Disease House Rules

This is a page about diseases in the role playing game Marvel Super Heroes (a game sometimes referred to as FASERIP), a game being run by James. Normally I wouldn't care about this at all, except one of the early villains in Super Saturday has some serious, don't-mess-with-me disease powers. So it's come up and I find myself trying to find a solution to this problem.

The Existing Rule on Diseases Says:

Sickness. A hero's Health can be reduced by sickness, too (even super heroes catch the flu). Sicknesses come in two tipes: fatal and non-fatal. A fatal illness reduces the hero's Health by a certain number of points every week until he dies or is cured. Non-fatal illnesses last a short time (usually less than a week), reduce the hero's Health once, and go away if he gets plenty of rest, drinks lots of fluids , and listens to his mom's advice. I'll tell you more about disease when you need to know - hope it's not too soon. [Presumably this suggests different adventures or character write-ups could alter how these rules are meant to work.]

Campaign Book, page 8.

James, What's Wrong with that Rule?

Handling fatal diseases by making them a weekly, fixed damage amount is very tricky.

Most super heroes in this game have a Health score in the range between 60 and 140; a few special cases lie outside this range but they're rare. A fatal disease is supposed to be pretty bad-ass, but you don't wanna kill someone in a single week. So, for example, a Monstrous fatal disease would do 75 points of damage and kill some of the weaker characters straight away. That's no fun.

But you can't set the damage for a fatal disease too low, either, because heroes heal extremely quickly. Remember that "[a]n injured or sick hero regains Helath points equal to his current Endurance rank number every day. This number is doubled if the hero rests in bed all day, and tripled if he is under a doctor's care or in a hospital." Battle Book, page 5 (emphasis added). This means that a character with Excellent (20) Endurance will heal 20 points of Health each day, or 140 over the course of a week - and that's without bedrest or hospitalization. So if he takes 40 points of damage from Mad Cow disease first thing Monday morning, he'll be in perfect Health by Wednesday morning - or by the end of Monday if he takes a sick day and stays in bed.

James, What Do the Advanced Rules Have to Say?

Actually, I really like how they handled it. The idea is that having a disease causes you to roll to see if you lose Endurance ranks, exactly as if you were dying. You're still conscious; you can still do things. But you're wasting away and if your Endurance bottoms out, you die.

A major disease has a cycle of 1-10 months, during which time the character must make weekly Endurance FEATs. Failing any FEAT results in loss of one Endurance rank. If that rank drops below Feeble, the character dies.

Judges Book, pages 12-13. It isn't clear how this interacts with the rule that heroes recover one lost Endurance rank per week, or per day of hospital care (see Players Book, page 32), but presumably that doesn't apply when a guy is still getting clobbered by the Swine Flu or something.

What are some options here?

1. As the Basic Rules: if you contract a fatal disease, you take fixed damage every week until cured. You heal at the regular rate.

2 As the Basic Rules, but with slowed healing. If you contract a fatal disease, you take fixed damage every week until cured. You heal at one rate slower: no healing is possible if you go about your daily business; you heal equal to your current Endurance rank per day of bed rest; you heal double your Endurance rank per day of hospitalization.

3. As the Advanced Rules: if you contract a fatal disease, you must make weekly Endurance feats, and failure means you temporarily lose a rank of Endurance, which could eventually kill you.

4. Some other option

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License