Last game a player of mine got hit pretty bad by a series of thrown objects using the Move power + Autofire. Needless to say all that damage had a low or non-existent Crit Rating. The issue we were having was dealing with the amount of healing we needed to get him back on his feet. We were also wondering if there were other consequences to going above WT "more than once".

So, few questions:

#1. When you take something like 30 net damage, and go over the Wound Threshold, apart from taking an automatic critical hit, is there any other consequence? Per RAW, wouldn't (let's say) a Turbolaser shot have other effects besides knocking you unconscious, receiving a single (low-level) crit and becoming incapacitated?

#2. If your base WT is 13, for example, would 30 net damage trigger two seperate crits (or a single crit +10 on the table)? What happens if you are hit by a planetary-sized weapon dealing, let's say, 90 damage? Would you take six seperate crits (or a single crit at +50)?

#3. When comes the time to be healed/stimpacked/etc., do you need to count the wounds above the threshold as well? Say our friend who just ate a Turbolaser shot: he's obviously incapacitated and has at least a single crit. Doeshe have 90 wounds of damage, of which 77 is "above the Threshold"? Do you have to Heal all those 77 points before the patient regains conciousness?

I am wondering how people handle that as well. I haven't had that level of damage hit my Players yet so I can't say how I have done it yet.

What about adding +10 to the crit. roll for every 10 by which the damage dealt surpasses the character's wound threshold?

That way, even on a character's first critical, there's still a possibility of death from massive damage, but it's more forgiving than most massive damage rules in other games.

Sometimes; one can safely say "that character dies." is sometimes an option. While the game might ditate you take acrit and spend a long time out unconcious; until all 77 damage is healed.

Though the +10 per 10 wounds sounds like a good alternative, in the cases where a character takes a direct hit from a turbo lasor. I am firmly in the camp that a character must either be exceedingly unlucky or stupid, or the DM is using unreasonable force directly upon a player rather then using it as an enviromental hazard, for someone to take a direct hit from a Turbo lazor of any description.

So the book describes it as thus:

When a PC suffers wounds greater than his wound threshold, he is knocked out and incapacitated until his wounds are reduced so that they no longer exceed his wound threshold. ... the character should track how many wounds he's exceeded the threshold by, to a maximum of twice the wound threshold.

That tells me the answer to your third question is, "No, just twice the wound threshold." However, you could easily (and reasonably, in my mind) house rule it so that if you exceed your wound threshold by greater than double its value, your character is dead. Especially if you take all of that damage at once.

That also sort of answers your critical questions, so in my mind, you would track each attack as simply advancing on the critical table by +10 until the character suffers wounds greater than twice his wound threshold, at which point -- if they aren't dead yet -- they die.

Last game a player of mine got hit pretty bad by a series of thrown objects using the Move power + Autofire. Needless to say all that damage had a low or non-existent Crit Rating. The issue we were having was dealing with the amount of healing we needed to get him back on his feet. We were also wondering if there were other consequences to going above WT "more than once".

So, few questions:

#1. When you take something like 30 net damage, and go over the Wound Threshold, apart from taking an automatic critical hit, is there any other consequence? Per RAW, wouldn't (let's say) a Turbolaser shot have other effects besides knocking you unconscious, receiving a single (low-level) crit and becoming incapacitated?

#2. If your base WT is 13, for example, would 30 net damage trigger two seperate crits (or a single crit +10 on the table)? What happens if you are hit by a planetary-sized weapon dealing, let's say, 90 damage? Would you take six seperate crits (or a single crit at +50)?

#3. When comes the time to be healed/stimpacked/etc., do you need to count the wounds above the threshold as well? Say our friend who just ate a Turbolaser shot: he's obviously incapacitated and has at least a single crit. Doeshe have 90 wounds of damage, of which 77 is "above the Threshold"? Do you have to Heal all those 77 points before the patient regains conciousness?

It is cumulative.

Every time the WT is exceeded the victim gains another critical hit. Each one would add a cumulative +10 to the roll to determine the specific critical hit. This has happened to a player in our game. Poor Bothan.

Yes, until the injury is below the WT the character remains comatose and unresponsive.

Thank you, I definitely forgot about that quote.

So you would rule that a WT 13 PC receiving 27 damage (exceeding twice his/her WT) would die? I'd be tempted to be a bit more... magnanimous. But I agree with you that each further hit, after incapacitation, autocrits; at least that's how I interpreted it. Would be similar to the old "coup de grace" rules, IMHO. (Anyone spending a minute attacking a dying unconscious PC/NPC deserves to be able to turn it into a corpse.)

But apart from house rules, on which we all may "YMMV" one way or another, is there any RAW indication that would give us a framework/baseline of interpretation? Is it assumed that sufficiently high wounds cause autodeath or is is implied that only a 141+ crit kills?

