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> Let's inflict diseases on player characters, Remember D&D 1st edition?
Wounded Ronin
post Mar 14 2009, 03:23 PM
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One of the coolest things every about D&D 1st edition was that if you were playing it right (meaning trying to use each and every rule) you were actually supposed to roll on a monthly basis (IIRC) to see if a character came down with a classic medieval disease. You would then make subsequent rolls within a certain time frame and the character could get better or basically be starting on a slow death.

I thought that was pretty hardcore cool and very evocative of a medieval feeling, especially if there were no pesky clerics with Cure Disease around. And since I've started as a diease investigator a while ago, I myself have seen some extremely sick people, even today, that I guess lots of people nowadays would not likely see on a typical basis in a city.

But when I think about the concept of a shadowrunner with the Squatter lifestyle and eats out of a Stuffer Shack, honestly that guy should get a lot of diseases. Even if we have "future tech" and clonal limbs and stuff what I've learned is that today many people suffer greatly from theoretically curable diseases because they rely on home remedies for an extended period of time, they think that Western medicine is scary and they try to avoid it, they think they know better than the doctor how to take their meds and rationalize all kinds of elaborate weird reasons not to follow treatment as directed ("We're a small people, and Western medicine is so powerful that it would just overwhelm our small bodies. Therefore I'm going to specifically take incomplete doses on my antibiotics on a sporadic basis.") , they're suspicious of authorities and thus their friends avoid "snitiching" on them when someone from public health comes looking for them to find them and offer them free medical care, and some people just seem to avoid seeking medical care no matter how sick they get.

In other words, there's not necessarily any difference between a medieval man who gets a disease and suffers horribly and a current day man who gets a disease and basically doesn't avail himself of modern medicine. The exact same thing would happen to those two people.

I could definitely see a shadowrunner being very suspicious of "the system" and basically ignoring signs and symptoms of a serious disease and not getting the medical treatment he or she needs, and then again there's no reason that the shadowrunner would progress any differently than our archetypal malnourished medieval man. Or if the Shadowrunner gets some kind of antibiotic from a crappy "ripper clinic" he could still screw up the treatment by not taking the antibiotics correctly and then he potentially comes down with a bug that is resistant to the "future medicines".

This could totally happen with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was and still is a nasty disease, and it is airborne. Four drugs were developed that can kick its ass when taken correctly for an extended period of time. But what happened? People all over the world dropped the ball and lots of people did not take treatment correctly. From all those millions of incorrectly administered treatments we started to get resistant strains of tuberculosis and they spread all over the world.

So we had to go back in time, and wheel out older, inferior antibiotics to treat the resistant tuberculosis. They were less effective and had worse side affects. Some people suffer a great deal from taking those drugs, which can include an extremely painful injection on a regular basis. But of course, then around the world people mis-administered these older antibiotics, and what happened?

Now we have tuberculosis strains that are resistant to almost everything we can throw at it. It is called extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XDR. Holy crap, that is bad news. We're talking potentially incurable contagious airborne disease. And it is entirely the creation of people around the world who basically dropped the ball on treatment. I understand that in some countries people with XDR are incarcerated in order to protect public health. I'd urge you to look at the following photo collection: http://xdrtb.org/

So, my point is, even if we have "future medicine", someone who lives a marginalized lifestyle as a shadowrunner would nevertheless be a candidate for getting all kinds of diseases including mutated or resistant versions of the ones we have today which could be resistant against "future medicine". What is more is that OOC meta-gaming aside, someone who chooses to live as a shadowrunner would likely avoid going to get medical treatment for lots of conditions until they became unbearable because he or she would be used to being injured and being in pain and at the same time would probably try to live as much under the radar as possible.

Another thought is that someone who is around flying blood and guts all the time is more likely to get something from aerosolization of body fluids, contact with blood, and so forth. Funky things can happen when you play with someone else's body fluids. I learned last night that although tuberculosis transmission is primarly airborne, there have been rare cases of it being spread cutaneously: http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/119/7_Part_1/594

QUOTE
A 48-year-old, white registered nurse, who was previously healthy, reported suffering a 1-cm superficial laceration of her left forearm. The laceration resulted from a metallic needle, which had previously been inserted into the port of a central-line catheter of a patient with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The lesion oozed a few drops of blood and was immediately washed with water and an iodine solution. Zidovudine (Retrovir, Burroughs Wellcome Co., Research Triangle Park, North Carolina) administration was started within 2 hours of the incident and was continued at a dose of 200 mg every 4 hours. The nurse denied direct contact with the patient's secretions before the injury and did not provide nursing care for this particular patient after her injury. She tested negative for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antibody on that same day.
...
The nurse interrupted her zidovudine therapy after 10 days secondary to a severe headache. During the next 5 weeks, she noted increasing erythema with subsequent abscess formation at the laceration site, along with fevers to 38.9 °C (102 °F). The abscess was incised, and despite treatment with dicloxacillin (Dynapen; Bristol-Meyers-Squibb, New Brunswick, NJ), it failed to heal. Fungal and standard bacterial cultures were repeatedly negative. Six weeks after the incident, a 2-cm, tender left axillary lymph node had developed, and an intradermal, intermediate-strength purified protein derivative showed a positive reaction of 15 mm of induration. The same skin test done 4 months earlier in the nurse had been negative. A chest roentgenogram was normal. Laboratory testing showed a normal complete blood count and a slightly increased Westergren sedimentation rate. A punch biopsy of the lesion showed granulomatous inflammation with Langerhans giant cells and acid-fast bacilli by Fite stain. A culture of the biopsy yielded 43 colonies of M. tuberculosis, sensitive to isoniazid, rifampin, and ethambutol.


