Here are some interesting house rules I liked that deal with damage, death and dieing.
This is an optional set of rules to make death and combat more dramatic and more like it is in fantasy realms.
Bleeding damage:
Injuries seldom kill us right away. Instead, we limp around bleeding for a while until eventually we collapse. To reflect this, you may add that any wound dealing more than 10 points of damage will continue to deal another point of damage each few minutes until it is properly treated or healed. If the wound is between 10-20 the wound will naturally close after an hour or so even if not treated. If the wound is greater than 20 it will continue to bleed until the character dies if it is not treated.
Infection:
Any time a character takes more than a single point of damage there is a chance of infection or complications. In such cases, the character should make a body check for each unhealed, untreated wound each day. If any wound becomes infected it will simply not heal normally by atrophy until treated. Each day after the first that a wound is infected the character must make a body check or the infection spreads reducing his body score by 1. A separate body check is made for each infected wound.
Dramatic death:
If a character or npc is killed, they get a brief but amazing final action. In effect, once the mortal blow is placed, the dead creature immediately gets to act. The DM may play this out in one of two typical ways. Option 1-The dead character is invigorated and is considered to automatically make a matched success on any one skill check (roll a single die and no matter what the role it is a matched
Resuscitation:
Ok, UA does not really like the dead coming back to life, but it takes a few minutes for the body to truly die after the mortal wounds have been placed. Once a character has been brought to less than 0 hit points he collapses. If he does not have a dramatic death (it wouldn’t be dramatic if he came back now would it?), he may be resuscitated by magic or amazing healing skills if treated quickly. In game terms a slain character may be resuscitated for a number of minutes equal to the tens place of his body stat. Resuscitating a fallen character requires a minimum of 20 points of healing (from magic or a skill such as first aid) to bring the character up to 1 hit point. At this stage the character is alive but not conscious for at least d100 minutes. The resuscitated character may be healed only up to 1/10 of his original hit points per day by any means. After being resuscitated, the character is considered to have a body and speed score equal to 1/10 of the original value. These will slowly recover naturally or via treatment at a rate no more than 1/10 of the value per day.
The brush with death has several other effects. First, the player or dm may use this as an excuse to see the world differently and begin spending exp on new skills such as aura sight. Second, the character looses all charges he had prior to being killed.
I like the bleeding and infection ideas (though the infection sounds like a bugger to remember properly), but I wouldn’t use the heroic death or resusitation rules. I like the way combat is just nasty, that it is simply lethal. Heoric deaths shouldn’t be a given, not in UA at least. I think that sort of thing is much more case by case thing. Sometimes I think it is better just to have the character cut down, because UA is nasty, but sometimes it is more appropriate for cursing, spitting and screaming to be the order of the day. Heroic last actions are precious enough that I wouldn’t want to give them out automatically and death speeches don’t seem to me to reflect the brutality of the violence just wreaked upon the dead or dying person. It works in plays and TV and Heroic Fantasy Rpgs (indeed last words were ruled into the D&D games I used to play), but I don’t think it fits in UA.
Again, the resusitation seems to offer a way out after death, and I think that makes combat seem less hazardous. I like having players who take one look at belligerant opponants with knives and back off (then smack them down later with iron bars 🙂 ).
Nonetheless I like the modelling of wounds to make them nastier. The more my players fear combat the better it is when it comes I find.
I guess I was not clear about this. The original idea was for these to be optional rules to be used to add flare. Dramatic death is something that only happens from time to time and only specific npc’s would get it. Resuscitation is kind of an out but perhapse it could be limited to still be useful without costing the game too much.
In any case these are presented only as potential rules to be used, or not, for flare.
I’d use the “dramatic death” rules if the character had something that might keep them going (Avatar ability, magical edge, skill like “brick shithouse”) but other then that I personally prefer the ease with which death can be dispatched in UA. Its makes combat a much less palatable option for the players.
What about “Dramatic Death” as a Soul skill?
It works just like Multitasking, only one of the actions is “Going into shock, cardiac arrest, etc.”
The tricky part is, how do you train?
re: training
15 points and you can do it. After all, it’ll only come up once…
It might not be “gritty,” but I do get the feeling that ruling out resuscitation in the name of grit is kind of an invocation of Reality Is Unrealistic. Even in reality, death takes a little while to become final after the killing blow, and barring it in a game that has both modern medicine and healing magick has a way of making said game *less* extraordinary than day-to-day reality.
I find it worth considering that modern medicine today routinely saves mortally wounded people. In reality sometimes it even happens that someone gets shot a few tens of times without body armour and not only doesn’t go down right away, but actually survives after medical treatment. Instantly going down with no chance of getting brought back from the brink after just two or three gunshots is kind of a “people are made of glass” scenario, and people aren’t actually made of glass. Most won’t be *up and kicking* after a few bullets–*most*–but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily beyond saving.
That said, some deaths are more final than others. Decapitation, brain blowouts, heart blown to smithereens, shredded aorta–some of those no amount of conventional medicine will save, though an epideromancer willing to rip themselves open and blow some sigs to put them back together *might*, depending upon the exact nature of the fatal wound.
Of course, if your big worry is players taking a decent chance of survival as an excuse to use violence to solve their problems and you’d rather they not use violence to solve their problems, you can invoke permanent damage, not unlike the Massive Damage rules. That traumatic of injury might permanently take a chunk out of their Body or Speed (though they could “rehabilitate” by spending XP to raise them again), or if they were put down by head injuries or simply spent more than a few minutes “dead” and/or didn’t get proper chest compressions to keep blood flowing to the brain, neurological problems or lost Mind or Soul points could result.