Disease Rules

[Sanctaphrax]

It is what the title says it is. Rules for running diseases in DFRPG.

These rules are heavily inspired by Kyeudo's take on diseases in Exalted, so lemme send a bit of credit his way.

Feedback would be great.

Diseases

A disease is an Aspect with a numerical rating. A character with a disease must roll their Endurance skill against a fixed difficulty every time a certain interval passes. If they succeed their margin of success is subtracted from the disease rating, if they fail their margin of failure is added to it.

Each disease has different effects. These effects depend on the disease's rating. The most common effects are for the disease to fill consequence slots and for the disease to inflict penalties to rolls. (If a consequence slot is full when a disease worsens to fill it, then both effects fill the slot together.) In addition to these effects, the disease Aspect can be Compelled.

Diagnosing and treating a disease requires a Scholarship roll. If the roll is successful, it lowers the difficulty of the Endurance roll to resist the disease.

Recovery gives +2 per level to disease resistance rolls. Living Dead and Powers similar to it provide full immunity to diseases.

At the GM's discretion, environmental effects may boost or penalize disease-related rolls. I recommend a -2 penalty to disease resistance for strenuous activity and a +2 bonus for strict bed rest.

Some diseases have tags that change the rules for them. Common tags (and their effects) include:

Magical (Lore modifies Scholarship rolls made to treat the disease)
Expensive Medicine X (Treating the disease requires a Resources X purchase.)
Mental (Discipline is used instead of Endurance to resist the disease. Potential doctors can use Empathy or Scholarship. Recovery, Living Dead, and other such Powers provide no protection.)
Temporary (The difficulty to resist the disease goes down by 1 each interval.)
Complex (Characters without a relevant Stunt can't even try to treat the disease.)

Sample Diseases:

The Common Cold

I'm pretty sure you know what the common cold is.

Treatment Difficulty: 3
Initial Rating: 3
Resistance Difficulty (Untreated): 3
Resistance Difficulty (Treated): 1
Interval: One day
Effects:
2+: The Common Cold fills a mild physical consequence slot.
4+: Anyone who spends time with you must roll Endurance against difficulty 0 or catch it.
6+: You take a -1 penalty to all physical, social, and mental rolls from general malaise and feeling like crap.
Tags: Temporary

The Flu

People often don't take the flu seriously, but it can and does kill people.

Treatment Difficulty: 3
Initial Rating: 3
Resistance Difficulty (Untreated): 4
Resistance Difficulty (Treated): 2
Interval: Three days
Effects:
2+: The Flu fills a mild physical consequence slot.
4+: The Flu fills a moderate physical consequence slot. You take a -1 penalty to physical rolls, and those you spend time with must roll Endurance against difficulty 1 or they'll be infected.
6+: The Flu fills a severe physical consequence slot. Your penalty to physical rolls increases to 2, and you suffer a -1 penalty to mental and social rolls as well. The difficulty to avoid infection from you increases to 2.
8+: The Flu fills an extreme physical consequence slot. The penalties to your rolls increase by 1, as does the difficulty to avoid infection from you.
10+: You die.
Tags: Temporary

The Endless Sleep

This is not exactly a disease. It's a curse. But it works in a fairly disease-like way.

Treatment Difficulty: 6
Initial Rating: 10
Resistance Difficulty (Untreated): 5
Resistance Difficulty (Treated): 1
Interval: One day
Effects:
1+: You need to sleep an extra 6 hours each day.
4+: You take a -1 penalty to all physical and mental rolls from drowsiness.
8+: You are asleep and cannot do anything. On the bright side, you have no biological needs.
16+: You fall asleep forever and are effectively dead.
Tags: Complex, Magical, Expensive Medicine 4

Cursed Madness Of The Wolf God's Crypt

Anyone who defiles the tomb of The Wolf God will gradually turn into a horrible monster. This is why.

