We have been counting to Wound Threshold and no higher. The status of being higher than WT already means a Crit. And any healing will bring them up but the Crit has to be healed after they are conscious.

Daeglan, my problem has nothing to do with injecting realism and everything to do with not penalizing the character for having a better WT.

We have been counting to Wound Threshold and no higher. The status of being higher than WT already means a Crit. And any healing will bring them up but the Crit has to be healed after they are conscious.

The problem with not counting past the threshold is how to determine when the character has come back under the threshold so that they are awake and functioning again.

The problem with not counting past the threshold is how to determine when the character has come back under the threshold so that they are awake and functioning again.

Which I believe is exactly why RAW stops counting your excess beyond 2*WT. For most WTs that you’re likely to see in this game, if you’ve taken a lot of non-critical damage then it may take a number of stim applications to bring you back down below your WT. Maybe even more stimpacks than you can effectively use in a single day.

But there’s no sense in going to ridiculous levels when you’re 10*WT, or whatever.

The first treatment they receive brings them back under their Wound Threshold.

Technically, we count to one past WT, which we just say is above WT.

A stimpack will bring the character right back into action, healing from the top of his WT.

This evolved from having a small group.

The problem with not counting past the threshold is how to determine when the character has come back under the threshold so that they are awake and functioning again.

Which I believe is exactly why RAW stops counting your excess beyond 2*WT. For most WTs that you’re likely to see in this game, if you’ve taken a lot of non-critical damage then it may take a number of stim applications to bring you back down below your WT. Maybe even more stimpacks than you can effectively use in a single day.

But there’s no sense in going to ridiculous levels when you’re 10*WT, or whatever.

Can you cite a page number for that? cause everything i have read implies you don't count beyond the threshold other than to say it was exceeded and roll a crit and the character is no longer able to take actions or maneuvers.

The problem with not counting past the threshold is how to determine when the character has come back under the threshold so that they are awake and functioning again.

Which I believe is exactly why RAW stops counting your excess beyond 2*WT. For most WTs that you’re likely to see in this game, if you’ve taken a lot of non-critical damage then it may take a number of stim applications to bring you back down below your WT. Maybe even more stimpacks than you can effectively use in a single day.

But there’s no sense in going to ridiculous levels when you’re 10*WT, or whatever.

Can you cite a page number for that? cause everything i have read implies you don't count beyond the threshold other than to say it was exceeded and roll a crit and the character is no longer able to take actions or maneuvers.

I believe I've already quoted this, but it's on page 216, the last paragraph before the "Strain and Strain Threshold" heading.

If you're asking for citation on the stim pack thing, that's basic arithmetic. The most wounds you can recover in a day with stim applications is 15. So if you need to recover 16 before you're back to the top of your threshold, 15 won't quite cut it.

The only effective argument I've seen for going against the RAW is HappyDaze's avoiding penalizing characters for having higher thresholds.

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.

Indy vs the convoy full of Nazis getting punched in the face and dragged behind the truck is damage. Indy getting shot in the arm by that one Nazi (who just happened to roll a crit) is a wound.

Ok, you can't even begin to compare a fake movie like Indy to a real movie like Star Wars or even a real game like EotE!

I totally agree with you on that Desslok. You know, I have not yet had a character take damage beyond their WT!! I did have 2 Group NPCs die, but that was handled as a cinematic, not a mechanics thing, so no rolling was done. I can't imagine someone taking 30 points in one hit. As to the case in the OP, even if was autofire move object, every hit after the one that breaks WT is a crit. So eevn if you stop adding up the damage, the crits at +10 each time can easily kill.

I use the WT and soak in conjunction with the roll result to tell the story of how someone was hit. If they have one net success and only do 1 point of damage, then it really wasn't a hit, it was a "near-miss" that takes away a few arm hairs, or leaves a little burn on the shoulder or your new jacket.

Or when you hit, and the soak eats up all your damage, it's just like Indy punching the Nazi Mechanic. It just makes him mad.

In my game, we have a house rule that you take another critical injury for every 5 wounds above your Wound Threshold. Our argument is that when the body is incapacitated, it is much more susceptible to catastrophic damage, and also it makes the game a bit more lethal which we all crave.

