Damage Tokens

Mausritter is a fantastic game – very few get as close as it does to the Platonic ideal of a post-OSR ruleset, covering so much ground yet remaining so brief. While most of it essentially reimplements the basic structure of Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd, the inventory grid stands out as its notable innovation. Based on fitting items into rectangular spaces, it’s not unlike similar concepts famously found in Diablo, Resident Evil 4, and a Japanese tabletop RPG that I read about years ago and am, at the time of writing, struggling to track down*. What sets Mausritter’s version apart is the joyful tactility of shuffling physical tiles, giving concrete heft to acquiring items and trying to squeeze them into your backpack. The game pushes the concept even further by overloading the inventory system with conditions (such as Injured and Sick) which up slots as well, modeling fatigue and attendant loss of strength for lugging all of that loot around.

The downside to all of that is the “all of that” part. There are so many bits getting passed around, and you’re going to need to print out at least as many copies as you have players of almost every piece. It adds to the prep time, the printer ink, and storage space used in between each session.

That downside didn’t stop me from employing a variation of it in Protoplastic, though. In a game about fulfilling the fantasy of playing with toy robots, if I wasn’t going to 3D print plastic parts to snap together, then the least I could do is 2D print paper parts to build on your character sheet. Instead of just being things you’re carrying, in Protoplastic your grid is you: you place pieces for your head, body, arms, and legs, along with any extras like tails and antennae. So obviously I needed to include hit location damage; there had to be some way you can get your mask knocked off or your hand detached.

Easy solution: a “Damaged” condition chit you put on top of parts when they got hit, physically obscuring them to signal they were unusable. Clean, simple! However, once I started trying to employ this solution to handle less localized effects (fatigue, emotional strain, etc.) it stopped working quite so elegantly. On top of that, I was already getting a bit tired of cutting out numerous special conditions along with dozens of body components.

Luckily, a much easier idea presented itself, and turned out to be of potentially broad application. It’s meant to be implemented in something Mausritter-like, but doesn’t strictly require it.

The Mechanic: Damage Tokens

Everything bad that can happen to your character (being hit in combat, sleeping poorly, getting reprimand from a superior) is a type of “damage”. Damage is represented by small tokens of some kind: glass beads, little wooden blocks, coins, et cetera. Whenever something happens that would cause your character to take damage, place a token on the part of your character sheet referring to the aspect of yourself the damage targets. That aspect is unusable while the token is on it. A cure of a type appropriate to that aspect (medical treatment for a body part, rest for fatigue, etc.) removes the token.

“Aspect” means pretty much anything.

• If placed on your character’s arm, it means that arm can’t be used due to injury or binding.
• If placed on a piece of their equipment, it’s broken or lost.
• If placed on an attribute, you fail checks that would use it. What it means diegetically depends on the attribute: stressed Strength might mean fatigue or injury, stressed Will could mean fear or despair, stressed Perception could mean overstimulation or distraction. Interpretation would depend greatly on the ability scores the game uses.
• If placed on an interpersonal bond, that relationship is strained and can’t be called upon.
• If placed on a skill, your head is feeling too fuzzy to execute it right now or your technique has grown rusty.
• If placed on your money, your bank account has been emptied and your credit score won’t let you get a loan.
• If placed on a spell or power, you either already expended it, your god is displeased with you, or you’re in an antimagic field.
• If placed on your movement speed or one of your movement types, you’ve been paralyzed in a way that prevents you from moving.
• If placed on a resistance, a gap has opened in your source of protection, or it’s gone offline entirely.
• If placed on your faction or alignment, you’ve either been cast out of the organization or lost your faith in it.
• If placed on your species, you’ve been hurt, restricted, or shamed in such a way that prevents you from using your innate abilities.
• If placed on your hit points, the number of stress tokens might simply track how many points you’ve lost for, particularly for a game with low average hit point totals.
• If placed on your character portrait or physical description, you’ve become dirty, mutated, or otherwise marred, such that you will be treated differently by others.
• If placed on your background or backstory, you’re suffering from retrograde amnesia and can’t remember it.
• If placed on your experience points, you have anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories.
• If placed on your name, you’ve been disgraced, to the point of damnatio memoriae. Alternatively, your name’s been sealed by a curse makes you lose your identity.

…or anything else that comes to mind. The great thing about this system is that you only need one type of token to indicate a diverse array of possible problems, not to mention that it tracks them all without the increasing material entropy of erasing and writing new numbers the way many games do. It conveniently facilitates the “attack every part of the character sheet” philosophy, greatly simplifying the process of introducing novel conditions and thereby increasing the likelihood of them seeing play. It doesn’t encode the way to get rid of tokens for each case the way condition chits do, but in the majority of cases this is either obvious (healing potions remove health damage, re-memorizing a spell removes spell damage) or unique magic nonsense the GM would need to explain anyways.

If, for a given case, you feel like a binary lock is too punishing, you might instead put multiple tokens on a given trait to apply an increasing numeric penalty – ticking off points of an attribute score with damage is common. On the flip side, tokens could mark progress on goal trackers and other clocks on your character sheet. You could even place dice on your sheet instead of tokens, if you wanted the extra granularity. There are numerous options here, techniques board games have been using for decades.

You don’t even have to limit the placement of tokens to the character sheet. Put them on the map (to show the devastation of a rampaging monster), onto the calendar (to show which days and times people can’t make), onto passages of the rule book (nullifying that rule), onto players (heads), onto usernames (for online games), on top of dice, onto the table itself, onto snacks, into drinks, onto other damage tokens.

We have so many levers to pull and sliders to set, we shouldn’t fear physicality.

———

* It did a neat trick where the length and width of your grid were determined by your Strength and Dexterity scores, respectively, modeling both your capacity to carry pure weight and your deftness in managing unwieldy bulk. If that rings a bell for anyone, please let me know.