Injury recovery times in RP: how long to play the wound

Why recovery time is where injury RP falls apart

Watch an injury storyline die and it dies the same way every time. A character takes a gut shot on Tuesday night, gets patched at the clinic, and by Wednesday is sprinting through Valentine throwing punches. Nobody calls it out, so the next player heals even faster, and within a month wounds in your city mean nothing at all.

Recovery time is what turns an injury from a scene into a story. The limp that lasts a week gives every stranger in the saloon a reason to ask what happened. Lingering injury RP is not a punishment, it is free plot: the sling, the cough, the scar that needs explaining. Skip it and you have traded a week of material for one night of drama.

Converting real time to server time

Real medicine is too slow for a game. A broken femur in 1899 kept a man in bed for months, and nobody is roleplaying that on a weeknight. So communities compress time, and most land on one of three systems:

• Story compression: one real day stands in for roughly a week of in-story healing, so a six week wound reads as about six real days of visible RP.
• Session clocks: the injury must be played noticeably for a set number of sessions or real days, whatever the fiction claims. Simple, and easy for medics to hold you to.
• Doctor-gated recovery: you are wounded until a doctor character clears you, which keeps medical RP employed and the timeline negotiable.

Gunshot wounds: graze to gut shot

How long to roleplay a gunshot wound depends on where it landed and whether the bullet stayed. Rough defaults, assuming a doctor saw you:

• Graze: stings for the rest of the scene, then a bandage and a bad mood for a day.
• Through and through, arm or calf: two to three real days of favoring it, a sling or a limp, no fistfights.
• Lodged bullet, any limb: add a day, and the clock does not start until somebody digs it out.
• Shoulder or thigh: three to five real days. These are meaty, vascular places, and the leg version means a genuine limp.
• Chest: about a real week of shallow breathing. No running, no brawls, no hauling crates at the dock.
• Gut shot: the long one. A real week at minimum, fever watch for the first three days, and every meal is a gamble. In 1899 a gut wound was often a death sentence, so a slow and uncertain recovery is already generous.

Broken bones, sprains and horse wreck injuries

How long to RP a broken leg is the most asked timeline question in the hobby, and the honest answer is longer than you want. Bone is the slow tissue. Defaults, with a splint and doctor care:

• Sprained ankle or wrist: one or two sessions of limping or a stiff hand, then occasional winces.
• Cracked ribs: one to two real weeks of guarding your side. No lifting, no galloping, and laughing hurts.
• Broken arm or collarbone: splinted and slung, one to two real weeks of one-handed living. No rifles, no roping.
• Broken leg: splint and crutch, two real weeks or more before your character trusts weight on it, and a limp for days after. This is an injury to build a storyline around, not to speedrun.
• Horse wreck: usually a bundle. Bruised everything, one headline injury from this list, and a session of being visibly rattled.

Bites, claws and infection risk

Animal wounds heal on the same clocks as cuts of similar depth, with one large exception: they are filthy. A wolf bite or a cougar rake is a puncture packed with whatever the animal ate last, and in a world without antibiotics, infection is the real antagonist.

Play the turn on a schedule. Day one the wound is angry but clean. Day two or three, if it turns: heat, swelling, red streaks crawling up the limb, a smell you pretend not to notice. Days three to five bring the fever, and a fever is a bedside scene begging for visitors. Cleaning at the scene, hot water, carbolic acid, honest whiskey, is what keeps you off that road, which is exactly why the medic deserves their moment.

Head injuries and memory loss

Concussions are easy to play and constantly skipped. One to three real days of headache, fog, light sensitivity and a short temper covers most knocks, and slurred words with repeated questions on the first night sells it. A second blow before the first has healed should land harder, a truth as old as boxing.

Memory loss works best small and specific. Losing the ten minutes around the blow is believable, useful, and dodges every argument about what your character saw. Some communities also lean on head injuries to explain rule-forced forgetting after a death scene, but that territory overlaps with new life rules and every server writes those differently, so check yours before you build a plot on a blank memory.

How doctor care shortens the clock

The simplest fair rule: proper doctor care roughly halves the visible timeline and buys you out of most infection risk. Untreated, everything above runs longer and meaner. Wounds reopen when you push them, bites turn septic, and a bone set by a well-meaning friend heals crooked.

This is why the 133 fate tables at d20rp.com carry two clocks on every result, a treated recovery and an untreated one. Roll the wound, hand the doctor the same numbers you are reading, and the scene gets to argue about story instead of arithmetic. It also gives skipping the clinic real teeth, which keeps the clinic in business.

Rolling a d20 to decide how recovery goes

Recovery does not have to be a straight line, and a die keeps you honest. At each milestone, the first bandage change, the first day on your feet, the first ride, roll the d20 and let the severity ladder narrate. A 1 is a catastrophic setback: the wound reopens or the fever spikes. A 2 through 8 is trouble worth a doctor visit. Middle rolls mean healing, but slowly. An 18 or 19 is a lucky day, and a 20 means you are ahead of schedule and allowed to say so.

Keep the emotes about your own state, never anyone else's:

• /me eases weight onto the splinted leg, testing it, jaw tight
• /me unwinds the dressing and checks the wound for heat and red streaks
• /me reaches for the coffee pot with the bad arm out of habit, then hisses and switches hands

Questions from the floor

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