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.

That's exactly how I would do it - it's still a hit, but not one that would just vapourise a person.

Why would anybody prefer to house-rule damage rolls so that one-shotting PCs and TPKs are more likely?

I love the fact that exceeding the WT doesn't kill the character, even if you exceed it by ridiculous amounts. Remember, multiple hits (autofire) still mean multiple crits, which means +10 for every hit.

It is still quite possible to kill a PC, all you need is to spend all advantage on autofire and crits, you can get a lot of +10s very quickly. With combat rolls, you don't want a lot of extra successes, you want a lot of extra advantage.

But in general, I prefer the option to revive a character after combat. I don't know why any GM worth his salt would think otherwise.

Why would anybody prefer to house-rule damage rolls so that one-shotting PCs and TPKs are more likely?

I love the fact that exceeding the WT doesn't kill the character, even if you exceed it by ridiculous amounts. Remember, multiple hits (autofire) still mean multiple crits, which means +10 for every hit.

It is still quite possible to kill a PC, all you need is to spend all advantage on autofire and crits, you can get a lot of +10s very quickly. With combat rolls, you don't want a lot of extra successes, you want a lot of extra advantage.

But in general, I prefer the option to revive a character after combat. I don't know why any GM worth his salt would think otherwise.

It is a cooperative system that requires both the player and GM to share responsability for maintaining the plot. There will always be certain situations where killing a player is a probabilty,This may stem from my group having it's fair share of tools that could do with a little humility now and again, or just simply that the stars weren't aligned. In any case; a character death should be a dramatic event in either case. Either to be a learning point or a plot point to be built upon.

Again; I would have treated the turbo lasor as a situational hazard rather then use it's weapon profile if only intended to set a scene with it, where a failure of such a check would either result in strain or minor wound damage (from the intense heat produced by the weapon). Again, that would be how I would approch the situation; because the Turbo lasor is likely too unweildy to realistically use it on a sil 1 object.

An easy suggestion would be:

If Wounds are -1 or less, just apply a Critical (if needed and +50 max) and the rest is up to the GM. From my point of view roleplaying doesn't consist on torture or make suffer players, the main goal is create an awesome story, so, if every player, is hit on that way and falls down, apply the cinematic option and after that decide if they are captured or rescued by allies. Don't focus on an exhaustive Wounds or effects track.

Don't forget the use of Destiny Points to determine the "off-screen" consequences about players. Of course, if this is the end of the game, no fear for that.

In my games so many players died and also so many others survived for a few years. If story rocks, show must go on, don't get lost in numbers

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.

That is not how I read it. I take it to mean what it actually says - that you simply stop tracking wounds after twice the threshold. The intent being that a PC shouldn't be floating in a bacta tank for months on end before they can get back into the action. Nowhere in that does it say that the PC should die - that's just something added by yourself because it made sense to you. What it actually says is that you stop tracking wounds.

The problem in the OP's question is that they have put interpretation before the dice roll. They say someone is hit by a turbo laser and then look at the wounds. What should actually be done is you look at the wounds and then interpret what has happened. It is the same whether you're working at the small scale or the large. If someone is shot with a blaster pistol and soak all the damage, it's not because they are immune to being shot in the face with blaster pistols, it's because their armour partially deflected it or it just left a nasty burn across their shoulder, etc. Similarly if someone takes 30 points of damage from a Turbolaser it's not because they stood in the middle of the beam and survived, it's because they dived to the side at the last minute but still took severe burns from the heat and were pummelled against the rocks as the blast of super-heated air flung them across the landscape.

To paraphrase Harrison Ford to Mark Hammill when Hamill questioned why they weren't made to look dirty after the scene in the trash compactor: "It ain't that kind of movie, kid."

In my games we have no issue with badly injured characters taking weeks to heal (but usually far less with access to stimpacks and bacta tanks). Of course, we often have several days or even a few weeks of downtime between some sessions too.

Yeah that's good campaign design where I'm from. Unless there's some reason or solution to having a player character offline or weakened for a while, just ensure that between every relevant story thread there's enough time to just hand wave "oh you're all better now, start fresh!"