Treatment Difficulty: 5
Initial Rating: 1
Resistance Difficulty (Untreated): 6
Resistance Difficulty (Treated): 4
Interval: One month
Effects:
1+: You take a -2 penalty to all rolls made to control your anger.
5+: You have the Berserk Stunt for Fists. If this disease puts you below 0 Refresh, you lose your free will and become a puppet to madness.
10+: You have the Spiritual Co-Pilot Power and Sponsor Powers. The Wolf God is the spirit and the sponsor.
15+: You have the Echoes Of The Beast Power. The wolf is your beast.
20+: You have the Inhuman Strength Power.
25+: You have the Inhuman Speed Power.
30+: You have the Claws Power. You now look rather inhuman.
35+: You have the Inhuman Recovery Power. It doesn't apply to silver.
40+: You have the Inhuman Toughness Power. It doesn't apply to silver.
45+: You have the Hulking Size Power. You don't look remotely human.
50+: You have the Supernatural Strength Power.
Tags: Magical, Mental

[Wordmaker]

You've obviously put a lot of work in there. Personally, though, I'd be inclined to keep illnesses and diseases as an additional aspect. Essentially it would be the infection using a maneuver on the character and creating a sticky aspect. It could be removed narratively.

But if you want sickness and disease to play a major role in your campaign, and you'll be paying a lot of attention to the challenges of treatment, then this looks like a good set of rules for it.

[Taran]

I think maybe we've discussed this before.  I did it very similarly to what you have but very close to how venomous works:

Each disease has a rating based on its potency and has a time interval.  I added a "conflict" interval.  Basically, it's how many consecutive checks you need to make before you body fights it off. Although, this probably isn't necessary.  I think one check is enough.  Most people fight off the common cold before it does anything.  Other diseases might have a requirement before it'll go away...like a magical disease that requires holy water, for instance.

You roll endurance at each time interval to resist the disease.  This continues until you get the proper medical attention or until the "conflict" ends.

Failing causes stress and, potentially, consequences.  Consequences don't begin to heal until your body fights off the disease (at the end of the conflict) or until proper medical attention is provided.  The difficulty to treat is equal to the potency of the disease.

Example: (i'm kind of making up numbers here)

Cold:

Potency +2
Interval: 1 day
Conflict: 3 consecutive checks
Medical attention:  scholarship (+2)


Magical disease
Potency: +4
Interval: 30 days
Conflict 3 consecutive checks
Medical attention: Lore +4 - requires grave dust.

So yeah, the disease just keeps going until it takes you out.  Depending on the disease, you might just die or something,like lycanthropy, you'd become a werewolf.

It puts an aspect on the character that can be compelled to spread the disease or complicate the persons life.  Any consequences that a disease creates automatically get tagged the next time the person needs to make a resistence.

In a sense, it's kind of like environmental damage.

[Haru]

So if I understand this correctly, you are setting up a challenge for the character against the disease, with effects not only happening at the end, but also along the way.

I think I'll have to agree with Wordmaker here. This will probably work great, if you want to focus on the diseases. I would just make them aspects or consequences, depending on when and how they happened and compel them at appropriate scenes.

This is not to put your idea down, just to advance it.
You could go full fractal and turn the diseases into characters and then get the characters into a conflict with them. You are already halfway there, so you might as well go the distance. You can remove pretty much every "causes a consequence" action from a disease, since that will probably happen in a conflict anyway. You can have a conflict after each Interval, representing how it worsened in that time. Each time you get into a conflict, the disease will aim for the next step on its incubation chart, what you have listed under effects. If it wins, the next effect happens, if the player wins, he is cured, if possible, or at least the disease doesn't progress.

Some of the diseases you suggest, I would model very differently. A sleeping curse would just be a conflict between the curser and the cursee. If the cursee loses, he falls into a magical sleep.

The wolf curse is a great idea for a back story, but not so much as a disease imposed on a PC. It would push the character into NPC territory at the first time he has to take a power he doesn't have the refresh for. I would have something like this progress at the speed of plot, not a fixed interval.

[Taran]

Well,

For me, I was trying to do it more simply.  Make it just like venomous.

Venomous makes an attack every round until first aid is administered, otherwise they make an endurance save every round until they are taken out.

I was just Giving the disease an attack rating and making one exchange 1 full day.

More potent diseases would have higher attack ratings or even weapon values.

