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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edgar Ironpelt" data-source="post: 9522574" data-attributes="member: 32075">Medievalish-Fantasy game systems do a fair job of emulating the injury and death rates seen among secondary characters and nameless mooks in read-only fiction, but a poor one of emulating the much lower injury and death rates among the protagonists - the characters who would be PCs in a game. As evidence, I offer this list of injuries suffered by the nine members of the Fellowship in Lord of the Rings during the course of the story. I'm leaving out the purely magical effects, the fatigue, thirst, starvation, and exposure damage, and the injuries to characters other than members of the Fellowship.---Frodo, Sam, and Pippin get scratched up by brambles, while hiding from a Black Rider during their walk through the ShireFrodo is stabbed on Weathertop. [physical injury, even if most of the life-endangering effect came from magic]Sam gets a scratch along the scalp in the fight against the orcs in MoriaFrodo gets the wind knocked out of him by a spear thrust in the fight against the orcs in Moria [He is presumed dead after that attack, but was saved by his mithril chain shirt]Gandalf gets injured ["I was burned"], dies, and then gets better, fighting the balrog. [This happens off-screen]Boromir is wounded and killed fighting orcs at Parth Galen. Unlike Gandalf, above, he does not get better. Noteworthy in that he received multiple wounds in that fight, where nearly all of the other examples are of single wounds. Merry gets a cut on his forehead at Parth Galen. The orc leader uses a nasty orc healing ointment on it. Merry and Pippin suffer various minor cuts and sores while being driven as captives of the orcs. [Those cuts and sores heal in a "remarkable way" when they drink from and bathe their feet in a stream in Fangorn Forest.]Gimli suffers a head injury in the Battle of Helm's Deep. It gets bandaged, and he passes it off as nothing serious. Frodo gets stung by Shelob in the Pass of Cirth UngolSam and Frodo get scratched by thorn bushes after jumping off a bridge when escaping Cirth UngolPippin gets crushed (and seriously injured) by the falling body of the troll he kills, at the battle before the Black Gate of Mordor. Sam gets knocked down from behind and hits his head, at the Crack of Doom. [The injury bleeds.] Frodo has his finger bitten off by Golum, at the Crack of Doom. ---I count 17 examples of members of the Fellowship getting injured in the whole Lord of the Rings, with 5 of the examples being bramble and thorn scratches. And I note that Aragorn and Legolas do not get injured at all.I submit that this is a low, low, low injury rate, compared to that typically seen in a tabletop game that covers the same amount of adventuring, run under either D&D rules or under some alternative rule set having about the same degree of crunch in its mechanics.</blockquote>

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