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Originally Posted by vierasmarius
Do you still use cumulative HP loss to determine when a character is incapacitated / killed? Or is that a result of specific injuries? I've considered doing the latter, since I've never been a huge fan of attrition-based damage systems. It gets rid of the "death by a thousand paper cuts" syndrome, though such can still occur (realistically) if bleeding damage is treated as a single, accumulating wound.
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I don't use cumulative HP loss to determine incapacitation/death. In fact, once a given wound is translated from HP of injury to severity level, I no longer keep a record of how many HP of injury it did. To determine the effects of a given injury, I have a table that gives a result of each severity/location. It includes things like crippling, severed limbs, unconsciousness, decapitation, and death. Most of the cells in the table give a HT roll and many are modified. But only the most extreme cells actually result in a death roll. Most deaths occur due to blood loss.
Bleeding is treaded as a single accumulating wound only it does FP damage instead of HP. When you've bled as many points as your max FP, you fall unconscious (you may fall unconscious sooner if you have also lost FP from other sources). Every point you bleed past that, you roll HT or die. This makes death by blood loss a real danger. Each cell on my severity/location table also has a frequency of blood loss roll associated with it. So for a light wound to the torso, you're rolling avery hour for blood loss and for a serious wound to the neck you're rolling every 30 seconds. Bandaging decreases bleeding roll frequency and full application of First Aid (or Surgery in certain cases) eliminates bleeding.
This is only the tip of the iceberg for this system of house rules. I could go on. But it's surprisingly non-cumbersome in play. I handle most of the details and only tell the players what they need/want to know.
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Originally Posted by JCurwen3
This sounds very interesting. Could you share any more details? Like what your severity levels were, and effects of missed meals, etc?
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There's a lot of details. I'm not up for writing them all out at present. But for Severity levels, I used the names in D&D (because I'm old school). So there's light, moderate, serious, and critical.
For recovery, I have a list of modifiers that apply to recovery rolls. Every day of missed meals, you suffer a -1 to the recovery roll. You round up so someone who needs 3 meals a day rolls at a -2 if they missed 5 meals during the week. Missed water is -2 per day. There's also modifiers based on level of activity over the week, margin of success of a physician roll, presence of a nurse (or equivalent helper), missed sleep, Rapid Healing (which has itself been changed), etc.