[Lavecki121]

I like the rules. However I want to add to this:

Magical (Lore modifies Scholarship rolls made to treat the disease)
Expensive Medicine X (Treating the disease requires a Resources X purchase.)
Mental (Discipline is used instead of Endurance to resist the disease. Potential doctors can use Empathy or Scholarship. Recovery, Living Dead, and other such Powers provide no protection.)
Temporary (The difficulty to resist the disease goes down by 1 each interval.)
Complex (Characters without a relevant Stunt can't even try to treat the disease.)

Mutagenic: The difficulty to resist the disease increases by 1 each interval

Transferable: If in contact with someone with this disease for two or more intervals you must defend against getting it.

*I have more just trying to figure out how to word them. Otherwise I really like these rules but like has been said before you would have to establish that this is occuring durring gameplay set up. If intervals were basically milestones I think the rules could work because you wouldnt have to worry about rolling every single time. just my thoughts.

EDIT: Thinking about it more it would make sense to categorize the intervals in that way:

Interval: 2 Milestones
             Every Moderate Milestone
             Every other Major Milestone

[Haru]

For me, I was trying to do it more simply.

In a way, that's what I'm doing as well. That's the beauty that I've found in the fractal. In this case, if the disease is boring, just aspect it and be done. If it is more interesting, zoom in on it and put a spotlight on it. That way, things do exactly as much as you want them to do.

Other people are better at phrasing these things, so here is a link to the same line of thoughts by Robert Hanz:
https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/87wrm6yrdWx

EDIT: Thinking about it more it would make sense to categorize the intervals in that way:

Interval: 2 Milestones
             Every Moderate Milestone
             Every other Major Milestone

I like that, makes more sense to use those intervals, since the game as a whole is measured in them. Good catch.

[Sanctaphrax]

You've obviously put a lot of work in there.

Heh, no.

I put a lot of work into the Powers list. This is the product of a spare afternoon.

I think maybe we've discussed this before.

I think we have. Not sure when, though.

Anyway, the rules you posted look okay. But I think they'd get repetitive if you used multiple diseases.

(I'm assuming that stress inflicted by a disease sticks around until the disease goes away. Because otherwise I don't see how a disease could ever harm anyone meaningfully unless its rating was really high.)

So if I understand this correctly, you are setting up a challenge for the character against the disease, with effects not only happening at the end, but also along the way.

I think I'll have to agree with Wordmaker here. This will probably work great, if you want to focus on the diseases. I would just make them aspects or consequences, depending on when and how they happened and compel them at appropriate scenes.

This is not to put your idea down, just to advance it.
You could go full fractal and turn the diseases into characters and then get the characters into a conflict with them. You are already halfway there, so you might as well go the distance. You can remove pretty much every "causes a consequence" action from a disease, since that will probably happen in a conflict anyway. You can have a conflict after each Interval, representing how it worsened in that time. Each time you get into a conflict, the disease will aim for the next step on its incubation chart, what you have listed under effects. If it wins, the next effect happens, if the player wins, he is cured, if possible, or at least the disease doesn't progress.

Some of the diseases you suggest, I would model very differently. A sleeping curse would just be a conflict between the curser and the cursee. If the cursee loses, he falls into a magical sleep.

The wolf curse is a great idea for a back story, but not so much as a disease imposed on a PC. It would push the character into NPC territory at the first time he has to take a power he doesn't have the refresh for. I would have something like this progress at the speed of plot, not a fixed interval.

I considered going full fractal and decided not to. Full conflicts would require a whole bunch of dice-rolling, there'd be no particular tactical challenge to them, and the final result wouldn't be any more interesting than what you get out a single roll. So it seems wasteful to use them.

Incidentally, the diseases don't actually inflict consequences. They fill consequence slots. The healing mechanic is pretty different.

The sleeping curse was mainly intended as a challenge for the doctor. "The princess is in a coma! Wake her up or the king will behead you!" If I was considering inflicting it on a PC, I'd definitely treat it as a take-out result.

The wolf curse is supposed to present a genuine threat of NPCdom. Some people (including me sometimes) like to have the possibility of death or a worse fate if the dice go against them.

I like the rules. However I want to add to this:

Mutagenic: The difficulty to resist the disease increases by 1 each interval

Transferable: If in contact with someone with this disease for two or more intervals you must defend against getting it.

