Hello All,

So, I've finally gotten around to working on my game Isolation, again. The previous thread on this project can be found here. Briefly, the game is designed to facilitate stories that involve a small group of people trapped together under stressful circumstances. Source inspirations for this game are: Night of the Living Dead, Cube and The Thing.

Anyway, I've just come to the Injury and Death section. My game borrows heavily from Story Engine and so it takes its damage scale from there as well with a few modifications. There are five basic health levels:

Healthy, Bruised, Injured, Wounded and Dead.

In most games my Wounded level is actually Unconcious but I hate unconcious states in RPGs. If there isn't some readily available healing method like there is in D&D then Unconciousness is kind of a downer. It's like saying, you're out of the game... but not really. Just let them make one last stand and then just kill them off and be over and done with it.

Anyway, I've got the damage taking system down pretty well. What I don't have is a recovery system.

Basic idea: The problem is that 'recovery' isn't really part of source material. Most of the source material covers a time period of less than 24 hours. Also the source material focuses more on strengh of will than physical endurance and so MOST characters are either alive or dead with not very much in between. Although occassionally one or two characters do get 'seriously injured' which is why I still include more than just one damage state.

Options I've considered:

a) Since recovery isn't really part of the source material there's no reason to include it in my game at all. Once you're injured, that's it, it's only down hill from there.

b) Since strength of will is so central to the source material I can blur the lines between willful efforts and physical endurance in the following way. Whenever a roll results in Complete Success (the highest level of success) then all the characters who were Cooperating (see earlier thread) heal one damage level if they are hurt. Obviously, Dead is Dead is Dead.

What do you think of these options? Do you have any alternative suggestions?

Thanks.

Jesse

How about "Dying" instead of "Wounded"? Mechanics for expending the last vestiges of your life on a few actions could be fun.

Paul

Jesse,

Both Extreme Vengeance and Hero Wars have a very good solution to the long-standing problem of "damage and recovery" in role-playing games, especially those with cinematic source material.

Get better.

That's right, if the combat is over, the scene's over, and you're moving to the next scene ... you're all healed. Oh, you might have a bloody bandage, or you might limp, or whatever rakish after-effect cosmetics might apply ... but you're fine. The only penalties for a wound apply during that one combat or scene itself.

(HW does have a way or two to take a "real" wound, but that's not the default.) (In EV, if you really get hosed or get your ass kicked, you actually add 1 Guts for the rest of the movie.)

Over the Edge and Sorcerer have a "halfway heal-up" that acts very similarly.

Best,
Ron

I say stay true to the source material. I mean hell, for this game to do what it's supposed to do, you're talking about people in cramped spaces melting down over a fairly short amount of time. If they make it to a second adventure, then they can be all healed up.

If, for some reason, a particular scenario were to play out over the course of several weeks or something, I'd do what Ron says. But I don't think that's what you intend for the game, is it?

Just looking at the films you described, I don't see a whole lot of characters limping around with debilitating wounds. They're either functional, or their dead (for the most part). I'd cut back on the wound levels and go for Hurt, Dying, Dead. The game's really about social/emotion meltdown anyway, right?

Just some thoughts.

- Scott

Some suggestions for ya:

1) You do need some kind of formal injuries system for the game, but not for the usual reasons found in traditional RPGs. One reason is obvious -- being wounded impairs your abilities. But the second reason is more important (and intriguing) -- having an injured person in the group hurts the group. This is a major part of this kind of game...what do you do with the guy who can no longer keep up?

2) I think it would be helpful to take a step back and look at the source material. In most cases, the characters are either fairly healthy or they're dead. There isn't a whole lot of middle-ground.

The exceptions are the injured characters who fear dying if their wound isn't treated in time. This also corresponds with characters who are low on food, water or oxygen...or those who are caught in some hostile environment. They WILL die if the situation isn't changed. But really, you don't see much of a degradation of their abilities (except maybe in a dramatic "pant pant, too hot, too hot, need water" kinda way).

The point is that everyone else is OK, Dead, or Borderline OK/Borderline Dead.

Borderline OK is when Bobbie Sue (Evil Dead II) is accidentally shot by Ash. She's definitely hurt, but it's not really anything that affects her (other than coloring her views of Ash's stability).

Borderline Dead when Roger (Dawn of the Dead) is bitten by the zombie. After a short period of time he becomes a liability (needing to be carried around in a wheelbarrow) and then he becomes bedridden and near-comatose. There's no coming back from Borderline Dead...it's just a matter of time.

So avoiding concrete game system lingo (because I haven't much info on your game's system), perhaps the answer lies not in levels of Health but levels of...oh, I dunno what to call it. How their health affects the group or something.

1: Character is unharmed and fairly rested.
2: Character's ability is slightly impaired.
3: Character is impairing everyone in the group.
4: Character is dead.

