Late to the party but a great question, so I'm going to do an info dump.
I was compiling a document on more intensive medical rules for Vortex/ DW a while back and faced this question myself.
The key areas to consider are: tissue/organ/bone damage, system shock, blood loss, pain, and infection (bacterial or viral). Translate these into attribute losses.
Also, whether the damage can be corrected by treatment, surgery, or is not treatable and is also temporary, lasting or permanent.
In a nutshell: any physical injury produces pain. This translates to loss of Resolve, Coordination, Ingenuity, Awareness and Presence. The greater the pain, the more attributes it affects.
Any injury that causes blood loss, I go with Strength (because physical stamina and vitality is affected). Awareness (because it causes confusion) and coordination (same reasons as Strength). Why have I chosen these? See below (The Trauma Supplement).
The Vortex damage system is actually quite deep because it allows us to creatively and accurately model the effects of injury and damage - if you know a bit about injuries and medicine.
There's no need for ultra-detailed rules for injury in this type of game and genre unless you make it into a tactical war game. This is why I stopped making the document.
But – adding a bit of extra detail to heighten the dramatic effect is a good thing. Basically, in this type of game, injury should determine these things:
- How it affects your character
- How it can be healed and is finding medical help a new plot development? (Classic Series style)
- How it adds dramatic intensity – slows you down in chases, finding a cure, loss of use of limbs prevents you from disarming a device, etc.
It should NOT do these things:
- Require you to book-keep constant complicated changes
- Slow play down to the point where the benefits of dramatic effect are over-weighed by heavy mechanics
If you want to do some research, there's an excellent damage supplement I used called 'Trauma'
www.drivethrurpg.com/product/92589/Trauma that is adaptable to any game. It is
really deep and intensive and is
not suitable to integrate completely into Vortex for the above reasons, however it will give you ideas on how things would translate into Vortex injury.
In addition, here are my unedited notes from the unpublished document. Hope they help.
Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space Roleplaying Game
Is there a Doctor in the House?
Distributing Damage
Most other roleplaying games have hit points, damage or injury levels to simulate damage, shock or injury to a character.
DWAITAS on the other hand, subtracts levels of damage directly from a character’s attributes.
Losing all points in a single Attribute is bad, and your character may gain a Bad Trait to reflect lasting effects of their injury.
Losing all points in two Attributes is very serious and when three attributes are reduced to zero points, a character is in peril of dying.
Therefore, it’s preferable for the player to lose damage from more than one attribute, spreading it out.
This is a very different concept than the more traditional ‘Hit Points’ or ‘Wound Levels’ and it may seem unusual at first, if you are used to playing roleplaying games with hit points.
Damage in the Vortex System works more interestingly.
Example:
A character, Sarah, gets hit on the head by a ruffian for 3 points of damage and the Gamemaster declares that 2 points are lost from Awareness and 1 point from Coordination.
The bang on the head has made Sarah unsteady on her feet. She staggers with the -1 to Coordination (and corresponding reduction in Speed). Blood trickles down her forehead. She is also seeing double and her ears are ringing, making her feel nauseous. All of this is a -2 from Awareness. Sounds like a classic concussion.
Not only is this system more flexible and descriptive, but it can open up further roleplaying opportunities by imposing a narrative condition on those attributes.
Losing even a single point of an attribute can have some kind of dramatic or narrative effect. For example, in the above example with the concussed Sarah, the GM could insist that simple Awareness and Coordination checks should be made for mundane actions. Sarah staggers out into the frigid air of the busy Victorian street. Normally, she wouldn’t need to roll, but the GM insists that since she is distracted with the injury, and is currently ‘concussed’, she is likely not to notice the oncoming black carriage being driven hell-for-leather by a possessed coachman. He asks her to roll her Awareness -2 against a difficulty of AVERAGE (12)…
Here is a guide using descriptive terms to help assign narrative conditions to loss of attribute points. You are encouraged to expand this!
Lose Points in…Awareness: seeing double, ringing in the ears, difficulty in focusing on anything, everything is in a haze, half-conscious, in a stupor, blinded, deafened, nauseated.
Coordination: Sprains, tears, fractures, breaks, twisted ankles, shakes, nausea, shocks, neural damage, paralysis. Note that a reduction in Coordination reduces Speed.
Ingenuity: Tiredness, exhaustion, confusion, disorientation, difficulty in focusing thoughts, neural damage.
Presence: Inability to communicate with others; withdrawn or distracted due to pain, disorientation, trauma.
Resolve: Great discomfort, terrible pain, disorientation, unbearable excruciating pain that saps willpower and motivation.
Strength: weakness due to: blood loss, sapped energy, great fatigue, toxins, disease, hypothermia, hunger, drugs.
Now lets give another example, this time to distribute 6 points of damage that are spread evenly across all attributes after a fall.
An average character with Attributes of 3 is hit for 6 points of damage reducing all Attributes to 2 each.
In descriptive roleplaying terms, the following happens:
The character is unsteady on his feet, moves much slower and shakes (-1 Coordination and Speed). He feels weak, gasps for breath (-1 Strength) and is in pain which is distracting and distressing (-1 Resolve).
He can’t focus and feels dazed (-1 Awareness) and confused (-1 Ingenuity). Finally, he stops talking and grows silent, seemingly withdrawn (-1 Presence).
A character displaying all those outward symptoms publicly would draw attention and cause concern. If they have a ‘Face in the Crowd’ Trait, it may be useless. In fact, the GM could rule that anyone suffering an obvious injury or displaying odd behaviour caused through damage might have a temporary situational ‘Distinctive’ trait.
Really Really Easy 3Put a Band Aid / sticking plaster on a scrape. (So simple, you shouldn’t even need to roll!)
Really Easy 6 Clean and dress a minor wound.
Easy 9 Clean and dress a major wound.
Normal 12 Perform a professional medical procedure.
Tricky 15 Perform a tricky medical procedure.
Hard 18 Perform a hard medical procedure. Treat a gunshot wound.
For all the above, increase difficulty accordingly if not in an equipped care facility or devices/drugs unavailable.