*I have more just trying to figure out how to word them. Otherwise I really like these rules but like has been said before you would have to establish that this is occuring durring gameplay set up. If intervals were basically milestones I think the rules could work because you wouldnt have to worry about rolling every single time. just my thoughts.

EDIT: Thinking about it more it would make sense to categorize the intervals in that way:

Interval: 2 Milestones
             Every Moderate Milestone
             Every other Major Milestone

I like Mutagenic. But I'd rather include infection in the Effects of the diseases in question.

I also considered using milestone intervals, but I decided against doing so because it seemed weird for diseases to suddenly speed up whenever the story gets intense. There are a few things in this game that are measured in minutes and years, and I figured diseases would work as one of those things.

[Lavecki121]

I also considered using milestone intervals, but I decided against doing so because it seemed weird for diseases to suddenly speed up whenever the story gets intense. There are a few things in this game that are measured in minutes and years, and I figured diseases would work as one of those things.

I understand what you mean about it being wierd. But the way I read it is that the interval is when you make a defense roll, not necesarially when you are being attacked by it. So by using the Milestone as an interval shows how often you get a chance to "Cure" yourself.

Though you could easily use the time interval table. The only reason I would say otherwise is because of how loose time is in this system. One exchange could last 2 minutes or 2 seconds. So That would be my only real issue with that.

[Taran]

You only roll a defense when you get attacked.

I'd just use the time chart.  That makes the most sense to me.

[Taran]

@sactaphrax:  we talked about it before because I am running a campaign that has "shadowlands taint" which is kind of like radiation poisoning...the longer you are exposed the more damage you take...and it causes mutations.  I also had creatures that caused diseases that, if you get taken out by the disease, you turn into said creature.  Your Wolf God disease would work very well for this, actually...

O.k...after re-reading your write-up ( I may have skimmed it the first time   ) 

I see that you have shifts of success/failure get added/subtracted.   So when you gain enough shifts to bring the disease to 0, you're cured?

To simplify, why not set it up as an extended test.  you need 'x' shifts to cure the disease.

Common cold:
Interval 1 day
Difficulty 3
Number of shifts required 5

Which I guess is kind of how you already have it.  the symptoms  would be based on the number of shifts left over at every interval....which doesn't really work...and it doesn't really simplify things at all...

What I like about an extended test is that it's a mechanic that already exists.

Which leads me to another idea:

You could say that the number of shifts left over(after each endurance roll)  The disease makes an attack equal to the amount of shifts left over.

That attack can leave consequences.  The worse you do on your endurance checks the more shifts the disease has and more likely to kill you/incapacitate/take you out.  As you succeed, you the disease is less able to hurt you.

I actually like this.  The numbers would have to be balanced.  Fast acting, very deadly diseases would have high number of shifts, short intervals and high Difficulties.

Something not dangerous, but tenatious, like a cold, would have low shifts, medium difficulties and medium to long intervals.

Something that takes a long time to kill you, but is inevitably fatal (like cancer)would have  High difficulty, long intervals but low to medium shifts.

Edit (again)

You don't get the cool Powers list that you drew up, though. (which I'm going to steal for my shadowlands taint). You only get to do consequences. 

[Sanctaphrax]

I'd just use the time chart.

In what way would you use it?

To simplify, why not set it up as an extended test...

I dunno if that'd actually be noticeably simpler. But it could work.

(For what it's worth, this is also using a mechanic that exists already. It's a modified Cat & Mouse contest.)

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that someone's gonna get some use out of this. It'll probably be a long time before I can use this in a game.

[Taran]

For the intervals for making checks.  Although, It might be cool to put extra shifts into time instead of fighting off the disease.
   

To put the disease into "remission". Until a more permanent cure can be found.  It's especially useful for diseases that require specific cures.

The only problem is how the time chart scales...it could be too much.

[Sanctaphrax]

So...how would you use the time chart for the intervals?

Would you just take entries from the chart and use them as interval lengths? That sounds more or less like what I'm doing...

[Taran]

So...how would you use the time chart for the intervals?

Would you just take entries from the chart and use them as interval lengths? That sounds more or less like what I'm doing...

Yup.  It just seems better than milestones.  What do you think of using shifts to offset the next interval?  I'll have to check the chart...but it might not work very well...or would have to be limited somehow.