Any expeerience with Injury Cards in play?

[ChaosOS]

What I'd suggest is come up with specific types of injuries (Been reading through Savage Worlds recently, they have a pretty good injury table) that they can draw from. Final state, rather than death, simply represents something that "Healed Wrong", without necessarily being strictly worse than the "it got worse" stage. Example Broken Leg

Cured <- Leg broken: Char is slowed <-> Leg is really bad: Char is immobilized -> Final state: -1 (or -2 if you're feeling extra harsh) to speed.

Only advanced magic (Paragon tier ritual) can restore the injury. The character will forever remember the injury, since it's a permanent debuff, but it's also not so nasty that people will lose characters. Plus, I'm a firm believer in a fate worse than death, and you can torture your players as they see their characters permanently weakened by the injuries they accumulate.

Other basic ideas for the permanent penalties for things that "Heal wrong"
Head wounds: Randomly choose Int/Wis/Cha. End state is a permanent penalty to relevant ability and skill checks
Arm wounds: Penalty to attack rolls/losing magic item slots (Not the items, just the ability to wear them)
Torso: Penalty to healing surge value

 

[darkbard]

What I'd suggest is come up with specific types of injuries (Been reading through Savage Worlds recently, they have a pretty good injury table) that they can draw from. Final state, rather than death, simply represents something that "Healed Wrong", without necessarily being strictly worse than the "it got worse" stage. Example Broken Leg

Cured <- Leg broken: Char is slowed <-> Leg is really bad: Char is immobilized -> Final state: -1 (or -2 if you're feeling extra harsh) to speed.

Only advanced magic (Paragon tier ritual) can restore the injury. The character will forever remember the injury, since it's a permanent debuff, but it's also not so nasty that people will lose characters. Plus, I'm a firm believer in a fate worse than death, and you can torture your players as they see their characters permanently weakened by the injuries they accumulate.

Other basic ideas for the permanent penalties for things that "Heal wrong"
Head wounds: Randomly choose Int/Wis/Cha. End state is a permanent penalty to relevant ability and skill checks
Arm wounds: Penalty to attack rolls/losing magic item slots (Not the items, just the ability to wear them)
Torso: Penalty to healing surge value

The Injury Deck does include rules for situational penalties.

I just reworked the initial rules framework thus:

When a PC is reduced to 0 hit points or fewer during an encounter that PC suffers a chance of accruing an injury. Make a saving throw after the encounter is complete. On a successful roll, the PC suffers no injury. On a failed roll, the PC suffers a minor injury. Injuries function similarly to the disease track. All injuries begin at Stage 1. Stage 0 represents recovery from the injury, and Stage 3 represents one of two possibilities: moving to Stage 1 of a major injury from a minor injury or character death for a major injury.

 

[Garthanos]

You could also have a major injury heal into a minor injury...to slow down the process a bit.

 

[ChaosOS]

I mean it depends on what kind of injuries you're talking, but in real first aid scenarios most of the time you're not looking at death as a real issue. People are actually rather difficult to kill, and for anything like an injury that takes multiple days to resolve it's unlikely to result in death unless the wound becomes infected. If you're trying to represent an infected wound I'd actually just write up a few diseases that can be complications (Fail an endurance check by 5 or more).

 

[Garthanos]

What I'd suggest is come up with specific types of injuries (Been reading through Savage Worlds recently, they have a pretty good injury table) that they can draw from. Final state, rather than death, simply represents something that "Healed Wrong", without necessarily being strictly worse than the "it got worse" stage. Example Broken Leg

Cured <- Leg broken: Char is slowed <-> Leg is really bad: Char is immobilized -> Final state: -1 (or -2 if you're feeling extra harsh) to speed.

Only advanced magic (Paragon tier ritual) can restore the injury. The character will forever remember the injury, since it's a permanent debuff, but it's also not so nasty that people will lose characters. Plus, I'm a firm believer in a fate worse than death, and you can torture your players as they see their characters permanently weakened by the injuries they accumulate.

