Traumas
When your physical hit points or mental hit points reach 0, you acquire a trauma. Generally speaking, if a player character experiences a number of traumas equal to their proficiency level, you should strongly consider your next trauma to be death.
While I’m not going to tell you how you want to run freeform rp, I advise you not to go above the sum of your fortitude and your willpower combined in addition to proficiency level, as that is probably the upper limit of traumas that is reasonable to give some kind of god-tier character.
This is a category that advantage cannot help with: Everyone exhausts themselves physically and mentally when challenging things that tire them, let alone actively try to kill them. Depending on the nature of the trauma, you may need new acquisitions in order to cure it, or it can even be potentially permanent. If it makes sense that your trauma is modified in some way (such as a poison treatment only being partially successful), you may update your trauma and reevaluate how it impacts your character. If your ankle got twisted, that’s pretty nasty, but if your foot is in a sprint you likely can put weight on it more easily in most situations, so don’t forget to apply advantage and disadvantage relevant to the trauma where it makes more sense.
Traumas are comprised of three basic components: Description, Duration, Cure.
Sometimes, when acquiring a trauma, you might not fill out more than the description, so keep in mind that if the effects of a trauma evolve over time, that doesn’t typically count as a separate trauma- unless it makes sense to, such as a lost limb leading to blood loss or an untreated concussion becoming unconsciousness.
Description
Name your malady.
Give it a voice.
What is your body trying to say?
What are your feelings trying to process?
Record how a trauma has changed if it makes sense, as behind every cure there is a story.
Some traumas may require that you make a challenge against it repeatedly, or over time - poisons, injuries, abuse, etc. can make life a lot harder both short or long term.
Duration
How long does your trauma last? Perhaps it is temporary. Leave blank if you don’t know. Extend the story how it pleases you, this is still a freeform game.
Cure
What will it take to overcome?
When you attempt to cure a trauma, its duration is affected somehow. If you are challenged by the cure, and you have a relevant acquisition to cure it, you may designate an arbitrary length of time to describe the cure. Let it make sense to you, and fix it later if it matters enough. Then, succeeding in a challenge against the trauma will reduce the duration by a number of points determined by your roll total.
However, consider the consequences of failing to cure a trauma. Bad therapy can be worse than no therapy. If you are looking to consider a negative effect for failure, you can:
- Make it narratively worse
- Make its duration longer
- Affect yours or your target’s HP or MP
- Affect yours or your target’s acquisitions where relevant
- Affect yours or your target’s traits where relevant
Or any other consequence you can think of that makes narrative sense.
Failing to apply a bandaid won’t kill someone, so at worst is modifying the pain to be uncomfortable instead of managed by proper bandage placement. But failing during a surgery could be lethal, causing HP damage on the failure. It’s up to you to decide how to interpret the result.
If your trauma cannot be mended, I am sorry, I understand, and I truly hope you are able to live with it comfortably. Remember that this is fantasy, and you are allowed to do whatever it is you need to remedy or accommodate this, both ingame and out.