Realistic historical healing

When we speak about historical settings,we often point that an infected wound would be the end of a character. Thus, people conclude, PCs that actually fight "need" access to magic healing, or an unrealistic damage system.
For quite some time, I was accepting this opinion and believing that "people in the past were just that tough they survived".
Then I remembered actual historical stories, and it didn't fit, but I wasn't in the mood to use stories as proof.

Last week, a wound on my leg (about 5 cm long and wide, but shallow) got infected. In fairness, everything would get infected with 5 days of neglect...but it was a time of great stress, so I had no time to visit the doctor. You know, like it routinely happens with PCs in games?
I recovered using nothing but herbal remedies, and an unguent my wife prepared from different kinds of food - no, I'm not kidding you - and which drew the pus from the wound. Then the herbal remedies kept it clean and disinfected it enough for it to recover.
I doubt any modern medicine would have done (much) more than that...in fact, it got infected while I was treating it with modern disinfectants!

All the herbal ingredients are easily found where I live (I don't know the names in English of most of the herbs, though I remember my Granny showing me some of them and explaining they are good for burns, or for infected wounds). The unguent can easily be prepared in any agrarian setting.
Another "truism" against historical gaming was put to rest, in my book.

Situation and skill

I found a post on Tales to Astound that talks about something that has been bugging me for a while now.
(OK, I apologise for taking it out of context a bit - the author is actually talking about impartial Refereeing. But I've got that part down, and am more interested in his intro...)

In older games (Classic Traveller, OD&D, according to the author of Tales to Astound), a roll of the dice answers the question "is your solution going to work, given the situation, with the situation including character skills".

When you move to skill-based systems with the skill roll being central (pretty much all other versions of Traveller, Runequest, GURPS...) the same question becomes "is your character skilled enough to deal with the situation".

I agree with the author that the differences are subtle, but potentially important. One of this approaches is all about the situation, the other is mostly about your skill, with the situation providing bonuses and penalties.

Are we giving too much "weight" to skills and attributes (and other "who the character is" bits on the character sheet)? When you pull someone's legs from under him, you don't need to roll Athletics to see the result. He falls. He might even manage to make a handstand, but keeping his balance is out of the question, unless you really had no idea how to do that move.
You can roll Athletics to see how bad the fall is...but if the other guy is manipulating your legs, it depends mostly on the other guy, and what the floor is covered with (admittedly, the "depends on the other guy" part could be subsumed in the dice of the Athletics roll...)
In short: are today's system trying to make it seem like more depends on factors we can control, and lessening the role of luck and the environment? (I'm honestly not sure).

Then again, there are enough situations where skill is the deciding factor. How do you model that?

Questions, questions. If you've got answers, tell me!

What I know is this: tonight, I played Call of Chthulhu 7e, and the game actually worked just fine based on the situation.
The evil sorcerer went down when my dilettante (no special skill with guns) just went next to him, while the anthropologist in the group was distracting him with a rapier cane. The evil sorcerer and his zombie were attacking the poor anthropologist.
Me: Tell me where I am at the beginning of next round (no battle mat).
Keeper: You're 4 meters from the sorcerer, and 9 meters from the anthropologist who's trying to free the sacrificial victim while the zombie is attacking him.
Me: I shoot the psycho mesmerist in the face at almost point-blank.
The Keeper gave me two bonus dice (new mechanic in CoC7e), with which my skill was enough to pull up the shot. All because I didn't shoot from a distance, but waited to close in.
Then I killed the zombie by toppling a pile of crates on it, and while it was pinned down, I shot it behind the ear. Until it stopped moving, which wasn't on the first shot.

It worked just fine. Granted, that's due to me making sure to improve my odds...but basically, an untrained character who would have Skill-0 in Traveller, pulled off winning the fight quickly and decisively - by acting while the enemy was being distracted, and using the environment.
To me, it made sense things would work like that. And they did, which was nice.
Was that a good balance between skill and situation? I don't know enough about guns to tell, but it seemed to be.

Multiple HPs?

In continuation of my previous idea: what if a (d20-styled) adventurer had multiple XPs and multiple HPs, each named after different gods?

You're a Barbarian. You have X hp from god A, Y hp from god B and Z xp from goddess Z?
It seems hard to remember. Writing it down on a character sheet, however, would remove the problem.
Hmm...that raises some questions.
The god of Fighters, the goddess of Magic, the goddess of Shadows? How many gods should there be?
Do I want a god of Songs, a goddess of Fertility?
Split the god of Fighters in a god of Excelence (with his sub-aspect of Arts and sub-aspect of Crafts) and a god of Violence?

The important question, if I decide to go there, are two:
Does "gods' Vitality" apply to different body locations, making it a hit location system?
And do the NPCs get "demon HP", or can adventurers gain it by dealing with demons as well? How does it interact with the HP granted by gods?
Decisions, decisions!

And now I almost want to write my own d20 game...almost

I'm still not sure whether I do.
But if I try my hand at it, we all know it would have a Wounds/Vitality split (and maybe Hit Locations...you know me).
In it, Vitality wouldn't be a matter of skill. Everyone has skill, including those that get disembowelled on multiple battlefields!

Vitality, however, is the semi-magical resource of imbuing your skill with magic. It happens at the will of gods and demons who enjoy watching the struggles of adventurers (and other, even more unwholesome, sorts).
Said resource is used for only one thing: to prevent deadly blows (Wound damage). It both gives them a better chance in another adventure, allows them to try more entertaining adventures, and makes sure a favourite "star adventurer" in the gods' reality show isn't going to be retired too soon.

Maybe I should try that? I could use some retroclone or with Fantasy Craft to begin with, and see how my players would react. I've got enough people in my group who dislike HP that it would be an interesting experiment if I can design a suitable character sheet that's not obviously related to the d20 system...

