Long-Term Injury Fun?

[FitzTheRuke]

LONG TERM INJURY
Your character has sustained an injury that will take some time to heal.

Until this condition is removed, you suffer the following penalties.

-1 square of movement
-2 to attacks
You get one less healing surge per day
You are considered "Bloodied" regardless of hit point total

(Or whatever penalties you feel like giving, depending upon how serious you want long term injury to be in your game)

You can attempt a save once per week/Save ends

I like this one. Nice & simple. I suggest the condition occurs as players & DMs see fit, primarily from large damage crits or dropping below zero.

Fitz

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Okay, here are my thoughts.

First off: Whatever you do, ensure that it stays fair. If the players are forced to go on adventuring despite persistent injuries/penalties, account for them.
I've seen or heard about interesting "drawback" mechanics that give the player a benefit whenever the flaw comes into play, but otherwise is "cost-neutral" (you can't take drawbacks just to pay for other cool abilities - we all know that leads to min-maxing and munchkining...

Handling Injuries "fairly":
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Try to give penalties that can at least be roughly translated to other mechanical effects that are traditionally worth a game resource. For example, if having a severe injury causes a -2 penalty to all physical rolls (attacks, physical skills) and reduces your speed by 2 squares, this is a bit as if you were (in 4E terms) constantly marked. Any encounter in which your injury is part of grants therefore worth some extra XP equal to a monster of a level (maybe only a minion monster...). If the DM tries to figure out the difficulty of an encounter, he can use this XP cost to get a more precise value.
(Note that the XP is not reserved for the injured player character. It's group XP, like anything else. If the fighter suddenly becomes less effective, the whole team has to work harder...)

An alternative might be to just reward action points for this. Could be cool, too, but it's a little more difficult since the granularity is lower, so you need injury penalties that have similar effective cost.
[/sblock]

Okay, with that part out of the way, you might come up with actual mechanics for getting injuries.

Getting Injured
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If a character is first bloodied in combat, he might take a persistent injury. Reroll the attack that caused the character to be bloodied. If it hits the victims Fortitude Defense, it suffers one wound.
If a character is first dropped to 0 hp or less, he can take a persistent injury. Reroll the attack that caused the character to drop. If it hits the victims Fortitude Defense, the character suffers a wound.

Alternative: Instead of rerolling attack, just roll a save.
Optional: As long as a character has action points or healing surges remaining, he can take a free (or immediate action for more "grit") to spend it and negate the injury the moment it happens. If an action point is spent, the point spent counts only in so far against your per encounter limit in as you can now no longer spend an action point for anything else but to avoid an injury.
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Wounds (Abstract Method):
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For each wound a character has, he regains one healing surge less per day. This represents your bodies effort to heal yourself.
The first wound is "free". It doesn't cause any further penalties. Your pure awesomeness means you're fine though you shouldn't be.
The second wound causes a -2 injury penalty to all checks.
The third wound adds a -2 penalty to all defenses and movement. (Minimum 1 square of movement)
The fourth wound increases the check penalty to -5.
The fifth wound drops checks, defense and movement by 5.
The sixth wound is simply to much. You're unconcious, until healed.

Healing a wound requires 1 day per number of wound you currently have. So if you have 5 wounds, you need 5 days to recover from it. After that, you need another 4 days to recover from the next. And so on.
A Healing spell triggering a Healing Surge heals a single wound.

Optional (Reduced Cleric Dependency) A Heal check that triggers a Healing Surge has the same effect, but it can be only applied either as first aid (within the same encounter / 5 minutes after the injury) or as long-term aid (6 hours of extended rest).
Alternative: Roll a save each day to see if you make progress at all. 20 removes a wound, 10+ means you make progress, less means you don't.
[/sblock]

Wounds (Complex Method):
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Determine the hit zone to determine which body part is injured:
Roll 1d6:
6: Head (1d6: 1-3: Jaw; 4-6: upper head)
4-5: Torso (1d6: 1-3 Chest, 4-6: waist)
3-4: Arm (1d6: 1-2: Left Arm; 3-4: Right Arm, 5: Left Hand, 6: Right Hand)
1-2: Leg (1d6: 1-2: Left Leg; 3-4 Right Leg; 5: Left Foot, 6: Right Foot)

Each part can take only 4 wounds.
The first wound is for free. Your badassitude allows you to compensate.
The second wound means you take a -2 penalty to all checks or movement related to that body part. The third wound means you take a -5 penalty to all checks or movement related to that body part.

Only apply the highest penalty. Torso wounds apply to all strength, Dexterity or constitution based checks, as well as Reflex and Fortitude Defense. Head wounds apply to all Dex, Wisdom, Intelligence or Charisma Based checks, and Will Defense.

A fourth wound can fully "destroy" the body part. Roll also a Save. If the save fails, the body part is severed or crushed, and requires powerful restorative magic (Regeneration) to be repaired. If a body part is part of a larger part (like the jaw is a part of a head), roll one save for each part. Only if each save fails, the part is destroyed.
If the save succeeds, the part is unusable until further medical attention arrives. (Anyhting that triggers a healing surge can make the part functional again, removing the third wound).
A nonfunctional head means you're unconcious, a nonfunctional torso means your paralyzed and can't move or attack and can perform any purely mental actions. Destroyed head or torso mean you're dead. Sorry.

