over her as she spoke the incantation in order to stabilize her).


That being said, while I do enjoy being creative with magical methods, I love emoting gore. So I vastly prefer physical methods as they let me go into great detail about lovely innards. Thus I actually prefer doing healing on Arey, as she has no magic whatsoever and so has to rely on nothing but old-fashioned bloody-handed surgery.

I got my druid, who mostly heal using magic, but also use herbs, bandages and sowing. He also (Inspired by Feral) Use a seed where he grow the roots into the wound, wrap around the foreign object and then pull out. He differ between situations.

My paladin heal mostly with light, but also, like above, use sowing ect.

My rogue know basics only. She can take out a bullet if its not complicated, stitch a wound (won't be pretty done though), disinfect and bandage.

a very interesting thread that raises some good points.

However! on the point of arrows being easy/hard to draw out, there is one exception, Bodkin arrows.

Here is an image of a few types of arrow heads...



Guess which is the bodkin? Yep, the one on the far left.



Bodkin arrows have a needle like head for a particular reason, primarily they are meant for penetrating armour while being shot from a longbow in a high arc. A good example of this was Agincourt, thousands of french knights killed by Bodkin arrows falling on them like rain. However, as good as they was for armour penetration, it was a known problem that they were often by far the most survivable of arrows, as they causes minimum damage on the way in, and yes! could be drawn out by hand.

So i'm not saying your guide is wrong! just that theres one small exception. Not that i think it counts in wow, you don't see many people firing arrows off in huge volleys at long range targets.

oh and one more question, Crossbow bolts/quarels. got any info on those?

Krogon Devilstep wrote:
oh and one more question, Crossbow bolts/quarels. got any info on those?

Only a couple of notes:

Most modern crossbows are adapted to shoot arrows (as this works better for game hunting etc). But medieval crossbows used these little bastards:


(Has some useful notes below on the types. There were also scythe-headed bolts for cutting ships' rigging etc)



Quarrels/Bolts. Much thicker, and like arrows, had a variety of different heads for different purposes. Also, whilst some had fletching, others just had wooden fins for stability etc (as above).

Mostly just posting this because modern x-bows so often use arrows rather than bolts. looking at the pictures you can see they would probably cause rather different damage.

Drustai wrote:

Lexgrad wrote:Bullets do not have to be removed as such, other than the chance of shattered bones and blood loss (plus the spilling of stomach acid into the body, which is said to be the most painful of wounds) the danger is infection caused by the bullet bringing cloth into the wound and it going rotten inside of you.

This is true. A lot of times, bullets were/are left in because trying to dig around to find the bullet in the body (since they like to ricochet and bounce around) it will cause more damage than just leaving it in.

I am reminded of an old John Wayne film where he had a bullet close to his spine that was left in there as the local doctors couldnt do anything. Every so often it would cause him pain and mild paralysis. Prob not medically accurate but one way you can RP out an old wound.

Krogon Devilstep wrote:a very interesting thread that raises some good points.

However! on the point of arrows being easy/hard to draw out, there is one exception, Bodkin arrows.

Here is an image of a few types of arrow heads...



Guess which is the bodkin? Yep, the one on the far left.



Bodkin arrows have a needle like head for a particular reason, primarily they are meant for penetrating armour while being shot from a longbow in a high arc. A good example of this was Agincourt, thousands of french knights killed by Bodkin arrows falling on them like rain. However, as good as they was for armour penetration, it was a known problem that they were often by far the most survivable of arrows, as they causes minimum damage on the way in, and yes! could be drawn out by hand.

So i'm not saying your guide is wrong! just that theres one small exception. Not that i think it counts in wow, you don't see many people firing arrows off in huge volleys at long range targets.

oh and one more question, Crossbow bolts/quarels. got any info on those?

Bodkins were not just for high arc, they would work directly also. The one you have in the second picture was an older arrowhead, a needle like bodkin used for parting chain mail. The one in the first picture is much smaller and used for plate mail.

The Battle of Agincourt is much debated as to how many were killed directly by arrows. Some experiments have shown that arroware not as effective as we thought vs armour, I would stress that the ones I have seen use modern steel, not middle aged and the bows used are not as powerful either. Many French were killed by falling off horses and being squashed plus the ones ganked at the English lines (horse armour is never as good as human armour, likely many more horses were kiled than knights. Finally there is an assumption that all the french knights were in shinning armour, I would guess many would have been in older armour or frankly cheaper armour (poorer knights).

But regardless of that the longbow was a great weapon.

Cross bow bolts had a few different heads, I am aware of a crosss shaped heads and some more like a bodkin but I dont know if they got the same development in ammo as longbows or if it is just down to local manufactoring processes. The interesting developments in crossbows were in the bow itself I think. Would be interested if anyone knows more.

ETA I forgot to mention, Bodkins had the top of their shaft made from oak rather than ash. Arrows were made from ash as it gave them flex for better flight but the oak gave it better armour pen as it was stronger.

PS Thanks Katt

Don't forget, Agincourt was a mud-bath so falling in heavy-armour as french knights did, it was a pain to get-up and easy to be killed by spikes through the visors by the english archers, once the arrows stopped flying

Amaryl wrote:Don't forget, Agincourt was a mud-bath so falling in heavy-armour as french knights did, it was a pain to get-up and easy to be killed by spikes through the visors by the english archers, once the arrows stopped flying

I believe the true winning weapon of that battle was actually the bill-hook.



Nasty polearm. With the english behind barricades, when or if knights rode up, they'd more than likely be 'hooked' and pulled off their horses and into the waiting english infantry to be butchered. and as amaryl said, the mud only made it worse.

That weapon.. No that Monster of a weapon!

The thing that really beat the french there, was the french XD But we did help them on their way. There were many other battles in the 100 year war (well duh) and overall they prove the effectiveness of the Longbow vs both crossbow and knight.

One thing I love about being a Fleshcrafting Death Knight is dealing with injuries. It's incredible what you can do when you have the right "tools" to do them.

My favorite thing is since Eliza has a deep Herbalist background, she sews runes into leaves that can be placed in a wound. Say an arrow for instance, she has Deathgate runed Sungrass to use with those. Drops it in, activates the gate and pushes the arrow head through safely. Then the sungrass can be used to heal the wound.

I always find a mixture of surgery and magic works best for RP styles. Eliza quite frequently has to repair her own body. She has a "stock" of dead bodies hanging in her quarters and basically harvests whatever she needs. After losing arms or legs she simply cleans off the area that it was lost, attaches a new arm, sews it thoroughly after using special alchemic creations to heal internally, and then a little necrotic magic to seal the entire deal.