You could even get crazy and put in a level BETTER than 1. Where the character is so rested and energetic and just so damn chipper that he gains a bonus...but the poor normal schlubs are operating at a deficit compared to Super Happy Guy.

I agree with Moose, except for the not having a wounded state. People are always getting wounded in such films, and it's often a point of tension. Do we carry the guy with the bad leg, or leave him behind for the creature to munch? Wounding is cool for the Premise, I think.

So, once you are hurt, you are hurt for the game, but then next game (assuming characters are actually played in campaign style at all), they are fine. I think that Moose and I would both like to see the name of the game applied to not only location but to time. It's Night of the Living Dead, not Campaign of the Living Dead.

Mike

Wow, that was fast. So far I agree with Paul and Moose. I've already revised the health levels to:

Healthy, Injured, Dying and Dead.

Also, I think Ron's suggestion works well for the heroic action genre's but not so much for this genre. After all, this is about the awful spiral of social self destruction. But he does have a point. I already have a few rules for multi-session games so I might add recovery to those rules. If your game spans more than a single session than characters can heal one health level.

First of all, I don't see too many games being multi-session. And I certainly don't see this game being used as a multi-adventure system either. But hey you never know.

Jesse

But Mike, I expressly had a wounded state. I called it Hurt! Damn you, misconstruing my words! This is an outrage!

Seriously, Jared and Mike are right. Jared, in the sense that hurt and injured people provide a dramatic centerpiece to such a story - what do you do with that poor guy? And Mike in that the game should definitely have a sense of time. Or maybe no sense of time - one of the cool things about Cube is that the people don't really no how long they've been in there, and that sort of carries over to films like NotLD, Dawn of the Dead, and The Thing. Time passes, but everything is centered on the here and now, and the outside world be damned. By excising any kind of healing rules, you would be telling your players "we're not worried about time - that is not our concern. We're worried about what's happening now!"

- Scott

The ability to 'stop and heal' (get bandaged) might be a viable strategic option if you do include rules (i.e. if a somewhat impared character spends a scene on his back he gets better-or maybe move the imparment from STR to AGI (splints) or something like that. Essentially put in healing rules to give a crafty character an option beyond staggering through the rest of the adventure like the 'almost dead.'

Or how about a "you killed my father rule." The character can be created with some goal or (if you get silly a phrase) or whatever--and if that gets triggerred (i.e. they get him *really* angry) he "gets better" for a while. I realize that is *somewhat* outside of the genre but I suspect it could add to play if some characters had a method of enacting a second-chance.

-Marco

jburneko wrote:
Anyway, I've just come to the Injury and Death section. My game borrows heavily from Story Engine and so it takes its damage scale from there as well with a few modifications. There are five basic health levels:

Healthy, Bruised, Injured, Wounded and Dead.

Hello Again,

I'm seeing a definite trend here that I like. There does seem to be a big push to just strip out any kind of recovery mechanic and for good reason. I think I may still go with a between sessions rule of some sort but the idea of focusing on the here and now is an important one.

Jared brought up a good point about having the injury some how tied into the stress mechanics which I really like and in fact had thought of before. It may be as simple as adding additional red links onto injured characters. After all, people are less likely to listen to and follow a wounded leader.

I'll have to think about this. So far the advice has been great.

Jesse

You also may want to think about giving incentive for healthy folks to help out the unhealthy. Some kind of in-game bonus or something.

I'd like to see a mechanic that causes serious debate about what to do with the wounded. Heroicism should be played against pragmatism.

Say in Pitch Black, where there's a few people left behind. Were they lied to and left behind? Or are the able characters truly coming back to rescue them?

This is just a thought, and it may be too far afield from the way you intend the system to go, but why not forget about abstract wound levels and replace them with specific injuries?

That is, if someone is at the "wounded" level, there's a menu of appropriate injury types, each of which is defined primarily in terms of its game effect: "movement speed slowed" could be a sprained ankle, a broken leg, or a busted rib; "physical actions impaired" could be a broken arm or a gut wound; "perceptual abilities impaired" could be a minor concussion or damage to the eyes, and so forth. You can also include a generic "in great pain" category, and have rules for gutting it out or sucking it up temporarily. You can also have a "bleeding to death" category: the character can act, but with the increasing chance of slipping into incapacitation the more he does so. Multiple injuries of different types or multiple levels of the same type of injury are both possible.

Then your healing system becomes a "Let's Take A Look At That, My Friend" sort of thing, where characters can try to do first aid, mitigating the effects of an injury with a total or basic success, doing no harm with a partial success or a partial failure, and making it worse with a total or basic failure (or something like that).

If a character dies or is left behind, those who are more complementary (i.e., more green) on the relationship map have their individual stress increase by a greater amount than those who are less complementary (i.e., more red).