Now that said there are situations where you may want to leave injuries intact. A campaign with a certain character dying of a horrible disease as a multi-adventure thread might see some kind of penalty on that specific character for a while but this is also the sort of thing where the player should probably get a heads up first too. (Thinking something like the end-game for Zhaan in Farscape)

Another situation might be an ensemble campaign where the players are running multiple characters. In that case taking one of them offline for a while is no big deal, simply because the player can fall back on another character or two, in fact this might be a good way for the GM to encourage the player to develop his alts if the player seems too focused on using a single character.

In my games we have no issue with badly injured characters taking weeks to heal (but usually far less with access to stimpacks and bacta tanks). Of course, we often have several days or even a few weeks of downtime between some sessions too.

I very much prefer having my characters acquire a bacta tank. It means they can regain the confidence they need to pursue a particular goal. If they play conservatively for fear of impending doom, then it takes away from the excitement a bit.

The only time we have lost a character in a campaign was me, in Age of Rebellion. I wound up crashing a T-47 airspeeder and my wounds went above what anyone could fix. Here's the thing: we all acknowledged that droids are very heavy, and you don't want to be carrying one whilst running from an Imperial invasion. They left my unconscious body behind. So there is a slight problem when it comes to the RAW. Some situations can incapacitate a character in such a way that it is impossible for them to contribute to the session.

Also: how do you take the strain off of an unconscious character? They can't do it willingly, but I couldn't find anything in the rules that allows you to remove their strain besides advantage on a medicine check. Even that poses a problem because you can only do it once per encounter. Did I miss something in the rules?

Unconscious characters still roll Cool or Discipline to reduce Strain after each encounter/scene.

I did not know they could do that, thank you. Still, suffering 30 strain from falling is beyond what can be reasonably expected of cool or discipline. At least for several encounters.

The only time we have lost a character in a campaign was me, in Age of Rebellion. I wound up crashing a T-47 airspeeder and my wounds went above what anyone could fix. Here's the thing: we all acknowledged that droids are very heavy, and you don't want to be carrying one whilst running from an Imperial invasion. They left my unconscious body behind. So there is a slight problem when it comes to the RAW. Some situations can incapacitate a character in such a way that it is impossible for them to contribute to the session.

See, I don't know how okay I'd be with that. Did that result in your character's death? Because that's a pretty ambiguous fate, and at my table that means the party's been split and your character is on his own, injured, behind enemy lines. I'd probably resolve that partially with you via e-mail, and then run a split session with the goal of reuniting everyone at the end of it.

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 was re-reading the rules and heck if I can't find it. Could you give me page numbers in EotE or Aor please?

The only time we have lost a character in a campaign was me, in Age of Rebellion. I wound up crashing a T-47 airspeeder and my wounds went above what anyone could fix. Here's the thing: we all acknowledged that droids are very heavy, and you don't want to be carrying one whilst running from an Imperial invasion. They left my unconscious body behind. So there is a slight problem when it comes to the RAW. Some situations can incapacitate a character in such a way that it is impossible for them to contribute to the session.

See, I don't know how okay I'd be with that. Did that result in your character's death? Because that's a pretty ambiguous fate, and at my table that means the party's been split and your character is on his own, injured, behind enemy lines. I'd probably resolve that partially with you via e-mail, and then run a split session with the goal of reuniting everyone at the end of it.

It did result in my character's death. But I was okay with that, for several reasons. One reason is that droids are going to be heavy. The other is that it was, at least to us, impossible for me to regain consciousness in time to rejoin the session. We can't play as often as we'd like, so screw that noise. I brought in a temporary Gank character and found myself enjoying it more than the droid I was playing. So I stuck with it.

I don't feel any ill will towards anyone involved. Luck of the dice, really.

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.

What about instead of using WT x 2, you placed a cap on wounds of perhaps 30? This way you wouldn't be penalizing the high WT PCs when it comes time to healing. A WT 10 and WT 20 PC both hit for 40 will both have 30 to eventually heal (instead of 20 and 40 respectively). Thoughts/problems?

That could create problems where someone with a high WT (high 20s isn't too hard, especially for a Wookiee) is always revivable with a stimpack or Medicine check, and I don't care for this either. Far easier just to remove the cap as it doesn't really serve a good purpose.