Xaosseed 2-24 Table for Scars
2021-10-05

Xaosseed 2-24 Table for Scars

The posts Oh, Injury! by Sandra and What are Hit Points? by Grumpy Wizard put me in a "lingering injury" mood.

The two posts propose or point at Lingering Injury or Death and Dismemberment tables. I've been using the 1d100 Scars table from Wolves of God by Kevin Crawford. I reproduced it here and added a "slice" column to indicate the part of the pie each scar gets.

There was a third post that inspired me last week, Hidden Depths Table by Xaosseed. He had this elegant idea of a 2 to 24 ranged encounter table whose probabilities can be modulated by changing the dice set rolled. In the end (and at the beginning), one places the less probable encounters, and in the middle (the top of the bell curve, one places the most probable encounters), the modulation determines how tall the bell gets.

Those Xaosseed 2-24 Tables, could they be used for modulated scar tables?

By taking a look at the "heatmap" for them, unreachable slots may be seen for 3d8, 4d6, and 6d4. That can be leveraged.

I went on and made a first version of a scar table using a Xaosseed 2-24 table.

Since Kevin Crawford's scar table has 22 entries and Xaosseed tables have 23, I added Death as the 23rd entry and placed it in the 2 slot, so that it's unreachable when 3d8, 4d6, and 6d4 are rolled.

I distributed the remaining 22 entries, trying to place the most lenient outcome Flesh Wound at the top of the bell, then distributing in order of decreasing leniency. I placed heavy wounds in the slots unreachable for 6d4, just south of the Death slot (2). That was not too difficult. Of course, it can be improved.

The final piece of work is to give the referee a rule to determine when a wound is not too severe (6d4) and when it is very severe (d4+d20).

Since Wolves of God (and his big brother Stars Without Number) use 1d6 as a hit dice for classes, I looked at multiples of 6. I also wanted to include the CON score.

The "rule" is interpreted from "Damage > 18" down to "else". By Damage, the damage points of the blow that fell the character is meant. If the character got felled by a 19 damage hit, you roll d4+d20. If the character got felled by a damage hit greater or equal to their CON score, they roll 2d12, and so on.

Here is the first iteration of this scar table: