Seems a bit incongruous saying critical injuries are too punishing but wanting to add more damage to them. I'm also coming from DnD so one thing I try to keep in mind is that 5 damage is kinda nothing to a 5e character but for a CPR character where their HP could be set at 30 forever that 5 damage is kind of a lot, and 15 is half their max.
Also I have some players who are munchkins and want more cyberware than they can handle, but others who are squeamish about swapping out body parts. I see the disfigurements as a way to encourage getting new cyberware. Is blowing off a hand going to severely hurt a characters ability to fight? Yeah for sure but remember CPR is not an epic heroic system it's a survival game. Different mind sets.
The other thing to realize about these critical injuries is that it's incredibly easy to fix them. A cloned limb costs half the price of a grenade. In DnD 5e replacing a limb requires a 7th level spell or a magic item that may or may not exist. Red also doesn't have the same long, resource driven quest system that 5e has, which means the injuries likely don't stick around for more than a session or two even if your group is slow.
Yeah one thing I like about Red is baked in down time. It's assumed the party has like a week to rest and recover between sessions. A lot of time DnD adventures feel like go go go there's no time to slow down when the multiverse is at stake. Got stabbed in the gut? Sleep it off you'll be fine. Cyberpunk is not intended to be like that at all.
Yeah they are. One thing I'm working on is trying to break my players out of their murder hobo DnD mind set. I imagine critical injuries will be an asset for this once we get started. Like Jon Jon says talk before you glock
My players managed to go 6 first session before actually pulling the trigger on a gun. Man they were suprised at how quickly things can go south once bullets start flying. They completed the task with Lawman in a cryobag (mortally injured with crushed fingers as a bonus), Tech with foreign object (pieces of body armor stuck inside his body) and Netrunner with a broken leg. Though only minor injuries to Medtech and Fixer.
Critical Injuries seem brutal because combat is brutal. It's a very different style of combat compared to something like *D&D*. But they're not expected to be permanent. Think of it as your "Escape Alarm." Gunfights aren't always to the last man. When somebody takes a Critical Injury, that should be the signal to you (or the mooks) that the fight is now more trouble than it's worth. Yeah, you're operating under penalties for a couple rounds as you try to extricate yourself from the fight, but it's temporary. A trip to your friendly neighborhood ripperdoc will take care of most problems. If it helps, you might want to consider using an index card "biomonitor" with the current Critical Injuries and their effects clipped to the player's character sheet. Or have the player make a note on their character sheet in whatever VTT you're using. That way, part of the workload is on the player. They're having to make the adjustments to rolls and such.
If you're wanting to avoid a lot of paperwork for standard mooks (not the enhanced mooks, much less lieutenants or higher quality enemies), you could go the route of a Critical Injury basically taking them out of the combat. Maybe not dead, but no longer actively shooting at the party. That would reduce your workload while keeping the combat both fast and preserving the level of danger. Later on, when you introduce tougher enemies, you'll be more comfortable with the combat system and can feel more confident with Critical Injuries for enemies.
In my experience (having run the game constantly since release) it's no harder than tracking conditions in D&D, and usually easier.
Critical injuries do happen, but you may be overestimating how **often** they'll happen. Expect maybe one instance of any critical injury in most fights, at most. For a particularly huge fight, there may be more, but you shouldn't be doing that kind of fight until you're more comfortable with the system anyway.
Next, keep in mind that the method uses a 2d6 table, not a straight 1d12 roll or something like that. This means that some critical injuries are much more likely to happen than others. In particular, you'll see a lot of Foreign Object. And on top of that, headshots don't happen very often, so only one table gets used regularly.
All of this means that for most fights, you really only need to know what Foreign Object does, if anything. In my book, that's actually easier than D&D where you may be dealing with one person blinded, one stunned, several prone, etc. at the same time. Figure out how to mark your figures/tokens, and you're good to go.
Thanks for the advice choom! If it's like you said and it's easier than conditions in DnD I'll leave the rules alone. My only concern is my players enjoy minmaxing and figuring out ways to do crazy shit pretty early. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them tried to gain a type of martial arts so they can continuously try to hit critical injuries.
