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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7068846" data-attributes="member: 82106">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.</blockquote>

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