Death, Injury, and Retirement

 I made a custom rulebook for my d&d game that's a mashup of AD&D 1e and Worlds Without Number, but I wasn't too excited about the death rules for either so I wrote my own. Here they are! As yet untested.

Character Death

So there are a few things that are being held in tension by character death. The first is that it’s important that the player be allowed to fail, otherwise the challenges you face have no meaning. A bad decision should be able to lead to failure just as much as an unlucky roll of the dice. In that sense, it’s also important that I have permission to cause you to fail, either through clever tricks and traps, smart tactics, or my own lucky rolls of the dice. However it’s also important that the consequences of failure aren’t too annoying, severe, time consuming, or harsh. Getting booted out of the game, even temporarily, kind of sucks.

There’s also this idea that we’re playing a game. On the one hand, I’d like to invite you to play a game with me that is, in many ways, directly about injury and death. By roleplaying, we’re entering a world together that is playing with the idea of danger and risk, and I’d like to be able to hold that lightly, and have fun, even and especially when things go south. Death however is a heavy subject, and as the real world gets more and more dangerous, and our individual safeties more in jeopardy, I know that sometimes the death of a character we closely identify with can be painful, unpleasant, and threatening outside of the scope of what’s happening in the game. At the same time, being that Dungeons and Dragons seems to be about death, it seems that entirely ruling out death as an explicit consequence would defeat the point of the game.

So this is my attempt to resolve those tensions. The risk of combat will be primarily injury, which runs the risk of being long-term. Death is still a possibility, but one that’s explicitly reversible. And secondary characters are given more explicit rules for you to fall back on.

System Strain

System strain represents your physical system’s capacity to prevent injury. When your system strain is high, your character is highly stressed out, over-taxed, and at their limit, mentally and physically. They’ll injure more easily, and have less ability to recover from damage. Low system strain represents the opposite: your character is rested and recovered, and able to absorb a lot of stress.

Your character has a maximum system strain equal to their Constitution score. Most forms of free and easy healing, such as Healer’s Touch and First Aid, will cost one point of system strain to receive. If a character is at maximum system strain, they cannot benefit from this type of healing. Some powerful items may cost a point of system strain to use. A character’s natural healing will also not function when system strain is at maximum.

Many divine spells do not increase system strain, being a boon from the gods.

Injury, Death, and Dying

Before 0 hit points, your character is strained, bruised, scratched, tired, or even badly physically injured, just not in a way that impedes them. When your character is reduced to 0 hit points, they suffer a terrible blow and begin to die. The character must immediately either receive 1d6 system strain or a temporary injury, by rolling on the injury table. If your system strain roll puts you over your maximum, you cap out at your maximum and receive an injury anyway.

Temporary injuries are serious physical or emotional setbacks that can only be healed by rest. The only way to heal a temporary injury is overnight with a good night’s rest. However, if a character dies while injured, or if they roll the exact same injury again while already injured, the injury becomes permanent, and can only be healed with significant downtime, or a level up. 

You can decide what the nature of the injury is, based on the harm that caused it. Mechanically speaking, each injury should represent approximately a 10% deficiency in that particular area, except attacking, which everyone is already bad enough at already. Some injuries are a little worse and some are a little better, and at least one gets a little better after a night of rest, even if it’s permanent.

When dying, a character will die at the end of their tenth turn. Another character may attempt to stabilize them with a Heal check as a Main action against difficulty 8, though if they have no healing tools on hand, the difficulty will be 10. Only one ally can attempt to stabilize a character per round. On their turn, the character can only speak feebly and move up to 5’. Similar to 5e, they may also attempt to stabilize themselves with a special Death saving throw: roll a d20, with a 10+ being success. This roll cannot be modified in any way. After three successes they stabilize at 0 hp, but after three failures they die. On a 20, they gain 1hp, stand up, and may immediately act. If a character takes damage while dying, they suffer an automatic failed death save.

A character that gains hit points while dying may stand up and immediately act.