Wounds take one day to heal. You can heal only one wound per day by spending one of your next days healing surges. Roll a Save. If it succeeds, your wound heals.
[/sblock]

Please Note: Despite both variants using wounds, the wounds function different. In the second "simulationist" variant, a lot more wounds can persist.

Both systems are complex enough to create a lot of variations of the rules to "fine-tune" it to your hearts desire. Neither rule claims to be perfect, complete or "realistic".

 

[KarinsDad]

How about:

1) Every time a PC gets hit with a critical, whatever damage is taken is subtracted from total hit points and current hit points.

2) A PC recovers 1 point towards total hit points overnight.

3) A PC recovers level points towards total hit points with a day of bed rest.

4) Magic does not heal this (or only specific ritual magic heals it).


One thing I think this does to benefit the game is to make the game challenging. From what we know so far, every PC recovers from every combat unless there is a TPK, or unless none of the conscious PCs have the Heal skill, or unless a PC is at very low hit points and gets hit for a devastating powerful attack. But typically, 4E appears to be a "fight, heal up, wash and repeat" type of system with little real threat of death.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

To me, I think longterm injury should be handled just as my dm and I did. An agreement between player and dm to enhance the story, not some unexpected screw to a character.

To me this seems the perfect solution.

 

[KidSnide]

I tend to run a campaign in a realistic world where battles are deadly, people get sick and injuries are difficult to heal, but where the PCs are generally not subject to debilitating effects because of their narrative role. They face the same risks, but everyone at the table agrees that they happen to be lucky. (If one of them got the silly idea of testing his luck by falling off his horse a hundred times, he would - in fact - break his neck.) I suppose I should add that, in my game Warlord healing makes tons of sense because clerics have always "healed" wounds through prayer and encouragement, not by magically closing cuts or setting bones. If you want to fix a broken bone, you need a doctor, who may also be a priest of Apollo whose prayers increase your chances of surviving the surgery he performs.

Consequently, I want a hit point system that gives me some guidance as to when an NPC receives a deadly wound or a long-term injury. I'm not really interested in anything that impacts a PC's ability in combat, because I figure that they are sufficiently heroic that they can grit their way through the pain when it really matters. (I'd expect an injured archer to move around less, but I see no reason to impose a penalty.)

For PCs, all I want to know is whether they received a wound that will potentially kill them if they don't seek medical attention. I figure any PC beyond the lowest level has access to skilled doctors with powerful prayers - if they seek them out. So, I want my players to make the decision between pressing on in the knowledge that delaying treatment will produce a potentially uncurable festering wound vs. saving their character at the cost of abandoning the mission.

 

[Dausuul]

Try to give penalties that can at least be roughly translated to other mechanical effects that are traditionally worth a game resource. For example, if having a severe injury causes a -2 penalty to all physical rolls (attacks, physical skills) and reduces your speed by 2 squares, this is a bit as if you were (in 4E terms) constantly marked. Any encounter in which your injury is part of grants therefore worth some extra XP equal to a monster of a level (maybe only a minion monster...). If the DM tries to figure out the difficulty of an encounter, he can use this XP cost to get a more precise value.
(Note that the XP is not reserved for the injured player character. It's group XP, like anything else. If the fighter suddenly becomes less effective, the whole team has to work harder...)

An alternative might be to just reward action points for this. Could be cool, too, but it's a little more difficult since the granularity is lower, so you need injury penalties that have similar effective cost.

To me, I think longterm injury should be handled just as my dm and I did. An agreement between player and dm to enhance the story, not some unexpected screw to a character.

See, this is more the kind of thing I was looking for. I mean, it's easy to cobble together rules for long-term injuries, I could do that in my sleep. So, I imagine, could most of the people on this board. Whenever you drop into negative hit points, roll some dice, consult this chart, oh look, you lost a hand. Here are your penalties until you score a regenerate spell, thank you, have a nice day.

But if the rules do nothing but "realistically" simulate long-term injuries, they add little to the game and usually impose a hefty cost.

What I'm asking for are ideas on how to incorporate such mechanics into a game, such that they actually add something to the game experience. The reason I'm asking is that I like the concept of long-term injuries, disease, and so forth, but in actual play they mostly just make the game less fun... at least, that's what they do if they're implemented in the simple, obvious, simulationist way.

I want a way to incorporate the concept and have it add to play rather than detracting.

 

[TPK]

THAT'S what 4e needs -- montage rules!

I'll second that. Why focus on the sucky part of being hurt, when you could focus on the awesome?

Simple variant: If you are reduced to negative hit points, you gain the right to wear a bloody rag around your head like a badass bandanna for the next week. Instead of grumbling about annoying penalties, you'll be getting free beers at the inn.

See? Focus on the positive.

 

[SteveC]

Here's my suggestion for injuries, based on something that I put together for 3x.