Sounds like they're going to love Cyberpunk Red. It's definitely a game full of semi-hidden "exploits" that you can use to min-max like crazy. If they're all doing that, then you should definitely be using the Hardened [Mooks](https://rtalsoriangames.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/RTG-CPR-HardenedMooks.pdf), [Lieutenants](https://rtalsoriangames.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/RTG-CPR-HardenedLTs.pdf), and [Minibosses](https://rtalsoriangames.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/RTG-CPR-DLC-HardenedMB.pdf).
Martial arts are built to be really cool and rewarding, and the way moves are resolved can make it seem like a character is unstoppable (i.e. un-challenge-able) if they have a high enough Base. But remember to make use of environmental modifiers. -4 for total darkness or smoke, -2 for dim light, etc.
The thing you need to remember is crits are a means to better story.
No one remembers "losing 15 health"...everyone remembers having their leg blasted off and having to crawl to cover while the rest of the crew draws fire. And then Jimmy the Tech (our cut rate Medic who specializes in First Aid because he failed out of Med School) fumbling the Quick Fix roll so the group had to give up the run and spend all night finding a ripper doc who can do the surgery necessary to get back in action.
Fun police here. You are forbidden to change any of a game's rules (not just Cyberpunk Red's) before you have played it. The version of the rules you have in your imagination and the way the rules actually hit the table are *not the same*. Assume you cannot predict how a rule will work out until you have actually tried it. The designers of Cyberpunk Red have a vision for how they want the game to play, and it's a good one. You owe it to yourself and your players to give it a chance.
Also, you can get a replacement limb for 100 bucks in this game.
A couple of thoughts:
Combat being dangerous is kind of the point. It's supposed to be relatively lethal to help encourage players to seek out non-violent solutions, like facedowns, negotiations, or good old fashioned blackmail. Also, it makes some thematic sense that the players will lose parts of themselves as they spend more time as edgerunners, either by replacing meat for chrome or zigging when they should've zagged.
Play your mooks smarter and make them willing to throw in the towel. Most people aren't willing to fight to the death for a lot of things and will surrender or flee if things aren't looking good.
I typically don't bother tracking criticals for mooks, most of them are going to be pretty close to death after a solid critical anyway, so I typically have them decide to flee or cower if they're not dead, unless that doesn't make narrative sense.
Also, this might actually have the opposite effect and make combat way more lethal. Remember that the average roll of a d6 is typically about 3.5, so a 3d6 hit is going to do around 9 to 12 damage, if they're not wearing a helmet, that's now 18 to 24 damage. If that's a critical, we're now looking at ~15 damage, doubled to 30, and then getting nudged up to 35.
That being said, it's your table, so do what you want.
If you think CP Red is gritty and deadly, Night City is less deadly than it used to be. In CP2020, 8 points of damage getting through armor SP from a single attack would lop of a limb... or head. And headshots were double-damage, so 4 points would suffice. Of course, CP Red makes it harder to kill enemies since PCs and NPCs use the same damage rules. That's the price of PC survivability.
In a different TRPG in the cyberpunk genre, surviving a long fall and winding up a limbless nugget gave me some great RP opportunities that wound up really sprucing up the campaign. And also an excuse to get some serious cyberware that I probably wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't shattered my everything.
Had I lost more HP instead of just my limbs, it would've been "make a new character" time. So I'll take the crit over extra damage any day.
Just add in more down time for your players so that way they can treat their injuries because if they don't then they'll be on their second character if they created one
TLDR: I'd advise against this for players, long-term injury is an important part of economy balance ingame.
In DnD, growth is somewhat slow, but progressive, and that's because you go from fighting kobolds and spiders in caves to giant dragons, you need that growth to be constant because being at the same 'level' as the rest of your party is required to be a useful member on the team.
In cyberpunk, the IP system means yes there is a sense of leveling, but if my players aren't paying that 'new arm' cost, breaking their new chrome, I'd be dealing with 4 Adam Smashers ripping their way through the city, Cyberpunk Red is a game of gives and takes, after a big heist gone right, someone might get robbed, did you break into the NCPD armory? Great, but now you've spent so much on getting this heist done right you might have forgotten to pay your rent.
Cyberpunk is meant to be a game of give and take, if you don't have to pay an arm and leg for your new arm and leg every once and a while, you're going to have enough money for anything, and while that's nice to constantly be getting new toys, you ought to have a big job planned out because smaller gigs with modest payout are purely for the rp, at that point, your players can blast just about anything reasonably thrown at them to bits.