Rest

At the end of a good night’s sleep, recover 1 hitpoint per level. You also heal 1 system strain, and all temporary injuries.

You cannot sleep in armor. If you do so, you recover no system strain, injury, or effort, and can only recover 1 spell slot per level of spell available.

When resting in the wilderness or a dungeon, it’s always assumed that someone is keeping watch overnight. If an encounter occurs, I’ll generally determine randomly who is keeping watch at the time. Additional safety measures should be specified through play.

If an encounter attempts to sneak up on your watch, an opposed Notice vs. Sneak check is allowed to prevent ambush. Generally however we will roll for surprise as normal (2 in 6 chance for either side to be surprised–see the Surprise and Ambush section), and the encounter will initiate at a fair distance from your camp.

Characters who are resting may be woken with a shout as an On-turn action, as long as they are within ear shot. Regardless of their manner of being woken, they can’t act until the next round, during which period they’ll be waking up, taking stock of their surroundings, gathering their readied items, and so on. At that point however they’ll be standing and ready to act. Remember though that characters cannot sleep in their armor, so only the character on watch will be armored.

If your sleep is interrupted, your hit points will still be at the level you fell asleep at, but you can borrow forward spells if you need to. If you suffer an injury while rest is interrupted, you’ll need another full 8 hours of rest to clear it.

Resurrection

Resurrection is not too hard to come by. Clerics and priests imbued with the power of life beyond death are glad to share the miracles of their gods with the world, generally for a price. However, any character that is brought back to life suffers a permanent -1 to Constitution. This cannot be restored, though your Constitution may be able to increase again from powerful magical effects or leveling up. This represents the powerful toll that dying has on a person’s spirit. Some theorize that some part of the soul is left in the afterlife, while others suppose that the Resurrection magic draws on a person’s life-force to bring them back. Either way, there’s a hard limit to how many times a person can come back from the dead, and some people may prefer not to.

Healing Permanent Injuries

Permanent injuries can stack. So eventually you might decide that your character is too injured to go on.

You’ve got a couple choices and both of them are pretty prohibitive. A permanent injury represents the kind of injury that takes a lot of time and rest to reverse, certainly more time than the pressure of the adventure would ever allow. It’s possible your character has simply suffered an injury that can’t be healed. If your character takes a month of downtime, they may attempt to roll under their Constitution. On a success, one injury is healed.

If you’d prefer, you can retire your character for a period and play a new one. They’ll start with 50% of the experience points of your old character. After you play four sessions, your old character can start making a single Constitution check at the end of each session to attempt to heal an injury. You can resume playing your old character whenever you want.

Finally, if your character levels up with a permanent injury, they heal one permanent injury.

When we get to higher levels there might be powerful spells that can heal permanent injury, such as Regenerate, but we’ll handle that when we get there. Otherwise, healing a permanent injury either means that your character completely recovered, or adjusted to their injury in such a way that it no longer impedes them. You can decide what it means.

Retired Characters

When you retire your character, choose somewhere safe they can rest. They’ll be pursuing a normal life, maybe working a trade of some sort, far from the dangers of adventuring life. You can decide what they’re doing with their life, whatever makes sense to you and feels like it contributes to your character’s recovery. If you have enemies, they won’t target this character, though they might need to go under-cover or something if your enemies are really crazy. If it makes sense in the game world, your characters can visit them for advice or just to hang out, but they’ll have sworn off using their powers.

You can distribute as much treasure and gold as you want to the party, though your retired character will need to keep their most treasured possessions. I’m thinking maybe half their Strength score in items and a modest sum of money. Consider leaving them a keepsake as well.

Your new character will start at 50% of the experience points of the your old character, with starting equipment.

You can resume play with your old character at any time, we’ll just need to come up with a good reason for them to rejoin the adventure.

