This is a basic question about Critical Damage: Does Critical Damage stack with previous Critical Damage sustained by an NPC or PC?

EG: Thorandin is critically hit for 3 damage and stunned for a round. Next round he suffers an additional 4 critical damage.

Does this second attack do 7 critical damage, or are they resolved and possibly stacked based on hit location, or do they simply never stack?

Jo is at 0 W.

Jo gets hit in the arm by an E type for 3 W. He takes a #3 Arm crit. Arm useless for 1d5 (clatter... )=4 rounds 2 levels of fatigue, and 1 more round stun

Jo then get hit in the belly for 2W of type X. He takes a #5 torso crit. 1d5 (clatter)=1 more level of fatigue, and 2 more rounds stun,

Joe then gets hit in the R leg for 1W of type I. He takes a #6 leg hit... his foot is shattered, and he takes 2 more levels of fatigue; if he fails a T Test, the foot is permanently lost. (Clatter) made. So he's half move until medical attention.

Jo then takes another 1W of type X to the other leg. #7 Leg Explosive. The L Leg explodes. T Test or die. (Clatter, made). stunned for 1d10 rounds (Clatter)=5, 1d10 levels of fatigue (clatter) = 10. Oh, wow, he's now up to 15 levels of fatigue, and passes out. He also is bleeding from the #7X Leg... and if he hadn't passed out from massive fatigue, he's still stuned for 11 rounds.

Yes they stack. (p 201 LC ¶1)

We house rule our damage slightly different by having damage stack per location but not per hit.

For example, Jimmy is at 0w and takes 3 crit to his left arm. He then takes 1 crit to his chest. It really makes no sense to me (and my group) to stack with his arm crit as the game is deadly enough already and Id rather build and play a character than make one up every other session cause a ganger with an autogun rolled an 01 to hit me.

So further crits to the left arm would stack with the 3 he already took, and further crits to the body would stack with the 1 he already took.

Yeah who wants guns to be deadly.

Shot in the head? Walk it off

Thanks for the very clear responses everyone. Especially Aramis, your description of the factual rules clarified everything perfectly.

Personally, I'm leaning towards managing critical damage on a location to location basis but will run a few sessions with either before deciding what the group prefers. Perhaps I might even use cumulative damage for generic enemies, and the location oriented version for special NPCs and the characters.

Just tossing ideas around at the moment though.

Varius said:

cause having a bullet skim your head for 1 crit should make it explode because you were shot in the leg earlier. yes that makes sense

forgive me for enjoying my characters and not wanting to re-roll them every 5 sessions.

Smokes said:

That's what fate points are for. That is, in fact, the main thing that fate points are for.

My group lasted for months before the first character death (though Fate Points had been burnt before that), and it was a dramatically-appropriate, well-played heroic demise as he sacrificed himself to defeat the villain before the shot of Stimm wore off and his fatal injuries kicked in. We've had two more since, but House of Dust and Ash can get a little vicious at times...

There are very few rules in DH which I don't like and don't use, and this is one of them!

Criticals stacking even if they are to different hit locations is, quite simply, silly. Sometimes the playability and speed taking precedence over realism can go too far and give birth to a ridiculous rule.

Criticals stacking even if they are to different hit locations is, quite simply, silly. Sometimes the playability and speed taking precedence over realism can go too far and give birth to a ridiculous rule.

Considering the wildly diverging amount of damage a weapon can inflict... why is it silly?

Cifer said:

Because if you get your hand chopped off with a chainsword first, a 5 year old would be able to knock your leg off with a base-ball bat?

Edit:

In other words, critical damage stacking is seen as silly because critical damage effects are then caused by the amount of trauma previously suffered by the targets body as opposed to the force of the attack it's self... something that is a touch silly, though easily fixed.

Because if you get your hand chopped off with a chainsword first, a 5 year old would be able to knock your leg off with a base-ball bat?

Once you accept that the results aren't causally related apart from a "you're getting more and more tired, your luck runs out and you really can't take anymore" sense, yes. Let's move away from the 5 year old (because for some reason the system allows you to be clubbed to death by one whether there's a chainsword wielder in the background or not - 1D10+1 still can deal damage) and towards your generic guardsman with his trusty lasgun. A lasgun can in and of itself kill or maim a man in one shot (by Righteous Fury). Game balance dictates that it doesn't do so very often, but the event is possible. So where's the problem with shifting the possibilities so that it happens more often when people already are wounded, wherever that may be?

Cifer said:

There's no problem at all with shifting possibilities to make weapons damaging, mutilations bloody, and the world match expectations at all. That's a good thing... when done well.

While i know that in the game world, there is supposed to be little causal relation between one wound inflicted on your arm one day and a completely different one inflicted on your leg the next, but not accepting them as casually related in the game world is a damned high order when you know, rules wise, they are. The players know they are as well and decisions will always be made with that knowledge floating somewhere around the old gray matter influencing the desisting and the view of events that happen in the game world as a result of it. I'm just an odd kind of obsessive that believes the rules should highlight the game world and help pull one into it, not offer up things that one needs to ignore or look past in order to fall into the game world. In the end, it's not in any way a bad problem with the rules, just a small niggly bit that gets under my skin.

By the same token, i also don't like looking at nor thinking of wound points as "luck" or "getting tiered". How the heck is bed rest and medical help supposed to restore your luck? I know, that's me thinking about the rules and not the story or the world, but, optimally, there should be little difference and each should accent the other.

I also know that when my players hit something, they want it to hurt and not just lose a bit of luck. But then again, wounds work fine as actual measurements of the amount of stress and abuse ones body can take before it just up and quits divorced of the specifics of each individual trauma that added up to system failure. The critical effects falling in at the end of it all and rapidly stacking on top of one another is just a bit out of place when they, by all rights, should be occurring throughout the whole bloody affair from the first hit you take through to the end. Likewise, the trauma that attacks visit upon the body should have more to do with the force behind the attack and less with the force that was behind the attack that preceded it. It wouldn't have been hard to make the rules fallow this line. I did so and have been using an altered damage tracking system for six or so months now and it seems to work just fine... and is just as "deadly", give or take, as the original system. I posted it HERE if you or anyone else is interested in looking it over.

Savage said:

I'm curious, how do you handle Criticals ?

Does your players have to record critical damage for each limbs (i.e. Left leg at -4, right arm at -2)? Or do you use another method like the one in WFRP?

Does your players have to record critical damage for each limbs (i.e. Left leg at -4, right arm at -2)?

This is what we do.

While my group does record criticals based on location, I do understand the reasoning behind critical damage stacking. The idea is that the body can only take so much physical punishment before it collapses and honestly, DH has represented this better than any system I've played in the past.

Only reason my group does it the other way is to make deadly encounters that much more epic when they survive with 6 critical to a leg and 5 to the chest, they get to be the heroes of the stories and survive, even if they do lose a limb or permanently lose half their felloweship. Thats what being a seasoned member of the Inquisition is all about to us.

This also ensures that when a character dies, they will at least get a chance to fight to the bloody death.