Hi, I did my best to see if these questions weren't already answered, i f i missed them i apologise in advance.

I'm a new DH aficionado and a first time GM. Me and my group were having trouble with some of the rules. I hope you guys can help us out.

They way we get it so far is that you don't gain additional wounds beyond character creation with the obvious exeptance of the 'Sound Constitution' talent. Is this right? We played a lot of D&D in the past so that's our frame of reference, so it seems natural to gain wounds along the way.

Second, the whole critical damage stuff is lost on me. The way I get it, any damage beyond 0 wounds is critical damage. Wouldn't the character/NPC being hit already be dead when at 0 wounds? i really don't get this part.

also, is there a righteous fury for ranged combat?

Thanks!

Hi there,

Although I'm new to DH as well, having only run one session so far as GM, I think I can explain the wounds/critical wounds situation.

When someone with 10 wounds is hit for, say, 7 damage, they are reduced to 3 wounds. If they are then damaged again, for another 6 damage, because they are effectively in negative wounds, they go on to the critical damage track (for the relevant type of damage) found in the main book.

You calculate it by subtracting the damage taken (6) from their current wounds (3), resulting in -3, which means you look up 3 on the relevant critical damage table, which is usually something pretty horrific but not immediately life-threatening.

The character now struggles on with whatever crippling effects they're suffering, and if they take further damage, say another 8 points, you add that to their position on the critical damage table (3) giving a total of 11, which I'm pretty sure means they are dead (without going into Fate Points). (I think that if, rather than 8 points they'd taken, say, another 3 damage, but from weapon with a different damage type, you would look up the result on the new damage type).

I'm sure someone will correct this if it's wrong, but hopefully that should give you an idea of how it all works. I was really thrown by this in the first game as well, as used to D&D as well!

Von Schaffhausen said:

On gaining wounds: Yes you are correct. Most ranks offer at least one Sound Constitution purchase and some offer multiple Sound Constitutions. However, you can't buy these until you hit that rank, so, in an odd kind of way, you do gain more wound points when you level up... you just have to actually spend the xp to get them as opposed to automatically recieving them ;-)

On Criticals, Wounds, and Death: Floating Disc is right on the money of how Criticals work. To simplify: it is recommended that for most unimportant NPC's, they die when they hit 0 wounds for the GM's sanity, but for the PC's and important NPC's, they don't die until a critical effect says they do. If a character has 10 Wound Points, their "hit points' plotted out would look something like this 9with positive numbers representing Wounds and negative numbers representing Critical levels):

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 2 1 0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10

They're doing okayish until they hit -1 (0 is a sure sign that things are fixing to start sucking in terrible ways) and they're dead somewhere from -6 to -9 depending on the damage type that inflicted the critical and the hit location (X to the head is the deadliest while E to an extremity seems to be the least deadly). Keep in mind that all critical damage stacks (the character only has one line of numbers up there) so, eventually, they'll hit a critical that says "congratulations, you're chunky salsa."

finally, yes Righteous Furry applies to WS and BS attacks. That is to say, it applies ranged attacks as well as melee attacks.

Thank you very much, the both of you!

Now we can can play the game without wondering if we're doing something wrong

Cheers!