I'm looking for adjectives to describe incremental degrees of injuries of various body parts for an RPG system. They should be both intuitively understandable and rankable to an average English speaker. That is, if the list of injury terms was given out of order to different people, they would consistently order them the same way. It's fine if they don't anatomically make sense for every kind of body part, e.g. a sprained head or a broken eye, so long as they establish a general degree of injury.
Injury levels are meant to represent a distinct degree of functional impairment, not the actual nature of the injury. A "broken" limb means a limb that is as impaired in its primary function as a partially broken arm would be, even if it happens to be some alien limb without bones at all.
I'm going to need about half a dozen injury levels in total, from superficial (currently named "bruised") to "might as well not be there" (currently named "crippled"). Right now I have:
- Bruised
- Sprained
- Injured
- Broken
- Mangled
- Crippled.
I'm the least happy with "crippled" as it could easily be mistaken for permanent impairment and is also often used as a term to describe disabilities.
These would be prefixed to body parts when describing injured characters, e.g. a mangled right arm or a sprained leg, but still accompanied by the numerical injury level. These terms aren't meant to replace the numerical system, but rather flavor it and provide intuitive guidelines for what ballpark of injuries a given level represents.