My Life As A Gamer: You Got Man-To-Man Combat In My Wargame (Part Five)

(Citations from the Player's Handbook (PHB) and Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition (AD&D1e) as needed.)

(Monday's post is here, and Tuesday's is here, and Wednesday's is here, and yesterday's is here.)

Introduction

Be it from wounds in battle, injuries from accidents or environmental dangers, or contraction (or infliction) of disease sooner or later your man is going to need to recover from these maladies and there won't be enough magic on hand to trivialize it. Furthermore, your spell-casters need to rest before deciding once more what spells they're going to have at the ready.

For those used to later editions, this seems odd; there's always enough magic on hand to make this irrelevant. That's not the case in AD&D1e; nowhere else but this intersection of circumstances so often misunderstood and unappreciated- and has been for decades.

We're going to start with spell-casting specifically to show how and why magic is not always available, and that will allow a transition to the natural recovery rules to address the times when players must do so when magic is not available.

Magic

Spell-casters do not have unfettered spell-casting access. They are required to get a full night of restful sleep, followed by proper nourishment, to prepare their minds for spell memorization. (PHB p. 40).

All spell-casters are required significant time in memorization. Each spell memorized takes 15 minutes per Spell Level. A spell-caster memorizing one 3rd, two 2nd, and three 1st level spells will spend two and a half hours in focused memorization, during which time he can do nothing else.

All spell components are mandatory; a caster cannot use a spell demanding verbal components if he cannot speak, or somatic components if he cannot move, or material components if he lacks the specific item(s)- or cannot use them as required.

A spell-caster without free use of his limbs or voice, or robbed of material goods (including spellbooks for Magic-User/Illusionist spell-casting) has diminished or suppressed capacity to use magic at all. (ibid)

A spell-caster able to freely use magic faces the opportunity cost that using magic to heal wounds or cure maladies instead of addressing other concerns possesses; the Dungeon Master (DM) is under no obligation to just allow players to hole up and do full recoveries with a hand-wave. That Cleric or Druid may opt to forgo magical healing for some other form of protection or utility that is more important at that time.

Combined, a party may not use magic because it either lacks the means or faces more pressing matters and as a result afflicted characters will need to rely on natural recovery until they are fit or the spell-casters are able to address the problem.

Wounds

Recovering Hit Points also requires a full rest; no strenous or stressful activity allowed (this would include spell memorization by definition). (DMG p. 82)

The scheme is simple enough to comprehend. It's 1 HP/day, with a weekly bonus or penalty by low/high Constitution (CON) score if applicable, and a maximum duration of four weeks.

Having done this for real a few times, I can confirm that this is an abstraction, but a useful and welcome one. So long as you can stay clean and rest properly, you're good in a month or less of downtime no matter what. That's a good rule.

Then there's the Zero HP Rule (ibid), or as some say "Have you mastered English Grammar?" due to the confusion born of the lack of same that this rule caused over the years.

The confusion comes from misreading the first sentance:

"When any creature is brough to 0 hit points (optionally as low as -3 hit points if from the same blow which brought the total to 0), it is unconscious."

That's exactly zero. No more, no less, in one shot. That parenthetical side is as described, optional, and not the default. Any blow, by default, that drops a target below zero kills the target. This matters due to what comes next.

It is only if that "exactly to zero" clause is met that the long-established custom of "bleeding out to -10 over the following Rounds" arose. This is a corner-case rule. Most of the time this is not the case; someone in a position to take wounds is far more likely to outright die than get put down and slowly bleed out.

Those who are put down in this manner and are rescued in time then get harsher recover terms: 1d6 Turns in a coma, followed by a minumum of a week in full bed rest (ibid) and those rescued at -6 or below are at the DM's mercy for further consequences such as severed limbs or scarred flesh.

Disease

Campaigning isn't an afternoon in a well-kept park. In addition to getting injured, one faces the threat of illness- including parasites.

At the DM's discretion characters face monthly checks for contracting disease when in favorable conditions, weekly when highly favorable and when exposed to carriers in manners that could spread the malady.

This is a % roll, with a low base chance, and it will stay low if players do very obvious things to avoid needless risk: cook your food, keep up hygiene, clean your water, avoid the sick, increase vigilance in warm/hot as well as humid conditions, etc. The catch is that you roll every time you're exposed; if you're rolling a 2% chance a hundred times or more, you're going to fail sooner or later simply by inviting constant dice rolls.

Recovery from infection requires treatment--the specifics determined by the DM--but nonetheless also requires full rest from the patient, and barring magical remedy a patient must step down from More Bad to Less Bad before full recovery is possible.

Availability

Even a most literal employment of the DMG's tables reveal that Clerics and Druids are far outnumbered by the population at-large. This is as true of men as it is of monsters. The availability of magical treatment of injury and illness, therefore, is subject to forces far more impersonal and uncaring than any god or government- reflected in abstract form by means of charging for spell-casting by such NPCs.

Therefore, especially early on, one can expect that resorting to natural recovery will be required- if not for your man, then for those under his command.

The wise will seek to build out their own capacity, or to ally with those who have, in order to secure the resources needed to recovery swiftly. (It's why your man can keep an Alchemist on staff.)

The successful will account for this as part of their logistics calculations and plan accordingly. Secure camps as they go, stockpiles of materials, maintaining personnel to handle the wounded, much like Roman and Chinese legions did in eras long past.

Commentary

The wargamers that know how to win campaigns are nodded sagely right now. They see that it is not enough to win the fight; it is necessary to recover swiftly after the fact, to replenish spent materials and take care of those wounded or taken ill in your service, so that victory today doesn't turn into defeat tomorrow- the tragedy of Pyrrhus, for whom "Pyrrhic Victory" is named.

AD&D1e forces players to handle this if they want to succeed. This is the part of wargaming that too many dismiss, as proper campaigning isn't done as much as it should, so it is not surprising that RPG play lacks it also to the detriment of the hobby and its participants.

Conducting combat in places favorable to disease or infection makes getting wounded even more dangerous; disease killed as much or more than combat in pre-Modern warfare. That Black or Green Dragon lair is now a lot more dangerous than you thought.

Combined, all of these factors contribute to the phenomenon of one's characters being forced into mandatory downtime between adventures or battles above and beyond things like Training when leveling up, travel over distance, and spell research/item creation.

Which brings me to the end of this week's series. The weekend's posts will be about other things; come Monday we'll get into that downtime discussion and how fundamental it is to proper and successful campaign play.