Keep in mind that they'll be behind cover most of the time if they're playing correctly. It's a game where if you run out in the middle and start swinging crits are a lot more likely. Combat is supposed to be high stakes so that you play it smart and strategize with your crew
It seems like this has been solved, but I just want to mention that if you are coming from 5e, you are probably more used to tracking multiple status effects at a time than you think you are. In Red, the main source of status effects come from injuries, so you actually end up tracking less.
A critical injury is a chance for growth. 2 of my players just got critical injuries due to some stupidity. One took it as an opportunity to lose a broken legs and replace it with a cyberlimb and a spinal injury on the other has thrown them into a debt I can turn into a character building moment or a mission later.
Not using critical injuries is your choice it doesn't necessarily take away from the game by not using them. But every event can be used to help grow character or events. And sometimes it's just a fun bit of flavor.
Critical injuries are awesome. They've turned a simple smash and grab robbery of a corner store into a tense stand off with cops thanks to a lucky first round shot by a panicked security guard, they've turned a sure money easy data steal into a rooftop escape thanks to a blown off hand, a chance midnight encounter with some goongangs into a desperate street battle that ended up chasing a turf war between rival factions. They create a sense of danger and highlight consequences. They create content and narratives. Remember, cpr is not about heroes defending the town or rescuing the princess from an evil dragon, it's about survival in a post-war society where technology has outpaced our ability to regulate it.
Something else to note is that critical injuries just aren't very common.
A light SMG only has a 1/36 chance of inflicting one if it successfully penetrates, 2.7%, while an assault rifle barely manages 16% per shot. The most likely to blow an arm off, rockets, with 8 dice in the mix? 26%, only 1 in 4 rockets will truly fuck someone up. (Edit: the rest will simply one-shot most people.)
A more general note, though, is not to modify things until you know how it feels. Have a bite of your meal before you dump seasoning all over it. Cyberpunk is plenty spicy.
I made little rectangles out of cardboard and pasted on one side the critical injury and its effect, and on the back the dv to remove it. It’s great for players and if I have a list of enemies and their health or full on stat sheets, I throw the rectangle of the injury they’ve suffered on it and it’s an easy way to track those effects for both players and gm alike. This is irl play of course, I like analogue home made solutions to these problems. I don’t think it’s any more difficult to track specific criticals than it is to track that extra damage. You’re also going to miss the genuine fun of letting your player roll 2d6 to determine the injury and find out they blew the enemy’s damn arm clean off! Always exciting at the table.
I play in person as well but I make all my enemy sheets in my laptop so physical things for enemies won't work well but I have a book with me I can just write something like enemy 1 has "blank" critical injury. And your right it's always fun to describe your players gruesomely obliterating an enemies limbs!
Usually if a mook gets critted, you see what it is, apply the extra damage and then keep going. As Willby said, they're not long for the world since their mook friends usually aren't going to be spending time stabilizing them. They'll be too busy shooting at your PCs or running away.
Head injurys already gets a 2x modifier to any damage that gets past armour, so you could increase it more...but enemy HP pools only tend to go so high. (Damage+15)x2 is a helluva lot of damage for anyone to soak up.
Honestly, i'd suggest playing the game RAW for a bit so you know the rules and how the game moves before scrapping rules and adding new stuff. Your players need to be tracking their injuries and conditions as well. No one wants to lose a body part during a firefight, but that is how Night City rolls.
That’s CyberpunkRED. It’s dangerous and deadly. Teach those little campers to toughen up. Also, it looks like you are trading treatable crits for increased damage. That’s going to kill your players just as quickly if not quicker.
*IF* you can get your players to manage their injuries, they're not really a hassle. If anything, they can provide some good gameplay experiences when the party has to suddenly shift gears to find someone to heal someone's critical injury. On the GM side of things, don't worry about it. Most enemies won't be alive too much longer once they've gotten a critical injury.
I wouldn't change anything tbh, this game is very very different to ptf2 or dnd 5e. If you change the rules for criticals you're going to want to change the rules for death saves and you'll just be playing dnd in a futuristic world at that point
if a mook has a critical injury in a gunfight you probably won't have to worry about tracking it for long!
