Poison & Disease Resistance

[Legendsmiths]

It's pretty obvious how to handle immunity, but what about resistance?

 

Poison I am not so concerned about, as poisons generally affect everyone, some survive and some don't, but everyone suffers (unless they're immune).

 

Disease however is a different story. People can encounter a virus once, not be affected, only to encounter it again a year later and get sick. Diseases in Hero are typically modeled as NND Drains and NND RKAs. This results in everyone being affected everytime.

 

Imposing a Resistance Roll seems appropriate, but does it make sense in terms of doing things hero-style.

 

You could apply an activation roll to Immunity, be it a set amount or a CON roll of some kind. But this doesn't vary by disease, nor represent that some strains are stronger than others.

 

So, what do you guys think? What's the best approach?

[Trebuchet]

I'm a bit vague on what you're trying to accomplish here. In heroic fiction, disease is not very heroic. So unless you have an overwhelming need to construct an attack as a disease, I'd just wing it as a plot device. Expose the characters to the disease vector, then either roll a CON roll or consider their Power SFX to determine whether or not they get the disease.

 

I did something like this in a recent Champions adventure I ran, when the heroes were attacked by zombie gorillas at their base. I determined beforehand that any zombie bites that caused BODY damage to a character would fester within a few days and make the character deathly ill unless antibiotics were given to the victim. That would have been bad news since three days later the heroes were deep in the Congo, and a sick teammate would have suffered considerable penalties to his Powers and other combat attributes. (I would have cut their CV and END in half to start.)

[Guest Keneton]

I would likely treat diseases as transformation attacks with delayed effect and NND does body. The body would recover based on the character's recovery which is ina lot of ways much like an immune sytem. If the transform overwhelamed the recovery the victim would eventually get sick and die. If not he or she would eventually fight it off, but during that time have a harder time fighting off other infections.

 

If you wnat to show a greadual weakening along with the disease, add a linked delayed effect drain to CON and or REC along with this effect.

 

My 2 ep.

[Legendsmiths]

In a heroic setting where disease is real, what I want to avoid is simply having disease be a straight effect like poison.

 

I use the threat of disease like I would any other challenge, and it adds a sense of reality to the game.

 

I can simply add a resistance roll to every disease, but I was more concerned about how to represent disease resistance. If 10 pts makes you immune to all disease, is it possible to create a talent that gives you a bonus, and is it worthwhile?

 

Another way to handle it would be to build resistance as Armor & Power Defense, vs. Poison or Disease only. Even though these powers are usually NND (immunity), GM fiat could allow the defenses to apply since they are simply a graduated form of immunity..

 

Armor is 3/2pts or 1/1 DEF.

Power DEF is 1/1 pt.

-2 limitation for Poison or Diseas only.

 

6 pts of Resistance would then cost 8 points, not much of an improvement over Immunity.

 

Thoughts?

[Monolith]

You could easily add a Talent for this just like the Resistance Talent currently works. For each 1 or 2 points the character could get a +1 to their CON Roll to not catch the disease. More powerful diseases would then purchase minuses to the CON Roll. So a cold might be -0, the flu -1, the pox -5, etc. You would just list out all the diseases and what their minuses to the CON Roll would be.

[Guest Keneton]

Another way might be immunity to disease, requires a Con Roll.

 

Monolith's method is simple but elegent.

[Legendsmiths]

Monolith: that's more or less what I have now. The question is how to cost out the penalty for more severe diseases, not that it really makes much of a difference.

 

My thought was a base of 12 - an Activation Roll. Therefore, a +4 CON roll disease would be a -2 lim. a -3 CON roll would be -1/4, and -4 would be without a limitation. This works since disease are so expensive anyway (NND and such).

[Monolith]

Originally posted by mudpyr8

Monolith: that's more or less what I have now. The question is how to cost out the penalty for more severe diseases, not that it really makes much of a difference.

 

My thought was a base of 12 - an Activation Roll. Therefore, a +4 CON roll disease would be a -2 lim. a -3 CON roll would be -1/4, and -4 would be without a limitation. This works since disease are so expensive anyway (NND and such).

I would just make it part of the defense for the NND. The defense would be appropriate LS: Immunity or CON Roll -5, for example. Then allow the players to buy the Talent Disease Resistance to give them a greater plus to the roll.