Allow characters to reduce damage by inflicting an injury on themselves. In effect you can immediately heal HP, at a long-term cost to yourself. In this way, injuries are optional and chosen by the players themselves.

In the previous system, I had three levels of injury: minor, moderate and severe. You can be injured at more than one level, but you may suffer each injury only once: until the injury heals you can't receive the HP for taking it a second time.

A minor injury heals one quarter your starting HP value, or your Con, whichever is higher. For 4E I would make this the equivalent of a healing surge. The injury effect is a -2 penalty on actions or a moderate penalty to movement. Minor injuries heal after three days rest.

Moderate injuries heal one half your starting HP value (or your Con, whichever is higher). In 4E I would make this the equivalent of healing HP equal to your Bloodied value, but keeping you in the bloodied condition until the injury heals. Moderate injuries cause a -5 action penalty, reduce your movement to 1/2 or remove your ability to use one of your limbs. Moderate injuries heal after a week of rest, and become minor injuries after four days.

A severe injury heals two-thirds your starting HP value (or Con, as you may surmise by now). In 4E, I would keep the amount healed the same, and state that you are considered bloodied until the injury heals. Severe injuries cause a -10 penalty to actions, reduce your movement to 1, or have some other extremely severe effect. Severe injuries heal after two weeks of rest, and become moderate injuries after one week.

...that's just the start, and off the top of my head. Adjust penalties and healing times to taste, throw in a dash of the healing skill to improve healing time and voila!

--Steve

 

[smathis]

My thoughts exactly. When I first heard about the rules for healing completely after a long rest in 4e, I set out to create rules to simulate long term injury. After much number crunching, I came to the conclusion that magical healing would always be a quick fix for it, and it would add little to the game.

I agree with Kenneth on this point. My preferences, though, are for Low/No-Magic settings where "healing magic" is either non-existent or very difficult to come by. Hence, 3.x and I never got along. But I'm liking the Healing Surges in 4e. So take what's below on the assumption that magic that would heal wounds is not happenstance.

Continuing in the tradition of one of my favorite brainstorms of late, here's suggestions. Some are mine and others are just some of the best I've heard so far.

1.
Taking a critical hit uses up a Healing Surge.

2.
Recovering healing surges after a 6 hour rest is determined by rolling a hit die and adding your Con bonus. this way, it's entirely possible to have a bad 6-hours of rest and not wake up at full strength. This would only apply to dungeons and such, though, where the PC is sleeping in tense, uncomfortable, uncertain or potentially unsafe conditions. A 6-hour rest at an Inn would bring a PC full up.

3.
With a nod to SWSE and Earthdawn, a PC takes a Persistent Condition when dropped below zero hitpoints. Multiple Persistent Conditions are applied and stack like the Condition Track in SWSE. To remove a Persistent Condition, roll a save after a 6-hour rest.

Like with regular saves, rolling a '20' removes all Persistent Conditions. Otherwise, only one roll per day can be made to remove them. Or just keep the normal save rules and roll a die for each condition. So a PC with -5 in Persistent Conditions would roll 3d20. On a roll of 4, 11 and 15, he would go from -5 to -1.

Alternately, the Persistent Conditions could subtract (-1, -2, -5, -10) from the PCs Healing Surges at the start of each day. I'm reluctant to penalize Healing Surges with both 2 and 3, though.

Earthdawn would apply the penalty to hit points. But maybe the scale should change if that is the case? Maybe -2, -10%, -20%, -50% would work? A -10 at even 3-4th level would be pretty weak, from what I've seen.

I'm reluctant to go the route of temporary ability scores. Just too fidgety for my tastes. So I'd prefer if a Persistent Condition either applied as a negative to attack/skill rolls or take off a percentage of Hit Points at the start of each day. But not both.

4.
If a PC fails three saves after being dropped below zero or takes enough damage to move to "negative bloodied" (in other words if the PC would normally die), the Player may opt to stabilize the character by opting for a "Long Term Injury". This injury would have an agreed-upon effect on one of the PCs ability scores or movement (Player's Choice). But other than that, it would mostly be flavor.

Examples would be Frodo's wound from the Nazgul that would "never properly heal" in LotR. Or Luke Skywalker getting his hand chopped off. Sure, they may have had a minor effect on the PC's stats. But nothing that prevented the character from contributing to the story.

The immediate story would change (as it did in the examples) to "Ohmigod! We've got to get [insert name here] some help! Quick!" But that could be fun too. Escaping a hostile dungeon with a wounded comrade is just as viable as any MacGuffin, IMO.

 

[Dragonblade]

I, personally, would not enjoy realistic long term injuries in my game. Why would I? What it adds in realism it takes away in bed rest. And many truly realistic injuries would never heal at all.

I also would not enjoy realistic long term injury rules coupled with magic that bypasses them and heals you instantly. That would be an additional level of complexity that didn't actually DO anything, since we'd always bring along a healer.

This is my position as well. I prefer fast cinematic healing. If I want long term injuries, I'll go play Warhammer.