Pseudo-Pseudohistorical Injuries (and Other Combat-Related Matters)

Pseudo-Pseudohistorical Violence Master Page 

Injury Guidelines

I think there is real tension between the idea of letting injuries be diegetic and fit the scenario and having guidelines and procedures in place to reduce GM fiat. I am trying to thread that needle here; as long as DMs (me) keep in mind that these are guidelines, not hard and fast rules, I think things will work out.

Injury Check:

1-6: flesh wound; no effect

7-10: light injury

11-12: medium injury

13-15: downed; medium injury

16-19: heavy injury

20+: mortal injury

Hit location (d12)

1: head

2: right leg

3: left leg

4-5: dominant arm

6-7: non-dominant arm

8-12: torso

For hit location, use the melee die that the character used. If a character wins a melee roll by 2 or more (complete victory), then they can choose to force the opponent to use the result of either their own melee die or the opponent’s.

Injury Severity

Light wounds: temporary impairments

Light wounds are things like deep cuts, hairline fractures, concussions, and heavy bruising and trauma. Enough to hamper a character, but not outright stop them. If an arm is injured, melee checks will be at -1 while using it, and other actions with affected limbs get a disadvantage. Injured legs will slow characters by a movement rate. A character can push themself to ignore the effects of a light wound, but they have a 3-in-6 chance of worsening the wound to a medium wound.

Light wounds take 2d6 days to heal, and do not require specialized medical attention.

Medium: long term/permanent impairments

Medium wounds include things like broken limbs, heavy bleeding, cracked ribs, and the like. Many medium wounds will make the affected limb unusable temporarily, and even when healed will have long term or permanent impacts, similar to the short term effects of a light injury.

A medium injury takes 2d6 weeks to heal. Perfect recovery requires attention from someone with some medical training (i.e. field medicine will do).

Not sure how well this will work, but heres some guidelines for healing:

A person with experience in some form of medicine can attempt to treat a medium wound. A DC12 check can be made to ensure the injured character suffers no long term effects from the injury. This requires that the medicine-skilled-person attends to the character throughout the injury (e.g. weekly checkups, proper medicine, etc.) Full bed rest, an expert doctor, and high quality medicine can all grant advantages to that roll.

Heavy: permanent severe impairments

Heavy wounds include things like shattering limbs, ribs, extreme bleeding (possibly internal), and cracked skulls. Heavy wounds cause debilitating short term effects, and even once healed may have long term or permanent penalties. A shattered arm, once healed, may not be able to sustain the strain of wielding a weapon. A leg with a cut tendon may not heal right, causing a significant permanent limp.

A heavy injury takes 2d6 months to heal. Recovery requires attention from someone with medical training. Without extreme luck, a very skilled doctor, or excellent medicine characters will suffer long term impairments from their wounds.

Similar to the above guidelines for medium wounds:

A DC12 check will ensure the injury heals properly, though it will still have a permanent effect as if it were a light wound. A DC16 effect will heal enough that there are no permanent effects, though the affected area may still be more susceptible to injury.

Other combat related rules:

Fatigue

One level of fatigue is automatically gained after a combat encounter. Fatigue can also be assigned when characters perform tiring tasks or push their bodies to the limit (e.g. running for their life, swimming a sizable distance, doing a forced march, etc.). By incurring a level of fatigue, a character can add an advantage to a d20 roll.

Blood loss, hunger, and thirst can also cause fatigue.

Optional, as it may be unbalanced: fatigue can be incurred in order to gain a +1 to a melee combat check.

Characters get one “free” level of fatigue. Every two level of fatigues gives a -1 to melee combat checks, and a disadvantage on d20 rolls. Four levels of fatigue will count as a level of encumbrance. At six levels of fatigue, characters faint.

A single level of fatigue is removed after sleeping. A day spent fully resting heals two levels of fatigue.

If using Dolmenwood camping rules, fatigue is not cured if characters do not get a “good night’s rest”.

Extra and/or permanent levels of fatigue may be penalties from certain injuries.

Drawing/Stowing items during encounters:

In order to draw and/or stow an item, such as a weapon, scroll, etc. a character must roll a d6. If the d6 is over the combined number of slots of the items drawn and stowed, the character is quick enough to perform an action that turn. Otherwise, fiddling with their items take the entire turn. Dropped items do not count against this, but dropped items are always damaged/broken. Taking off and dropping a backpack counts as 2 slots worth of items.

Note: surprised characters may not have their weapons ready.

The goal here is to give some utility to shorter length weapons. Magic-users and rogue-ish characters with many tricks up their sleeves will want to use shorter weapons in order to ensure they can draw and stow them to cast spells, dump caltrops, etc. I’m quite proud of this idea, so I hope it works in practice. If this ends up being too harsh, the die rolled could easily be stepped up to a d8 or d10.

Now to actually run it…

With the completion of this post, I am officially done enough to playtest! I’m excited to put my ideas to the test, so keep your eyes out for a session report with some analysis of what worked and what didn’t.