New Pain and Shock System

PAIN AND SHOCK
As most Order members lack Synaptic Modulation, pain suddenly becomes far more important than for most agents. The system given below applies for any player character without Synaptic modulation.

PAIN
Pain is built up over time, and causes serious distractions to you in critical circumstances. This is represented systematically by your remaining HP. Different HP ranges will give different penalties to all rolls. This penalty can be ignored by a successful Int+End check, although this uses your free action for the round as you have to concentrate. The same penalty applies to the Int+End check to resist the pain; the more pain you’re in, the harder it is to ignore it!
For Order members, use the table below for HP ranges and penalties. You should adapt the HP ranges to your player party so that at least the minimum maximum HP the players can have will not cause them pain; a character should not be feeling pain if they are fully healed!

Pain Level	HP Range	Penalty
None	20+	0
Minor	19-15	-1
Moderate	14-10	-2
Severe	9-5	-3
Agnonising	4-1	-4

SHOCK
Shock occurs when the human body takes too much damage in one go and loses the ability to function. If you take more than half your maximum HP in a single attack after armour has been applied, you must make an Int+End roll with a -4 penalty to avoid going into shock and losing your next action. An alternative rule is that the penalty is the amount of damage over half your maximum HP the attack does, so if your max health is 30, and you take 21 damage, you will have a -6 penalty.
When you go into shock (by failing the roll), you lose your next turns worth of actions and must make the roll again (without the penalty) to stabilise yourself and prevent yourself from losing another round. Anyone can make an Int+medicine check to bring someone out of shock, while someone with the field surgery training can do it automatically.

I like Pain, but not Shock. One lucky grenade could knock all the players' turns away, especially if you use the alternate penalty. It's not as bad as it could be, but maybe give an option like being able to take an action at the cost of further damage or a mashing wound or something?

The pain section could use % of total HP to determine the penalty taken for all actions rather than set numbers. Pain causing penalties is a nice simple way to handle that side of things.
I would be tempted to ignore making rolls to ignore the pain because this will slow things down in a fight scene. Perhaps trainings and drugs could be used to remove/reduce these penalties instead.
Possible product: "More-fine" pain relief, because we can't all be agents.

The shock rules I am still thinking about, but I'll add my thoughts on that later.

@Midboss: True, I hadn't considered that for shock. I'll think about it.

@Admin: I have genned some trainings for ignoring pain that will go up when the rest of the Order stuff I've genned is ready. One allows you to treat yourself as being one row higher on the pain table for penalties, and another allows you to bio-kinesis your nervous system to avoid pain.

I'd like to keep the resistance rolls in, since it means if you really need to concentrate on something, for instance a shot or opening a door, you can get rid of the penalties just for that round? A drug would be helpful though.

I think losing a free action alone is bad enough, without the chance of it failing. Using a free action for something is already explicitly concentrating hard on something, like maintain a shield. If I was playing this game I would give my character high-ish biokinesis then force the power as a standard so I could take a regular free. Although since its the same roll as activating TE powers you would only want to do it if you were running low on TE or doing something else, like melee fightng.

It Also makes maintaining a shield a lot harder since you need your frees to maintain the effect. Sure its a shield but unless you go first theres no guarantee you won't already be hit and shields aren't foolproof. Lasers can shoot through them and you can be shot/stabbed just as well from within them. So I agree with Matt taking your free action to ignore pain is bad enough as it is. Especially since, for the most part the OTF players ought to be passing the roll anyway since its the same roll you activate Telepathy with.

How about if I changed the system to "You can give up your free action for the round to automatically ignore the pain for a round, or you can make the Int+End check to potentially activate it without needing to give up the free action?"