I know this may sound like I subject my players to horrendous damage, but it's not the case. I don't use Turbolasers on them. It's just something that propped up when a force user attacked the PCs with fairly large objects, thus peppering them with high wounds but no crit except for the incapacitation. I was curious to know how to deal with that.

I have only found in the rules that the 141+ crit kills.

ummm per the rules you can't go further than 1 over your wound threshold. every hit after that is a crit with a +10 to the roll each time they are hit.

ummm per the rules you can't go further than 1 over your wound threshold. every hit after that is a crit with a +10 to the roll each time they are hit.

I may have to re-read that. Every hit you say?

The problem with the "every hit" comment is the example was vehicle level damage against a person. It is still 1 hit. So that one hit isn't hitting for 14 it is hitting for 90... which is where the confusion comes into play.

So there is either;

• 1 "attack" of 14 damage, generating one crit (your comment)
• 1 "attack" of "a butt load" of damage generating multiple crits
• 1 "attack of 26 damage, generating 1 crit
• 1 "attack" of .....

You start to see the problem pretty quickly.

The problem with the "every hit" comment is the example was vehicle level damage against a person. It is still 1 hit. So that one hit isn't hitting for 14 it is hitting for 90... which is where the confusion comes into play.

So there is either;

• 1 "attack" of 14 damage, generating one crit (your comment)
• 1 "attack" of "a butt load" of damage generating multiple crits
• 1 "attack of 26 damage, generating 1 crit
• 1 "attack" of .....

You start to see the problem pretty quickly.

But thats the way it works. The problem as I see it is that the Devs used the wrong terms for Damage and Wounds because it gives the impression that every hit creates an Injury but only Criticals actually do any lasting Injury to the PC.

If you think of Damage as an abstract and only Criticals as Wound/Injuries it's easer to grok.

Edit: I don't know what would be better terminology, language and all that.

The problem with the "every hit" comment is the example was vehicle level damage against a person. It is still 1 hit. So that one hit isn't hitting for 14 it is hitting for 90... which is where the confusion comes into play.

So there is either;

• 1 "attack" of 14 damage, generating one crit (your comment)
• 1 "attack" of "a butt load" of damage generating multiple crits
• 1 "attack of 26 damage, generating 1 crit
• 1 "attack" of .....

You start to see the problem pretty quickly.

But thats the way it works. The problem as I see it is that the Devs used the wrong terms for Damage and Wounds because it gives the impression that every hit creates an Injury but only Criticals actually do any lasting Injury to the PC.

If you think of Damage as an abstract and only Criticals as Wound/Injuries it's easer to grok.

Edit: I don't know what would be better terminology, language and all that.

It doesn't matter if it is 90 points of gibbledegook or 90 points of damage, sorry but Shakespeare had a point on that. The problem is the method to represent that amount of, whatever you call it, against 1 target is not addressed.

Yeah, apart from the apparent linguistics, there is an underlying "in-game reality" problem that is not going away. Sure, one may gloss over the question, thinking it's a rhetorical one, but once PCs in the party start taking Swoop/Landspeeder/AT-AT shots (vehicle scale damage at 20+), a Missile from an assassin droid, or get hit by one or more Silhouette 3-4 objects (for 30-40 damage each), the difference between "you suffer one crit", "you suffer one crit at +30" or "autodeath" becomes an important one to adjudicate.

Obviously, it's not for NPCs, who die when the GM wants them to, but contrary to NPCs, players will argue if they feel they've been hit too hard, that their heroes shouldn't have died, etc. The point of having a ruleset to deal with those questions is expressly to avoid too much arbitrariness on GM's decisions (and take off some of that burden). If the rules don't say you die when hit by a Turbolaser, if a player loses his/her hero because "I say so", he's going to search the ruling and ask me why I killed him on the basis of a vague rule. He/she may be wrong about debating the Turbolaser shot, but where do I trace the line between that and a 30 damage hit from being telekinetically thrown a TIE fighter in the face?

And rules-lawyering when one's character is killed is certainly not the most unlikely instance of rules debate.

IMO, the general solution to that problem is “talk to the player”.

If, by some bizarre circumstance, a PC gets hit by a Heavy Turbolaser that does 150 personal-scale damage, then if I were the GM I think I’d be inclined to say they’re dead.

However, before actually declaring that as the final word, I’d pull the player aside and ask them what they think.

Can they come up with a good explanation of how they’re not really dead? If not, then maybe we can come up with a way for them to get a new character that has certain starting benefits that a normal starting character wouldn’t have?

So, set the Rules As Written aside, and talk to the player. Even if they’re a rules lawyer, they might be pleasantly surprised by what you can work out together.

