New gift: High pain threshold --- And new flaw, disease

[[MKF]Kapten]

I have considered adding this ability as a new gift with a major and minor version:

High pain threshold
A person with the major version of this ability can ignore pain that would debilitate a normal man. This means that he/she can ignore Shock values of up his/her WP.
The minor version of this gift lets the character ignore Shock up to half WP.

Do you consider this too strong? I got a feeling that it is but Im not sure.

The flaw is named "incurable disease" but I couldnt fit in the entire word in the subject line ^^. I got the inspiration for it from the book "The Sicilian" by Mario Puzo.

Incurable disease
The PC is carrying a disease that isnt very fast but fatal in the end. This may be some autoimmune disease, a slow but malignant cancer or a newly contracted diabetes type II. Each month the character must make an aging check. The lost attribute points from this roll will only affect temporal attributes. In a strenious environment the character will have to roll an aging check a week instead.

I dont know if this is good to start with but if it is I dont know whatever it would be a major or minor flaw. From one POV it certainly is fatal to the PC but from a cynical POV most characters dont live long enough to be killed by the disease.

---

I would appreciate any input.

[Mokkurkalfe]

I like them. You've avoided the Gift-That-Increases-Strength-By-Two trap.

The concept of the High pain treshold gift is good, but to me it'd feel more logical to make you more resistent to, y'know... Pain? :)

Incurable disease givs lotsa SA possibilites, as well as the possibilty to discreetly kill of PC's something my players do sometimes.

[Lance D. Allen]

Remember that it's not always necessary to "kill off" a PC. Retire them.. You still get the Insight.

btw.. I like your Gift and Flaw ideas, too.

[Lxndr]

Ooooh.  If I'd seen incurable disease at the start of the last TRoS game I was in, I'd have been sooooooooo tempted to pick it up.  I love that sort of stuff.

[Ingenious]

Ahhh!!!! It's a leper!!!! AHHHHH!!!!!!!

...anyways.
I like this general idea. The high threshold for pain would be interesting also.. especially in a situation where it is needed, such as a torture chamber or other such horrifying place of extracting information..
The incurable disease however pretty much applied to almost every historical disease of that era..
Shit, if people back then can die from cholera and diahrea(incorrectly spelled I know, but how often does one right that word?)..hell, most of the disease had to do with poor hygeine.. walking around barefoot in raw sewage... etc... so you'd be looking to put this situation into a character that already has the flaw. All of this is fine and dandy.. but then how do you explain a character spending 10 or 20 points to buy off this flaw in the story? Did they suddenly get better? Did their habits of hygeine improve? Or did they just go see a 'doctor'?(that has to cost a pretty penny too ya know)

Anyways, come up with some more gifts and flaws.. they always interest me.

-Ingenious

[Bob Richter]

Don't forget that not all flaws can be bought off.

Hm. WP already reduces Pain in most situations, but Shock doesn't really have much to do with Pain.

I'd suggest a multilevel (minor or major) flaw that allows a character to ignore (1 or 3) dice that would otherwise be lost to pain and that also grants the character (1 or 3) dice to resist painful torture.

(there are many other ways of extracting information, however....)

[Krammer]

I like the idea of an incurable disease flaw. A while back I made a flaw that sort of is similar. It is the Sickly flaw, where you are much more susceptible (did I spell that right) to disease and the like. it mostly just had a penalty on all rolls pertaining to disease and stuff

[gregkcubed]

i love the idea of a high threshold of pain.. could cause some funny moments when he gets his offhand arm chopped off and then doesn't realize it until he tries to swing his stump at someone.

[timfire]

The incurable disease however pretty much applied to almost every historical disease of that era... so you'd be looking to put this situation into a character that already has the flaw.

I see your point but do you actually play like this? Do you play that characters can randomly get an incurable and fatal disease? Just curious, because I never have unless it was called for by the story.

[Ingenious]

Well I certainly don't play like it at the moment because we've only had 4 sessions of TROS under our collective belts... and the seneschal as with the rest of us has yet to fully explore every option available to him to put stuff into the storyline.

Let's begin by having some general guidelines for an incurable disease. This also can be left up to seneschal discretion...but I'd like to peruse this issue more.

For example, what symptoms would present themselves through the character's life.. and how fast would this degrade the health and well-being of a character? And how fast do additional symptoms occur?(Think ebola virus and the movie Outbreak, but on a lesser scale and severity) How long do you think he has to live?
Can the flaw be bought off? Could there possibly be a cure..just nobody has had the brains to figure it out?(We ARE talking about medieval medicine here..)
I see these types of questions being asked of a seneschal from a player who has this flaw.

Also, a high pain tolerance would not subtract from shock. Shock is a one time depletion of your CP.. easily regained. And since it is 'high PAIN tolerance'... should it not be exclusive to just pain itself?
For example.. a character with the minor version of this treats pain as if he had a willpower 1 point higher... a character with the major verson would treat pain as if he had a WP 3 points higher..

Treat pain 'all' as it normally would though, but that is pretty much common sense. I couldnt realistically see someone's skull being shattered and have them feel less pain than any normal person getting their skull shattered would feel.

-Ingenious
:edit Sorry for the temporary technical difficulties..
Crap-ass browser hijacking virus..

[[MKF]Kapten]

Thanks for the feedback and nice words everyone!

Now I have some explanations of my thinking when it comes to this gift and flaw:

-High painthreshold: As pain determines how fast you heal I imagine that Pain is pretty much regular trauma as well as pain sensations. This gift allows for a character to better deal with lower level damages.

-Incurable disease: A disease that is not "incurable" is pretty much a disease when the immune system of the body either wins the fight in a couple of weeks or goes down trying. Many autoimmune diseases and tumors cant be defeated by the body alone. This flaw is simulating one of them. The symptoms are a bit diverse for this kind of diseases, but something that is always there is tiredness and general ache. Just have the PC have a fit of cough or something like that at cinematic moments ;).

For buying of "Incurable disease" it could be manifested as a miracle or a secret cure. Sometimes this even happens IRL; there are (sadly very few) cases when someone with cancer goes to the hospital and the tests show that the cancer is gone. The PC could have one of those moments when buying off this flaw.