So, I'm thinking of a list of diseases with which to slam player characters in the increasingly unlikely event that I ever GM again:

Diseases you've got a random monthly chance of contracting, adjusted up or down for risk factors:

1.) Tuberculosis
2.) Community-acquired pneumonia, could be bacterial, fungal, or whatever
3.) Mutant avian flu
4.) Impetigo
5.) Malaria
6.) Meningitis
7.) Fungal infection of the skin
8.) Parasites in the stomach or intestines
9.) Nasty case of food poisioning
10.) Influenza
11.) Bacterial infection of small scrape or cut, most probably staph, but possibly something exotic like cutaneous tuberculosis
12.) Scrofula, aka "The King's Evil". Player character must go on a quest to France and fondle the rotting exhumed bones of a French king to be cured. Since it's resistant to, y'know, medicine. Technically this would fall under the broad catergory of cutaneous tuberculosis but scrofula is so charmingly medieval...


After exposure to blood or body fluids, roll for:

1.) HIV
2.) Hepatitis

Hmm, I need more research for myself relating to blood borne diseases.


But, that's the idea. D&D 1st edition monthly disease checks. It would help you to role play your character by being gritty and realistic. It could also enhance flavor when a doctor at Seattle General Hospital tells you that if you kill his wife and make it look like an accident, he will in exchange treat your horrific disease.
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Posts in this topic
- Wounded Ronin   Let's inflict diseases on player characters   Mar 14 2009, 03:23 PM
- - hermit   QUOTE But when I think about the concept of a shad...   Mar 14 2009, 03:39 PM
- - Malicant   All such rules does is increase pointless dice rol...   Mar 14 2009, 03:40 PM
- - BIG BAD BEESTE   Heh, infecting PCs with diseases can be fun for th...   Mar 14 2009, 03:53 PM
- - Rotbart van Dainig   O Cell Nanites.   Mar 14 2009, 03:56 PM
- - Snow_Fox   yeah it seems a little over the top, I mean there ...   Mar 14 2009, 04:03 PM
- - Neraph   OP, if you haven't already, check out Augmenta...   Mar 16 2009, 05:27 PM
|- - Rotbart van Dainig   QUOTE (Neraph @ Mar 16 2009, 06:27 PM) (o...   Mar 17 2009, 12:14 PM
- - TBRMInsanity   I suppose if you want to you could create a house ...   Mar 16 2009, 07:37 PM
|- - Neraph   QUOTE (TBRMInsanity @ Mar 16 2009, 02:37 ...   Mar 16 2009, 09:41 PM
- - Method   I kind of like the idea, but then I'm a little...   Mar 17 2009, 01:12 AM
- - BIG BAD BEESTE   Funnily enough, I've never really known a PC t...   Mar 17 2009, 10:19 AM
- - Medicineman   I'm dancing with Hermit here(maybe not as aggr...   Mar 17 2009, 11:57 AM
- - Fuchs   I am with Medizimann and Hermit. If someone had su...   Mar 17 2009, 12:20 PM
- - hermit   QUOTE I sure hope not. You sure get to meet intere...   Mar 17 2009, 01:07 PM
- - suppenhuhn   I think it's horrible gamemastering when a sim...   Mar 17 2009, 01:23 PM
- - kanislatrans   my 2 I wouldn't make it a rule, but would p...   Mar 17 2009, 01:45 PM
- - TBRMInsanity   Maybe my levels are too high, and I think a DocWag...   Mar 17 2009, 02:31 PM
- - nezumi   If I'm reading this correctly, these diseases ...   Mar 17 2009, 04:11 PM
- - Neraph   QUOTE ...one of the players is a Nosferatu with......   Mar 17 2009, 05:16 PM
|- - Method   QUOTE (Neraph @ Mar 17 2009, 10:16 AM) I ...   Mar 17 2009, 06:42 PM
|- - TBRMInsanity   QUOTE (Method @ Mar 17 2009, 12:42 PM) Ag...   Mar 17 2009, 07:05 PM
|- - suppenhuhn   QUOTE (Method @ Mar 17 2009, 07:42 PM) It...   Mar 17 2009, 08:18 PM
|- - Method   QUOTE (suppenhuhn @ Mar 17 2009, 12:18 PM...   Mar 17 2009, 11:05 PM
|- - suppenhuhn   QUOTE (Method @ Mar 18 2009, 12:05 AM) Ac...   Mar 17 2009, 11:29 PM
|- - Method   QUOTE (suppenhuhn @ Mar 17 2009, 04:29 PM...   Mar 18 2009, 04:33 AM
- - fistandantilus4.0   I'd like to see a bit more of this sort of thi...   Mar 17 2009, 09:35 PM
- - cryptoknight   QUOTE (Wounded Ronin @ Mar 14 2009, 09:23...   Mar 17 2009, 09:52 PM
- - Heath Robinson   Factors that should affect your chances of catchin...   Mar 18 2009, 12:21 AM
- - Method   Heath: I like your mechanic, especially because it...   Mar 18 2009, 04:54 AM


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