Sharing a house rule on harm.
I’ve found the specific harm penalties punishing. The GM usually ends up fudging them, the party ignores them, the GM lets armor negate all of it 90% of the time, etc. John did this a lot in his games as well.
What I’ve tried is putting a time limit on harm, when it’s done to players. Next action, until you take a “turn” off, rest of the scene, a score, etc. Even though this is more mechanics, its putting more fiction into the game. It opens up what harm can be, and let’s me punish more – knowing it won’t break the rest of the score. Harm can be a stunned moment, temporary backlash, a bleeding cut that needs a bandage, a sprain that goes away on its own, etc. It let’s us be more descriptive with the fiction, and thus use it more. The times are up to the GM, and stated before the resist roll, like normal harm. (Ideally, its part of the action roll description, but we’re flexible about that.)
Have other people tried this? I found it particularly interesting because it’s adding a mechanic to enable fiction, which is pretty nifty.
Anyways, recommended.
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Ive separated my harm levels into 3 categories. Injury, state, and progressive harm.
Injury Harm is like the harm we have now and covers things like broken bones, bruising, gunshot wounds etc.
State Harm is temporary harm that lasts until a single self healing action is taken or a scores worth of time passes (whether you were part of the score or lost in vice). It covers things like hangovers, drowsiness, loss of ballance.
Progressive Harm is harm that ramps up over time, starting at level 1 harm and slowly creeping up towards a predefined harm level. For example “Level 3 Harm: Poisoned” starts at level 1, and slowly fills up to level 3 harm as the poison takes hold. This type of harm covers things like poison, bleeding out, not being able to breath etc. If the situation causing the harm ends, or a heal action is taken, the progressive harm stops where it is and acts as Injury Harm from then on.
Antimatter That’s a really good idea. I may adopt that for my campaign.
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Antimatter how do you handle the effects of harm if a PC is suffering from multiple types? Do they stack, or do you just implement the highest?
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Antimatter Cool idea. How do you determine when the progressive harm should tick up? I feel like it would be easy for me to forget.
Also, do you have an easy way to track the other kinds of harm on the character sheet, or do you just use the notes area?
Wow…both of these are good ideas. 😀
Matt Kay They stack. So you could have a broken arm at level 2 harm; be poisoned and have it slowly ticking up; and be level 1 harm Drunk all at the same time. If all level 1 or 2 slots are filled, then the poison skips a level, acting faster due to you being injured already.
colin roald I use it as a consequence, or after a certain amount of time has passed. So on a 1-5 I might play up that the poison begins to take hold and up it a level as a consequence. I also typically have a 4-piece clock for it that I tick as time goes on. It’s also a nice devils bargain to say “You can have a bonus die if the poison acts faster”
In #AgeofBlood I adjusted the Harm penalties to be less punitive overall. An easy way to think about it for me was to shift everything “up one” slot.
So for my hack, Level 3 Harm is now the -1 dice one. Level 2 Harm is now the Less Effect penalty. So where does that leave Level 1 Harm? I chose to invent a penalty called “-1 Resist”, which just like it sounds means that any Resistance roll the character makes is counted one lower if the Harm fictionally applies to the situation. I like this one because rather than force a hard change in the way the characters do their business (it might never come up if the players keep on trucking by Getting 6s or shrugging their shoulders at my Consequences), it instead subtly alters the decision space of Resistance and makes the players think just a little bit harder about how much they really want to fling their buff Slayer’s 4-dice Prowess resist at some consequences they might have already on the fence about.
As for why I did it this way: I didn’t want to rewrite the way that Harm works structurally in the game (easier portability of rules), however my hack fictionally encourages dungeon-crawl type narratives and so Harm consequences simply “make sense” a lot of time. As a Blades in the Dark GM I also find myself pulling back a lot from invoking Harm penalties (Level 2 particularly) on action rolls because it always seemed hard enough already on my poor dudes. In Age of Blood the Harm spiral is less painful so I can call on those consequences more, vindicating the existence of the rules, while still letting the players feel like hard-core adventurers fighting through their wounds to the bitter end (rather than being debilitated and crippled by them).