Psi-Wars diseases as Afflictions

 So, awhile back, I introduced an alternate disease system, to make diseases more usable in a more "narrative" game where tracking HP day by day is less interesting.  I've been working on psychic powers, particularly Necrokinesis and Psychic Vampirism and they, plus some Communion powers, make sense as a source of disease.  In classic GURPS, each disease would be made as a bespoke thing, but because my version of disease is generic, in the sense that all trivial diseases work more or less the same way, and all major diseases work the same way, and so on, then it should be possible to apply a generic disease as an affliction.

How, then, would we price it?  There are two possible ways.  First, we can determine what a disease would look like in RAW GURPS and work out its cost (on the theory that my system is an abstraction of the RAW), and we can work out what a literal Affliction using my new rules would look like, and decide which direction we'd like to go.

Psi-Wars Diseases Part II: Psychic Diseases

 The prime impetus behind my exploration of medicine wasn't just to determine how technological medicine worked, but how it balanced with esoteric medicine in Psi-Wars.  If medicine could cure you of all ills in a day, what benefit could there be of going to a Keleni temple, or seeing a Ranathim Navare healer? Just check in at your local hospital.

Obviously Esoteric Medicine in Psi-Wars is vastly more capable than it is in the real world.  Psychic Healers can wipe away illness with a wave of their hands.  But that only really helps the Keleni. What about other healing traditions, such as that of the Ranathim, which don't have access to miraculous psychic cures? Well, the obvious niche for Esoteric Medicine (and exorcism) is in dealing with psychic diseases.  We've already established this as a thing in Psi-Wars. If ghosts and Broken Communion can afflict you with infectious diseases that only Esoteric Medicine can cure, then surely we have a niche for Esoteric Medicine!  But if that's going to work, we need to establish our psychic diseases in as much detail as we do our physical diseases.

This turned out easier said than done.  I was surprised by the level of detail one can get into when delving into psychic diseases, from diseases that doctor's claim are normal medical conditions that are simply hard to cure, but that quakes claim are easy, to forms of possession and forms of madness. I cobbled them together here in a decent list.

One of the other things that popped out was Corruption itself.  See, Psi-Wars uses the Corruption mechanic of GURPS Horror with Broken Communion.  The idea is that you can slowly ruin yourself as you ruin the world, and the cost of Broken Communion is this Corruption.  But I find in practice players run screaming from even a single point of corruption because maybe it'll reduce their point costs.  That's an acceptable loss in a horror game, but not an action game.  It's also painfully slow.  To lose even a single point would take an average of 6-8 Minor Blessings from Broken Communion, never mind the means people have to cleanse them.  Which makes Corruption a trait to track, often for many, many sessions, and will likely have no dramatic payoff.  What if, instead, we allowed Psychic Diseases to stand-in for Corruption?  You cast some miracles of Broken Communion, go nuts for a session, and then it's done.  You get some cool drama and a consequence, but it's non-permanent.

This also forced me to look, again, at mutations.  I'm surprised how often mutation and transformation comes up in Psi-Wars.  It doesn't seem to be a thing you see as much in Star Wars as, say, 40k.  But then again, I suppose the dark side does "warp people" in Star Wars, just not as freakishly as it does in 40k.  Even so, I had to wrestle with Devouring Taint, whose whole mechanic is faster corruption.  I went with Uncontrollable Transformations into subtle(-ish) mutant racial templates.  Hopefully this seems plausible and fitting.

Without further ado:

Psi-Wars Diseases Part 1: The Physical Diseases

 Alright, so here's a project I've wanted done for a long time.  This likely isn't complete, as there are several diseases I could include here, and when I rework the psychic diseases and finish up my medicine rules, some of these might change, but the final version will be on the wiki somewhere.

This is essentially a "worked version" of the rules I posted yesterday.  Those rules work fine for a modern world setting, where you can talk about "Cholera" and "the flu" but what about when you're in space? Well, then are we talking the Andromeda Strain or the Purple Polka Dotted Pox?  Some names to toss around might be nice, and how disease shapes the setting might be nice to know as well.

In particular, the Umbral Rim is famous for its diseases.  This comes from the fact that it has filthy aliens in it, but it also comes from the presence of the Gaunt, who often act as carriers, and even have a special trait for it. When I started working on them, I wanted a list of diseases to introduce, but that proved too much work.  Well, now I have it! They can give you anything from the Umbral Pestilence to the Centauri Sniffles!

I've also included "Terminal Illness." I like the idea of a Terminal Illness: there's a dramatic weight to a heroic character that is dying of cancer and knows it.  I do agree with critics of the disadvantage that point out that it hardly matters to  the player when the character dies, as they'll just make a new character and keep playing.  However, having cancer (or leprosy or tuberculosis or AIDS) might shape other things about your character, other disadvantages that you can explore. So the terminal illnesses here treat "time left to live" as a feature: Your character will die at some dramatically appropriate moment that you and the GM both agree to.  But in the meantime he'll have a persistent cough or he'll have open sores or he'll have moments of intense chest pain, etc.  These are just disadvantage bundles to give your character some in-setting disease or illness.

I did need to play with some disadvantages to make this work, though.  The first was Chronic Pain.  I like the idea of it, but I find it limited.  Mild pain is effectively the Moderate Pain affliction, Severe Pain is effectively the Severe Pain affliction, and Agonizing Pain is effectively the Terrible Pain affliction.  With some wiggling around, it seems reasonable to substitute other afflictions: what about a Chronic Cough? That's basically the same as Mild Pain, and so is worth -5 as a base.

The second was Cardiac Stress.  The idea here was that we could treat the limitation as a straight disadvantage.  However, Cardiac Stress assumes the character is using something.  What's he using if we give it to them as a raw disadvantage? Everything? So I said "if you're under stress" and took the limitation value and halved it as a disadvantage value.  It's a back of the envelope guess here.

Nobody Takes Resist Disease

 Quite some time ago, I worked on "Tech Infrastructure" posts for Psi-Wars, small things like how electricity worked or how computers worked. Most of it was in preparation for my stint in GURPS Vehicles.  One of the things that I wanted to work on, but never got around to, was medicine, and awhile back one of my Secret Council urged me to finish that up. With my work on Xen brought to the forefront by a Bounty Hunter poll, I started work on that. And then I ran into a problem.

Disease.

See, Psi-Wars sets at the nexus between sci-fi and fantasy.  On the one hand, it's the sort of setting where you expect to go into a med-lab, get bio-scanned and then sit in a regeneration chamber for an hour.  On the other hand, it's also the sort of setting where you might expect an attractive alien witch-doctor to tend to your wounds with an herbal poultice and by casting the demons out of you.  This meant I needed to explore both how Bio-Tech handles disease, and how the Heal advantage handles disease, whereupon I learned that they handle it in the roughest way possible: there's some penalty and some cost based on very vague guidelines (1 fatigue for "the sniffles" while -15 for "bone marrow cancer.").  In fact, in general, I found all the guidelines on disease to be wildly vague.  You can find about 5 or so defined diseases, and all the rest are left "up to the GM."

This isn't the first time I've wrestled with disease.  I had a backer who commissioned a treatise on disease, which ended up as a backer bonus for those who want a disease system.  But as I worked on handling disease in Psi-Wars, I noticed something:

Nobody Takes Resist Disease