I've seen a lot of complaints about the critical system and how it lends itself to BS deaths... Like dying because you took 1 point of damage to the head, after taking 5 to the leg. So I made a slight adjustment and my players like it.

In my system, critical effects don't accumulate. You take 2 to the leg, use that effect for the chart. Then you take 3 to the arm, you look at 3 instead of 5. Each critical wound is separate and distinct. Even to the same body part. One hit does not make a different hot more significant.

However, people with similar setups have seen a problem with this: it makes characters too hard to kill. So I gave players another stat: critical threshold. Your CT is equal to 10 plus or toughness bonus and 1/3 of your willpower bonus, rounded up. When your total critical damage reaches this number, you succumb to your wounds, even if you never took a hit that was lethal on its own.

Thoughts?

Why not just track crit effects for each location individually ?

Get hit in the left leg for 3 crit damage: You now have 3 crit on left leg

Then get hit in the body for 1 crit: You now have 3 crit damage on the left leg, 1 on the head. Since the head is the only new one, its effect is applied.

Then get hit in the left leg for 5 more. You now have 1 on the head, 8 on the left leg. Take the 8 on left leg effect.

Though whatever you do, you are increasing how much damage it takes to kill characters and increasing the bookkeeping. So I'd just tell the player to ignore that little bit of unrealism because trying to be more realistic is too much bookkeeping for my liking.

Yes, the increased survivability is why I added the critical threshold. If your CT is, say... 12, and you take 3 critical damage to four different body parts, you die from your wounds, even though none of those hits were lethal.

Is the threshold actually necessary, though? Meaning, is it that much of a difference, on average? The Crit tables aren't exactly long, and some body parts are hit more often than others anyways.

The funny thing is that a whole lot of people have been playing this way for years simply because they didn't know any "better", and still it was working. I just learned that you're supposed to stack Crits from different locations about one or two months ago!

Though, if you want to make it more lethal, you could always do away with Toughness Bonus aka your-skin-is-better-than-armour.

I think the toughness bonus is meant to represent an overall resilience, rather than the literal toughness of your skin. Some people can simply take more punishment than others.

The reason I have the threshold is that it allows for the continuing accumulation of damage, regardless of where you are hit. If you take almost-lethal damage to several body parts, you're gonna go into shock and die.

I think the main difference between my system and yours (and the reason why I added the crit threshold) is because I don't think the critical effects should stack... Even if they are to the same body part. If, for example, you take a 5 point critical energy hit to the arm... That makes your arm useless and stuns you. Then you take another 1 point of explosive damage to the same arm. Exact same arm, Much weaker hit. If you stack the effects, then that hit blows your arm off, even though it was much weaker than the hit that only stunned you. It doesn't make any sense.

If you separate the effects like I do, you still apply the level 1 effect after that hit... Though in this case it doesn't matter much because the arm is already useless haha. But I keep coming back to the fact that a previous hit should not somehow magically increase the severity of the next hit. Seperating the effects also solves the question of whether or not different damage types should stack, which I thought was the biggest issue due to the major difference in lethality between some damage types.

Anyway... Yeah that's my reasoning for not stacking effects. And the Critical Threshold prevents the players from being too tough as a result. The end result is players who get the chance to accumulate some interesting battle scars, and may actually survive to get their bionic limb replacement.

To be honest, the CT doesn't really add all that much extra book keeping. You just write that number next to the critical damage box on your sheet, and when your critical damage reaches that number you die.

It's like a hybrid system. I still stack the damage, just not the effects.

I think the toughness bonus is meant to represent an overall resilience, rather than the literal toughness of your skin. Some people can simply take more punishment than others.

Sure, meant to. It's just not doing a very good job if that's the case.

Rather, I would point to GW's own d100 Inquisitor game, where Toughness Bonus served as a "buffer" between Crit levels. Anything that goes through the armour is going to injure you .. TB just governs how much .

Sorry, TB is one of my pet peeves with this system.

If you separate the effects like I do, you still apply the level 1 effect after that hit... Though in this case it doesn't matter much because the arm is already useless haha. But I keep coming back to the fact that a previous hit should not somehow magically increase the severity of the next hit. Seperating the effects also solves the question of whether or not different damage types should stack, which I thought was the biggest issue due to the major difference in lethality between some damage types.

With "stacking" I actually meant the RAW, in terms of injuries not belonging to the same body part; basically, what you described in the opening post.

But I have to say, you make a compelling argument here. I'll have to ponder about it some more to see whether I like it more or less.

I've considered negating or reducing the toughness bonus once you reach critical damage, since personal resilience wouldn't do much to prevent, say... A limb being blown off.

It is a valid approach, but from a realism PoV -- why not? Isn't that where "personal resilience" should apply even more than just to Wounds (which are pretty much nothing considering that they have zero effect on the character)?

Leaving aside the issue of Wounds being personal resilience as well , and thus the entire system being somewhat redundant, how about ignoring TB for Wound hits, but applying its damage negation once you go into crits? Gameplaywise, this might also make injuries somewhat more likely, without actually risking "sudden death" once you reach critical effects -- which would be the case if you strip TB from crits (which would effectively make any critical hit 3+ points worse than it'd otherwise would be).

Just a suggestion, mind you; personally, I don't like the idea of Toughness as an additional layer of armour in general, so I've pretty much committed to doing it Inquisitor -style, as to me, "makes injuries not so bad" sounds a lot better than "capable of averting incoming damage 100%".

That's an interesting way to think about it... although it may not be necessary. I also utilize a sort of abstract degrading of armor through repeated breaches, and that does enough to reduce damage mitigation. Taking away my player's toughness bonus sounds mean haha.... at the very least I would have to start an entirely new campaign. No fair to do that after people have already invested Exp into the characteristic.

I came about time and again with mine but:

Once you reach 0 wounds, you're dead. All wounds you lose in an attack (once TB and armour have come) are critical damage that doesn't stack.

Righteous fury stacks with normal critical damage.

This way, critical damage are rarer (unless with a **** fu*kin' big weapon of doom), but righteous fury make them bigger.

When a character reaches 0 wounds, he's dead, I give him a penalty according to it (lost arm, lost of permanent characteristics, etc.)

Yesterday, one of my player was fighting a guardsman holding his sword baïonnette, vs her that was in deep **** and had only a lasgun stock to hit him. Even if she was way faster, she had no armour at that time and only an improvised weapon again a fully armoured guardsman.

He finally had a max roll damage, inflicting 13 damage + righteous fury to the player that had 4 TB. She lost 9 wounds, so 5 critical damage. First of all, she lost all the wounds she had left (5), and suffered 5 +1D5 from the righteous fury damage.

She died, and lost 3 permanent toughness for her revival. Needless to say, her badass telekine brothe didn't took it very well and the responsible for her death was thrown in all the arcs possible of the room until he was a sack of dead meat, but that's another story.