So far I have been a bit let down by the disease rules. I have had people contract a disease a couple of times, but they just got rid of it with a nights rest or two.

Last session I finally got to see how dangerous the disease rules in WFRP really are. It was pretty funny.

This time a Th3 (no Resilience skill) character had this experience from drinking some foul water:

1D Resilience Check to see if he becomes Queasy -> Rolls a Chaos Star

2D Disease Check -> Fails and a Chaos Star = "Galloping Trots"+ extra Symptom

2D Recovery Check -> Fails and a Chaos Star = gets another Symptom

Seriously, the character was one Symptom away from dying from diarrhea. It was glorious. He spent the whole session frantically trying to find a cure while trying to keep control of his bowels.

In addition, with Th3 and no Resilience skill, he was rolling too few dice to even have a chance at the Recovery check. The severity was higher than his maximum possible successes.

He still had the disease with one symptom when we finished last session, so there is still a chance I get to kill off a character in a very Warhammery fashion

Anyone else run into situations where the disease rules killed or seriously threatened to kill one of the characters?

I recently lost my character..and was turned into a plaguebearer. It was due to very unlucky rolls though.

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I had a player who was one symptom away from dying from disease, it was real close for several nights but he pulled through at last. I have had several characters wíth lingering diseases that just would not get better. So my players really fear the disease deck.

Trick is to throw in misfortune on the recovery checks. Unless the character doesn't spend most of the days resting and in good conditions chances are that you'll get misfortune dice on your roll. If you travel, gety into combats, sleep in tents/barns/most inns you should at least get some misfortune dice when rolling.

Haha!

Haven't had more than a sniffle equivalent in my games, but you've inspired me to bring forth some festering water in my campaign. Or maybe a Skaven baby chewed its way into a grain silo and gave it a double dose of corruption and disease!

My players so far are way too lucky with disease, as the next update of adventure will show all had to make checks on reaching Southlands and all passed (admittedly 2 of 4 were elves with their fortune dice bonus but two also weakened from long sea voyage and penalties as well)!

I've found the disease rules to be plenty nasty, especially for characters that aren't high-Toughness front-line fighter types. A character with average toughness and no resilience is likely to get worse rather than better. 2 Purple > 3 Blue, and rolls chaos stars often enough for the disease to progress. (If you let people roll stance dice on the recovery checks, the danger is much reduced.)

The specifics of the disease itself are less important than the symptoms attached to it. If you get two Lethals or a Lethal and a Virulent, you can quickly end up dead, and every extra symptom makes your next recovery check that much harder. Diseases that start off looking like just a minor inconvenience can become life threatening with one or two bad rolls and corresponding unlucky symptom draws.

For that reason, the two medicines that give you bonus white dice on your disease check after 4 or more days of treatment are mostly laughable. If you lack the Toughness/Resilience to shake off the disease on your own before your fourth test, a white die or two isn't going to save you.

In the course of running The Enemy Within (which doesn't have many Disease moments written into it) we had two different times where a character made a recovery check that had >10% chance of killing them. At the end of the campaign one PC was suffering under a Disease + Nurgle's Rot, so if the campaign had gone on another session or two she may have died.