While bumbling about on my Ars Magica hack, I came up with an idea for tracking damage/harm.

While bumbling about on my Ars Magica hack, I came up with an idea for tracking damage/harm.

While bumbling about on my Ars Magica hack, I came up with an idea for tracking damage/harm.

In keeping with the medieval paradigm, health is based on the four humours (melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric and sanguine).

What if each humour had say, 3 boxes representing how far out of balance that humour was. Taking 3 boxes of damage to any one humour causes the person to fall unconscious. A fourth box could cause death.

Damage would be applied to the most appropriate humour, based on the source. Likewise, healing each humour would have to come from an appropriate source in the fiction.

Damage wouldn’t necessarily be physical harm – it could also be caused by very strong emotions or by environmental extremes (magical or otherwise).

Still spitballing here. What do you think? Too complicated for PbtA? Just plain silly?

11 thoughts on “While bumbling about on my Ars Magica hack, I came up with an idea for tracking damage/harm.”

  1. I like it!  It’s definitely worth exploring.

    I guess my first thought, though, is that 3 boxes before falling unconscious is too few (though it all depends on the system you use, of course), and what exactly are the humours going to translate to in the fiction?  They translate roughly to sadness, apathy, anger and blood.  So, how does your Anger take damage?  Also, if you are equally wounded in all of them, wouldn’t that make you balanced?

    So…  off the top of my head:

    Humour       ~ Meaning ~ Fictional Expression

    meloncholic ~ sadness  ~ empathy, perception

    phlegmatic   ~ apathy     ~ self-centeredness

    choleric         ~ anger       ~ passion, willpower

    sanguine       ~ blood       ~ body, health

  2. Very nice! That’s perfectly in line with where I’m going with this Richard Robertson.

    My initial response would be that damage sources wouldn’t impact one humour exclusively. For example, getting stabbed with a sword might imbalance your sanguine humour by 1 box (loss of blood) and your choleric by 1 (anger).

    You’re probably right that 3 boxes is too few (I’m trying to stick reasonably closely to AW harm). I’ll have to play with the math a bit more.

    I wonder if overlapping damage might work (if you currently have 1 box of sanguine harm and suffer 1 more, the two overlap and no additional boxes are filled in).

  3. An alternative idea: not damage as a source, but something to do with either aquiring or using magic. So casting a fire spell might makes you more choleric, speaking with the dead more meloncholic; that sort of thing. So the house’s sterotypical behaviour becomes related to their magic.

  4. Saga of the Icelanders does damage to your Youth (I think) stat when you’re injured. Maybe the humours are your stats, and you can apply damage directly to them a la SotI.

    Disclaimer: I haven’t been following this closely enough to know if you’ve already made stat decisions, so I’m sorry if my suggestion is useless backtracking.

  5. I’m liking these suggestions 🙂

    I did some brainstorming and the only concern that keeps coming up is that this is leading me further away from the PbtA engine. Nothing wrong with that – just not where I had intended to go. I’ll have to see how the rest of the process develops.

  6. Oh, right.

    And I agree, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either.  That’s a bit the point of a hack after all.  I mean, we’re just exploring that humours aspect now, and, imo, we ought to explore it to its end before we judge it.

  7. I completely agree. This line of thought definitely bears exploration.

    I think my actual concern is that since this is my first AW hack I was hoping to stick relatively close to the source material in terms of balance elements like health, harm and their interaction with stats.

    The starting place for this line of thought came from trying to come up with a more thematically appropriate countdown clock. The countdown clock is perfect for a child of the 80s post-apocalypse, but it doesn’t feel right for Mythic Europe. I first looked at the zodiac, since it is associated with time and was also part of medieval medical theory. I abandoned it because: a. 12 signs seemed like too many, and b. every sequence I contemplated didn’t feel right.

    Have I actually solved anything by moving to the humours?

    Perhaps seasons would be easier? Spring and Summer = 1 slice each; Autumn divided in two (Harvest and Preservation); Winter another two (Rationing and Darkness). That would put me directly in line with the countdown clock and, as a bonus, would be easier to adapt to the other AW uses outside of health tracking.

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