2 questions re: poison, disease, and falling

[olshanski]

I am getting useless responses to this question at a different forum, so I am trying my luck here.

I am working on a fantasy style roleplaying game. It has a damage track (like Hit Points) and no other damage track. Every character has exactly the same Hit points. The ability/skill check results have 3 common results: fail, partial fail/success, and success. In very rare circumstances there is a critical success.

MY FIRST QUESTION:
What should the difference (if any) be between poison and disease? I am not asking about poisons like lead poisoning, or diseases like alcoholism. I am asking about infectious diseses that in a game world can kill in days or weeks (hemmoragic fever, infection, tetanus). For poisons, I am referring to things like snake bite, jellyfish, dart frog. I understand that there is plenty of overlap, because many diseases kill by releasing poisons in the bloodstream. I am not so much concerned about slow dangers like lead poisoning or tuberculosis. There are in-game abilities like medicines and antivenom that can alleviate either of these conditions.

This is sort of an open-ended question, because I am interested in what other people think. Right now I am kicking around the idea of a poison being fast-acting and having a limited duration... if it doesn't kill you in 24 hours, you will be OK. Disease will be something that leaves you in a state of constant injury for a period of several days, and can linger.
So I am considering resolving poisoning with a fixed number of rolls on the hour (like 3 rolls in 3 hours). For Disease I am considering having 1 roll per day, with a failure taking damage and 3 successes required to shake the disease. (So it will can linger).

If anyone has other suggestions for how "disease" or "poison" might work, I'd be interested in hearing it. Again, this is a general gamist question, I am not trying to accurately simulate real-world diseases in any but the most generic style. There could be arguments for treating both with a unified mechanic.

MY SECOND QUESTION
For falling, like getting pushed off a catwalk or thrown out a 2nd story window, I am interested in what we think most humans can be expected to survive. I have 4 different "grades" of damage: 0= no damage, 1=minor damage (scrapes, sprains), 2=major damage (broken bones), 3=dead.

What sort of expected average result of a fall? What distance would you put on an average fall that results in no damage, minor damage, major damage, death?

Assuming an unexpected fall, and landing on a hard surface: I'd say:
5 ft = no damage
10 ft = minor injury (sprain)
20 ft = major injury (broken bone)
40 ft = death

What sorts of numbers seem reasonable to you?

MY PLEA:
I am not interested in answers like "switch to a different game system". Or "Get rid of hit-points and use a condition track", or "Don't worry about precise heights, just use generic terms like "Safe" or "Dangerous". (Those are the answers I am getting at another forum).

[Onix]

It seems like you've thought about what you want from the poisons and disease, is there a reason the solution you've come to isn't satisfying you? It sounds fine to me. Am I right in assuming that characters have 3 hit points (just the impression I got)? So if you fail all three rolls you'll be dead? If that's the case, the issue of granularity is there aren't a lot of options.

You could have the saving rolls hold off the damage if you want things really deadly. Each roll could be easier to save against but it just buys you time. On the other hand, maybe this is what a partial success roll is.

Another option could be that poison and disease reduces attributes which leads to interesting effects but you didn't want any other kinds of damage.

So is the question then comes down to should they have the same speed that they do damage. IRL the answer is maybe no, maybe yes. So maybe there are 1 hour poisons 1 day poisons and 1 week poisons. They do damage like you outlined but at differing speeds one point for each interval. Same thing with disease 1 day (nasty nasty bug) 1 week, and 1 month diseases.

Falling
I've seen weird stuff when people are falling. You can fall well, you can fall badly. Sometimes it's what you fall on, sometimes it's what position you fall in. How big you are also makes a huge difference.

I had a friend fall 20+ feet, land on his side and get up with absolutely no harm to him (we thought he was dead). I've seen others fall two feet and break an ankle.

So let me propose this, use the list you have, but passing a agility (or equiv) check means you reduce the damage by one. you have differing levels of passing so maybe you reduce the damage but still get a penalty, (winded, stunned, etc) or maybe a partial reduces one point while a full success is two points.