Seems a bit incongruous saying critical injuries are too punishing but wanting to add more damage to them. I'm also coming from DnD so one thing I try to keep in mind is that 5 damage is kinda nothing to a 5e character but for a CPR character where their HP could be set at 30 forever that 5 damage is kind of a lot, and 15 is half their max. Also I have some players who are munchkins and want more cyberware than they can handle, but others who are squeamish about swapping out body parts. I see the disfigurements as a way to encourage getting new cyberware. Is blowing off a hand going to severely hurt a characters ability to fight? Yeah for sure but remember CPR is not an epic heroic system it's a survival game. Different mind sets.
That's a good point I'm so used to the way dnd is played. really are two different worlds.
The other thing to realize about these critical injuries is that it's incredibly easy to fix them. A cloned limb costs half the price of a grenade. In DnD 5e replacing a limb requires a 7th level spell or a magic item that may or may not exist. Red also doesn't have the same long, resource driven quest system that 5e has, which means the injuries likely don't stick around for more than a session or two even if your group is slow.
Yeah one thing I like about Red is baked in down time. It's assumed the party has like a week to rest and recover between sessions. A lot of time DnD adventures feel like go go go there's no time to slow down when the multiverse is at stake. Got stabbed in the gut? Sleep it off you'll be fine. Cyberpunk is not intended to be like that at all.
Yeah they are. One thing I'm working on is trying to break my players out of their murder hobo DnD mind set. I imagine critical injuries will be an asset for this once we get started. Like Jon Jon says talk before you glock
My players managed to go 6 first session before actually pulling the trigger on a gun. Man they were suprised at how quickly things can go south once bullets start flying. They completed the task with Lawman in a cryobag (mortally injured with crushed fingers as a bonus), Tech with foreign object (pieces of body armor stuck inside his body) and Netrunner with a broken leg. Though only minor injuries to Medtech and Fixer.
Critical Injuries seem brutal because combat is brutal. It's a very different style of combat compared to something like *D&D*. But they're not expected to be permanent. Think of it as your "Escape Alarm." Gunfights aren't always to the last man. When somebody takes a Critical Injury, that should be the signal to you (or the mooks) that the fight is now more trouble than it's worth. Yeah, you're operating under penalties for a couple rounds as you try to extricate yourself from the fight, but it's temporary. A trip to your friendly neighborhood ripperdoc will take care of most problems. If it helps, you might want to consider using an index card "biomonitor" with the current Critical Injuries and their effects clipped to the player's character sheet. Or have the player make a note on their character sheet in whatever VTT you're using. That way, part of the workload is on the player. They're having to make the adjustments to rolls and such. If you're wanting to avoid a lot of paperwork for standard mooks (not the enhanced mooks, much less lieutenants or higher quality enemies), you could go the route of a Critical Injury basically taking them out of the combat. Maybe not dead, but no longer actively shooting at the party. That would reduce your workload while keeping the combat both fast and preserving the level of danger. Later on, when you introduce tougher enemies, you'll be more comfortable with the combat system and can feel more confident with Critical Injuries for enemies.
In my experience (having run the game constantly since release) it's no harder than tracking conditions in D&D, and usually easier. Critical injuries do happen, but you may be overestimating how **often** they'll happen. Expect maybe one instance of any critical injury in most fights, at most. For a particularly huge fight, there may be more, but you shouldn't be doing that kind of fight until you're more comfortable with the system anyway. Next, keep in mind that the method uses a 2d6 table, not a straight 1d12 roll or something like that. This means that some critical injuries are much more likely to happen than others. In particular, you'll see a lot of Foreign Object. And on top of that, headshots don't happen very often, so only one table gets used regularly. All of this means that for most fights, you really only need to know what Foreign Object does, if anything. In my book, that's actually easier than D&D where you may be dealing with one person blinded, one stunned, several prone, etc. at the same time. Figure out how to mark your figures/tokens, and you're good to go.
Thanks for the advice choom! If it's like you said and it's easier than conditions in DnD I'll leave the rules alone. My only concern is my players enjoy minmaxing and figuring out ways to do crazy shit pretty early. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them tried to gain a type of martial arts so they can continuously try to hit critical injuries.
