Injury Variant Help

[mythusmage]

I'm putting together a d20 injury variant. It uses the wound categories "established" by the Cure X Wounds spells. The system itself is adapted from the True20 system by Green Ronin.

I'm using the True20 system for determining what sort of injury is received based on how well the attacker hit. What I need help with is establishing what each type of injury does to the injured. For example, how do you see the following injury types affecting a character?

Minor Wound
Light Wound
Moderate Wound
Serious Wound
Critical Wound

I also added Fatal Wound and Death as injury categories. The difference between them being that a Death Wound kills a lot faster than a Fatal Wound.

Please note I'm talking not just about the effects of individual wounds, but about cumulative effects as well. Now a Minor Wound probably won't add to the effects of a Moderate or Serious Wound, but a Light Wound probably would. Then you have the problem of numerous Minor Wounds. The Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts deal.

If you have any experience in or links to information on traumatic injury it would be a great help.

One last thing. In the system I've devised lesser wounds do not add up to a greater wound. A fighter gets 20 Minor Wounds in the course of battle he has 20 Minor Wounds, not 2 Moderate Wounds (for example). The effects of all those Minor Wounds may be equivalent to the effects of 2 Moderate Wounds, but he is healing from Minor Wounds and not Moderate. (Means healing won't take near as long, so long as he gets the proper care and nutrition.)

Any ideas you come up with go ahead in post them in this thread. Thanks.

 

[mythusmage]

bump.

 

[tjoneslo]

Comments:

You now have five damage tracks. For people that complain about VP/WP being too complex because of the two sets of hit points, this will drive them nuts.

If I have (for example), two light wounds, two moderate wounds, and a serious wound, which order do I heal in? All at the same time, least to most serious, or vice versa? I'd suggest least to most.

I'm assuming that the cure light wounds spell cures one light wound. Can I use a Cure Serious wound to cure multiple light wounds, and what is the conversion?

I'm not sure why you want trauma sites, unless you want to add a critical hit type additional injury system on top of this. It looks like it would work fine as is.

Are their penalties for each wound type? I'll have to go back to Blue Rose to see, but I recall it giving a penalty for some of the more serious wounds.

 

[mythusmage]

Comments:

You now have five damage tracks. For people that complain about VP/WP being too complex because of the two sets of hit points, this will drive them nuts.

If I have (for example), two light wounds, two moderate wounds, and a serious wound, which order do I heal in? All at the same time, least to most serious, or vice versa? I'd suggest least to most.

I'm assuming that the cure light wounds spell cures one light wound. Can I use a Cure Serious wound to cure multiple light wounds, and what is the conversion?

I'm not sure why you want trauma sites, unless you want to add a critical hit type additional injury system on top of this. It looks like it would work fine as is.

Are their penalties for each wound type? I'll have to go back to Blue Rose to see, but I recall it giving a penalty for some of the more serious wounds.

To answer them in order ...

1. It's going to require a notepad and some pencils to keep track of. Seriously, the margin of success does not count as hit points, if you want to get technical about it. Or you could think of everybody having the same number of hit points, but not really. Each wound is tracked separately, which leads us to ...

2. All wounds (potentially) heal simultaneously. Once a day make a fortitude save, adding any bonus for class, nursing, doctor's care, and the like. One roll suffices for all injuries. Each wound's current value (original margin of success plus or minus any modifiers from care, healing, aggravation of injury etc.) acts as the wound's DC. So if the modified save is a 15 a 14 point Moderate Wound would improve by 1 point, but a 16 point Serious Wound would not. Obviously this variant is not intended for games where the PCs go out and battle everyone they meet every day of the week

3. One Cure, one wound. Use a Cure Serious on a Light Wound and all that extra healing goes for naught. At the same time, if all you have left is a Cure Serious and all you need is a Cure Light, I'm sure an exchange could be worked out. Say, swapping out the Cure Serious for a Cure Light and a Cure Moderate.

On a related note, if one lacks the proper Cure for an injury type one can use a lower level cure, which will lower the severity a number of points. Effectively lowering severity one or more steps.

For example:

Cure Minor: 5 points
Cure Light: 10 points
Cure Moderate: 15 points
Cure Serious: 20 points
Cure Critical: 25 points.

Heal is the only curative magic that will handle all injuries at once.

4. I'm looking for information on what wounds do to a person overall. What effect wounds have on a person's capabilities. Stunning, dazing, and the various kinds of traumatic shock. Also effects on abilities, skills, traits, and powers. I rather doubt somebody with even just a Moderate Wound is going to be as good at Improved Bull Rush as someone who's uninjured.

Then you have the fact pain is distracting. I know the RAW has a rule for the effect of hit point loss on Concentration, but that won't really work here since technically speaking people don't have hit points.

