RPG System Face Off: Diseases

d-Infinity is taking a look at multiple popular tabletop RPG game systems and judging them on which ones handle certain game aspects best. This time d-Infinity will be judging systems on how well they handle diseases, and the three game systems in question are Pathfinder, D6 Fantasy, and RuneQuest!

Pathfinder

Pathfinder, as expected from a Dungeons & Dragons derivative, is very verbose in its description of disease and the free online SRD contains over 50 specific diseases! A character’s ability to fight off disease is governed by their Fortitude Save score, and a successful first Fortitude Save means the character’s immune system fought the disease off completely while a failure means the character is infected – makes sense so far. Some diseases are harder to fight off than others, and this is governed by the disease’s Difficulty Class (DC) – sure, a cold is relatively easy to get over and Ebola not so much. There is an onset period before an infected character starts to suffer the ill effects of a disease, which can vary from hit point damage, to ability score damage, to status conditions.

D6 Fantasy

The D6 Fantasy SRD does not have a section dedicated to diseases but it is mentioned specifically (by name only) in the “Damage Resistance Total”, “Medical Diagnosing”, “Immunity”, and the “Stamina (Physique)” sections. The effects of a disease are staved off by a character’s Stamina skill, which can be boosted by the Immunity advantage. The difficulty score for fighting off a disease is determined by its lethality and dosage (botulism is given as an example, but no specific mention is made of how the difficulty is calculated). Diseases deal damage and reduce a character’s damage resistance, botulism is given as an example again (it deals 4D damage) but no mention is made of how to derive this value either.

RuneQuest

RuneQuest does have a section dedicated to disease that, while not as full of examples as Pathfinder’s, is very thorough with explaining the effects and components of disease. The most interesting part of RuneQuest’s disease mechanic is that it uses opposed skill rolls, the disease’s potency against the character’s resilience. Characters must make resilience checks, diseases make potency checks, and the winner of the opposed roll determines whether the character becomes more ill or gets better. Using an opposed skill check as opposed to a difficulty score gives the disease credit for the living organism it is. The first opposed check can potentially fight off the disease completely and failure means that the character is infected. The disease’s delay determines how often the infected character must make additional resilience checks to resist falling further under the effects of the disease. Negative consequences for diseases include physical damage, characteristic score damage, skill damage, and special effects.

Best System

The winner here, though by a tight margin, is RuneQuest. It includes enough details on how diseases work and enough pre-constructed examples to guide the creation of new diseases and incorporate them easily into game play. Pathfinder comes in very close, but by using a set difficulty class instead of RuneQuest’s opposed skill check it just doesn’t feel as dynamic as a disease should. D6 Fantasy could not compete with the other two, not because it didn’t provide many examples, but because there was no clear explanation of how diseases should be constructed for the system or even how to use them effectively.