Injuries (roll d12)

1. -1 to attack (coordination harmed)

2. -2 to weapon damage (strength harmed)

3. -2 to AC (wounded in such a way that your armor doesn’t fit right)

4. -2 to one save (roll 1d6 to determine which kind)

1. Paralysis/Poison/Death

2. Petrification/Polymorph

3. Rod/Staff/Wand

4. Breath Weapon

5. Spell

6. All

5. +2 to saves against YOUR spells (ability to concentrate harmed, reroll if you can’t cast spells)

6. -2 to skill checks (roll 1d6 to determine which kind)

1. Feebled (strength)

2. Off-balance (dexterity)

3. Sapped (constitution)

4. Concussed (wisdom)

5. Concussed (intelligence)

6. Feared (charisma)

7. -1 to max effort

8. -½ hitdice lost to max hit points (So if your hitdice is d8, lose 4 max hit points)

9. -15% to reaction rolls (your character is physically scarred, depressed, pessimistic, doom-pilled, traumatized, and so on in a way that other people find off-putting or frightening)

10. -15% to morale checks that you cause (is character is physically scarred, depressed, pessimistic, doom-pilled, traumatized, and so on in a way that your enemies perceive as a sign of weakness)

11. -10’ to movement (leg or foot mangled, hurt, twisted, crushed, burned)

1. When this particular injury becomes permanent, reduce the penalty to 5’ after you get a good night’s rest– 10’ is a really severe penalty for long-term use, but seems like an appropriate model for a temporary broken bone or chopped foot

12. One arm temporarily unusable (roll for left/right). If you try to use the unusable arm anyway, suffer a -6 to attacks and -4 to skill checks involving that arm. Don’t worry about whether the arm is dominant, your character is well-trained enough that switching arms is no big deal, though you can decide whether it matters in a roleplaying kind of way.

so we've been playing Worlds Without Number by Kevin Crawford

 We've been playing for about six months now, maybe a little more. There's a lot I really admire about it and some stuff that doesn't quite seem to cohere. We've reached level 4 and are at a natural point to pause and reflect, so here are some thoughts so far.

OUR PLAYERS

We have:

•  Ratt, a Healer/Necromancer played by Nick
• Thrummond, a High Mage played by Thomson
• Serou, an Expert played by Chris
• Wren, an Expert/Blood Priest played by Cher
• and Benson, an Expert/Shapeshifter played by Michael Tom

THE SET UP AND WORLD

Their characters were kidnapped and brought deep into Sardoom, the Cursed Kingdom, where they were branded with the curse of the Dead God Emperor of Sardoom and set in the depths of the Demon Temple as a sacrifice to the Demon Wyrm there. They slew the Wyrm and emerged from the Demon Temple into the Keldwood, an ancient forest in the southern reaches of this vast, lost kingdom. They discovered that all citizens of this kingdom bear the curse of the God Emperor and are unable to leave on pain of death. They were urged to travel to swear fealty to the warlord of the Keldwood, a man called Kyrus the Fetch, who rules the forest from his ruined castle Pattern Transfiguration.

The characters are aware that theirs a world at the far end of time. Long stretches of space-faring civilizations have preceded theirs, and all have fallen to ruin. The world is peppered with artifacts and entities from other dimensions and other worlds, and all alive bear the marks of genetic, scientific, and magical meddling. Great cataclysms have rent the land, and in the last great war between the God Emperors, the sun itself was shattered, and for a long epoch known as the Age of the Black Dawn war was waged in the resulting darkness and the God Emperors were destroyed. At some point the broken remnants of the sun were lit, and tentative civilization proceeds in an Age of Kindling.

The characters spent a long month exploring the Keldwood. They came across old gods of the land and made covenant with one known as the King of All Sleep, who promised them respite from the curse of Sardoom if they could meet with him beneath Orax the Cursed Capitol, which lies at the joining of the Suffering Sea and the Siring Sea, far to the north.

Then they journeyed north to Pattern Transfiguration. They discovered a ruined castle beset by mutiny. The knights of Kyrus' Roundtable have seized different parts of the castle, and all seek the path to the Megathrone, which was lost long ago. It is said that he who sits the Megathrone has the power to project the castle into all possible futures. And as the characters have explored the ruined castle, they've discovered entities from other pasts...