It's not realistic that someone taking massive damage isn't smeared across the battlefield like jam across a slice of bread... but I don't think it's meant to be.

If you're unlucky enough to get tagged with a vehicular weapon the rules take you out of the fight because - you're right - it'd be ridiculous if it didn't. But the rules also preserve the fun and protect's your group's story by saying that (bar complications caused by existing injuries) you won't die from the hit.

When you die it'll probably be because some guy has a vicious weapon. Or is a lethal killer. Or because you've just been through hell and fell at the last step. Y'know, reasons that tell a cool story.

(Or if your spaceship explodes and you have trouble breathing vacuum, I guess.)

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I thought you stopped tracking wounds then the tally is twice your WT? (Unfortunately this means meat-heads can take longer to heal than waifs.)

There's no cap on how high Wound Threshold can get except the number of occurrences of the Toughened talent in existence and the xp required to buy them. Eventually you'll run out of Specialisations you haven't already purchased (for a growing amount of xp each time) and mined for it's delicious Toughened talents.

the reason I brought up the nomenclature was to say that RPGs have an inherent problem of dealing with a balance between injury and playability. How you describe damage will make a difference with immersion in the game and adjudicating these types of problems.

My suggestion would be to not think of Damage as being an absolute but the flawed representation it is. So a "Hit" from a Turbo Laser that does 90pts of Damage but ends up only KO'ing and giving one Critical wasn't actually a direct hit, which no one would survive, but a near miss whos explosion throws the PC a distance or something similar. There will be times when this just doesn't make sense at which point you just kill the PC, but for most situations you should be able to justify the PC not dying outright.

If they don't die from a turbo laser what is to stop them from ever caring about death at all? Why not just take an x wing and shoot up the whole galaxy if you give them a get out of death free card?

At the point a GM shoots a Turbolaser at a PC it is because consequences demanded it to have an opportunity to happen (or it is a noob GM that didn't care enough to take that into account, but that is not the case here). So giving a get out of death free card in that situation is... unfair.

My point about the name was abstract or concrete, it is still a turbo laser worth of damage to a person. If the GM wanted it to hit near the person they would have said near, but spaceship / turret damage hits HARD and saying "oh but it hit near them and just barely did enough to knock them out" is a GM cop out that Players WILL exploit. Part of being a GM is making decisions and while you can wash away the damage sometimes you have to say, boom dead.

Depending on the conditions that lead to the attack and why the PC ended up taking a Turbo laser to the face is how much extra bonus XP/etc to new character creation I would give.

If they don't die from a turbo laser what is to stop them from ever caring about death at all? Why not just take an x wing and shoot up the whole galaxy if you give them a get out of death free card?

At the point a GM shoots a Turbolaser at a PC it is because consequences demanded it to have an opportunity to happen (or it is a noob GM that didn't care enough to take that into account, but that is not the case here). So giving a get out of death free card in that situation is... unfair.

But where's the fun if you're constantly walking the knife's edge and wondering if this is the session where your character finally eats one blaster bolt too many? Why take any risks at all if you think the penalty is too steep?

At the point a GM involves a turbolaser, it's because the situation has escalated to that point, presumably as a natural side effect of the developing story. There's no reason why that should suddenly make all the PCs more vulnerable to death; only the ones who are pushing it with existing injuries are at risk for that level of consequence. Most likely, they understand their risk already but are pressing forward already.

Because it actually is fun if you're stumbling along, wondering when the killing blow will fall, but only if it's a result of your own actions. In games like Pathfinder and L5R, we accept that sometimes the dice will align against us as a consequence of the randomness that also lets us succeed beyond our wildest dreams. You don't have to do that here . No matter how badly the dice fall, you won't die -- you physically can't roll the death result without several +10s from both Vicious ratings and previous injuries.

What's the price of failure, then? Failing. Losing the race, not making money, the bad guys get away or take you prisoner. Maybe the Inquisitor decides to coup-de-grace your unconscious form, but he'll only take that route if you've already pissed him off extensively. A good GM will either have your tacit permission to off your character in that instance or else introduce enough vagary that you could survive, if you wanted.

Yeah, apart from the apparent linguistics, there is an underlying "in-game reality" problem that is not going away. Sure, one may gloss over the question, thinking it's a rhetorical one, but once PCs in the party start taking Swoop/Landspeeder/AT-AT shots (vehicle scale damage at 20+), a Missile from an assassin droid, or get hit by one or more Silhouette 3-4 objects (for 30-40 damage each), the difference between "you suffer one crit", "you suffer one crit at +30" or "autodeath" becomes an important one to adjudicate.

