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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3434570" data-attributes="member: 4937">D&D has never really handled poison and disease well.  When I was younger, this really bothered me, and I spent a lot of time thinking and designing for a rules set that would make poison and disease truly realistic with incubation, symptomology, stages, and so forth.  In pursuing this goal, poisons eventually acquired a description that was about as complex as your average monster entry.  And that wasn't the worst problem.  The biggest problem was that in actual play, elaborate symptomology and so forth just wasn't much fun.  I had let my simulationist tendancies get the best of me and once again mistaken my 'cool' mental simulation in which all sorts of 'realistic' things could happen for fun.  The problem with a realistic disease and poison simulation is that in practice, elaborate symptomology doesn't open up nearly as much cool roleplay as I wanted to believe that it did.Sick people don't actually do alot of things.  If they have a choice in the matter, they'll do nothing.  There is only so much of doing nothing and suffering through the elaborate symptoms of a disease or poison you or your players are going to want to do.  Sick or diseased players do one of two things.  Either they have the resources to cure the disease or poison, in which case they do so, or they don't do anything until they can cure it.  In the former case the complexity you've added is meaningless.  The disease or poison goes away before it does any of the 'interesting' stuff you intended for it to do.  In the latter case, play is put on hold until the issue can be dealt with, and as I pointed out dealing with the disease generally isn't alot of fun anyway.One of the things that I had to learn the hard way, because my instincts as a game ref kept driving me the other way was that realism is not a good goal in and of itself.  One of the biggest places realism just gets in the way is maiming a PC.  Whenever you maim a PC, whether temporarily or permenently, you've taken that player out of the game.  Maiming is actually worse than death, because with death the player gets a new character and can get back in the game at the next full stop.  When you maim a character temporarily, you take that player out of the game.  He can no longer play the game.  Parties tend to stop and rest until a character is no longer maimed, not just because it is the smart thing to do or the appropriate in game step, but because since this is a multiplayer game it is also the polite thing to do.This is why D&D's system of either healthy or dead is - despite all the grumbling that you hear about it - actually a quite good thing.  If you had realistic maiming, you'd effectively either killed that character or put the game on pause.  If you as a DM have a time line, your time line is probably dead and you'll probably put the time line on hold any way to prevent that, because face it, you as a DM want the PC's to succeed.  Maiming is realistic, but it isn't fun.Realistic disease and poison is just another sort of maiming.</blockquote>

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