D&D 4E Wounds: 4e Style - Calling for house rules

[Garthanos]

Does anyone have house rules for wounds they would care to share

How Wounds Work

Each wound has a progression, with positions 0 to 4;

When a character is wounded, their conditions start at position 1 or 2. If they reach position 0, the wound is cured. If they ever reach the rightmost position 4, the wound has reached its final state and its effects can only be removed by some special means that depends on the wound: Usually the level 4 Martial practices Meatball Surgery or Battlefield psychiatry will do the job, but sometimes their benefits may be limited. Field Psychiatry often temporarily suppresses set in Battle Trauma (psychic damage induced wound) temporarily and takes multiple applications. Immediate application of Meatball Surgery may even replace a lost limb, normally only incurred with a critical hit induced mortal wound ie one resulting in death saves for heroes .... but it must be applied within 10 minutes of the injury, note the alternative achieved by standard heal checks is cauterization (which may result in interesting pirate flavor for a hero).

Every wound-specific time increment (extended rest is most common), the player of the wounded character must make an endurance check to recover from the wound; another character may also make a heal check to try to treat the character the affected character uses the highest of their endurance check and any heal checks made on their behalf.

Each wound has two DCs. If the check used is greater than or equal to the high DC, the characters condition moves one position to the left on the wound track. If the check used is less than the low DC, the characters condition moves one position to the right on the wound track. If the check used is greater than or equal to the low DC but less than the high DC, the affected characters condition remains in its current state.

MASH references intentional... but temporary.

The above is basically just the disease track translated a little.

If a character is reduced below zero hit points their wound condition begins at 1 and at 2 if they fail a death save.

The concept of wound afflictions are to have them be generally passive state effects (perhaps reducing long distance travel rates or similar) but which become active when one engages in challenging situations... High and low rolls reflecting pushing oneself and or inept performance and the wounds become when aggravated by a roll of 1 or 2, 19 or 20, are temporary effects comparable of normal combat effects but perhaps varied by the current stage. Slowing, falling prone, weakness, generally with a save ends.

My current thought is to have powers that allow one to accept a wound to gain an effect, such as the classic running on an enemies weapon to enable you doing an even deadlier attack or simply accepting a wound in place of the hit point loss from a nasty attack.

 

[Garthanos]

Places I want to use these kind of house rules?

Powers that allow one to accomplish something awesome at a cost... Like a Boars Rush Up their blade to do a big attack by accepting a Wound.

Martial Practices
Ones to remove them already mentioned above.(Surgery and Psychiatry)
perhaps one called accupressure which allows one to ignore the affliction caused by a wound for a period of time.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I haven't felt the need to implement, but I thought prettymuch the moment I saw the Disease Track 'oh, you could use this for lingering wounds.'

One genre trope I do really like that D&D hasn't ever tried to do AFAIK, is the determined hero going back into battle against at the risk of 're-opening his wounds.' That'd be something that could be added onto the Disease Track fairly easily - on a trigger, make an additional Endurance check to avoid worsening your condition (no chance of improvement, of course). Triggers could be spending an action point or using a Daily attack power - anything that implies exceptional effort.

A debilitating wound could impose a condition, like Weakened, Dazed, or Slowed, and each turn you could choose to make an Endurance check - on a Hard success, you ignore the condition until the start of your next turn, but on a Moderate failure your wound worsens on the Wound Track.

 

[Garthanos]

A debilitating wound could impose a condition, like Weakened, Dazed, or Slowed, and each turn you could choose to make an Endurance check - on a Hard success, you ignore the condition until the start of your next turn, but on a Moderate failure your wound worsens on the Wound Track.

thats pretty much a no fighty fighty for you...

 

[Garthanos]

By the way mine has the problem being randomly symptomatic and is distinct from yours. The two could be combined.
[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]

 

[Garthanos]

Pysychic wound ie the battle trauma wouldnt be endurance managed but rather will.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I haven't felt the need to implement, but I thought prettymuch the moment I saw the Disease Track 'oh, you could use this for lingering wounds.'

One genre trope I do really like that D&D hasn't ever tried to do AFAIK, is the determined hero going back into battle against at the risk of 're-opening his wounds.' That'd be something that could be added onto the Disease Track fairly easily - on a trigger, make an additional Endurance check to avoid worsening your condition (no chance of improvement, of course). Triggers could be spending an action point or using a Daily attack power - anything that implies exceptional effort.

