Anthology Questions

Burning Wheel First Reading
#1

Howdy!

I’ve been enjoying digging into my copy of the Anthology and have a handful of delightful little questions to ask:

  1. How do superficial wounds compound for wound obstacles, treatment, recovery?

    My urge is to say that:

    • The total wound obstacle is +1 Ob, no matter how many superficial wounds you are suffering from.

    • You recover from all superficial wounds at once with an Ob 1 Health test.

  2. Do the obstacle factors for poison type increase the base obstacle for treatment, just like damage type?

  3. When you fail to treat a wound, does the wound increase its permanent record one step in addition to deteriorating one step? That is, does a mistreated moderate wound become a severe wound and also leave the permanent record of a traumatic wound?

#2

That is consistent with the default rules as per Superficial Wounds and +1 Ob on 488 of BWGR. I would imagine that without a stated exception, they would be the same? I do not have a copy of the Anthology yet, though.

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#3
  1. Yes.
  2. Yes.
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#4

Woof. I love how much these new rules put the fear of god and injury in me.

Thanks for the reply!

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#5

Another question!

  1. How does curing diseases work?

    • Are they completely cured by any successful treatment test, regardless of whether the test alleviates all their symptoms?

      • In this case, do the remaining symptoms fade away over time, just as if the disease ran its course?

    • Otherwise, do you have to completely alleviate the symptoms, after which they just never return?

I’m leaning toward the first interpretation, with an affirmative corollary.

#6

Diseases cannot be cured unless by magic or miracle. Otherwise, symptoms can be alleviated until (or if) the duration elapses.

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#7

Characters are made of meat and Will to Live doesn’t guarantee survival anymore, does it? If you get treated, you might die. If you don’t, this might happen:

  1. So, hypothetically, an orc takes a mortal great bow shot to the eye and spends Will to Live. He makes two recovery tests, reaching severe, but hits 0 Health at the same time. This guy:

    • Never heals past severe and retains a –3D wound penalty indefinitely.

    • Is incapacitated because of his zeroed-out B3 Forte, indefinitely.

    • Cannot perform strenuous practice because he’s in recovery, indefinitely.

    • As an orc, is probably going to die of starvation. Or be eaten by other orcs. Any other stock might have a chance to be cared for in their withering condition, but not this guy.

Does all that sound right?

#8

Hello. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I had to carve out some midnight hours to go over the text.

So my read of the sequence on page 25 is that:

  1. Your character suffers a mortal wound
  2. You spend a persona point for Will to Live
  3. You are then guaranteed a recovery test
  4. However, you might prefer to wait to test until you see the results of the treatment test as it could provide advantage dice—of course there’s a chance that this test also just kills you.

I think it’s a more forgiving process than the Olden Timey Mortally Wounded rules. You can reduce MW’s permanent record to nothing with enough MoS.

But okay, looking at your example…maybe I broke something by taxing Health. In traditional BW, Health isn’t reduced by wounds—allowing us to at least attempt high obstacle recovery tests and obviating this problem.

I don’t hate your example, though. Getting penetrated through the eye by a clothyard shaft sounds like a bad deal. And slowly withering and dying of the wound over a year sounds appropriately dramatic to me. Maybe Orco had a chance to write his memoirs…

That said, let me consult with @Thor and make sure I didn’t break anything too badly with the Health tax rule.

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#9

If a fix is needed, perhaps simply forestalling all of the Health Tax until the end of the recovery process would work? Note the tax from the Mortal Wound Recovery tests, but don’t apply them until after you make the last one.

#10

Let’s talk soon. I’m not sure how I feel about it. We haven’t had any failed Recovery tests of that magnitude in playtesting.

We play with Persona Point complications, so in general, if the players have Persona, they spend it on a Complication when taking the wound rather than Will to Live.

#11

What if we added this rule to recovery:
Reduce any stats over their exponent cap by the margin of failure. Adjust Reflexes and Mortal Wound as appropriate.

I feel like it’s missing from the currency cycle of this system as it stands anyway—and it provides an outlet of 6D of margin of failure. But for it to be useful, you have to be willing to drive down a stat in order to save your Health.

#12

Here, I rejiggered Recovery to be clearer and more unified. WTL is on the next page.

Screen Shot 2022-04-10 at 12.10.13 PM
Screen Shot 2022-04-10 at 12.10.13 PM1920×1482 299 KB

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#13

Thank you very much! I’m glad to have provided useful playtest data and the rejiggering is very clear^^

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