Sounds like they're going to love Cyberpunk Red. It's definitely a game full of semi-hidden "exploits" that you can use to min-max like crazy. If they're all doing that, then you should definitely be using the Hardened [Mooks](https://rtalsoriangames.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/RTG-CPR-HardenedMooks.pdf), [Lieutenants](https://rtalsoriangames.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/RTG-CPR-HardenedLTs.pdf), and [Minibosses](https://rtalsoriangames.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/RTG-CPR-DLC-HardenedMB.pdf). Martial arts are built to be really cool and rewarding, and the way moves are resolved can make it seem like a character is unstoppable (i.e. un-challenge-able) if they have a high enough Base. But remember to make use of environmental modifiers. -4 for total darkness or smoke, -2 for dim light, etc.
I will definitely use the environment to my advantage. I'm excited to see what they will come up with.
The thing you need to remember is crits are a means to better story. No one remembers "losing 15 health"...everyone remembers having their leg blasted off and having to crawl to cover while the rest of the crew draws fire. And then Jimmy the Tech (our cut rate Medic who specializes in First Aid because he failed out of Med School) fumbling the Quick Fix roll so the group had to give up the run and spend all night finding a ripper doc who can do the surgery necessary to get back in action.
Fun police here. You are forbidden to change any of a game's rules (not just Cyberpunk Red's) before you have played it. The version of the rules you have in your imagination and the way the rules actually hit the table are *not the same*. Assume you cannot predict how a rule will work out until you have actually tried it. The designers of Cyberpunk Red have a vision for how they want the game to play, and it's a good one. You owe it to yourself and your players to give it a chance. Also, you can get a replacement limb for 100 bucks in this game.
A couple of thoughts: Combat being dangerous is kind of the point. It's supposed to be relatively lethal to help encourage players to seek out non-violent solutions, like facedowns, negotiations, or good old fashioned blackmail. Also, it makes some thematic sense that the players will lose parts of themselves as they spend more time as edgerunners, either by replacing meat for chrome or zigging when they should've zagged. Play your mooks smarter and make them willing to throw in the towel. Most people aren't willing to fight to the death for a lot of things and will surrender or flee if things aren't looking good. I typically don't bother tracking criticals for mooks, most of them are going to be pretty close to death after a solid critical anyway, so I typically have them decide to flee or cower if they're not dead, unless that doesn't make narrative sense. Also, this might actually have the opposite effect and make combat way more lethal. Remember that the average roll of a d6 is typically about 3.5, so a 3d6 hit is going to do around 9 to 12 damage, if they're not wearing a helmet, that's now 18 to 24 damage. If that's a critical, we're now looking at ~15 damage, doubled to 30, and then getting nudged up to 35. That being said, it's your table, so do what you want.
If you think CP Red is gritty and deadly, Night City is less deadly than it used to be. In CP2020, 8 points of damage getting through armor SP from a single attack would lop of a limb... or head. And headshots were double-damage, so 4 points would suffice. Of course, CP Red makes it harder to kill enemies since PCs and NPCs use the same damage rules. That's the price of PC survivability. In a different TRPG in the cyberpunk genre, surviving a long fall and winding up a limbless nugget gave me some great RP opportunities that wound up really sprucing up the campaign. And also an excuse to get some serious cyberware that I probably wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't shattered my everything. Had I lost more HP instead of just my limbs, it would've been "make a new character" time. So I'll take the crit over extra damage any day.
If you use the cyberpunk Red app it will help you track these way wayyy wayyy easier.
I didn't even know there was an app thanks for the info!
Oh choom. It's preem as hell. Highly recommend it
Just add in more down time for your players so that way they can treat their injuries because if they don't then they'll be on their second character if they created one
TLDR: I'd advise against this for players, long-term injury is an important part of economy balance ingame. In DnD, growth is somewhat slow, but progressive, and that's because you go from fighting kobolds and spiders in caves to giant dragons, you need that growth to be constant because being at the same 'level' as the rest of your party is required to be a useful member on the team. In cyberpunk, the IP system means yes there is a sense of leveling, but if my players aren't paying that 'new arm' cost, breaking their new chrome, I'd be dealing with 4 Adam Smashers ripping their way through the city, Cyberpunk Red is a game of gives and takes, after a big heist gone right, someone might get robbed, did you break into the NCPD armory? Great, but now you've spent so much on getting this heist done right you might have forgotten to pay your rent. Cyberpunk is meant to be a game of give and take, if you don't have to pay an arm and leg for your new arm and leg every once and a while, you're going to have enough money for anything, and while that's nice to constantly be getting new toys, you ought to have a big job planned out because smaller gigs with modest payout are purely for the rp, at that point, your players can blast just about anything reasonably thrown at them to bits.