A debilitating wound could impose a condition, like Weakened, Dazed, or Slowed, and each turn you could choose to make an Endurance check - on a Hard success, you ignore the condition until the start of your next turn, but on a Moderate failure your wound worsens on the Wound Track.

Right.

My current implementation has some things like this. Its like [MENTION=82504]Garthanos[/MENTION]' suggestion, a disease track implementation. I originally considered that 'wounds could only get better', but that may not be an absolute, you could MAKE them worse, as you suggest. However, I would make this a 'plot device'. So, the player simply chooses to make his wound worse, spends his inspiration (or a surge or whatever you want to do) and trades a single step increase in wound severity for advantage or some similar thing. I wouldn't have dice be involved in this decision at all.

I would recommend 4 wound levels. The first level, minor is simply a wound, it doesn't have any mechanical effect, or the effect is VERY limited at least. Its main purpose is to allow for a worsening condition. The second level, serious, has a basic penalty associated with it such as being slowed, losing a surge, or maybe something more wound-specific like -2 on ranged attacks, or whatever. The third level would be major, and this is fully debilitating. You can do things, but you have the cumulative effects of levels 1 and 2, plus they are worse or there's something serious on top of that, like disadvantage, being dazed, etc. The final level, permanent, simply makes the serious wound effect stick. If the wound's endpoint is death, then this is it. I'd consider condensing this to 3 levels for some wounds, perhaps even all of them.

Now you can play with your various practices, healing skill powers, healing magic of other sorts, etc. These can produce instant results, allow reduction of level 4 to fix permanent injury, give an immediate injury reduction check, etc. I don't really like the whole idea of checks governing worsening and recovery ala 4e's Disease chart. That was too much use of dice in a rather arbitary way to me. If there's some sort of question of a struggle to achieve healing, then make it an SC. Otherwise its just window-dressing and general "how things are" in the world, and thus a wound should simply recover at a specified rate (or maybe some wounds are simply not recoverable without help at all). If you do the things needed to get better, you get better.

As an extension of this, consider how this would work for diseases. These are things that CAN get worse and better, obviously. A disease is ALREADY a conflict in and of itself, and thus should be, or be part of, an encounter. Here healing should be governed by the SC rules. In effect a disease isn't far off from that already, but I think you could simply call the stages of a disease by number of SC failures. Once a requisite number of successes happens 'the fever breaks' or whatever and then recovery becomes assured, though it may still require some bed rest, etc. I'm not sure if this would all ideally lead to some redesign of the disease track, and how that might cast a different light on the wound track.

Finally I'd note that curses are also a type of 'affliction' which can and should use a similar mechanism. In fact I don't distinguish between a disease and a curse, all diseases are some form of malign magic and thus a type of curse.

 

[Garthanos]

Lots of magical afflictions mentioned but not actually developed ... on the remove affliction ritual.

 

[Garthanos]

but I think you could simply call the stages of a disease by number of SC failures.

Now that idea disease == skill challenge is intriguing

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Now that idea disease == skill challenge is intriguing

Its not perfect. I'd really like to make something like an 'outbreak' into a full SC, but I also have the concept of removing all checks that don't fall into a challenge or encounter (I actually use the term 'challenge' for any conflict situation). That makes things like disease checks, at least standalone ones, something I'd like to eliminate.

It comes down to this: A single straight-up disease affecting a single victim is a pretty limited SC.

Maybe I need to reconsider my thinking in terms of 'only challenges are conflict' in some degree? That is to say, a 'resource game' is some sort of conflict, right? Its kind of the essence of Man vs Nature in a sense for one thing. I mean, you could arrange every one of these situations as an SC, you could in effect set up every 'day' of adventuring as a sort of challenge that contained your other encounters as elements. You could do the same for the whole adventure. It just seems a bit awkward. So maybe we need to consider a class of things that are NOT challenges or parts of challenges that deals with resource use and acquisition across an adventure. A disease could then fit into that paradigm where the disease track manages these elements, at least when used in that fashion. You could of course still devise an SC "cure the patient" but you probably in this conception wouldn't actually write up each disease AS an SC.

I am of mixed minds about this.