Pain and Emotions

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Introduction:

Here we will explain to you some standards for Pain Roleplay and Medical Roleplay. While we certainly are not doctors, this is meant to help guide and keep things more realistic.



Section 1: Physical Pain

What is Pain RP? Pain RP is pretty self explanatory. It is emoting out the strain put onto your character caused by physical trauma. A lot of people don’t emote out their wounds very precisely. Which is fine and all while you’re in combat, but that half-inch cut to the waist or the crushed rib doesn’t just disappear. It takes weeks, if not months to nurse someone back to full health, especially with wounds like those that our characters receive via combat. Here are a few guidelines to emoting your character’s injuries:

1. Imagine the pain

While I’m sure we’ve all been given minor injuries within our life-time, a broken finger can’t begin to compare to being hit with a magical force or being stabbed in the leg. Regardless of whether you’re in combat or not, having a stab wound is very painful and distracting. If you can even feel a tenth of that pain, that is more than enough to empathize with your character. Of course, there are some injuries, such as fire related ‘accidents’, which would burn a character’s nerves and cause them not to feel any pain (At that point, they would be near death).

2. Do some research

Maybe your character has received a major incision or has been hit by an angry half-giant with a hammer, you could take some time out of your day to emote those injuries and nurse the character. But let’s keep in mind that you are more than likely not a doctor/EMT/nurse, so it wouldn’t hurt if you were to google symptoms and effects of certain things. This doesn’t mean to look up something such as ‘How to treat a stab wound’ and then do that ICly. This means to look up something along the lines of ‘Effects of a stab wound’. This way, you can determine what will happen if you’re not given treatment.

3. Seek help

Panic often is a big part of injury situations. Your character probably won’t know what to do, so the best thing to do would likely be to find help. While most people generally look for a cleric or paladin to heal them ICly, people with actual medical knowledge, rather than all of this magic and heresy, would exist. Of course, some treatments would even be common knowledge. Broken finger? Splint that bad boy right up. Laceration? Pour some hard alcohol on that little bastard to disinfect it before you need to get an arm cut off due to infection. Back on topic, if healer isn’t around to fix your wounds, you’ll have to improvise and find someone who knows a thing or two.

4. Go into detail
The right amount of detail can be captured within a few sentences. Especially with Pain RP. Let’s say you generally emote something like this: ‘/me grunts as an arrow flies into his breastplate’. While this passes for decent quality roleplay, a little bit more detail can make it a lot better: ‘/me grunts and clenches his chest as an arrow pierces through his armor, cutting into his flesh. Blood would then very slowly roll down his plate as he showed an obvious sign of pain on his face’.

5. Adrenaline

A very important aspect of pain and survival. Adrenaline is a natural substance created by our bodies that is released when we strongly feel a single motion, such as fear or rage. It causes one’s heart to beat extremely fast. I notice how people act as if adrenaline is the solution to a fight and giving someone the upper hand. It isn’t. While it can aid someone in reacting faster and allowing them to summon new strength needed for survival, it can quickly cause them to die if they already have several wounds. Blood would quickly drain out of the body as you struggled to hang onto your last thread of life. That aside, adrenaline does not make you immune to pain. As stated before, it’s our body’s natural defensive mechanism activated by emotion. If your character is in combat a lot, they wouldn’t very likely get an adrenaline rush unless they were near death.

6. Everyday Pain

When was the last time you felt pain? Was it hitting your pinky toe on the couch? Or tripping and falling onto concrete? The majority of the time we feel pain is when we simply lose our balance or don’t pay attention to our little surroundings. A good way to bring about everyday RP is to give your character that disadvantage or carelessness, and cause them to fall every once in a while. Or maybe even cause them to do something as foolish as cut themselves while they’re cooking

Section 2: Emotional Pain

Now that we’re past the part of Pain RP where you take an arrow to the knee, we can get to the trauma your character receives when they watch thirty innocent families get burned alive. Let’s get started!

1. Sympathy

This is what all characters lack. We, as players, do not think to imagine another character’s pain. This is why many people find it so easy to kill of someone else’s character. This is wrong, though. For many cultures in the D&D world, killing is not an everyday thing. So why is everyone a death-dealer? Because they aren’t thinking of the character’s emotions. Every character has a past, present, and a future. A family, a story, a legacy. When you kill a character, you are wiping away everything they are and everything they could be.

2. Trauma (Present and Post)

Your character’s best friend / lover / sibling / pet hamster has just died in a horrific incident. Their death was in no way natural. As a matter of fact, your character still has blood on their hands from when they tried saving the person’s life. Imagine how that could cause someone to break down emotionally and rethink their life. Imagine losing your own best friend, lover, sibling, or pet hamster in a terrifying situation. A situation such as that, or even seeing anyone die in that manner, could possibly cause someone to change their entire lifestyle.

3. Guilt

You should be ashamed of yourself. You just killed that man. What will you do? Well, unless your character is just an emotionless, abnormal, psychopath, they’re gonna recall that situation. Depending on their past, they may or may not feel a lot of guilt because of it. Not to say they’d regret it, but they did just end a life. As I stated in part one of this section, everyone has a family and a story. Guilt can push a lot of people to do things they wouldn’t normally, such as:
-Admitting to what they’ve done
-Committing suicide
-Trying to make up for what they’ve done
-Looking for people or items for help (I.E. Drugs/Alcohol)

If one does not come to terms with their guilt, it could lead to A LOT of mental issues.

Section 3: Medical

Medical roleplay is something we personally love to do because it requires real life knowledge to do properly. If you intend on having a doctor character, we suggest learning some medical terminology or maybe watching some youtube videos of medical procedures. Not that you’ll be RPing surgery, but knowing basic first-aid would be a huge help. Below we will provide some information on a few injuries that I’ve seen to be common on RP servers. Keep in mind that this doesn’t give you IC knowledge on the subject.