OVERALL:

A fun game with a lot to admire that supports lateral problem-solving over brute force and tactical combat. Characters have an inherent fragility which makes head-on fights a poor idea, but monsters are cowardly and character powers are very strong and flexible, so the odds feel stacked in the players' favor.

Among the things nice about this game have been:

COMBAT IS NICE AND SNAPPY

So I really like how almost everything you can do in combat has an immediate effect, and combat is generally over very quickly. If you miss, you deal automatic shock damage anyway. If you cast a spell, the effects of the spell are powerful and always tip the combat in a big way. Hit points are low enough that you're never just chipping away at a guy's health for a long time. Monsters are constantly rolling against Morale, so there's always a good chance that your enemy simply decides to stop fighting.

This has meant that we can usually get through a bunch of combats each session. I noticed in Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of the time fights will be the main focus of each session. You might have one fight or two if you're lucky, and they'll be detailed and tactical. It's fun that in WWN you're likely to get a few even in short sessions like we're playing lately. 

Spells especially shine. There are only 5 levels of spells, but even at level 1 you're getting spells that let you enslave undead, gain complete control of another creature's senses, or instantly kill a low level enemy. At level 2 they're able to tunnel through stone and make walls of thorns. These are really fun and generally define the session. They've been able to sidestep powerful boss fights with clever use of spells -- when they faced off against the Cannibal Knight in a storm on the steps of Pattern Transfiguration, they cast a spell that destroyed the stairs under him, causing him to fall to his death. I love this kind of puzzle-solving approach to combat in a game like this; even though I'd given the Cannibal Knight a couple phases and mean powers, it makes sense and fits the world that their power was able to kill him without a fight. 

ARTS ARE PRETTY FUN

So in WWN you have spells that are a certain number of casts per day like normal and then you have "Arts" which essentially play the role of cantrips. You get arts as you level up, and you have a certain number of art points called 'Effort' which regenerate at a pace commensurate with the power they're used for. So if you use a mighty art on par with a spell it'll regenerate the next day, but if you use it to create a more basic power like light or magic-vision, you'll get it back as soon as you stop using the power. This means that each magic character has some neat little powers they can just sling around.

The downside though is that some classes are pretty much just their arts. Sometimes it seems like the Blood Priest doesn't have much to do but make magic light and blessed blood. Benson hasn't played many sessions, but when he does he mostly logs on and goes "I have the sharp claws art so my dog form can deal 1d8 damage with a claw attack." Arts have seemed most interesting for the Healer/Necromancer and High Mage -- Ratt has some fun little powers like she can't ever over-exert herself, and she can self-heal on a hit, and analyze an enemy's hitpoints and physiology with a glance. Thrummond can Dispel Magic and see enchantments, which gets a single-sentence description of any magical effect, or he can retain a spell he just cast. Lots of flexibility and potential here.

SKILLS ARE NICELY SCALED

Skills in WWN are scaled to a 2d6 roll and only go up to Rank 4. As soon as you're Rank 0 in a skill you're considered to be able to do most things that a skill calls for. So you roll 2d6 and add your skill points and attribute modifier (which never goes above +2), and you try to get the target difficulty, which ranges from 6 - 14. This is a really easy scale to wrap my head around, and it's easy to assign monsters a skill bonus as well. It's easy to look at an ogre and say "Yeah, he's got a +4 to strength based skills but a -2 to thinking" and just go from there. It means that players with pretty bad bonuses also have a good chance to winning, but it's easy to look at a difficulty to 10 - 14 and reconsider your choices.

It's easy to overlook, but the Expert really is good at skills in a way that makes that class stand apart. Serou doesn't have spells or arts, but he's always getting into ill-advised scrapes and jams, only to weasel out of them by a free reroll on one of his many skills. He feels like Bilbo in a way I haven't encountered in a thief class before: a loose cannon way in over his head, who's managed to survive with mysterious good luck.

