Tracking Individual Wounds & Healing

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by martinl

The following link may be of interest. (At sjgames.)

I like this article a lot, and in fact it was part of the inspiration for me wanting to try this approach. My problems with it were that: (1) it still seemed unrealistically generous as far as healing times go, especially for high HT characters; (2) because it applies a penalty to HT rolls instead of increasing the time between rolls, it doesn't really provide good advice for characters having any level of Regeneration, as even at the lowest level you're not making HT rolls anymore to recover HP; and (3) no mention of magical or ultra-tech healing means (like 4th Ed Healing and Leech).

Still, it does have several interesting ideas. And to be fair to the article, it is targeted at realistic, mundane humans as they would be found in the Hârn setting. Some ideas can probably be taken from Hârnmaster itself and adapted, I'd think.

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by Edges

I've done this a few times too and have used an elaborate set of house rules. Basically, every wound is labeled with a severity level based on the HP stat of the wounded person. After a week with the wound, a HT roll is made for each wound to see if it improves by one severity level. Critical success improves it by 2 levels. I have a list of modifiers to the HT roll that includes severity, level of activity, missed meals, treatment by physician, etc.
The only thing I don't like about this system of house rules is how long it took me to make.

This sounds very interesting. Could you share any more details? Like what your severity levels were, and effects of missed meals, etc?

[Edges]

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.

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.

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?

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.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Edges

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.

Sounds awesome! I've taken a look at other non-cumulative wound systems (and worked on one of my own) but they seemed to add quite a bit of complexity. Do you have yours posted on a site, or would you care to share it here?

[Edges]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Sounds awesome! I've taken a look at other non-cumulative wound systems (and worked on one of my own) but they seemed to add quite a bit of complexity. Do you have yours posted on a site, or would you care to share it here?

I don't have it up on a site, sorry. I have it in a few word documents. If you were really interested, I could attach them to a PM I guess (unless there are filters I don't know about).

My system does add quite a bit of complexity. But it's complexity that I don't mind handling. And on the player's side, it's manageable. To the player, I would just describe what the wound look like and how much blood is visible. If they want to know the game-mechanical effects, I might say, "You have a moderate wound on your left arm. Every time you want to use it, you need to make a Will check. You have -1 to IQ and DX from the pain." If the player asks how often bleeding rolls need to be made, I'll tell him (in this case) 10 minutes. Otherwise, I just have him roll every 10 minutes and keep track of the loss and the effects of loss informing him when his weakness starts to be noticed (i.e. further penalties are incurred).

So it adds a lot of complexity but it's all behind the curtain.

[Lord Carnifex]

This is from a slightly older game system, but might be applicable: "I'm not Dead Yet!"

From the house rag of some small-time publishing company...

[JCurwen3]

Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex

This is from a slightly older game system, but might be applicable: "I'm not Dead Yet!"

From the house rag of some small-time publishing company...

Thanks, this article is really useful!

[jabarto]

I realize this thread was revived by a spammer, but it's a good opportunity for me to ask about something that's bothered me for a while now:

Originally Posted by Maz

Stopping bleeding have to be rolled for each wound individually at their individual penalty.

Is that a personal ruling, or is that how the book intended it to work? I ask because I like the idea of the bleeding rules, but the Basic Set says,

At the end of every minute after being
wounded, make a HT roll, at -1 per 5 HP lost.

which implies that you go by the total amount of HP you've lost rather than tracking each individual wound (which sounds boring and annoying to deal with). However, most of the time when I see bleeding rules discussed, people say it's the latter. Am I reading it right?