Incision:
A cut or tear of the skin. Depending on the length, width, and depth, these can be very easy or very difficult to treat.

-Apply pressure to wound.
-Rinse with clean water.
-Disinfect; With strong alcohol or an actual antibiotic.
-Wrap wound very tightly IF no one can close the wound (Stitching or Cauterizing).
-Change bandages often, close wound ASAP.

Amputations:
The removing of a limb by cutting. Whether losing a limb was an accident or on purpose, it is extremely fatal (obviously). Surprisingly, one might not bleed very much if a small part of a limb was amputated (I.E., hand or foot). But generally, blood will be a factor. If you’re alone, you will more than likely not be able to treat an amputation and will die quickly.

-Elevate the part of the body that received an amputation to limit blood flow.
-Apply direct pressure for several minutes.
-Removed any items in or around the wound (Clothes, jewelry, etc.)
-Carefully disinfect.
-Apply a lot of bandages, check often (Or Cauterize)


Penetration and Puncture:
Stab wounds and wounds from ranged weapons such as arrows. As an object passed through tissue, it decelerates and transfers kinetic energy to the tissues. Regardless of whether it is an object such as a dagger or an arrow, there are a lot of factors as to how fatal these injuries are.

Is the object still lodged in the victim? If it is an object such as an arrow and you can see both ends (going in one side and coming out of the other), wrap a towel or bandage around the entry point. Carefully hold the object while you break off the shaft of the arrow. If the object is a dagger, quickly remove the item and apply pressure.

Back to the arrow situation. If the object is inside of the person, it is stable so long as the victim isn’t moved to much. It is very important that when you do attempt to remove it, you do so very gently. Any splinters or bacteria left behind from the arrow would be extremely difficult to get out. The best thing to do would be to put disinfectant on each end of the wound (entry and exit points) and then slowly remove the arrow.

Now that we’re at the point where an object isn’t inside of our victim, you must do the obvious things: Disinfect, apply pressure, etc.

Broken Bones / Fractures:
Broken bones can take longest time to heal and can also cause permanent injury such as paralysis. While the key to fixing a broken bone is different for every bone, it isn’t too difficult to decide what to do.

Generally the basis of fixing a bone is to restrict movement. This can be easily done with a splint (for smaller bones) or a cast. However, a sling can also be required for some injuries. Injuries to the spine can require a full-body cast and restrict movement for months. The best way to find information for the specific injury is, you guessed it, Google.



Section 4: Fear

Many people rush into the forests to fight the unknown, caring little if their characters die. While YOU may not fear a collection of pixels on a screen, your character certainly might. Even fighting something as simple as a wolf or a bear would frighten a strong person. Even a barbaric culture of orcs would have some fears, or they might just be too dumb to actually fear most things. Regardless of what culture your character comes from, he/she will fear something. A character with only productive traits is a badly made character. We must balance out the positive traits with negative ones. So consider giving your character a couple of fears, it could really spice up your story.





Additional Advice:

Pain and Medical roleplay are only a small part of being a good and efficient RP’er, however they are possibly the most difficult. Not all injuries are as severe as we described here, but no one expects you to roleplay stubbing your toe or spraining your ankle through non-combat means. Which is exactly why you should do it. These little things add spice into everyday roleplay. Having your character trip, fall, and break a couple of fingers can lead to a lot of fun RP.



"If the object is a dagger, quickly remove the item and apply pressure."

I'm almost certain you DO NOT want to do this unless you're going to be ready to immediately suppress/stop the bleeding, either by applying bandages, cauterizing the wound, or having it healed. If you pull that sucker out and you/someone else isn't ready to do what's needed, you'll bleed out. It's best to keep the dagger in so as to "plug" the wound, and keep the victim as still as possible, until you're ready to treat that wound of course. Oh, and make sure there's no debris (such as broken pieces of dagger) in the wound, and pull it out if there is any.
TLDR; Don't pull out the dagger/blade until you're damn sure you can stop the bleeding.



"The best thing to do would be to put disinfectant on each end of the wound (entry and exit points) and then slowly remove the arrow."

If the arrow that's been shot at you has gone through-and-through, you're pretty damn lucky. I'd assume that it's going through a thin area of skin, like an arm or leg.

Most of the time, though, the arrow will NOT go through. It will have an entry point, but no exit. This is a problem. You could try to pull it out, but that would more than likely make more problems than it would fix. If the arrow head is adhered well, it'll come out in one piece, but it may cause serious damage on the way out.

Let's look at some medieval Arrow Head styles. If the arrow were, say, type 1, 3, or 7, you'd probably have an easy time pulling it out, as the tips are more or less "smooth". If you had type 2, 4, or 9 though, that's a no-go. Those barbed tips will rip flesh on the way out. This is all assuming that your character knows whether the arrow they were shot with was barbed or not, and in the heat of battle, that may be unlikely.

Of course, arrow heads weren't always adhered to the shaft in a sturdy manner. As explained by Wikipedia: "In medieval Europe, arrowheads were often anchored with nothing but candlewax minutes before firing, if not merely saliva - this ensured that the head would remain in enemy's body if the shaft was pulled out".

In conclusion, there are only two effective ways to get an arrow out, one being slow, and the other quick. A, widen the wound with a sharp blade and carefully pull out the arrow so as to keep the tip attached to it, or B, break off the end and push it through.
TLDR; Either cut the wound wider and pull out the arrow if you've got time to spare, or push that sucker through if you're in a hurry.