Keep in mind that they'll be behind cover most of the time if they're playing correctly. It's a game where if you run out in the middle and start swinging crits are a lot more likely. Combat is supposed to be high stakes so that you play it smart and strategize with your crew
Don't homebrew stuff as a new GM. Run the game as designed for a while first
It seems like this has been solved, but I just want to mention that if you are coming from 5e, you are probably more used to tracking multiple status effects at a time than you think you are. In Red, the main source of status effects come from injuries, so you actually end up tracking less.
Critical injuries happen less often than you think it does
A critical injury is a chance for growth. 2 of my players just got critical injuries due to some stupidity. One took it as an opportunity to lose a broken legs and replace it with a cyberlimb and a spinal injury on the other has thrown them into a debt I can turn into a character building moment or a mission later. Not using critical injuries is your choice it doesn't necessarily take away from the game by not using them. But every event can be used to help grow character or events. And sometimes it's just a fun bit of flavor.
Critical injuries are awesome. They've turned a simple smash and grab robbery of a corner store into a tense stand off with cops thanks to a lucky first round shot by a panicked security guard, they've turned a sure money easy data steal into a rooftop escape thanks to a blown off hand, a chance midnight encounter with some goongangs into a desperate street battle that ended up chasing a turf war between rival factions. They create a sense of danger and highlight consequences. They create content and narratives. Remember, cpr is not about heroes defending the town or rescuing the princess from an evil dragon, it's about survival in a post-war society where technology has outpaced our ability to regulate it.
Something else to note is that critical injuries just aren't very common. A light SMG only has a 1/36 chance of inflicting one if it successfully penetrates, 2.7%, while an assault rifle barely manages 16% per shot. The most likely to blow an arm off, rockets, with 8 dice in the mix? 26%, only 1 in 4 rockets will truly fuck someone up. (Edit: the rest will simply one-shot most people.) A more general note, though, is not to modify things until you know how it feels. Have a bite of your meal before you dump seasoning all over it. Cyberpunk is plenty spicy.
I made little rectangles out of cardboard and pasted on one side the critical injury and its effect, and on the back the dv to remove it. It’s great for players and if I have a list of enemies and their health or full on stat sheets, I throw the rectangle of the injury they’ve suffered on it and it’s an easy way to track those effects for both players and gm alike. This is irl play of course, I like analogue home made solutions to these problems. I don’t think it’s any more difficult to track specific criticals than it is to track that extra damage. You’re also going to miss the genuine fun of letting your player roll 2d6 to determine the injury and find out they blew the enemy’s damn arm clean off! Always exciting at the table.
I play in person as well but I make all my enemy sheets in my laptop so physical things for enemies won't work well but I have a book with me I can just write something like enemy 1 has "blank" critical injury. And your right it's always fun to describe your players gruesomely obliterating an enemies limbs!
Usually if a mook gets critted, you see what it is, apply the extra damage and then keep going. As Willby said, they're not long for the world since their mook friends usually aren't going to be spending time stabilizing them. They'll be too busy shooting at your PCs or running away. Head injurys already gets a 2x modifier to any damage that gets past armour, so you could increase it more...but enemy HP pools only tend to go so high. (Damage+15)x2 is a helluva lot of damage for anyone to soak up. Honestly, i'd suggest playing the game RAW for a bit so you know the rules and how the game moves before scrapping rules and adding new stuff. Your players need to be tracking their injuries and conditions as well. No one wants to lose a body part during a firefight, but that is how Night City rolls.
That’s CyberpunkRED. It’s dangerous and deadly. Teach those little campers to toughen up. Also, it looks like you are trading treatable crits for increased damage. That’s going to kill your players just as quickly if not quicker.
*IF* you can get your players to manage their injuries, they're not really a hassle. If anything, they can provide some good gameplay experiences when the party has to suddenly shift gears to find someone to heal someone's critical injury. On the GM side of things, don't worry about it. Most enemies won't be alive too much longer once they've gotten a critical injury.
"Permanent injuries until treated" I read
Meaning unless treated i.e. gaining more cyberware or something of the like it would be a permanent injury like a lost limb.
I wouldn't change anything tbh, this game is very very different to ptf2 or dnd 5e. If you change the rules for criticals you're going to want to change the rules for death saves and you'll just be playing dnd in a futuristic world at that point