Resistance
Trait Description: This trait is important in combat. Resistance allows characters to combat the effects of disease, poison, fatigue, sleep deprivation, pain, extreme temperatures and other harsh or potentially damaging conditions. Characters with this Ability can march carrying heavy loads and swim in ice-cold water.
Specialties: Holding Breath, Enduring Pain, Resisting Poison, Resisting Disease, Going Without Sleep, Moving While Encumbered, In Combat, Extreme Temperatures
Trait Effects: Someone with Resistance 1 can probably keep her head after a night of heavy drinking. Someone with Resistance 3 can run 10 miles without stopping or easily recover from an infection. Someone with Resistance 5 can easily throw off the effects of a deadly poison or stay awake for a week without impairment.
Dramatic Rules for Resistance
Avoiding/Overcoming Disease (Resistance, Medicine)
In the world of Exalted, plague is a horrifying prospect. The Chosen might be virtually immune to sickness, but mortals have no such protection. See Disease and Infected Wounds. In addition, characters can also become diseased from a magical effect with a Sickness effect keyword. These diseases are sometimes conventional and sometimes sorcerous ailments with their own idiosyncratic rules. Characters who are immune to all illness ignore both natural ailments and those caused by Sickness effects, even if the Charm uses its own rules. Characters who are immune to natural ailments ignore only those diseases that use these following rules.
When a character is first exposed to a disease through its usual vector, roll her (Stamina + Resistance) against a base difficulty of the Virulence of that disease. Reduce this difficulty by as much as two if the contact is brief, or increase the difficulty by as much as two if the vector is practically unavoidable (like the stinking miasma of festering rot in a plague-wracked ruin). If the roll succeeds, the character avoids catching the disease. On a failure, she contracts the sickness.
Once a character has caught a disease, she has a period of time equal to its Incubation before it threatens her life. (She may develop symptoms much sooner, putting her at -1 or -2 internal penalty to all actions from discomfort.) Once this period is up, reroll (Stamina + Resistance) every day against a difficulty of the illness's Untreated Morbidity. If the character receives medical attention from a healer before the Incubation period elapses, the difficulty is the disease's Treated Morbidity instead. With a success, the character’s symptoms never worsen. They fade over a day as her immune system overcomes the malady.
Mortals and animals whose players fail this roll spend a number of days equal to their Stamina rating dying (during which they are at -4 to all actions from pain and exhaustion rather than the usual -2). Exalted and other similarly hardy magical beings are at -2 to all actions as a result of failure, but their players may recheck each day until the characters throw off the disease and have their full health restored. As long as the Chosen carry a sickness, they could be contagious, so they must be careful when they encounter a serious malady that they do not accidentally spread it to others. Spirits and Fair Folk are completely immune to normal disease—they resist magical diseases as Exalted. Only the Great Contagion has ever proved an exception, slaying 90 percent of the world's population regardless of Exaltation, leaving only spirits and the Fair Folk untouched.
Treating a sick character requires an (Intelligence + Medicine) roll with a difficulty rather unsurprisingly based on the disease's Difficulty to Treat. If the disease's difficulty to treat is unknown, it equals the (Essence of the character who caused the Sickness effect + 1). Physicians cannot treat a disease until they have diagnosed it (see Diagnose Patient).
Treating illness is a dramatic action, requiring a minimum of a full hour to administer poultices, herbs and/or other curative regimens (the necessary ingredients of which normally have a materials cost of Resources 1, but may be higher for rare diseases). Village healers and witches often gather their herbs and drugs rather than purchase them, requiring a successful (Perception + Survival) roll (difficulty 2-3) assuming proper ingredients can be found in the area.
For dramatic purposes, Storytellers should allow ingredient substitution so this roll has a chance unless finding a rare and exotic ingredient is a plot point. In such a case, characters might be forced to journey to strange lands or to seek magical assistance from spirits, the Exalted or even stranger beings in order to administer a cure.
If a physician actually spends a full day regularly checking in on a patient, the healer's player gains an additional die on the roll. This bonus increases to two dice if the healer does virtually nothing else but administer treatment throughout the day. Giving treatment to a character who is dying from disease after receiving no aid allows the victim's player a reroll at the disease’s Untreated Morbidity. If successful, the character recovers. On a failure, the character continues dying and without magical assistance will expire. Characters suffering from Sickness effects with no stated Untreated Morbidity automatically shake them off, without a roll, when they successfully receive treatment.
Enduring Hardship (Resistance)
Most living beings require certain basic essentials to remain healthy: air, sustenance and sleep foremost among them. The need for air is addressed in "Holding Breath" (the next entry). Characters can go a number of days without food equal to half their (Stamina + Resistance) total without penalty, rounded up. For every day that passes thereafter, characters suffer a cumulative -1 to all actions. When the total penalty exceeds a character's (Stamina + Resistance), she dies. Characters who imbibe insufficient nourishment starve more slowly, treating two (or even three) days as one for the purposes of assessing penalties. Eating a full meal removes -1 from the penalty, but characters accrue penalties automatically for periods of nutritional deprivation until they have eaten sufficient meals to reduce the penalty to zero. Thirst can kill even quicker than hunger. For each day without water past the first, a character is at a cumulative -1 to dice pools. When the penalty exceeds (Stamina + Resistance), the character dies. Drinking proper fluids for a day removes all thirst penalties.
Compared with starvation, sleep deprivation is a mere nuisance. For every day that a character goes without sleep beyond the first, she is at a cumulative one-die internal penalty to all pools. This penalty cannot exceed three dice. Furthermore, players of characters suffering any penalties from sleep deprivation must roll (Stamina + Resistance) at standard difficulty whenever their characters are left alone without anything to do. Failure indicates the character falls asleep for eight hours or until awoken. Once a character sleeps eight hours, all penalties from sleep deprivation fade.
Characters track penalties from all forms of deprivation separately, but only the highest of the three penalties actually applies. In place of deprivation, a final hardship condition of note is pregnancy. Mortal pregnancies last three seasons, imposing a Dexterity-based dice pool penalty of two during the second season and four during the third. Exalted pregnancies last a full year, with the characters not even showing until the fifth month or penalized at one die until the 13th. In the final month, Exalted increase the penalty to two. When mortals give birth, roll (Stamina + Resistance), difficulty 1. On a botch, the mother dies. Exalted are immune to death from childbirth.
Strenuous Activity (Resistance)
Characters can perform continuous heavy exertion for a number of hours equal to their (Stamina + Resistance + pertinent specialty). Such exertion includes running, swimming, sex or any other athletic activity. For each subsequent hour of activity after that, characters suffer a cumulative one-die internal penalty to all actions from fatigue. Spending a Willpower point negates all fatigue for one action and reduces total fatigue by one. Channeling a point of Conviction negates fatigue for the next minute and reduces fatigue by a character's Conviction rating. When the fatigue penalty exceeds a character's (Stamina + Resistance), the character passes out and remains unconscious until she has slept for at least one hour (which removes one die of penalty). Every additional hour of sleep or three hours of rest removes another one die until the penalty is removed. Until the penalty is completely gone, the character automatically begins accruing more penalty dice for doing anything strenuous. Characters who are treading water will drown unless they have a buoyant object to keep them afloat while they rest.
Particularly extreme conditions of temperature (in either direction) can penalize a character's effective (Stamina + Resistance) total for the purposes of determining resistance to fatigue. Generally, such conditions do not impose a penalty greater than -3.