Jun 22, 2026 · 59 min · 12 segments
Dan and Paul discuss diseases in D&D and other fantasy roleplaying games. From the surprisingly extensive disease rules found in the earliest editions of D&D to the colorful afflictions found in…
Dan CollinsHost
Paul SiegelHost
look at if we can let's look at the first one okay so um the first time dnd has disease rules is actually in uh the the second supplement to original dnd right that's the blackmore supplement by arneson heavily edited by tim cask and you know paul sometimes we talk about the fact that your uh bind bound version of the original dnd rules for me uh includes chain mail those little brown books the first supplement greyhawk which we agree is pretty darn pretty darn useful uh it doesn't have supplement tool except except for the disease rules because i personally just printed out the zero rules and those are the the and pasted them in the back of the book and that's the only thing from supplement two that i
and so clearly arneson and you know let me just read a couple a couple bits from the first paragraphs because this i think this reflects where arneson was coming from to add these he says sickness and disease have killed far more people than war and heretofore this fact has been glossed over Knowing no allegiance or alignment, disease can strike down the highest level characters as well as non-player characters.
When adventuring the outdoors, players run across all manner of disease breeding grounds.
And then later on says, it should be mentioned that in times of overcrowding, such as sieges, foster disease to an alarming rate.
and then near the end it says please note that the inclusion of disease is optional and primarily concerns the game master as it is incumbent upon him to determine if the disease exists so he's clearly in a place where he's kind of thinking about war gaming right he's thinking about well disease kills many people in war probably more than the injuries he's thinking about simulating a siege in a city and these are all the things that he expects to be happening in his games i guess And he thinks it's a real oversight that
You know, I think that's so interesting because I think when you when you boil it down to its impact on a war game, right, I think disease or injury or anything that impacts your health is really just boils down to a simple question of are you present or not? Right.
I won't be surprised, and I don't have them in front of me, but I won't be surprised if you look at these disease rules and they talk about things like hit points, which I think is not particularly helpful, right? Because if you're doing hit points of damage, most players are going to gloss over that, and they're going to be fine and act normally up until the point that they're at zero hit points, and now they're no longer viable to use in the game, right? Now I'm on the ground and can't perform actions.
Whereas I think what I would expect from something that models disease is that it impacts you in weird, unusual ways, dependent probably on the disease, right? Some diseases might make you immobile or some diseases might make it impossible for you to, I don't know, cast spells or, right? And I think you see it more and more as the game expands into these areas, right? Where you have more things than just fighting, right? You have social encounters or travel or things like that.
Like I can certainly imagine a character who's, very ill, but is capable of getting on a horse and riding around, maybe having a conversation, but can't really do combat.
You might actually like these rules then, Paul, because possibly surprisingly, a lot of what you described is exactly what Arneson injects for his disease rules at the outset of original D&D.
Maybe pull up the image just because there's a point or two I could make with, there's a table here.
Again, it runs about three digest pages with details on the different diseases they're gonna detail in the generals.
look at if we can let's look at the first one okay so um the first time dnd has disease rules is actually in uh the the second supplement to original dnd right that's the blackmore supplement by arneson heavily edited by tim cask and you know paul sometimes we talk about the fact that your uh bind bound version of the original dnd rules for me uh includes chain mail those little brown books the first supplement greyhawk which we agree is pretty darn pretty darn useful uh it doesn't have supplement tool except except for the disease rules because i personally just printed out the zero rules and those are the the and pasted them in the back of the book and that's the only thing from supplement two that i
and so clearly arneson and you know let me just read a couple a couple bits from the first paragraphs because this i think this reflects where arneson was coming from to add these he says sickness and disease have killed far more people than war and heretofore this fact has been glossed over Knowing no allegiance or alignment, disease can strike down the highest level characters as well as non-player characters.
When adventuring the outdoors, players run across all manner of disease breeding grounds.
And then later on says, it should be mentioned that in times of overcrowding, such as sieges, foster disease to an alarming rate.
and then near the end it says please note that the inclusion of disease is optional and primarily concerns the game master as it is incumbent upon him to determine if the disease exists so he's clearly in a place where he's kind of thinking about war gaming right he's thinking about well disease kills many people in war probably more than the injuries he's thinking about simulating a siege in a city and these are all the things that he expects to be happening in his games i guess And he thinks it's a real oversight that
You know, I think that's so interesting because I think when you when you boil it down to its impact on a war game, right, I think disease or injury or anything that impacts your health is really just boils down to a simple question of are you present or not? Right.
I won't be surprised, and I don't have them in front of me, but I won't be surprised if you look at these disease rules and they talk about things like hit points, which I think is not particularly helpful, right? Because if you're doing hit points of damage, most players are going to gloss over that, and they're going to be fine and act normally up until the point that they're at zero hit points, and now they're no longer viable to use in the game, right? Now I'm on the ground and can't perform actions.
Whereas I think what I would expect from something that models disease is that it impacts you in weird, unusual ways, dependent probably on the disease, right? Some diseases might make you immobile or some diseases might make it impossible for you to, I don't know, cast spells or, right? And I think you see it more and more as the game expands into these areas, right? Where you have more things than just fighting, right? You have social encounters or travel or things like that.
Like I can certainly imagine a character who's, very ill, but is capable of getting on a horse and riding around, maybe having a conversation, but can't really do combat.
You might actually like these rules then, Paul, because possibly surprisingly, a lot of what you described is exactly what Arneson injects for his disease rules at the outset of original D&D.
Maybe pull up the image just because there's a point or two I could make with, there's a table here.
Again, it runs about three digest pages with details on the different diseases they're gonna detail in the generals.
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