Bill White

I'm not that familiar with the genre.

Do the wounded-impairing-the-party get better from being left alone or after being dragged all over creation (in a wheelbarrow)?

IF the former THEN
Gamblng with life: Each scene of alonerisk grants a level of healing (or half a level, or however the pacing should go) and 10% chance of being et up. When the party returns to the sickbay, roll to see whether the helpless clod was eaten or is now recovered. Schrodinger's PC.

ELSE
Individual Pain transformed into Party Pain: Another party member can accept a penalty (declared before the fact) on a Pretty Serious roll. Each instance moves the injured one step closer.

Should there be a distinction between those who become Walking Wounded and those who become, er, the Walking Dead? Something like "roll guts+stamina+virginity" just to see if you make it to that exalted state of injury?

-Matt

Garbanzo wrote:
Do the wounded-impairing-the-party get better from being left alone or after being dragged all over creation (in a wheelbarrow)?

You also may want to think about giving incentive for healthy folks to help out the unhealthy. Some kind of in-game bonus or something.

About in-game bonus for helping ...

Jared A. Sorensen wrote:
I think this would be a mistake. The thing about this kind of story/situation/whatever is that the ONLY reason to do something altruistic is because of some innate sense of right and wrong, humanity, friendship, whatever.

Great ideas so far...

If you wanted to have a game where characters could receive vicious injuries but be relatively unharmed for later scenes, I've an alternative to Ron's suggestion (heroic characters shrug off wounds). What if characters just realise that their wounds weren't so bad after all?

Torg used plot points to change serious wounds into minor wounds at the moment the wound was taken. Though the wound was bad, it turned out to have gone through mostly skin/avoided any serious arteries/missed the heart by an inch. You *could* have a system where characters reduce the severity of wounds a little with a roll/expenditure. Or where medicine ret-conned injuries.

That feels more like tv-reality than gritty survivalist horror, though.

Joe.

Hi Joe,

I was a little unclear, I guess. Your statement is exactly what I was driving at, and it's explicitly stated in Hero Wars as the appropriate use of the rules - retroactive "lessening" of what was perceived to be the injury's severity.

For the record, I was not suggesting that the heroes have some "rapid healing" type of ability, so to speak - although looking back on the post, I wasn't clear enough in terms of the description/use of this principle for anyone to pick that up. So thanks for zeroing in on the real issue.

I do think it's appropriate for the type of story we're talking about - the key is that an injury either gets ignored/retroactively "not so bad" (long-term), kicks a character into "slow death," or kills him. Works perfectly for zombie flicks, in my view. I do not consider them "gritty survivalist horror" but rather gruesome, ramped-up dramas.

Zak,
Check out my review of Dead Meat, in which I propose a "link" system of relationships among characters to facilitate exactly the issues you describe.

Best,
Ron

Best,
Ron

jburneko wrote:
So, I've finally gotten around to working on my game Isolation, again. The previous thread on this project can be found here. Briefly, the game is designed to facilitate stories that involve a small group of people trapped together under stressful circumstances. Source inspirations for this game are: Night of the Living Dead, Cube and The Thing.

In most games my Wounded level is actually Unconcious but I hate unconcious states in RPGs. If there isn't some readily available healing method like there is in D&D then Unconciousness is kind of a downer. It's like saying, you're out of the game... but not really. Just let them make one last stand and then just kill them off and be over and done with it.

Basic idea: The problem is that 'recovery' isn't really part of source material. Most of the source material covers a time period of less than 24 hours. Also the source material focuses more on strengh of will than physical endurance and so MOST characters are either alive or dead with not very much in between. Although occassionally one or two characters do get 'seriously injured' which is why I still include more than just one damage state.

Jared A. Sorensen wrote:
There should be a penalty to everyone in the group when Joe Broken Leg is there. Which makes one side (get rid of Joe) easy...in terms of practicality. But in terms of humanity (keep Joe), it's tough. Does the good of the many really outweight the good of the few (or the one)?

Paginini,

In reference to your post about cooperation/humanity mechanics...

These movies really aren't about the goodness of humanity. In fact, most of them are about the exact opposite.

There is an automatic, built-in benefit to cooperation that does not require a game mechanic at all - you get to pool the skills and abilities of the various characters, which every gamer equates with greater survivability. And this fits the premise of the game very well - other people's characters are only important in that they are somehow useful to you. If Joe Broken-Leg is valuable in some sense - if he possesses some ability, knowledge, or information that would be useful to the others - then they may just keep him around.

I could see some interesting game sessions coming of this where the player of Joe Broken-Leg lobbies for support from the other PCs. But I think a mechanical enforcement of humanity would be in conflict with the game's other mechanics, which encourage the taking of sides and the break down of civility.

