Recovery Coma

Medic!

Mausritter is an OSR style roleplay where you simply roll up a new character when they die. The journey and the peril of dying is the point of the RP, without a possible deadly outcome, surviving the dungeon is just not as meaningful and epic.

That said - In my opinion, not every defeat needs to end in death of a character. I am still working on the idea, but while playing Kenshi, a very brutal videogame, I learned that there is so much more to RP after your character falls.

Let me give a few examples:

Your mouse party is completely defeated in a battle. The rat bandits empty the party's pockets and takes what they want, then runs away, leaving the downed mice for dead. A roll is made, sort of like a death saving throw for each character. One wakes up and she staggers over to grab some bandages and fix herself and the others up. One or two of the mice do not make their saving throws and die, but she and another survive but now have to limp their way to safety, evading more rats and other threats.

Lets say that the party was not defeated by bandits, but by a vicious animal that will begin eating the characters alive if they do not make their saving throws.

Maybe the party is defeated by some wood shrews but then instead of dying, they wake up bandaged and prisoners while the guards talk about how these mice are to be sacrificed in the morning.

The possibilities are endless!

The game master might also give the player an option when their mouse fails their death saving throw. Would you like to roll up a new mouse? Go into a recovery coma, which will put the character unconscious for the duration of the mission - and roll a new mouse anyway. Or should they take a permanent wound?

The hit table seen here can be used in a variety of ways, and I will probably reference it in other house rules. Basically if the area of the body being hit is random, you would roll a d6 and refer to the table. Different body parts correspond to different stats and such as seen above. If a player chooses to take permanent damage to a body part, the game master could roll or choose a body part that makes most sense and the character takes permanent damage to some degree in the specified stat. Alternately you could use this table for temporary wounds and assign a simple series of wound severities that apply penalties to those stats while the body part is wounded and healing.

I will probably make a few tables, one for every body part. For example if damage is taken to the head, the table might contain a concussion, maybe an ear or an eye was permanently damaged, or a spectacular wound that leaves a scar across the face.