Legends of the West: Vitality & Experience

Wild West Weeks
Wild West Weeks

I haven’t given up on my 24 Hour RPG, Legends of the West, even though I didn’t make it within the time limitation. Here are two more Traits, Vitality (and Wounds) and Experience. Vitality is integral the Wounds system and determines what kind of beating a character can take while Experience is the currency of character improvement.

VITALITY & WOUNDS

Injury, disease, famine, and other ailments are a daily concern for people living in the frontier. Medicine and doctors are not as ubiquitous as they are in the urban areas of the East. The Trait that governs injury and general health is Vitality. Vitality is calculated from adding a character’s Body Resistance with her size and a static value. The default and minimum static value is five, but Judges can adjust this value to make the game more forgiving. Humans have a default size of five.

Whenever a character suffers injury, if the amount of injury meets or exceeds her Vitality score, then she suffers a Wound. For every Variance of Success, the character suffers an additional Wound. For every Wound, a character must apply a negative one modifier to all Action Rolls. A point of Grit may be spent to ignore Wound modifiers for a single Action Roll.

Once a character reaches five Wounds, she falls prone, is helpless, and cannot take actions. Any Wounds beyond five requires a character to make a Death Roll. A Death Roll is a special Action Roll where the Difficulty Rating is the difference between fifteen and a character’s rank in Resilience and Wound modifiers still apply. If the character fails, she’s ready to be fitted for a pine box. At negative ten Wounds, a character is automatically dead and no roll is required.

Vitality = 5 + Size + BR
Minimum Vitality = 1
Death Roll = 15 – BR + Modifiers

EXPERIENCE

Experience (XP) is the currency by which players improve their characters. When and how much Experience is given is determined by the Judge, but Legends of the West recommends somewhere between five and ten a session with adventure rewards after each milestone of a story. There are plenty of other things a Judge could award Experience for, such as roleplaying or performing gaming tasks, but that’s left up to the discretion of the Judge and her group.

All Experience costs are listed under the Trait descriptions, but they have been collected in the table below.

Experience Cost Table:

Trait

XP Cost

Ability

New Rank x 5

Attribute

(10 + New Rank) x 4

Legend

New Rank x 25

Wild West Weeks

Listening to:  – True Grit OST – Father’s Gun

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