Skip to main content

BtW: Death and Dismemberment Table


Death of Beowulf by JR Skelton
Beyond the Wall has a "Cheat Death" rule:
A dying character may spend a Fortune Point to stabilize at 0 hit points and not continue taking damage every round.
The rules also say:
All damage taken before reaching zero hit points represents narrow escapes, minor cuts and bruises, and painful, but not debilitating, wounds.

Once a character reaches zero hit points, however, he is out of the fight, either unconscious or nearly so. It is at this point that we can call a character seriously wounded, perhaps with a grave sword wound or a nasty blow to the head. He’s not dead yet, but he is in serious trouble and desperately needs the help of his companions.
And:
Characters who have reached 0 hit points need help immediately. They will continue to lose hit points at the rate of 1 per round unless they receive medical attention. Should a character’s hit points reach -10 he is dead.
So that works. But, after reading +Lloyd Neill's Death & Dismemberment blog, and especially after seeing the Death & Dismemberment table on Roles, Rules, and Rolls, I cobbled together a table for my BtW campaign:

Death and Dismemberment pdf

Notes:
Hitting 0 HP packs a wallop even if you spend Fortune. Without Fortune, there is the risk of imminent death and you are left permanently scarred, if you survive. Some of the results are based on Medieval notions of anatomy, in case you're wondering why an injury to the spleen makes you more jealous.

Also, there's a Spooky Addendum for when creepy magic and nether-realms and whatnot are in the mix.

EDIT: This post edited to excise some rules confusion on my part.

Comments

  1. This is per the original core pdf, but see p.18 "Characters who have reached 0 hit points need help immediately. They will continue to lose hit points at the rate of 1 per round unless they receive medical attention. Should a character’s hit points reach -10 he is dead." With that said, I still like what you've added/done here ; )

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah! Thank! I had that in my head, but didn't find it in the new edition.

      Delete
  2. Very nice. I like how you specify the immediate and permanent effects of being maimed, it makes things quite clear.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Here's hoping you never have need of that table! ;-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch