Fighting crime is a dangerous business.  Sometimes you have to go under the knife!    With my critical hit rules, surgery is sometimes the only way to regain hits or to get back on your feet.  Here are the rules I made on the fly.

Getting surgery causes 2d8 damage to the patient, which they, of course, can not roll with.  This damage is modified by the surgeon's skill.   You take the damage modifier of the surgeon and subtract it from the 2d8 damage of the procedure.

  Also the surgeon needs to roll Id20  ( I is his intelligence score) to see if he is successful.  It it is not successful, then the damage is taken but no positive results are gained.   It needs to be done again, and with more risk, as the patient has less hits!


After each surgery the patient rolls Ed20.  If he fails the roll he permanently loses a point of Endurance.    This simulates wear and tear.   Its best to avoid injuries after all.

  And then,  don't forget to roll to see if the damage taken from the surgery is critical!      If it is, treat this as complications from the surgery.

Good Ideas!   Really good.  Lets brainstorm something.

Yes,  the intelligence of the doctor would make it easier to operate on someone with an abnormal physiology.    Certain powers would also hinder the doctor.   Biological armour would have to be broken open before surgery could happen.   Also invulnerablity would be a problem.  I remember a Superman comic when the doctor had to expose Superman to kryptonite inorder to soften his skin so he could remove a magic bullet.   
   A doctor operating on a cyborg or a guy with bionics would need the appropriate knowledge areas or risk harming the patient.

I do use a skill system in my game.   And to tell the truth, I haven't yet used the surgery rules in my game as of yet.   No player got that beat up yet.

John wrote on Apr 18^th, 2009 at 11:30pm:

Here are some general thoughts.

Unless a special attack or poison, etc., was in place, or the character faced an unexpectedly bad consequence from a missed attack or failed inventing attempt, I don't see surgery coming into play very often.

Even then, there's surgery and then there's surgery.

I might treat minor surgery as a devitatalization attack (3d10 power points), since it won't incapacitate a patient.

With major surgery, I basically see patients losing all their hit points, then recovering normally.

For highly unusual procedures, the physician might need to make an Intelligence save (d20) or even make an inventing attempt to repair the damage. An Endurance save by the pateint (d20 or d100) might be necessary as well to prevent a lingering impairment in the case of a special attack, etc. This would be a lasting result of the initial injury--not a side effect of the surgery. Also, this would be a rare event. The kind of things that happens once every 10-20 years of a super-group book.

As an aside, I don't see many instances in comics when characters have to keep going under the knife. But I could see that happening, perhaps, in a grittier, pulp campaign.

SKill: Emergency Medical Care. 

With this skill a person can treat a wounded character's critical hit.  While they can not close it up and heal it without the proper medical equipment, they can slow down the damage the victum takes from the wound.
Normal, untreated critical wounds bleed and cause the character to suffer one damage a turn until they are dead or the wound is treated.
   

The character with this skill must roll  Id20.  The lower the roll the better the treatment.

Here is a rule of thumb chart.

If they roll a success of 1-5 the  they only take 1 damage per minute.

6-10  1 damage per five minutes.
11-15  1 damage per ten minutes.
16-20  1 damage per 20 minutes
20-   The wound is closed, regular healing can now take place.

I had almost the same thing happen when we were in our teens.  An NPC was shot in the chest, and the hero had to use his lazer powers to do some quick surgery as the bullet was too close to his heart, or what ever, were in our teens.   He had to roll vs his Ad20 to save the life of a beloved NPC.   And I made this all happen on a whim, just for some drama in the story.    It worked then.