- Scott

Editorial Note: I guess should point out before someone else does that someone often rises to the top in these movies, managing to remain human despite all odds (and s/he seldom receives any reward for it, beyond her/his own self gratification - see NotLD for a good example). The point being is that I think the players will bring enough real humanity to the table with them that no mechanical measure is necessary. Much of the game's intensity and horror will arise form the fact that the mechanics will require the players to do things they wouldn't otherwise want to do; it will challenge their inherent humanity, and maybe push the envelope in regards to their comfort level. Any mechanic that mitigates this effect will be doing a disservice to the game itself.

Just my opinion, of course.

It's a mistake to think in terms of classic RPG's where hurt=unconscious. All that unconsciousness is (in game terms) is that the character is "out of play." If the guy wakes up and is all ready to kick ass again, well he wasn't hurt was he? So I don't think you need to make that distinction. The players know he's going to be fine in an hour, the PC's probably guess he's going to be fine in an hour (no visible blood or trauma, no broken bones, etc.). The PC who gets smashed on booze then passes out, for example. Unless the PC's are in a situation where action MUST be taken, then unconscious guy isn't that much of a nuisance.

I think the key (again) is to look at the injured character in terms of the group. If Joe is OK then get's hit on the head and falls over unconscious, he's still OK. But if that's when the earthquake happens, he becomes NOT OK at that moment. His condition is now a hazard to himself and possibly the others (if they try and save him).

hardcoremoose wrote:
I could see some interesting game sessions coming of this where the player of Joe Broken-Leg lobbies for support from the other PCs. But I think a mechanical enforcement of humanity would be in conflict with the game's other mechanics, which encourage the taking of sides and the break down of civility.

The whole debate about adding incentive to keep the wounded guy is moot. There already is a mechanical reward for keeping him, and it's the main mechanic. Sure, the wound may end up being an extra red line or two. But some characters may still have more green lines to that character.

This is absolutely perfect. For characters without the green lines the wounded character is a liability. For characters who have more green than red, he is still an asset. So what you get is intra-party conflict over whether or not to keep the character, even if playing Gamist. That all in addition to whatever emotional impact the play delivers. Which is exactly what the system is supposed to do.

If you read the original post on how it's supposed to work, you'll see what I mean. Make sense to you, Jesse? Thinking about it, I'd actually advocate making death unlikely but wounding relatively common, just to get these sorts of relationship changes to occur. Just let wounds pile up. One red line for each (maybe two or three for severe ones). Eventually, there will come the time when even the character's best friend will figure out that he's a goner (after the red lines have piled up really deep), and wistfully leave the wounded character behind.

Or, if you want to include Moose's hero option, the hero can be the guy who ignores the most red lines during the game. Score one hero point for each red line involved in a roll. Incentive for people to try even when it's obvious that a roll is going to result in lots of intra-party conflict. Nifty.

Mike

hardcoremoose wrote:
These movies really aren't about the goodness of humanity. In fact, most of them are about the exact opposite.

There is an automatic, built-in benefit to cooperation that does not require a game mechanic at all - you get to pool the skills and abilities of the various characters, which every gamer equates with greater survivability. And this fits the premise of the game very well - other people's characters are only important in that they are somehow useful to you. If Joe Broken-Leg is valuable in some sense - if he possesses some ability, knowledge, or information that would be useful to the others - then they may just keep him around.

Editorial Note: I guess should point out before someone else does that someone often rises to the top in these movies, managing to remain human despite all odds (and s/he seldom receives any reward for it, beyond her/his own self gratification - see NotLD for a good example). The point being is that I think the players will bring enough real humanity to the table with them that no mechanical measure is necessary. Much of the game's intensity and horror will arise form the fact that the mechanics will require the players to do things they wouldn't otherwise want to do; it will challenge their inherent humanity, and maybe push the envelope in regards to their comfort level. Any mechanic that mitigates this effect will be doing a disservice to the game itself.

Since I love to play the martyr, my thoughts are staying with the wounded. Rather than dealing with physical recovery, what about dealing with emotional recovery? In many of these types of films, the wounded liability ends up sacrificing himself to gain more time/escape/advantage for the rest of the group. I'd be interested in a similar mechanic here. As the liability continues to be a burden to the group, can he accumulate metagame "points" to further his impact beyond the physical? Perhaps he can spend these points in small ways to improve his long-term value despite the liability, or spend them in a Blaze of Glory sacrifice.

I also think that physical wounds do not necessarily correspond to liability. Is there any doubt that Ash is more effective once he chops off his hand and mounts the chainsaw there?

$.02

Skippy

I also think that physical wounds do not necessarily correspond to liability. Is there any doubt that Ash is more effective once he chops off his hand and mounts the chainsaw there?