In addition, what you're landing on makes a difference. Foilage, soft dirt -1 damage. "Maybe I can survive this 40 ft drop if I roll well and jump into those bushes." Water -2 damage. Jagged rocks +1-2.

Something like that anyway.

[olshanski]

I think the ideas I had were ok, but I was not very confident, so that's why I've posted. There could be something obvious I am missing. I also wanted to see if the falling distances passed a sort of gut-check. There could be something similar to a disease or poison that I am neglecting.

Yes, characters have 3 hit points. It is more of an injury track with 3 thresholds, but it works like fixed hit points.

For falling, I am planning include an agility-style check that that causes additional damage with a total failure, and less damage with a total success. (Moderate fail/succeed result stays with the average roll). I'll use your suggestion for different landing options providing a bonus to the agility roll...

I am still open to other ideas.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Most games don't include much in the rules about disease or bad poisons, instead providing for more active challenges and larger than life actions. Its one thing to be dragged down by the Charybdis, and another to suffer Paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea from Beriberi because the mage knows of the magical reagents to make fireballs, but nothing about vitamins. (B1 thiamine is your friend!)

The important thing to remember is that you're trying to invoke a certain feeling with your game, and just including disease at all says something grim about the setting. Are the PCs brave fools that face the plague lands to bring back curers, or simply brigands who want to get as far as possible from these blighted shores. (And will Mr. Poe please tell us who is that dapper fellow in a face concealing mask at our party. uh-oh.)

What you have proposed is a pretty good idea, but without seeing the system in play, I can't say what a good threshold or set difficulty would be. I will say that you should probably think in terms of symptoms and impairments to the character, rather than outright roll the die to see if you die. There should also be a bit of role-play involved in dealing with these dangers - knowing to check drinks or understanding the taste and symptoms of poison, or remember to thoroughly wash their armor and dry it to avoid infections and tetanus. Unless this a player vs GM dungeon crawl type of event, the challenge should be "how to defuse the situation when I'm too dizzy to aim my bow" rather than can I roll a six.

RPGnet had a good series of articles on poisons and disease -though the only ones I can find quickly are "death by rock" parts and which cover heavy metals, arsenic, cyanide, and radiation amongst others.

Something I can't find anymore is a comparison of various levels of falling and getting shot with a .45 caliber handgun. I seem to remember a statement to the effect of "falling one meter out of bed is equal to a handgun bullet, but since its across your body, not a half inch spot - the effect is far more minor". I don't feel real confident about that statement, but I'm not about to work backwards and do the actual math right now. (Presuming 230 grain [15 gram] .45ACP traveling at 300 meters per second, on earth with gravity acceleration of 9.8 meters second and average human male weighing...) Your numbers seem pretty reasonable, and have the advantage of being fairly intuitive or easy to demonstrate for most people (Human height, one story, two, and four)and the doubling sequence makes it a lot easier to remember than p=GMH converted to 1/2MV squared over a time of...(On the up side, I do at least remember two things from high school physics ten years ago.)

Theodosius - often hailed as the father of Toxicology - famously said "the dose makes the poison" - and modern medicine bears this out with LD-50 measurements. A gram of Plutonium a day would accumulate in your bones and be problematic rather quickly, and a gram of VX is a hundred times lethal dose for skin contact. Technically I consume a three or four lethal doses of Caffeine each month (28 cups of coffee per week X 4 weeks = 112 x 250 = 28000mg, not including soft drinks - caffeine, lethal dose for my wight is 9600 mg) but its eliminated it from your system too quickly to die like that. (Pills or an otherwise more concentrated form can be dangerous though).

Trying to be direct after all this rambling - from a mechanics point of view, chemical and disease exposure can use the same system, perhaps even the same system as falling (four levels of disease equals something like cold, stomach flu, pnemonia, and ebola while drugs might be alcohol, gasoline, mustard gas, nerve agents)

Hopefully this is food for thought or at least amusing, if not directly what you asked for.

[olshanski]

Excellent ideas, thanks.