Given that constitution doesn’t have anything to do with how someone looks (and neither do any of the other ability scores), they could look like anything from the street urchins of Great Expectations to Conan the Barbarians bigger, meaner older brother.
So it depends on what you are going for. A person can have a chronic illness and be on crutches and half blind and half deaf and still have a 20 constituent, but just as easily the same person could have a low one.
what it sounds like you are seeking is a description of a character that is weak, frail, coughing, perhaps with lesions that leak, raspy breathing,.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Different illnesses are going to manifest in different ways, so you should try to make the symptoms mesh with the particular sickness you are attempting to depict. If you are not sure what symptoms you want, I would look to tuberculosis and haemophilia.
TB was known as consumption in the olden days, and for good reason. Those afflicted with TB looked like death—their skin took on a deathly pallor, their eyes dilated, they lost incredible amounts of weight, and they just would waste away to nothing. Coughing, confinement to bed, etc. were all very common. Basically all the classic movie, television, and art ways of showing “this person is about to die from some kind of unspecified illness” come from consumption.
Haemophilia is characterised by an inability of the body to heal from injury—something that seems to fit well with a very low constitution score. Haemophilia’s outward symptoms can differ greatly between those with the disease, and many might not show the disease. Some visual clues you can use: Regular bleeding from nose and gums; swollen joints (haemophilia can cause blood to pool in the joints); bruising across the body; confinement to a wheelchair to minimise potential injury; and bandaging to try and contain blood when an injury does occur, or to provide pressure to afflicted areas where there is subdermal joint bleeding as pressure can alleviate symptoms.
It's for a child NPC I'm making that has a chronic illness.
E
Given that constitution doesn’t have anything to do with how someone looks (and neither do any of the other ability scores), they could look like anything from the street urchins of Great Expectations to Conan the Barbarians bigger, meaner older brother.
So it depends on what you are going for. A person can have a chronic illness and be on crutches and half blind and half deaf and still have a 20 constituent, but just as easily the same person could have a low one.
what it sounds like you are seeking is a description of a character that is weak, frail, coughing, perhaps with lesions that leak, raspy breathing,.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Dead.
[REDACTED]
Different illnesses are going to manifest in different ways, so you should try to make the symptoms mesh with the particular sickness you are attempting to depict. If you are not sure what symptoms you want, I would look to tuberculosis and haemophilia.
TB was known as consumption in the olden days, and for good reason. Those afflicted with TB looked like death—their skin took on a deathly pallor, their eyes dilated, they lost incredible amounts of weight, and they just would waste away to nothing. Coughing, confinement to bed, etc. were all very common. Basically all the classic movie, television, and art ways of showing “this person is about to die from some kind of unspecified illness” come from consumption.
Haemophilia is characterised by an inability of the body to heal from injury—something that seems to fit well with a very low constitution score. Haemophilia’s outward symptoms can differ greatly between those with the disease, and many might not show the disease. Some visual clues you can use: Regular bleeding from nose and gums; swollen joints (haemophilia can cause blood to pool in the joints); bruising across the body; confinement to a wheelchair to minimise potential injury; and bandaging to try and contain blood when an injury does occur, or to provide pressure to afflicted areas where there is subdermal joint bleeding as pressure can alleviate symptoms.