Obviously, it's not for NPCs, who die when the GM wants them to, but contrary to NPCs, players will argue if they feel they've been hit too hard, that their heroes shouldn't have died, etc. The point of having a ruleset to deal with those questions is expressly to avoid too much arbitrariness on GM's decisions (and take off some of that burden). If the rules don't say you die when hit by a Turbolaser, if a player loses his/her hero because "I say so", he's going to search the ruling and ask me why I killed him on the basis of a vague rule. He/she may be wrong about debating the Turbolaser shot, but where do I trace the line between that and a 30 damage hit from being telekinetically thrown a TIE fighter in the face?

And rules-lawyering when one's character is killed is certainly not the most unlikely instance of rules debate.

You're kinda hitting the ceiling of the system to be honest.

The overall concept is similar to the old "baby in a box" trope, where you could place a baby in a box with a live grenade and the baby would be able to survive. The mechanical justification being that you don't want to be able to kill a player character by accident. I'm sure you know players do stupid things form time to time, and it sucks to end a game with a TPK because of a pants roll, or just a bad decision. The Crit system does resolve that, but you can get silly, I once had an Inquisitor take so many crits he was a legless mass unable to do anything but parry and reflect (and his WT was till in the green). The players just stopped because it started feeling like they were beating up the special kid.

While it's unlikely that your player will take a direct hit from a turbolaser, have you considered the breakout box on pg 224 and add +50 to the crit roll of planetary scale weapons? If you like you can tweak it a little further like have the blast rating on vehicle warheads and anything lighter then a medium laser cannon not get the benefit if you want your players to engage heavy stuff on any kind of regular basis. I know it's not and insta-gib, but it'll make any possible crits way scary as it opens up the enire lower 3rd (except "dead") of the crit table.

Recovering from that amount of damage is not going to be cheap. If you make the players realize the are going to loose a lot of credits and or time they may simply chose to have their character die.

On the other hand. having the group find a way to get the... surgery.... bacta tank.... doctor.....mechanical limb.... etc.. necessary to keep that PC alive has the potential to be verry fun. (i would simply give the player an NPC to use while they try to heal his PC).

While it's unlikely that your player will take a direct hit from a turbolaser, have you considered the breakout box on pg 224 and add +50 to the crit roll of planetary scale weapons? If you like you can tweak it a little further like have the blast rating on vehicle warheads and anything lighter then a medium laser cannon not get the benefit if you want your players to engage heavy stuff on any kind of regular basis. I know it's not and insta-gib, but it'll make any possible crits way scary as it opens up the enire lower 3rd (except "dead") of the crit table.

How did I miss that box? God, that suddenly solves most of my issues. I'll definitely go by that, and probably include being thrown TIE fighters in the face as well (30+ damage), if the damage is enough to knock a PC unconscious.

While it's unlikely that your player will take a direct hit from a turbolaser, have you considered the breakout box on pg 224 and add +50 to the crit roll of planetary scale weapons? If you like you can tweak it a little further like have the blast rating on vehicle warheads and anything lighter then a medium laser cannon not get the benefit if you want your players to engage heavy stuff on any kind of regular basis. I know it's not and insta-gib, but it'll make any possible crits way scary as it opens up the enire lower 3rd (except "dead") of the crit table.

How did I miss that box? God, that suddenly solves most of my issues. I'll definitely go by that, and probably include being thrown TIE fighters in the face as well (30+ damage), if the damage is enough to knock a PC unconscious.

Yeah, if it's enough to take you all the way to the max wound count in a single hit, it's probably ok to give it a crit boost.

That said, I do have a campaign with a character that's got a WT of 20, so it can get up there.

I did away with the cap on accumulated damage (at WT x 2) because I found it absurd that a character with a lower WT somehow recovers to a healthy state faster than a character with a higher WT. As an example, throw 50 damage (one success with a light blaster cannon from a light vehicle) at a character with WT 10 and at another character with WT 20. Assuming both have Soak 5, the first character takes 20 damage while the second takes 40. The first character can be brought back to being active with only 10 points of healing (four stimpacks) while the second character needs 20 points of healing (not generally possible with a single-day's allowance of stimpacks). I see this as penalizing the character with the better WT, and that doesn't sit right with me.

I did away with the cap on accumulated damage (at WT x 2) because I found it absurd that a character with a lower WT somehow recovers to a healthy state faster than a character with a higher WT. As an example, throw 50 damage (one success with a light blaster cannon from a light vehicle) at a character with WT 10 and at another character with WT 20. Assuming both have Soak 5, the first character takes 20 damage while the second takes 40. The first character can be brought back to being active with only 10 points of healing (four stimpacks) while the second character needs 20 points of healing (not generally possible with a single-day's allowance of stimpacks). I see this as penalizing the character with the better WT, and that doesn't sit right with me.

This is supposed to be a cinematic game...why are you trying to inject that much realism into it?