(The above idea was based on the fact that most people agree that if a Godbound or Exalted character has a crossbow pointed at him at point-blank range, what we can expect is him dodging to taking the attack on his chest and then disarming, knocking out or killing the attacker.
But the same people have an issue with an adventurer's HPs allowing him to do the same. Is the difference magic/divine power?)

Wuxia Boxing System?

I've been thinking about the Wuxia Action System used in Weapons of the Gods and Legends of the Wulin. Well, not the system itself-but the principle of "rolling to see how many opportunities you get this round".

(You could say Mythras/RQ6/MRQ2/Legend RPG is based on it, too).

Thing is, I find that it emulates better how things actually happen in a fight...based on my (admittedly limited) experience.

And I'd like to use it for a game based around a boxing story. You know, like Rocky, Hajime no Ippo, the Raging Bull, and the like.

How would I do it?

Everything has a TN from 2 to 8.

Roll anywhere from 3 to 6 dice. Any doubles add 1 (or 2) to the number rolled, tripples add three times this. The downside, of course, is that they take up your possible actions.

Declare your intentions before rolling, if you declare 3 or more, roll one die less. One of your actions is "impede the attack", raising the TN to be hit.

Now roll, and assign whatever you rolled to one of the actions. See what happened.

Hmm, I need to work more on it.

OK, it's final! "Schools" are more misleading than useful.

I was just wondering what games I like, whether I prefer old school or new school, or something in-between.
After some deliberation, I was surprised at the number of OSR and old school games that are among my favourites.
Scarlet Heroes and DCC take the lead. Then we follow, probably, with Spears of the Dawn, ACKS, Epées et Sorcellerie, Spellcraft and Swordplay, Backswords and Bucklers, Stars Without Numbers, and arguably even Crimson Blades and Lamentations of the Flame Princess should be there.
If we include old-school games in general, we add Grunts (Fantasy Fucking Vietnam minus the fantasy part) and 43 AD/Warband/Zenobia right next to Scarlet Heroes. And arguably any edition of Traveller, BRP, Flashing Blades and Dogtown should be right there as well. And Dragon Warriors, which I happen to like, even if the system could be improved.

And then we go forFates Worse Than Death and Hoodoo Blues, which are old-school in a good way. And my wife is younger than Pendragon, so the game definitely counts as old-school to me, as far as games go!

Okay, maybe I'm an old-school guy, reading the above...
Except I love WotG and LotW, Sorcerer, Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Gods of Gondwane, TBZ, Houses of the Blooded, Enemy Gods, Fate and Shahida just as much, all of them being New School par excellence!
But I also like GURPS, RQ6, Savage Worlds, Artesia, Volant, TRoS, Seeker and Blue Planet, which are some kind of a middle-school. And Celestial Warriors, which is new-school in a different way. And post-GMC nWoD, which is also "middle school" in its own way...

In theory, I'm either the happy guy that can play everything (hah! Good luck getting me to play PF, just to name the example I turn down most often)...
...or we can conclude the distinction between "schools" to be absolute BS. In theory, my tastes should clash with at least some of these games, just on virtue of liking their polar opposites!
In practice, I like each of them for what they do well.
So, this is my conclusion for today. Find a game that does well whatever it does. Play it in a way that would make it shine. Laugh heartily at the idea that games come in "generations". Seriously, there is no difference, except in what was modern at the time!

Reading Sorcerer RPG: does it work as a manual for simulationist GMs?

I purchased recently Sorcerer RPG by +Ron Edwards from Adept press. It was in a Bundle of Holding, or I might not have bothered.
Then I started reading and went "wow" (not as in the notorious MMORPG - it was more of "wow, that's what I'm trying to tell my friends - the ones I'm teaching GMing"). Because, well, that's what I call Simulationist play. As in, "pretend to be the character to the point that you only bother with what the character is thinking - no story arcs, no pre-planned plots, no nothing".
And that's almost word-for-word what +Ron Edwards is advising you to do as part of his "Narrativist" game. Even more, that's THE game for narrativist players - AFAICT, storygames started with it!
Still, so far, I only disagree with one sentence in his advice. "Don't play the setting". Well, no, you can't do that if you need to play the NPCs...because the setting is an NPC, too (just like any other organisation)! But that's ONE sentence.
I usually disagree with half the GMing chapter in "traditional" games. Seriously, guys... ONE sentence? That might as well be written by me (no, I'm NOT claiming credit-I discovered my current GMing style long after Sorcerer has been written. I just haven't read it, for various reasons that are kinda besides the point).
And then I remembered that the OSR advice has similar points, where I'm nodding my head in agreement.
The only other games where I agree with the GMing chapter to such an extent? Atomic Highway, Fates Worse Than Death, Crimson Exodus/Fantasy Dice RPG, Legends of the Wulin, Apocalypse World/Monsterhearts. Runequest 6 also comes close. But that's not even 10% of the games I own...
Still, all of these games are from wildly differing "schools". Seems like good GMing is good GMing, no matter who's doing it. (Well, if it's "open-ended" GMing, at least. I've run games that were going against this, and the players were still happy. So it might be called "good" GMing - although I'd consider my current style to be far superior both in terms of simulation and in terms of story - but it would be wildly different).
Just food for thought.

And in the meantime, I purchased the Sorcerer supplements, and I'm looking into other games by the same author, too. He's got a KS campaign for his "S/Lay w/ Me" game (which I discovered the day after buying the PDF). Of course, I'm now a backer.
The only other KS I'm currently backing is the one by +Levi Kornelsen for his zombie apocalypse game. But that's another story and should be told in another blog post.