God Slayers: TTRPG - Wounds (Patreon)

As I’ve been designing this game system, I’m always trying to keep in mind the weight and complexity of each subsystem. Given the post-apocalypse setting and our focus on survival, I’ve put more weight into systems like Vitals, Wounds, Combat and Adaptations, while reducing the load of Equipment, Skills, and many others. Different players have different tolerance levels for complexity in their games, and whatever that threshold is for any given set of players is impossible for me to predict. Instead, I strive to strike a balance between complexity and the frequency a player needs to think about or interact with a system. The more complex a system is, the less frequently I want players to have to interact with it, and their interactions with that system should be short and somewhat limited. If players are thinking about a complex system too often, that can feel overwhelming, however if a system is relatively complex, but players only need to think about it a few times per session, it’s much easier for more players to engage with. My intent is to have it to where Wounds are a versatile enough system to account for nearly any kind of injury players can imagine, but most players should only have to think about it once or twice per session, when they need to make simple, quick, and largely binary decisions in response to it.

So I’ve mentioned Wounds! What are Wounds?

Well, by now you’re probably all sick of me talking about my obsession with replacing Hit Points with anything else. While Pain covers the first part of that effort, my Wound system is the second and more significant part. I’ve been loosely inspired by games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, both of which focus on tracking the progress of individual injuries rather than a character’s total health. Both of those games can get rather complex with their wound tracking though, which works only because the computer is right there, doing all the calculations for you in the background and simply showing you the result. I’ve tried to capture the raw essence of what they do in those games and boil it down as much as possible to a few core elements in the hopes that it isn’t clunky or tedious when using pen and paper. I’ll remind everyone that I’m super shitty at math. I don’t want to do a lot of math when I’m playing a Tabletop RPG, and that translates to my game design goals as well.

Wounds is meant to be a system that shifts player priorities. While most of the time, you might be seeking food or water or salvage to prolong your character’s life, reduce your Sickness or meet your longer-term goals, receiving Wounds will shift those priorities more towards protecting yourself from further harm and seeking treatment for those injuries, first. If you don’t have any Wounds, the system can be safely ignored, and even as you gain low-severity Wounds, it’s still not a huge issue. However, as your character gets more and more roughed up, suddenly seeking Treatment for those Wounds becomes more important. You can, if you choose, still ignore them, but if a Wound gets Infected, that requires Treatment even sooner, as an untreated Infection will lead to death eventually, possibly sooner than starvation or dehydration. If a vein gets sliced, that’s an emergency that requires immediate attention, you gotta plug that leak pronto because you can bleed out in minutes.

One reason I like tracking individual Wounds is that, from a roleplay perspective, they allow you to be as descriptive as you like with your injuries. When you get slashed with a sword, you can imagine your Wound from that damage is perhaps a severe Slashing wound across your chest or shoulder, which might be very different from a Wound gained by other types of weapons like a dagger, an axe or a flail. The description doesn’t matter as much for gameplay, however, only for flavor and roleplay. Nothing is stopping me, of course, from writing a description for injuries suffered in any game, even ones using traditional Hit Points, but I find I never do that, even if I want to, because nobody ever does that and it seems weird.

From a gameplay perspective, Wounds have only two crucial mechanical components, Type and Severity. When you take damage, those are the only two things you need initially care about. Type is used when protecting against damage with armor or resistances, and Severity is, in a word, how fucked you are.

As I mentioned in the post last week, most superficial injuries only cause Pain, and Pain is usually temporary. Such injuries might be interpreted as 0 Severity Wounds, representing bruises, tiny cuts, scars, pinches, etc, but we don’t ask players to bother tracking those.

The lowest Severity Wound that’s actually worth tracking is at Severity 1 (Usually written as S1 because I’m lazy), which represents a very low level but still fairly significant injury. It passively causes Pain, and it’ll take some time to heal. Wounds track in Severity from 1-13. An S3 or S4 Wound might be considered a substantial injury like a deep cut or a sprained ankle. S7-8 might be considered a major injury like a pierced lung or minor fracture. Anything above S10 might be considered a near-lethal injury like a leg being cut off or your guts being spilled. An S13 Wound is instant death, representing on average your missing head, stopped heart, or obliterated everything. Why this matters is because any Wound can be eventually upgraded to S13 in various ways if it isn’t taken care of properly. When a Wound is downgraded to S0, it can be safely erased from your character sheet. It’s as healed as it’s going to get.

Wounds of higher Severity take longer to heal, which gives them a higher chance of becoming Infected if they aren’t Treated properly.

Natural Healing

Natural Healing is very slow, which is why it’s important to avoid getting Wounded as much as possible. Some characters might have an Adaptation that speeds it up a bit, but none of your Wounds are going to be closing on their own in the midst of a battle. At the start of each in-game day, after updating their Vitals for the day, any wounded player characters will make a Natural Healing check. Much like with Vitals, this will usually be the only time Wounds change on their own that’ll require the player’s attention. This is a simple roll (for now it’s based on your Passive Brawn, but this all needs testing and balance) that determines if your character heals naturally. On a success, one untreated, uninfected wound reduces its severity by 1 level. On a normal failure, one Infected wound worsens by 1 level. On a severe failure (7+ Threat remaining), one untreated, uninfected wound becomes Infected (if you have any).

Treated Wounds always reduce their severity by 1 level each day during Natural Healing regardless of the outcome of the check and they can never become Infected, which is why it’s important to treat your wounds as soon as possible.

Treating Wounds

Kuserra isn’t the sort of place where it’s easy to find a medkit around every corner, or a doctor in every town. It’s not the sort of place where you can just happen upon a priest that can channel their divine power to cure your wounds (and if they could, someone would probably shoot them). Kuserra is the sort of place where your best anesthetic is a stick to bite on, your best disinfectant is that bottle of booze you’ve been drinking, and your best bandage might be the shirt off your back. So Treatment of wounds depends on context. Mechanically, it’s a binary choice, either a wound has been Treated or it has not. As for what Treats a wound, it’s up to the GM or a consensus at the table. Generally speaking, in order to treat a wound properly, you need some way to disinfect it, and to cover, stitch, close or protect it so it can heal normally. If these two criteria can be met by any means, then the Wound can safely be considered Treated. For purely internal wounds, the body can sometimes do a lot of disinfecting for you, so for something like a broken bone (IE. a S9 Crushing Wound), a splint or cast to set the bone might suffice. For a cut, pouring alcohol over it and wrapping it with cloth might be good enough. For poison, swallowing anything that’ll neutralize it (like an antidote) will be good enough to Treat the wound and enable your eventual recovery. You can also stitch up a bad cut, or cut off an infected limb, to remove a life-threatening wound in an emergency. The document I’ve been writing includes many more examples and suggestions for ways to treat wounds, but hopefully you get the idea. Making a Medical check can help, but in the desolation of the post-apocalypse, if you don’t have the proper tools to Treat a wound properly, there’s not much even a doctor can do with just their bare hands.

If a player wants to Treat one of their Wounds, and the people at the table can agree that the two conditions (disinfecting and setting the wound) have been met for a Wound to have been Treated, then it’s Treated. If there’s doubts or disagreement, then it is not Treated. Personally, I like to think that simply licking the wound for a few minutes is good enough to Treat simple S1-2 Slashing Wounds, but others can disagree with me on that and that's a discussion to be had at the table. Once a Wound is Treated, it cures Infection, cannot get Infected, it stops Bleeding, it causes less Pain, and it will heal faster. At that point, the player can pretty much stop worrying about it. Unless you get into combat and someone tries to Exploit that Wound, but that’s a topic for another post. For the sake of player sanity and simplicity, I don’t personally think there should be any way for a Wound to become unTreated, perhaps except in very rare, extraneous circumstances.

Infection

If a Wound gets Infected, it will not heal on its own during Natural Healing. It can also slowly get worse over time, increasing the Wound’s severity, contributing to more Pain and eventually causing death if it reaches S13. It is possible to remove an Infection without Treating the wound. If all you have is a bottle of strong alcohol, pouring it over an infected cut would be good enough, at least at my table, to remove the infection, but without some way to close or set the Wound, then it doesn’t quite meet the criteria for Treatment.

I’m also toying around with the idea of Sepsis, which is basically a condition that gets applied to a character when they have too many Infected wounds at once, causing further problems. Ignoring your character’s Wounds is supposed to be a very bad thing, but one Infected Wound can still take many sessions to ultimately result in death if ignored (which might need to be sped up, ah, balance.) I want players to have to take care of themselves, so the more they ignore their Wounds, the worse they get, and the higher that priority should be in the player’s mind.

Bleeding

This is still a pretty fresh and new system, and I’ve yet to decide if it needs its own space on the character sheet or not. It really depends how much I want to hook it into other things. Bleeding is intended to be a much more immediate threat to the life of the character. Lots of wounds bleed, but when a Wound is marked as Bleeding, which can occur from a number of different sources, this represents a major vein or an artery being sliced. Then, and only then, it needs to be marked, because the character is losing roughly 5% of their total blood every minute (per bleeding wound), and something must be done about it immediately. Basically, for each Bleeding wound, each minute of in-game time, you gain 1 mark or token that represents a loss of blood, and if you get ten of these marks total, the character bleeds out and dies (S13 stopped heart). Stopping the Bleeding is usually as simple as cramming some cloth in there, stitching up the wound or making a quick medical related check, but it’s important for players to drop what they’re doing and use some of their supplies to take care of it as soon as possible.

Armor and Resistances

Resistances represent a natural, soft protection against a specific kind of damage, and they reduce appropriate incoming damage by an amount equal to your Resistance level. So if you have 2 Resistance against Crushing damage, and you receive a S4 Crushing wound, it is reduced to an S2 Crushing Wound.

Armor, on the other hand, represents more rigid, solid protection and it protects against any amount of damage up to its level. If you have 3 Armor versus Slashing and Piercing damage, and you receive a S3 Slashing Wound, it is blocked by your armor completely. If, however, someone hits you with an S6 Slashing attack, you still receive a S6 Slashing Wound.

These can work together. If your Resistance reduces incoming damage to a level below your armor, your armor can block it entirely. This will obviously need testing and balance.

And um… actually, I guess that’s it for Wounds? Hopefully I explained them well enough, despite my incessant ramblings. I dunno, lemme know if you have any questions or feedback!

Next time I'll dive into how carrying stuff around works. And maybe if the post isn't too long I'll cover Mastery and Expertise as well.