Injury

This rule in a nutshell: You don't have to worry about being overly realistic and medical with injuries your character sustains, but they should still affect his or her ability to keep fighting.

Let's get to the point, here. Most Sonic characters have tiny bodies, unrealistically wiry skeletons, and gigantic heads with features so big that, if they were shot anywhere, there's a 50% chance it'll be in the eye. That said, we do not handle injury overly realistically here. The issue of your character ever being shot in the pancreas will not come up. (I don't even remember where the pancreas is or what it does.) However, at the same time, we don't treat it the way the actual Sonic series games do; characters don't spew rings everywhere every time they get hit or insta-die when pin-pricked while not holding rings.

Instead, most all characters are assumed to be fairly resilient. Some may take less punishment than others before going down for the count, but none will be as fragile as real-life human beings. Character death will be uncommon, and recovery time from injury will be fast.

Here are some general guidelines.

• Blunt impact wounds are handled in a kind of an average-video-game way. Particularly tough characters may shake off those ridiculous "hit by a truck" injuries without a whole lot of ill effect, while normal or weaker characters will likely be KO'ed, but not killed.
  • Even tough characters will soon succumb after enough abuse, but again, blunt impact will almost never be treated as potentially lethal except in the most ridiculously extreme cases.
  • In real life, being struck in the head hard enough to get knocked out will most likely cause potentially serious brain injury. You do not need to worry about your character getting brain damaged here.
  • Characters will seldom be seriously injured by recoil from their own attacks. For instance, if one of your character's main methods of assault is punching things, and he or she punches a robot or door, don't worry about shattered knuckles or anything like that. This is a Sonic RP; it is okay to try to smash robots with your character's body. (If the punched object is really tough and doesn't give much at all, though, it would be reasonable for it to smart some. Think "glowing red cartoon fist" rather than "broken bones and blood everywhere.")
  • Really hard blows to the head (the ones that don't cause a KO, anyway) should reasonably make characters feel disoriented. (In real life, this is because the brain gets jarred against the inside of the skull ["concussion"] as the head gets knocked around.) Some characters may be more resistant to this than others. Use your discretion and try to make it sound justified if you intend to shrug off any hits like this.

• Burns are played down in their gruesomeness, but still should not be shrugged off. Getting burned hurts. They'll cause characters intense (and probably lasting) pain, and that will affect their ability to function. Most of all, though, burns should increase vulnerability to other attacks of any kind. (Imagine getting punched in a burn!) Appearance-wise, you're mostly going to see singed hair/fur and reddish skin, as we do not really want to go into the nitty-gritty gore of realistic burning.

• Cuts and gashes are handled pretty much like gunshot wounds. There will be blood, and the character's performance will be affected, but lethality will be mostly played down. (Making any throat-slashing psycho characters is probably ill-advised in the first place. This is a Sonic RP, for cryin' out loud!)

• Electrocution is played relatively simply but realistically. It causes pain, extreme spasms, stun (loss of control and mobility), disorientation, burns (again, burning is played down in its gruesomeness as said above) and rapidly drains stamina (that is, it causes a sensation of heaviness and weakness). Some really tough characters may be able to literally shrug off a small stun gun, but unless they have stars for electricity resistance, high-power electrical hazards and attacks should cause significant harm.

• EMP (electromagnetic pulse) does not have an effect on living organisms. Robotic characters may be mildly to heavily disrupted, fully disabled, or outright defeated depending on the magnitude of the pulse and how shielded the robot is against EMP. Do note that some things that create EMPs (such as EMP bombs) may still be damaging to living things in other ways, though, such as by, say... exploding violently.

• Energy weapon damage depends on the weapon being used, and is usually a combination of other damage types you see in this list. For instance, a plasma cannon will probably cause burning, electrocution, and a small concussive explosion. A chaos energy pistol will be more vague and fictiony, though, and probably just cause blunt-impact damage and burn some.

• Explosions typically do damage in three ways: concussive force (the deadly shockwave, which does extreme blunt impact damage), burning (the actual heat and fire of the explosion), and sometimes shrapnel (the little metal bits that fly). Just treat it as a combination of those three things, and remember that this is a Sonic RP and only be as realistic as the drama of the scene calls for.

• Gunshot wounds are handled pretty much like in your average (non-Sonic) video game, with a dash of realism added. There will be blood, and any unprotected part of the character struck will be adversely affected (i.e. an arm may temporarily become much less usable, or a character may be left limping or unable to walk). However, given how tiny the characters' bodies are, it's assumed that the bullets usually just "shatter" on impact, and do not penetrate, because frankly, there's no room in most Sonic characters.
  • That said, if a character of normal toughness is shot in the head from a normal range with a normal, small firearm, expect it to be an instant loss of consciousness, but not necessarily something lethal.
  • If a character is shot many times, or from point-blank-range, however, it is possible (or even highly likely) that the wounds will be treated more realistically, and the character may die.
  • Obviously, the severity of the damage depends on what the character is being shot with, too. Use common sense.

• Poisoning ... has not really come up before in our setting. (To be addressed when it happens?!)

• Scrapes and abrasions basically don't exist because this is an actiony video game setting where people are constantly combat-rolling, flipping, and sliding all over the place in all kinds of settings. This level of realism is not necessary.