Them Bones of Adventure - XX: Disease

An ongoing exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats and rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

By definition a challenging subject, characters succumbing to disease is a shorthand for bad times and its representation on the tabletop is justifiably marginalized, the lack of appeal making it pretty much a conceptual nonstarter, modern disneyfied DnD being content to reduce it to just another form of contact poison discharged by some monster’s special attack or painting it as inert set-dressing, if anything.

Salvaging what little gameability could be squeezed out of microbial foes definitely took some odd turns. The proposal that follows is, for once, more conceptual than systematic, writing its checks to the name of Mr. Tone and Mrs. Mood.

Any reader who squints will see that the settled approach wouldn’t be at all out of place if filed under rules musings. It fits this rubric on account of the fact that disease has ever occupied a prominent position on the annals of exploration and adventure narrative.

A Cold, Dank and Ill-lit Place

While the standard host of debilitating effects are simple and effective signifiers of localized danger (and absolutely fair game to me), what I’m here to discuss is truly withering illnesses – the likes of which cut down characters of level high or low – and their practical applications on a running. I’m talking the inominable plagues of antiquity, thought to originate from the miasmal outflows of the underworld itself, the kind of disease that doesn’t just debilitate, but utterly prostrates.

Hazy and foetid swampland, sweltering rainforest thick with fungal spores, noxious shafts driven into the cold earth, sickly and isolated dying hamlets or the virulent bustle of overcrowded city wards, through a blend of whispered rumour, fragmented histories and apocrypha, the enmity towards life of these blighted places ensures they acquire all sorts of names for themselves. Characters visiting such insalubrious locales will quickly become aware that, by tarrying about or proceeding any further, they do so braving the risk of contracting disease.

Even going past this thin layer of agency, it would not do to allow a character to become so ravaged by illness as to become incapacitated, such being simply antithetical to the wider conventions of getting people together in a room for the express purpose of playing a game. But it offers up some negative space, fit to be reframed.

The Fifth Column on the Fourth Wall

From my usual viewpoint, mechanic approaches to the topic seemed dispiritingly inadequate: going full-on old school would have meant dispassionately offing characters for standing at the wrong confluence of place and time; taking a page from the OSR’s gonzo playbook would mean table time consumed with players shitting live donkeys for laughs while skirting or copping-out on the problem’s essence, that of representing illness as a negative status with no remedial counterweights whereas, on the far shore, emulation tantalizingly invited one to the edge of a rules sinkhole to govern exposure vectors, incubation times, modes of transmission and arrays of symptoms for what in the end would differ but little from elaborate curses with pseudoscientific clauses for activation, dissemination and erradication. These ended up resolving into the paths not taken.

- The proposal: When a player misses a game session, if the character is either currently exploring or previously passed through a blighted place within the last two runnings (or forty in-game days) he succumbs to disease, becoming incapacitated for the current session’s duration, to recover only upon the player’s return.

Instead of leaving it to game-related structure of rolls and probabilities to carry the impact of flagging a place as dangerous, the suggestion is to stress a different angle: embracing the shared commonality between the vagaries of disease in a low fantasy setting and the mundane social constraints of players missing the game night.

It is known that the two things are disagreeable but altogether unavoidable certainties of, respectively, a setting that rings true and the gaming table. Both can strike suddenly and without rhyme just as they can remit much the same way, disrupting the normal flow of the game for both the afflicted character and the wider group.

Fear of Missing Out

Typical refereeing ethos counsels one to willingly bend reality and inflict as much of a strain on the economy of coincidence as it’ll bear. But there is such a thing as a middle ground between the extent to which these options represent the lesser evil on the path to promoting gameplay and interesting decisions and the wanton cutting of corners just to get to the next combat encounter. If a character perishes, I’ll be one to say that marginalizing the player until the return to civilization happens because it “wouldn’t make sense for anyone else to show up down here” is not an acceptable argument.

As such, it is understood that allowing the outside world to intrude upon the game is decidedly not a peaceful proposition. But before tearing one’s vestments, consider the cast of unappealing solutions: characters that are temporarily abducted, get lost in tunnels, become mind-controlled drones in the hands of their fellow players or recipients of the ubiquitous “magical teleportation passe-partout & no questions asked”. These oscillate between pure softball and barely-satisfactory, all fall short if looking to deliver a grittier running experience.

Ironically enough, this proposal only makes sense if running a healthy and cohese playgroup, one whose players are mature, reliable and where instances of absentism are both exceptional and evenly distributed among all the participants, with no poor soul getting singled out. It also requires that the players embrace a stance or at least some concept of heroism, with callous behaviour targetting their burdensome ward being pretty much unthinkable.

Grit in the gearbox – Gameable Implications of Disease

How hard to go on the disease-ridden character whose player is missing? Ideally, no more and no less than what a credible game world will dictate. This should be off the referee’s hands, the gold standard to uphold being that player absence cannot be tacitly equated with character invulnerability.

Knowing from the start that the baseless assassination of bedridden player characters is not condoned, the casualties or even the dreaded total party kill that may happen amid an expedition gone foul will lie at the other end of the spectrum: the character that has fallen ill and is being dragged about on the sled is still factually there, he should not be exempt of the danger in the face of the absence of his player.

Consider the scenario of one among the party’s number having fallen prey to disease and now lying wracked in a feverish haze on a makeshift stretcher, effectively incapacitated. From this fact will spring actual – gameable – challenges, ones whose repercussions should be played to the hilt:

·         The party will have to make do with carrying both their downed comrade and the extra weigth of his now-unattended possessions, accounting for the reduced travel speed when facing the miles of trackless wilderness;

·         Likewise when exploring the sinuous confines of the underworld, obstacles such as ledges and climbs will become much more daunting, requiring special measures carrying both risk and additional time expenditure;

·         Random encounters are on the party to prevent, head off or otherwise react to, with the simplistic act of leaving their comrade somewhere behind not necessarily constituting a vouchsafe from danger;

·         Spells and features that target or prevent disease become more valuable, as they might at least temporarily ammeliorate a sick character’s condition enough to allow feeble participation in a fight or retreat;

·         Leaving a sick character behind amid civilization to be safeguarded being doable with no concern, the fact remains that the party moving geographically away will imply a need to link up at a later time.

Closing Thoughts – Disease in a Setting

In terms of wider setting building, the whole “germs” face of the triangle can handily bear some weight in terms of explaining population dispersions, also serving a gating purpose for places that lesser characters learn to fear to tread, offering a different facet of inacessibility as opposed to someplace being underwater or way up in the clouds.