Other basic ideas for the permanent penalties for things that "Heal wrong"
Head wounds: Randomly choose Int/Wis/Cha. End state is a permanent penalty to relevant ability and skill checks
Arm wounds: Penalty to attack rolls/losing magic item slots (Not the items, just the ability to wear them)
Torso: Penalty to healing surge value

Well level 8 is currently raising the dead so ahem... unless you also double its level that kind of feels odd, which I admit I have done in the past.

 

[darkbard]

I mean it depends on what kind of injuries you're talking, but in real first aid scenarios most of the time you're not looking at death as a real issue. People are actually rather difficult to kill, and for anything like an injury that takes multiple days to resolve it's unlikely to result in death unless the wound becomes infected. If you're trying to represent an infected wound I'd actually just write up a few diseases that can be complications (Fail an endurance check by 5 or more).

I appreciate the suggestions, but this feels like a simulationist approach, which is not really what I'm looking to implement.

 

[darkbard]

You could also have a major injury heal into a minor injury...to slow down the process a bit.

Good point.

 

[Garthanos]

Cured <- Leg broken: Char is slowed <-> Leg is really bad: Char is immobilized -> Final state: -1 (or -2 if you're feeling extra harsh) to speed.

In realistic verse an adults broken leg is 3 months to heal, and a kids is more like 1 month to heal. A character with agelessness I would give the childs healing rate. Ofcourse with characters like shifters something obnoxiously fast might be appropriate.

 

[Garthanos]

Ironically if the character is not in the middle of battle and or pushing it I am quite inclined to leave such healing to interlude activity and not roll any dice.

Which is why I like the idea of wounds that get aggravated inducing a condition on high and low values during action scenes ...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, Athas is a harsh world. That said, maybe I should rethink this. Perhaps once reaching stage 3 a minor injury switches to a major injury at stage 1 and then proceeds from there? Whaddya think?

It's true this will variation will produce many injuries, but that's kind of the point. I haven't used this yet (game still has not gotten off the ground yet), so I'm open to continued feedback.

I don't know. I mean, these things really need trying out usually to see how they go. You COULD have minor wounds 'evolve' into major ones, that might work. People 'die of a hangnail' now and then, but it takes some time and bad luck.

I have 2 thoughts on injuries being common. One is that 'front line' characters may just be piled with them. This is especially typical in low-level play where monsters are less likely to hit the squishies and even hardened defenders only have 30-60 hit points, which can be chewed through pretty quick by some monsters (especially MM3 ones, and particularly if you're tweaking things or using a lot of tough monsters of level+3 or more).

This could seem kind of burdensome to a fighter, for example, who may end up rather degraded by a lot of small penalties. And I'd note that the penalties cannot be THAT small, because major wounds have to be more dire than minor ones, and if there are 5 stages to each wound (or even 3) then you have to distinguish 4 (or 2) levels of severity, meaning a major wound at level 4 has to be given penalties that are 8 ranks of penalty worse than a minor wound of level 1. Now, chances are few wounds will reach the greatest severity, but a severity 2 major wound could be pretty common, and that already mandates it be 6 ranks worse than "a paper cut" (which to be meaningful must give SOME penalty already, so six ranks worse is going to have to be a significant disadvantage).

For that reason alone you may want to make minor wounds only 3 levels.

My 2nd thought is that familiarity breeds contempt, and the game impact of things that are fairly trivial is hard to measure and often not worth the cost of tracking (which is probably a major reason D&D has always stuck entirely with abstract hit points). One more 'strained ankle' or whatnot isn't likely to be terribly memorable. I've taken to a principle of glossing anything that isn't really significant in HoML. I find it produces simpler and more memorable results. Thus you can only get either advantage or disadvantage (in the 5e sense) there are no minor situational penalties and bonuses. Now, a severe wound might well be worthy of disadvantage, and obviously you can come up with other types of penalty (slowed, immobilized, blinded, etc) but it might really be best to only have a very small number of these things.

Maybe it would even just be better to have ONE 'wound' affliction and have it go from say 'slowed' at level 1, to 'dead' at level 5 and progress through some other conditions in-between, with say level 3 being just flat 'disadvantage on all checks'. These would be cumulative of course.