5. I would certainly hope there are penalties. Of course, this home rule of mine is not as forgiving as the True20 system. Which, after all, was designed for romantic heroes. This is a bit grittier. Overall there's much to be done with it.

BTW, thanks for your assistance.

 

[tjoneslo]

4. I'm looking for information on what wounds do to a person overall. What effect wounds have on a person's capabilities. Stunning, dazing, and the various kinds of traumatic shock. Also effects on abilities, skills, traits, and powers. I rather doubt somebody with even just a Moderate Wound is going to be as good at Improved Bull Rush as someone who's uninjured.

Then you have the fact pain is distracting. I know the RAW has a rule for the effect of hit point loss on Concentration, but that won't really work here since technically speaking people don't have hit points.

I'm not really sure what you are looking for here. The real problem with this is that (in the real world), reaction to similar wounds varies widely, even in the same person. I can probably find a number of sites which describe the effects of knives or guns on flesh. How a real person reacts to this injury changes, and may change radically, depeding upon circumstance.

Now I'm sure you can model this using a complex series of "critical hit" type damage tables for each wound category. RoleMaster's Arms Law has a really detailed set. GURPS damage rules are nicely detailed. But are you really looking to add this level of detail?

Otherwise, a slightly extended version of the Blue Rose damage system seems appropriate.

 

[Vrecknidj]

There are already lots of different ways to be damaged to keep track of. A character can suffer hit point loss, non-lethal damage, ability score damage, negative levels, and a variety of other conditions (fatigued, nauseated, etc., etc.).

I don't have any experience with what's being proposed, so I can't respond in a helpful way in that regard. But, I don't see that converting over to such a system will necessarily be of a degree of complexity that's burdensome for players or DMs.

Dave

 

[ecliptic]

I think a wound level system would be good for critical hits.

 

[mythusmage]

To clarify matters, this injury variant is meant to be used in place of hit points. It pretty much combines the 'to-hit' and damage rolls into one.

Where injury effects are concerned, I'm looking to do a simplified model. With a provision for heroic efforts and stuff like that.

Then you have the effect of bloodloss, which does need to be addressed. I'm thinking of making bloodloss up the effect of the worst injury to higher levels, depending on how many points of blood are lost. More to work on.

Invention is so much fun.

 

[tjoneslo]

Let me see if I've got this right: Character makes a to hit roll against target AC, if the miss, no damage, if they hit exactly, it's a minor wound, if they hit by 1 or 2, it's a light wound, if they hit by 3 to 6 it's a moderate wound, if they hit by 7 to 10 it's a serious wound, if they hit by 11 to 15 it's a critical wound, if they hit by 16 to 20 it's a deadly wound and if they hit by 21 or more it's a fatal wound. (numbers made up for the example).

Since consitiution seems to be the big affector of damage taken I suggest the following. It takes 4 + con modifier of one wound to accumulate to the next level. For example, Fred has a 10 con, if he takes 4 light wounds, he now has a moderate wound as well. Strongbad the barbarian with 18 con requires 8 light wounds to make a moderate one.

Effects of the wounds:
Minor wound: Nothing.
Light wound: A cumulative -1 circumstance penatly to all to hit, save, and skill checks. You may rid your self of this penaty by taking a full round action.
Moderate Wound: Cumulative -1 penalty, but requires a Fort check DC 15+# of wounds and a full round action to remove this penalty.
Serious Wound: Penalty as above, plus accumulate an additional minor wound each round. Requires a Treat Injury check (with the accumulated penatly as well) to stop the bleeding and shock, plus the Fort check to remove the penalty.
Cirital Wound: As Serious wound, but accumulate light wounds.
Fatal Wound: Character is dying. As above, but accumulate moderate wounds.
Deadly Wound: Unless treated in CON rounds by treat injury skill, character dies. A second deadly wound kills the character out right.

But this gets more complex that I would like. It does allow for character to be badly injured and unable to continue a fight without killing them. And I'd add a few feats which make the saves easier or take less time.

 

[mythusmage]

The actual determination of what degree of wound one has is:

Modified die roll minus armor class +1. This gives you the margin of success. Why the +1? So you don't have to deal with number ranges of 5-9 for example.

The numbers and their associated injuries are:

01-05: Minor Wound
06-10: Light Wound
11-15: Moderate Wound
16-20: Serious Wound
21-25: Critical Wound

Wound Effects:

Minor Wound: For every 5 such wounds a -1 on all rolls, combat, stkill, saves etc.

Light Wound: For every 3 a -1 on all rolls.

Moderate Wound: For each wound a -1 on all rolls.

Serious Wound: -5 on all rolls.

Critical Wound: No actions possible other than movement at 1/3 normal speed.

Shock and bleeding still need to be worked out. Bleeding acting as a sort of systemic injury. Then there is the matter of heroic efforts and all that.