Disease

For those able, here are my rules for disease.

My son-in-law K is a power gamer; he's arguably the best player in any of my campaigns.  He's excellently versed in the game without being jaded, he's a tactical genius and he's able to be both dispassionate about bad things that happen and emotionally involved in the sheer pleasure of the campaign.  From a rules-lawyer standpoint, he'd be hard for many DMs to run ... unless, like me, they're perfectly happy to be called out on the rules when forgetting how they work.  Oh, and my son-in-law is better versed scientifically and mathematically than I am.  He thumps me occasionally on those subjects as well, which I accept as best for the game.

He began playing in my game at 17, along with my daughter, many years before they were married.  And three weeks into the campaign, I killed his 1st level druid character with a cold.

They were walking towards the city of Samara on the Volga river in Russia when it started to rain.  They decided to keep walking.  I rolled the base chance of catching disease on page 13 of the original Dungeon Masters Guide,  for everyone in the party.  K's number came up, though it was a 1% chance (cool weather or climate).  I rolled acute, terminal on page 14.  Just like that, "Pikel" was dead.

Pikel is an 11th level druid in my game.  He was carried to Samara, raised and continued on as a character.  K never faulted me for the decision to make the roll; never faulted me on a world that will let natural elements kill players; never mentions it except when the matter of walking in the rain comes up.  He and the party have been caught in worse weather, brutally worse, including freezing winter rain on the shore of the Caspian and arctic climate while toiling along the river Pechora in the far north.  The party survived those journeys by chance and through preparation ... but one of the things about disease is that it isn't "rational."  It's capricious.  A fact we're painfully aware of now.

I'm writing this post on disease because it came next after Aging in the DMG.  I've been writing my way through the DMG for a month now.  As it happens, I've gotten through the front part, which is mostly punditry about gaming, and into solid rules, with tables and firm results.  This sort of content, incidentally, is all over the original DMG.  It doesn't exist anywhere in 5e, as near as I can tell.

I read about players rage-quitting over being killed by a wandering monster.  I had a conversation with my daughter today where she talked about players rage-quitting over not enough treasure, and the not kind of treasure, and an unequal treasure division between players.  Correct me if I'm wrong — and I'm not — but there's clearly something toxic about a community that a) argues that rage-quitting is a reasonable response to the manner in which a DM adjudicates either happenstance or reward; and b) that expects the rule-makers to continuously reset the game measures in order to soothe the marketing demands of such people.

I believe firmly that the crippling of D&D began here, with disease.  Deviations have multiplied plentifully in the DMG so far: how stat dice are rolled, what level do you start at, the deliberate failure of the designers to write effective rules fully and an over-reliance on the DM's skill in keeping players from becoming bored if they don't get what they want.  Those things, I feel, are matters worthy of discussion and debate, and were by not means clearly understood when I began as a DM.  But this — the use of disease.  Or rather, the decision not to use it; and then to argue that it shouldn't be used, because the insertion of a real world consequence that can strike any person any day is "wrong," or "unfair."  This is where the game's meaning began to fall apart.

We're watching a country fall apart in the same way.  The indisputable fact of Covid will not be accepted as fact by a substantial part of the United States.  To that I can add the indisputable fact of climate change, which the conservatives in my country, Canada, decided yesterday isn't real.  We can add to that a host of things, including Biden's constant, frustrating assertion that racism, violence, greed, whatever is on today's docket, "isn't America."  When it plainly fucking is.  Pardon the political digression, the metaphor is made.  A considerable number of human persons are simply not capable of seeing the intrinsic benefits of a game that, like art, reflects life ... because so many humans are incapable of life.

There is no other way of correlating the evidence.

The next subject heading in the DMG is "Death."

Guess what I'm going to say.