God Slayers: TTRPG - Character Vitals

Shoutout to BorderlineAxo for cleaning up my messy character sheet! It’s still a rough draft, but it’s a nicer-looking one at least, thanks to them!

Vitals

Alright so, Vitals! After Attributes, the second most important thing on the character sheet is your Vitals. These are what give you a picture of your character’s health. The three primary Vitals are Hunger, Thirst, and Rest. Now, in a lot of games like D&D, it’s kind of silly for you to track something like your character’s hunger or thirst. When you can just drink out of any running stream, or buy some dried meat at any town for a few copper, these things are trivial to satisfy, and it’s a waste of a player’s time to fret too much about them. In Kuserra, however, I actively encourage the GM to starve you and deprive you of basic needs like clean water and safe, comfortable rest. In Kuserra, you can’t just make a quick survival check, succeed, and turn over a rock to find a fat juicy rat cowering underneath it. Such a check isn’t even allowed, because there’s nothing under that rock. There’s nothing under ANY rock. Food is better at hiding than that. If you want to find any food in Kuserra, you have to work for it. That juicy rat is waiting for you at the end of a multi-session adventure, you’ll be risking your lives to chase after it, and when you finally catch it, you’ll have to split it with your companions (or fight over it). Even if you do manage to gather a big pile of watts, there’s no guarantee that food is even available for sale in the market that week. It all depends on when the last trade caravan came in and whether or not all the supplies have already been bought up by other hungry people. Scarcity is the name of the game in Kuserra, and as such, you’ll likely go days without eating. That’s why I ask players to track their Vitals.

It was important for me not to overcomplicate them, however. Health and nutrition are complicated topics when you start peeling back the layers, so I’ve done my best to keep Vitals as simple as I can. There's a balance to be struck between reality, fantasy, and gameplay, and the whole point is to abstract these things for the smoothest possible gameplay. Players should not be constantly updating their Vitals, nor is there a reason to try and balance what you eat. Food is food, even if it’s a toxic mudloaf (though there’s other consequences for eating every random poisoned lump). The primary three Vitals are there to be updated maybe once or twice per session, sitting as a reminder for what you need to do to keep your character alive.

Hunger, Thirst and Rest

So I guess I’ll start by explaining the primary three Vitals, Hunger, Thirst, and Rest. These all increase by 1 in the morning of each in-game day, and your goal is to keep them all as low as possible. You’re effectively only tracking the number of entire days that have passed without your character taking care of their needs. Hunger can be taken care of by eating food, Thirst is taken care of by drinking water, and Rest is taken care of by, that’s right, resting.

To the left of each of these three trackers is an extra checkbox. This represents if the Vital has been Satisfied for that day. If a Vital has been Satisfied, the next time it would increase (each morning), you simply erase this checkmark rather than increasing the Vital. Simply satisfying a need doesn’t reduce the points you’ve accumulated, but it does buy you extra time.

Most things you find in Kuserra will only Satisfy your Vitals. Scraps of food satisfy Hunger, a swig of water will satisfy Thirst, a quick nap will satisfy Rest. In order to actually reduce your Vital scores, you’ll need to do something more substantial.

So let’s take Hunger for example. In the morning of the day, having not Satisfied your Hunger the previous day, it increases by 1. By the end of that day, let’s say you and your companions manage to track down that tasty rat I mentioned earlier. I’ll say it’s a fat enough rat to provide a Full Meal for one person, which reduces their Hunger by 2 in addition to Satisfying it. If you want to divide it up between two people, that can count as two Half Portions, which each reduce Hunger by only 1 (and also Satisfy). Finally, you could divide that rat up amongst four people, dividing it into four Scraps. Scraps only Satisfy Hunger, but that can be important to delay something that’s much worse. That’s all there is to it! Cutting Scraps up into any smaller pieces will not satisfy anyone’s Hunger.

