This may have been answered before, but I recently added characteristic injuries to my chargen and I'm pondering how to reconcile characteristic losses with figured attributes, such as wound, strain, and soak.

Here's the situation: Let's say you have 2 Brawn from your species, 1 purchased ranks of Brawn, 1 Dedication rank of Brawn, and 1 cybernetic rank of Brawn, for a total of 5 Brawn.

Strain and wound is only calculated using species ranks plus purchased ranks. In this case, wound would be 3 + species starting value. Soak would include the Dedication and cybernetics ranks, but not ranks from items or attachments. So, Soak would start at 5, plus bonuses from armor, etc. Good so far.

Now, let's say you take a Gruesome Injury hit to Brawn. This lowers Brawn by 1. But... you have multiple sources of Brawn, and each combination of source affects wound and soak differently. Would the -1 Brawn affect wound? In other words, would it lower your (species + purchased) Brawn value so that your wound would be reduced by one? Or would, perhaps, it "cancel out" your Dedication rank, or your cybernetics rank first, leaving your wound intact? I suppose that it might ignore cybernetics, since you can just replace it and the injury is no longer permanent. But there's still the Dedication rank to consider. If it "cancels out" your Dedication, but leaves your (species + purchased) alone, then it wouldn't lower your wound threshold. Or maybe it ignores any boost to Brawn that you obtain after character creation and only lowers your base by 1, thus affecting wound.

Any insight into this? Or am I missing something obvious?

I think you're overthinking it, I don't think loosing one brawn even if you'd never increased it via dedication wouldn't touch your wounds, after all once they're generated they're generated and don't really go anywhere without specific talents that say so. Given theirs really no right answer here as the RAW never delves into this but if I where to run across it id leave the players wounds alone as loosing one stat seems enough of a drawback to be taken seriously.

Oh, I'm sure I'm overthinking it For wounds and strain, if those values are permanently "fixed" after character creation, then they can be left alone (assuming this is the case). But what about soak? It figures in stat increases from Dedication and cybernetics, just not equipment.

We were discussing it here and have come to the conclusion of... We wouldn't count cybernetics as they aren't natural and can be replaced. So we are just looking at your 3 Brawn plus Dedication to bring you to 4 Brawn. We can liken it to a naturally strong person that works out. Now say this person is gruesomely injured and will never be as strong as he used to be, so his brawn drops to 3, BUT he can still take a hit like he used to so his soak value wouldn't change. If he was to get injured again, it would be a different story, but in this particular case I would say it would just negate his dedication bonus, leaving his wounds and soak intact.

Gets even slightly more complicated if its your Droid that gets a 'gruesome injury crit', can we just rebuild him?

I would say it depends on the wound.

• If an Ion Blast critical'ed and that caused the "injury" I would say it is damage and you lose all benefits from it. soak/etc.
• For a body part I would still say it affects wounds because "realistically" the dedication is trained being able to handle more strength, but the injury would definition affect threshold for this as it would attack natural before "learning", unless it made you stupid somehow.

This is just my take on it. You could never lose the dedication because it has been spent, but you can lose everything else.

For wound and strain, it says:

After this initial value is determined, increases to Brawn [Willpower] rating do not increase a character’s wound [strain] threshold; wound [strain] threshold improvements can then be acquired only by purchasing the appropriate talent, such as Toughened [Grit].

I really just want to make sure I get this right before my next release. As it stands with the current release, wound and strain are left alone, but soak is affected. Which might actually be correct

Soak would decrease no question about it, but like I said there is nothing in the book that really determines if dropping Brawn would drop WT, now if I was going to go one of the two routes I'd eliminate the last aqcuird brawn first, ergo if it was from dedication their WT would stay untouched but if they had taken no dedication or had already lost any they took then I'd make their WT effected. Anyways as I said there really isn't any clear adress yet that I can see to this so I think it's your call as the GM how to go here and what you think was intended.

Given the wording from the character creation, wounds/strain are set once you leave character creation. Gain/loss of characteristics have no impact on them, so injuries won't change those thresholds.

Given the wording from the character creation, wounds/strain are set once you leave character creation. Gain/loss of characteristics have no impact on them, so injuries won't change those thresholds.

This is now my thought, as well. Plus, it makes things a lot easier in the generator It's also how it's currently implemented.

OggDude, I think that bit you quoted covers the situation, even though it doesn't refer to decreases.

Personally, I'd say it makes sense that Wound and Strain Thresholds are 'locked' at character creation. That they are, in effect, decoupled from the Brawn and Willpower characteristic after character creation has been completed and gameplay has started.

This means changes to Brawn and Willpower don't change those thresholds, they can only be changed by things that specifically change thresholds.