The downside here though is that the skill list is a little loose. It's kind of cool that everything thief-related gets moved under "Sneak," but then there are some more mysterious choices. There's nothing that governs ropework, for instance, so we've kind of just moved ropework under "Sail," and decided that since Serou is a sailor, he's good at ropework. And then Sneak gets used a lot -- we're rolling Sneak for pick locks, disarm traps, hiding, and so on. And when we get to the little-used skills, it's a little tough to figure out what to use for instance "Lead" and "Trade" and "Connect" for. I guess maybe if they ended up in a city, and we wanted to run a city sandbox?

FOCUSES HAVE A BIG EFFECT

So aside from spells the big thing that really stands out are the focus choices. A focus is basically a feat, and you only get a few of them per character, maybe 5 at most. Each focus has two levels too, and if you specialize in a focus, it has an even bigger effect. These are focuses like "Poisoner" and "Artisan" -- Poisoner lets you craft basically infinite poison and antidotes which can deal tons of damage or insta-kill an enemy, while Artisan gives you huge leeway and advantages over the kinds of items and upgrades you can craft.

And crafting is a pretty chunky system in WWN -- you can make +1 weapons or weapons that emulate magical effects, or if you have the time and resources, you can craft just about anything you set your mind to. They've used crafting to create ladders when they don't have sufficient rope, or wheels for a wagon, or to repair a ruined gatehouse, or repair armor ruined by a rust monster. It's a nice way for the players to take some time to try to out-think a problem rather than just shoot it with spells or hit it with their sword.

Some of the other focuses are a little less interesting. There's a variation of the classic "Tough" feat which just gives you some extra hitpoints and lets you automatically stabilize at 0hp. Tempting when you're a fragile 1st level character but possibly not a lot of fun to play with.

HOWEVER:

There are some issues.

THE EXPERIENCE SYSTEM FEELS LIKE A COP OUT

Basically, you're supposed to just give your players a few XP per session as a good job reward. This rankles me as a matter of principle, so I've bolted on some other basic OD&D leveling system and give them XP for gold. It kind of contributes to my main problem with WWN which is that...

IT DOESN'T QUITE FEEL LIKE A COMPLETE GAME

It's really almost there. It has almost all of the components, and a lot of the stuff that any experienced DM needs to run a game. But there's this persistent sense of hmm this isn't quite a complete game. The monster section is very sketchy. The spell list is quite short, compared to D&D. The advanced classes are set aside in chapter 6, and implemented only as partial classes. I wish there was like, double the stuff. And of course, a lot of the stuff that's here is a conversion of D&D. So you've got Magic Missile and Fireball, they're just called "Coruscating Coffin" and "Howl of Light" or whatever, so they're just a little harder to remember what they do.

The XP thing particularly bugs me. It feels like a misunderstanding of what XP is doing in a game, and sidestepping it as a concept entirely feels like a misstep. XP isn't only a way for the game to change over time, it's pacing and reward. Gaining power should feel earned through struggle, not just by passively enduring a game.

MAN THERE'S A LOT OF TRACKING

One ration costs one encumbrance, but 7 rations cost 4 encumbrance. My players have evolved spreadsheets to track inventory and encumbrance and at times during hex exploration we've lost a lot of time just to ration tracking. We've managed to make it work by putting the onus on me to say "You have to eat," which I do every time they camp... but it's hard to remember. And then they try to forage, and forage a certain number of units of rations, which then gets converted into encumbrance and oftentimes immediately eaten. Ooh it's cumbersome.

And on top of that is system strain. System strain basically accrues every time you're healed, and when you're at max system strain, you can't heal anymore. You heal one system strain every time you rest. Can you see where I'm going with this? Basically it's just a lot of tracking. And for the most part, it doesn't matter. No one's ever run out of system strain.

I do like the encumbrance system though. Equipped and readied items have a different inventory than stowed items, and it's quite costly to retrieve a stowed item in combat, so players have to be smart about their inventory.

