Wait... What?
Oh..
What practical difference is there between a monster that cannot get to a doctor that will help, and a man that cannot get to a doctor at all?

Ah... but the vault dweller isn't that; their history is defined. The only way this could [shakily] work ~IMO, is with maxed medical skill, and a luck stat check (or just very high luck).

This, for starters. When we're talking about dismemberment in regards to this game - I've been assuming we've been talking about a situation wherein:

• A particular limb reaches 0 before the NPC is killed (ie, 0 limb HP, but still some remaining HP)
  
• The dismemberment animations from Fallout 3 occur - where your limb is entirely (and graphically) severed from your body - or pulverized into bloody chunks
  
• Said NPC remains alive
  
• As limbs reaching 0 already are crippled, I've been assuming that said effect only applies to rare cases of massive limb overkill (because obviously, every time I cripple my arm doesn't mean that it's physically removed from my body.)

Is it possible to survive having your limb forcibly removed from your body by mass trauma? Yes. I'm certainly not saying that 100% of every person who has lost a limb in battle immediately died and had no chance of survival. But the very fact is that yes - anyone who has lived through such trauma has beaten the odds. At best, however, that pretty much automatically makes you a non-combatant. It could theoretically be possible to reduce an NPC to a quivering pile of pain hovering at death's door in need of immediate medical attention - but would the in-game implications warrant that level of attention?

Again, if we're going to take Pirates and Civil War Soldiers, etc - as proof... In the vast majority of those cases, the poor fellow still had an intact limb at the time he received medical attention. It was the doctor who removed the limb - either to prevent infection, or because medical technology had not reached a point where it was worth saving. As such, those examples are kind of irrelevant to the topic of what would hypothetically happen if you blasted someone's entire leg off, with a shotgun, in the middle of the Wasteland. :shrug:

... I was talking completely in the real life sense of just surviving a blown off limb.

I kind of forgot the topic was about limbs blowing off in game. yeah i agree with not wanting to be an amputee in-game or at all really. The only way it would be cool is if you got some robotic limbs like rex has.

Being able to blow off all an enemies limbs and he still is trying to gnaw your legs off by his teeth is pretty damn unrealistic.

Its not that hard to survive losing a limb. There are plenty of stories of farmers losing limbs and surviving. A tourniquet will stop the bleeding if there is enough limb left. Or you could cauterize if your hardcoe. Shock and infection are the things to worry about.

The cleaning lady at my work had both arms and half her scalp torn off in a recycling plant. Shes doin ok...

Both arms?

______________________________________

'Die by the Sword' has full enemy and PC dismemberment, and in this game, the combatants for all intents, just ignore the loss (unless its their head). Chop off a guy's leg and he hops after you with his weapon still swinging. I've never managed it, but I think its [theoretically] possible to complete the game on one life with missing limbs.

Cybernetics could work well in Fallout, as the game begs to spoof Star Wars, and it's theme of 'a better life through technology' goes hand in had with limb replacement.

My issue is that the enemies were either bullet sponges or not. I rarely could cripple some enemies without them dying first. I've even killed a couple of raiders while shooting the gun out of their hands via VATS. So, I think limb health being reduced would be kind of helpful.

Would actually give us a reason to aim somewhere other than the head in VATS.

Every developer played video of VATS that I have seen has them waste all shots on the head. Not one, not a single one of the videos that I have seen show any dev targeting any limb but the head.

I would have been really interested in video of a developer showing off the benefits of shooting the leg or the arm (and explaining the benefit of crippling both legs, arms, or the head), but none have, and it makes me wonder if it is because there really isn't any. In Fallout 1 you could cripple a melee opponent's leg and gain time to fire on gun wielding opponents before having to deal with close combat. ~leg crippling was a MUST, when fighting two or more Death Claws.

After some thought - maybe I've been approaching this backwards. I haven't been thinking in terms of the rules already in place within the established ruleset, and the potential circumstances they could already provide for. If we're talking about blowing an NPC's limbs off before they're dead, then it really boils down to:

• If an NPC takes enough damage to knock a limb's individual HP down to 0, it's crippled. (But still attached to the body, of course.)
  
• The addition would be wherein a limb either takes sufficient damage in one hit, a sufficiently critical hit, or damage surpasses the 0 mark past a certain threshold (for example: you have 50 HP in an arm before it becomes crippled - taking an accumulation of damage to knock it into, say -50 would also remove it from your body.)
  
• The NPC, while having taken enough damage past Cripple Status to become Dismembered, still has enough remaining HP to stay alive.

I could see there being room in the ruleset to accomplish something like that. There are precedents in other (table-top) roleplaying games that work along similar lines. Chances are, most of the time an enemy taking enough damage to dismember a limb is also going to die at the same time (thus representing real-world chances of surviving a wound of this magnitude.) A possible "bleeding effect" might be called for, as well - because I don't think anyone's going to argue that someone's who's taken that degree of trauma is going to be in dire need of immediate medical attention, for any number of reasons.

But, for those rare instances where it would be applicable, I do suppose it would be (hypothetically, at least) possible. At least insofar as the rules are concerned. Whether or not it would be "worth" the resources necessary for this eventuality, is another matter entirely. :cheers:

Such an effect should leave long term decals on the ground that would enable the PC to follow the blood ~and should also become a path for NPC's hunting the PC, and any animal that crosses the trail should follow it.

a bleeding out effect would be awesome, and being able to follow the trail of blood would be even better.

chasing someone through the wastes as they limp away clutching their severed arm and watching them eventually collapse from exhaustion/blood loss would be hilarious.

... might also tie-in rather interestingly to the Bloody Mess Perk, as well, come to think of it. (At least increased chance of causing a dismemberment during a critical, or simply replacing Crippled with Dismembered entirely - though there might be potential game balancing issues involved...)

Do body parts even get cut/blown off in new vegas like they did in FO3? I assume they do but i haven't seen it in any of the videos.