Healing Advantage and Disease Modifiers

[Humabout]

Has anyone assembled a list of diseases and their associated penalties for the Cure Disease function of the Healing advantage? If so, how did you set the penalty? Was it based on mortality rates or how easily cured it is? Would you mind sharing what you have? Unfortunately knowing the modifier can range from +1 to -15 doesn't help me terribly much when I look at things like cholera, dysentery, bubonic plague, typhoid, small pox, mumps, leprosy, etc. Not having much knowledge in general about such diseases, I'd love to get some more references so I can just do some research and start banging out a small collection of these.

[Refplace]

I start with any modifier to resist and then assess penaltie if its gotten a good hold on the subject. Eyeball it from there.

[munin]

GURPS Powers: Divine Favor (p. 15) has FP costs for 10 diseases from which can be derived their Cure Disease penalties:

sepsis, -6
polio, -7
meningitis, -8
herpes, -9
leprosy, -10
parkinson's disease, -11
brain tumor, -12
pancreatic cancer, -13
leukemia, -14
aids, -15

Not a general solution, but helpful.

[Humabout]

I found a brief table in Divine Favor that lists Leprosy as a -10 penalty (inferred, anyway). It also implies that malaria, dysentery, and bad flues have -5 or better. I also found a post from PK saying that he arrived at those penalties based on conversations with a few RNs about how hard it is for the body to fight off the diseases on its own without any medicinal help.

[EDIT]
Quotes:

Originally Posted by PK

I invented the table ex nihilo for GURPS Powers: Divine Favor. It came from me sitting down with a few experts (RNs, etc.) to figure out which diseases should logically fall where on this progression.

Originally Posted by PK

Entirely on the difficulty of treating the disease, but not for TL7-8. We tried to look at the resistance to treatment of the disease as a whole, both in days of old and extrapolated (as best as we could) to envision future medical techniques. After all, some diseases have treatment issues that are essentially technology limitations (e.g., we can't make a certain payload small enough) while others are just difficult on their own.

This is why leprosy (which we can cure at TL8) is listed as a harder disease to eliminate than herpes (which we cannot). Because it's not a question of "when is the cure invented" but of "how tenaciously does this resist the body's attempts to heal itself."

[vicky_molokh]

While we're at it, other stats, such as contagiousness or cycles would be nice to know.

[Flyndaran]

From what I've read it looks completely 100% arbitrary with no connection to anything except vague culturally considered "severity" and eventual harm done to the sufferer.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

From what I've read it looks completely 100% arbitrary with no connection to anything except vague culturally considered "severity" and eventual harm done to the sufferer.

Herpes (the type isn't specified, but the word is usually used conversationally to mean oral or genital herpes) is neither severe, nor particularly harmful unless you count mild social embarrassment or in the case of people with already compromised immune systems.

It is, however, a real bear to treat at the moment, and rates a -9 which seems pretty reasonable for the way all herpeseviruses bunker down inside the body for the long haul.

As quoted up thread, the values aren't "arbitrary" (unless you mean "not calculated from other game statistics" at which point yes, they're arbitrary - but since there aren't any other systems in the game to derive these penalties from that seems pretty reasonable to me).

[Humabout]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

While we're at it, other stats, such as contagiousness or cycles would be nice to know.

I was hoping to eventually work this out with some research, the penalties seemed the hardest to derive given the general lack of benchmarks. With PKs table in divine favor, we have some idea for more tenacious diseases at least.