Down/Out/Dead: A Death & Dismemberment Variant

​D&D has struggled to find a good answer for "what happens when my character hits 0 HP?" The original answer "you die" leads to a lot of character deaths at 1st level, and eliminates a lot of potential drama with trying to recover/defend a downed and wounded ally, being wounded and captured, etc., so even groups who are comfortable with a high-lethality game have looked for alternatives. Conversely, many of the common alternatives, such as unconsciousness at 0 HP and death at -10 or 5th edition's death saves make the characters too resilient: character death is technically possible, but you need to work pretty hard to make it happen.

Various alternatives exist: a single saving throw at 0 HP is one perfectly good option. Two-tier HP systems, where characters have a lot of ablative HP (commonly called something like Grit, Sweat, etc.) and a small amount of "real" HP representing physical damage (Flesh, Blood, etc.), with death at 0 real HP, is another good one. Bucklers & Backswords rolls the chance of death into weapon type, which interacts nicely with Elizabethan surgery – in a rapier duel it's quite probably for the winner to end up bleeding out from a mortal wound like Inigo Montoya. Other games have adapted some technology from The One Ring and/or various PbtA-derived systems, where "Wounded" is a condition you can get and "Dying" occurs if you're Wounded twice. The most popular alternative in OSR games however is probably the Death & Dismemberment table.

First used in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, a Death & Dismemberment table is essentially a big list of nasty wounds that you roll on when you take a hit while at 0 HP. They have a lot of knobs to turn in terms how the results are calculated, how specific vs general the results are, and how gory it is, but the general upshot is that a Death & Dismemberment table secretly *increases* player survivability (compared to death at 0 HP anyway) while making combat *feel* nastier and deadlier. It also introduces long-term or permanent injuries, which can set a game's tone and introduce complications into the paradigm of "surviving PCs get stronger over time”.  Characters are likely to accumulate scars and wounds that can lead to them feeling grizzled and tired as well as dangerous and capable. A really bad wound can also lead to character retirement rather than death, which can add a lot of interest to a campaign as former PCs become friends, allies, or simply local color to the world.

So far, so good. However, I’ve never been fully satisfied with a death & dismemberment table outside of a Warhammer game. They’re honestly hard to write: part of the appeal of the mechanic is having a big chart of gruesome wounds that a player can tensely roll on after taking a bad hit, but the more specific the table is the longer it becomes. Rules for differentiating various shades of injury to various parts of the body compound (assuming your plan isn’t to give up and leave it all entirely to improvisation). You can write a good general purpose one and then think “but what about bludgeoning weapons?” or “surely fire will need its own table” and before you realize it you’re buried in charts, all minutely detailing bad things happening to bodies, wondering where it all went wrong.

The reason this works for Warhammer, by the way, is that they’ve leaned into it. That’s Right, the chapter on combat has 15 pages of critical hits, welcome to the Grim Darkness son. That kind of grotty maximalism feels at home in WHFRP and 40k, but it can be jarring in a more streamlined rule set.

So I find myself exploring ways of getting the effects of a good Death & Dismemberment table without the downsides and page count. The injury system in my Hogwarts game is one such attempt. The one below was written with the GLOG in mind (Lair of the Lamb version), which means that you could bolt it on to your B/X of choice without too much trouble.

Damage and Dying: Down, Out, Dead

HP represents your ability to mitigate bodily harm. When you run out of HP you start taking Wounds.

 

Whenever you take damage while at 0 HP, you instead gain a Wound Die – a d6 – and roll all of your accumulated Wound Dice. 

• If the result is 6+, you are Down 

• If the result is 9+, you are Out

• If the result is 12+, you are Dead

 

Each additional Wound taken while at 0 HP gives you +1 Wound Dice.

 

When you’re Down, you’re off your feet and badly injured. You can choose to lay low, and you’ll be safe as long as nothing else attacks you. If you take an action while you’re Down, roll your Wound Dice after you complete it. If you roll 6+ while you’re Down, you get an additional Wound Die as you aggravate your injury.

When you’re Out, you’re unconscious. If you are dealt further damage while you’re Out, you die.

Healing

Resting restores HP at the usual rate for your system, while Wounds clear at the rate of 1/week. 

Magical healing restores [Dice] Wounds and [Sum] HP. So a Cure Light Wounds spell removes 1 Wound Die and restores 1d6+1 HP.