Attribute Damage as a Base Mechanic, Attribute-Based Wounds, Insanity and Fatigue

So in my last post I introduced the seven attributes, or ability scores, that I plan to use in my upcoming post-apocalyptic game.

I briefly touched upon the fact that Health would be reduced by physical injury after hit points are depleted.  But all seven attributes can be depleted by various forms of damage.

Now, most games have a few monsters, spells and poisons that can cause temporary ability score damage.  But in those games it's treated as a rare and special thing.  In my game I want it to be fairly common, a central mechanic that gets used almost as often as hit points get used.

I credit The Nightmares Underneath by Johnstone Mentzger for giving me the basic idea of using attribute damage like this.   I also think the concept of attacking every part of the character sheet, which I learned from Skerples and Arnold K, contributed to the me coming up with the overall idea for this system.

The rule is: if you lose half or more of an attribute at once from a single source of damage, or suffer a critical hit, you take a wound from the table for that attribute.  So if you have ten willpower and lose five or more willpower from a spell or horror or whatever, you take a willpower-based wound. Or maybe I'll call it a  derangement if it relates to a mental attribute.

Health is unique in a couple ways.  It doesn't have just one wound table– it has several, for different types of damage.  Also, the different wounds on that table will be ordered by severity, so the more health you lost in getting the wound, the worse the wound is.

For the time being I'm using the six tables from Esoteric Enterprises– ballistic, cutting/tearing, bludgeoning, heat/fire, toxic/acid, and electrical.  They're pretty good; I'll eventually modify them a bit and add maybe a radiation table, a nanotech table or something, idk.

Other attributes have just one table, and each type of wound is about equally bad.  You roll one possible wound randomly, and the number of attribute points you lost determines both how severe it is and how long it takes to heal.

Strength damage can be inflicted by certain poisons, diseases or maybe nerve damage.  It's a bit different from fatigue, which I'll describe at the end of this article.  If you would suffer a strength wound, roll a d6:

1: Lose strength in your hand(s)

2: Lose strength in your arm(s)

3: Lose strength in your back (affects encumbrance)

4: Lose strength in your legs (affects speed and encumbrance)

5: Loss of power, i.e. weaker attacks, can't jump high (note: strength is the ability to exert a lot of force slowly, while power is the ability to move lighter weights fast.  Think swinging a baseball bat versus doing chin-ups)

6: Loss of stamina– can't run, hike or climb for very long

Dexterity damage can be caused by blows to the back of the head or intoxicating chemicals. If you suffer a dexterity wound, roll a d6:

1: Dizziness

2: Poor manual dexterity (can't pick locks and the like)

3: Loss of balance

4: Shaky hands, Parkinsons-like symptoms

5: Slow reflexes

6: Inflexibility

Charisma damage can be caused by horror and insanity effects and the like, and maybe some magic.  Charisma partially represents confidence and sense of self, so maybe stuff that reduces one of those things.  Arguably it could also be caused by character assassination, which is what The Nightmares Underneath does, but personally I don't like that. I'd rather have charisma represent a character's inherent abilities, and handle reputation damage via a different mechanic.  

So, charisma wounds are generally related to sense of self or social ability, rolled on a d8:

1: Social anxiety

2: Multiple personality

3: De-realization

4: Survivor’s guilt

5: Depression

6: Bipolar

6: Narcicism

8: Megalomania

Knowledge damage can be inflicted by anything that would affect memory, like alcohol or other drugs, maybe blows to the head.  Knowledge wounds all involve knowledge or memory somehow. d10 knowledge wounds:

1: Retrograde amnesia

2: Anterograde amnesia

3: Lost History (Histories are a skill system I'll explain in a future post)

4: Face/name blindness

5: Selective retrograde amnesia

6: Selective anterograde amnesia

7: You can’t recognize certain words

8: Illiteracy

9: Loss of languages

10: Can’t do or understand math  

Willpower damage can be inflicted by intoxication, sleep deprivation, or the medium to long-term affects of drug addiction.  Or spells of course.  Willpower wounds are generally compulsions of some sort, and I have 6 of them so far: 

1: Substance addiction

2: Kleptomania

3: Anger control

4: Sex/food/games/whatever addiction

5: Phobia– specific

6: Fearful– Subject to morale rolls like an NPC

Perception damage can be caused by anything that might befuddle you, like drugs or insanity.  Damage to a specific sense is not represented as perception damage, since this would imply that, say, blind people are worse at hearing.    

1: Voices in your head

2: Hallucinations

3: Can’t recognize certain things

4: Synesthesia

5: Low pain tolerance

6: Psychosomatic illness

Horror and Insanity

So, a cool side effect of this system is that you essentially have an insanity system with four separate tracks– one for each mental attribute.  So that sort of puts it on par with games that try to specialize in this like Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies, at least if you choose to use it as such.  

Horror, learning That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know, getting a good look at non-Euclidean geometries, and other insanity-inducing effects cause damage to a mental attribute.  Sometimes a specific mental attribute based on the source, other times a random one rolled on a d4.  

Depending on the severity of the source, it might do d3, d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12 damage.  Those higher numbers should be extremely rare and lampshaded in advance though, like it's what happens if you summon Yog-Sothoth and get a good look at it.  Insanity should usually come on gradually.  

Sources of insanity allow a save for half damage.  Usually, but not always, a willpower save.    

Healing Wounds and Attribute Damage

Non-permanent wounds take a number of months to heal equal to the number of attribute points you lost when you suffered them, squared.  So if you broke your arm after taking six points of damage, it would take 36 months.  But that's for natural healing; good medical care takes this down to the same number of weeks rather than months.

Permanent wounds take that same number of weeks, rather than months, to heal to whatever extent they would heal, and good care reduces that to days.  i.e. if you lose an eye, it takes that much time for the eye socket to heal over so it's not prone to infection, and for you to get as used to seeing with one eye as you'll ever be.  

Attribute points, it depends on how realistic you want to be.  Fast healing– one point in your most damaged attribute per night's rest.  Medium pace– one point per full day's rest, or per night under the care of a medic, or per week in which you at least eat and sleep.  Slow pace– one point per week.  

From a realism standpoint, slow is probably the way to go.  Like it takes weeks to regenerate the blood you lose from a blood donation, and that's like one point of Health.  But that's also not terribly fun so I'll probably do either fast or medium.  

Fatigue

I like the idea of fatigue from 5E, but not the way it's implemented where the first level of fatigue gimps you so hard you're basically done adventuring until you get a long rest.  So here's my alternate implementation:

-For every level of fatigue, all of your attribute modifiers go down a point. Once two of your attributes reach -4, or whatever is one point lower than the lowest negative modifier your system allows, you have to have a health save to avoid falling unconscious any time you exert yourself even a little.  If three of them get that low, you're unconscious.

You heal one level of fatigue after a night's sleep, and two or three after a full day's rest.  Powerful stimulants can temporarily alleviate fatigue, but after they expire you have to save or take another level of fatigue.