Editing User:Bill/Rifts Week by Week (section)

===Drowning & Suffocation===
The official rules for drowning are very simple but are not easy to locate. Drowning takes two to four minutes according to certain spell and monster descriptions. Per the swimming rules, a character begins drowning after three failed swim attempts and will die if not rescued. This rule doesn't go into much detail and will limit a player's ability to save themselves. I don't anticipate this situation coming up frequently due to the near universality of environmental body armor in the setting, but just in case it does we'll use the following instead. 

The period that a character may hold its breath without significant effort is equal to its Physical Endurance in actions. A character not performing any actions may effectively hold its breath up to its PE in melee rounds.

Beyond this point the player must roll percentile to avoid the character blacking out with a base chance of 1-50%, +10% per two actions (or melee round doing nothing). Apply any bonus that the character has versus Coma/Death to the die roll. Once the character has blacked out, roll versus Coma/Death (1-20%) every round until the character dies or is resuscitated; failure indicates that the character has died.

Resuscitating a drowned or suffocating character requires a First Aid or related medical skill check. Apply a -5% penalty to the check for every round that the character has been unconscious. After the successful resuscitation check, the player of a drowned character must still make two successful saves versus Coma/Death per the table on page 355 of Rifts Ultimate Edition. Failing to succeed on two checks indicates that the character has lapsed into a coma from complications related to drowning/suffocation such as water in the lungs, a collapsed trachea or other life-threatening problem. Characters that survive drowning will feel weakened and may be vulnerable to pneumonia and other diseases; temporarily reduce the character's PS and PE by 1d6 each. The character recovers both PS and PE at a rate of 1 per week without hospitalization and 1 per day if he or she is receiving treatment at a hospital or other medical facility.

Characters with supernatural endurance multiply their PE by 10 for purposes of calculating how long they may hold their breath. Characters with superhuman levels of endurance are very unlikely to drown.