IT'S NOT D&D

Dungeons and Dragons simply has the juice. It has history and volumes and volumes of books and ideas to draw from. There's an endless fountain of inspiration to draw from in D&D. D&D can encompass almost anything -- it's such a wide net that it can cover a huge range of genres and move between them effortlessly. It can go from horror to comedy to high fantasy to gothic fantasy to sci fi and still feel like fantasy roleplaying. The iconic monsters and villains of D&D are touchstones that can inspire entire campaigns.

Combat in WWN is missing some of the rules I came to love in D&D. No critical hits? No death from massive damage? Fighting can sometimes miss some of the old excitement.

Worlds Without Number is a fantastic take on sci-fi sword and sorcery. A world where you can go from fighting ancient robots to activating an ancient star transfixer to entreating a barbarian atop a wyvern for assistance, and then fight a tentacled alien in a mist-filled forest. It's easy to imagine the rusted tombs and timeworn cities that fill this broken world.

On the other hand though... all of this stuff can exist in D&D.  But in a sci-fi game like this, it gets harder to expand out of sci fi into the kinds of myriad fantasy ideas that D&D supports, while in D&D, I find it easier to branch temporarily into sci fi and then flip back into whatever fantasy the session needs. At one point in D&D they spend a few sessions fighting Noise Marines in an electrified techno-pyramid, and everyone was just like "Okay, we're doing noise marines now," and when the next monster was a giant crawling mummy, that was no big deal either. In WWN, when they fought a dragon, we all had to think together like, "Wait... what does it mean for a dragon to exist in this world?" And it's a little bit of a struggle.

and maybe finally?

TEN LEVELS FEELS TOO SHORT

I know that a ten-level system is standard for a lot of OD&D and OSR hack games, so I wanted to see how it felt. And frankly it feels like way too much of a compression. I love the sprawling feeling that a 20-level system provides. In fact, I loved it so much I let my players level up to 26 before I put my foot down and sent us back to level 1. With a ten level system, it's hard to avoid, for me, a feeling of claustrophobia and a sense that, damn, we're almost done. They're getting close to level 5 and though I know there's a lot of raw XP to chew through before getting to level 10, it just looks to me like halfway there and I don't like it.

There's also just not much in between progression. You get your one art in a level or your one focus IF you're lucky, and most of the time it's a few skill points and an attack bonus. So in fact, there's maybe not a lot that changes level to level. It's meant to be more a sandbox maybe, and the characters are progressing laterally somehow? I'm actually not sure. That kind of goes back to my complaint about it not feeling like a complete game. 

I really want the experience of setting out on a grand adventure, and to have that sense that if you persevere through myriad trials, you'll see a number of adventures over your lifetime. In my D&D game--which lasted ten years mind you--they completed like ten dungeons and a 400+ room megadungeon and explored like 2-3 cities and traversed multiple wastelands and explored the sky in their Flying Fortress and went to Hell and so on and so forth. The Orostranthian Elf Mecha, a boss which took them 2-3 tries when they first fought it at level 10, MANY YEARS into the campaign, was eventually the kind of enemy they could surely handle multiples of at level 20 and then level 25, again, many years later. I love that sense of progression and history. Hitting level 3-4 feels appropriate for the players in my WWN game... IF it was a standard 20-level system. Almost halfway there feels like a letdown.

SO IN CONCLUSION

This is a fun, snappy, smart game with a lot to admire, but I'm not convinced it really meets my needs for a game. A nice experiment but ultimately will need something bolted onto it or vice versa to really work long-term. Really good game but not quite there, I think, for me!

The Keldwood

At the southern edges of Sardoom the Forgotten Curse, bordering the fetid lakes of Meregrave, Land of the Swollen Hand, sprawls a great forest which roams over the twisted and fractured landscape. The Keldwood held fast when the sun was shattered, and when the sun's shards were rekindled, it had grown an ancient stubbornness, and the creatures that dwelled there, now used to the darkness, burrowed deeper. The enchantments of Sardoom lie thickly on these southern forests, and the cursed who wander into its groves are lost, or transformed beyond recognition. A place lost both to Sardoom, and to the regions without it.