Recently my hunter, a Monstrous Were-Panther, picked up Unquenchable Vitality as new move. UV reads as:
Unquenchable Vitality: When you have taken harm, you can heal yourself. Roll +Cool.
On a 10+, heal 2-harm and stabilise your injuries.
On a 7-9, heal 1-harm and stabilise your injuries.
On a miss, your injuries worsen.
It seems counter intuitive that a move that heals you has the chance to injure you more. Now it does not say take harm on a failure, but I was thinking more along the line of taking a 0 harm move when you fail. How have others handled it?
A 6- is a failure. If you fail at stitching up a gash on your arm, you probably made a bunch more holes and ripped your skin – making it worse.
I don’t see how it’s counter-intuitive to make injuries worse if you fail at healing yourself.
But would you actually inflict harm (and how much), all that it says is that your injuries worsen.
It would depend on what is happening at the time the move was used.
I think the answer depends on two important questions:
1. How was the PC trying to heal?
2. What Keeper move fits best in context with injuries worsening?
Let’s say a vampire PC just got messed up badly in a fight. They roll to heal. The Keeper asks, okay, you’re barely holding yourself together, but you’re in a room full of fresh corpses – what do you do to heal yourself? The player takes the hint and describes crawling to the nearest pool of blood, seeping from a fallen human, and they roll … a 6. So what happens? “Your injuries worsen.” Now it’s on the Keeper to describe how.
Keeper moves can be helpful here for inspiration. “Put someone in trouble” with a worsening injury might mean the vampire passes out on the way and continues to bleed out until an ally finds them. “Inflict harm, as established” with a worsening injury might mean they take another 1-harm from trying to crawl across the broken glass littering the floor. “Turn their move back on them” (which is really what the “injury worsening” text is doing) might mean that drinking the blood does more harm than good – maybe cultist blood is dangerous for a vampire to drink, causing coughing fits that open wounds further and accelerate their own bleeding.
In short: I think there’s more than one valid way for your Keeper to interpret this, and they will probably have to improvise based on context. Your job as the player will be to describe how your hunter heals so your Keeper has something to work with.
Try to make sense of it narratively, a similar example, in the tv show Bitten if the werewolf is bound/restrained a certain way as a human that when they change into a werewolf it hurts them (since the change contort bones etc a specific way), which the same or similar can be described when defining how UV works in relation to healing