Sickness

Now, that thing I mentioned that’s much worse is Sickness (WIP name, but idk, it might stick). Sickness is a long-term multipurpose progress-towards-death tracker. It doesn’t normally increase on its own, in fact it normally decreases slowly, but neglecting your Vitals, and exposure to many other things like poison, disease, or radiation can increase it quite rapidly. As your Sickness tracker fills up, everything you want to do starts to get harder starting past 10 points, as you just gain a flat +1 Threat to everything for each point of Sickness past 10. After 20 points you fall into a coma, and at 25, you’re dead. There’s no way to increase this limit, but there are ways to slow the rate at which you gain Sickness from various sources, and there are ways to increase the rate at which it recovers on its own. Certain items and drugs can also help reducing Sickness, but, again, it’s Kuserra. You might get lucky, but don’t rely on finding them.

So if you're trying to survive by eating poisonous dirtcake all the time, it might Satisfy your Hunger for a day, but you'll gain at least one point (maybe two) of Sickness for each noxious loampastry you consume, and that'll add up quickly.

Pain

Alright, so next I’ll explain Pain. I don’t know if this is truly a Vital or if it’s sort of its own subsystem though. As I’ve thrown Hit Points right in the garbage where they belong (because Hit Points are a garbage system that belongs in the trash, gods I HATE THEM SO MUCH,) Pain is a type of damage your character will receive in various forms. (Albeit balancing this will take some time.) Now I know an argument could be made that Pain is just a different way of doing Hit Points, and I might concede that there is some merit to that argument. But the flavor is very different I think. Accumulating Pain is not the same as subtracting a random number from your arbitrary pool of red goo points. When someone punches you, it hurts, that’s Pain. When you touch a hot stove or step on broken glass, that’s Pain. You accumulate Pain, and the more Pain you have the more it SUCKS. This just makes sense to me. I’ve never known how to roleplay a character that is sitting at 1 Hit Point, because I’ve never figured out what the hell that means. I’ve been stabbed through the neck, so… my red goo is low, but I’m still totally 100% fine and capable of everything so long as I don’t lose any more of my red goo bar? Usually I end up ignoring my red goo pool because it’s a completely flavorless abstraction of health. It’s much easier for me to imagine a character that’s one point away from passing out due to Pain. At the end of the day, maybe it’s just a change in words and a reversal of the approach, but I think the flavor of game mechanics is very important for preserving the mindset we need for roleplaying.

Hit Points has become meaningless to me. And while Hit Points attempts to abstract all forms of damage as red goo, I’ve made an important distinction, I think, between Pain and Wounds. Pain in this system is only Pain and Pain alone. Pain alone does not kill you. You can pass out due to Pain, but you’ll sleep it off. Any superficial injuries, cuts, scratches, burns, biting your tongue, that’s all stuff that can be resolved as just a point of Pain. It goes away on its own (most of the time). Wounds are different. Wounds are very bad. Wounds need to be treated and can confer permanent points of Pain until they heal. Wounds get Infected and kill you. Don’t get Wounds.

Stress

Finally, I want to touch upon Stress, which is still technically one of your characters Vitals, kinda. Some gamers I’ve noticed love playing around with mental health and stress mechanics in games, and I’m one of them. Others are kinda bothered by it, so I’ve decided to make Stress and insanity all part of its own modular subsystem to be engaged with as much or as little as you want. You can ignore it if you want, or you can engage with it deeply and have an entire eldritch horror post-apocalypse campaign where the biggest threat to the players is just straight up going insane. Psychology is too complex of a topic to effectively abstract in gameplay terms in a realistic way, so I decided to approach it from the perspective of sort of a Darkest Dungeon or Call of Cthulhu-esque fantasy of a character being slowly driven to madness. Too much Stress causes Trauma, Trauma causes you to gain more Stress much faster via repeated exposure. As there’s no therapists in Kuserra, Trauma can be managed (poorly, I might add) via Delusions. Delusions represent a permanent, severe break from reality, ergo madness, but taking one can reduce your Trauma down to manageable levels. This mechanic is taken from the idea that many severe mental illnesses are born from the brain’s inability to cope with extremely stressful stimuli. It requires some tweaking still, but I’m pretty happy with where it’s at so far. Accumulating too many Delusions won’t directly cause you to lose the game, but they can certainly make your character increasingly more difficult to play, to the extent where they might just get themselves killed or you might decide to lay them to rest and reroll.

So that pretty much covers a huge chunk of the character sheet. Next week I’ll tell you all about Wounds and the many ways they can kill you! Cuz they will. Wounds are probably how your character will die, long before you have any chance to die of thirst.