So, how nasty are critical hits in 3e?

Are we talking "Suffer a -1 to Dex until end of next turn"
*or*
"Blow breaks nose and drives fragments into eye-socket. Lose D10 Fel and an eye of your choice."

Just curious?

I don't remember seeing any that went away after a set time, so no to your first.

There were a few very nasty ones and they linger and can get worse over time, so while the exact text would be different, yes to your second.

Are all wound cards and therefore criticals born equal?

wound cards don't have any kind of rating attached to them do they, so how severe (or not) the critical you take is more down to chance depending on which wound card you pull from the deck and which you then choose to turn over from those in front of you... right?

nasty!

pumpkin said:

You are correct. The 'hurt' from a critical is in your hands literally and figuratively. Cool system and I think it really engages the GM in cool ways as well.

Winter324 said:

You get a recovery test each day to remove 1 critical.

Presumably each critical counts as a wound as well, reducing the amount of damage you can take. Anyone know for certain if thats the case?

Loswaith said:

That is my understanding. If you suffer 4 wounds +1 crit, you have 4 Wounds, one of which is flipped over to show the crit effect; not 4 wound cards with the "regular" wound side showing and a 5th card with the crit side showing.

What's really nasty, is there are some attacks that have a line that states: "Does Critical Damage".

It means, so far as I can tell, all the wounds inflicted on this attack are Critical Hits. Viscious.

I won't say where this hits can come from at this time, I'll just leave it to GM's to let their players know at a more, uh, appropriate time.

One other thing abour critical recovery. If you manage to recover a crit, it flips to the wound. So you still have to deal with it as a regular wound after getting rid of it.

Boris Hochloff said:

No. All it means i that the hit does is a minimum of 1 critical. In essence, it is a non-cumulative critical. There are 2 types of criticals, essentially. Criticals that say "+X Critical damage" are cumulative. Ones that say "inflict critical..." are equal to 1, that only stacks with the previous "+X Criticals".

So, say a hit does 3 Wounds.

a) Effects say the hit "inflicts critical damage". The hit does 3 Wounds, one of which is critical

b) Effects say twice that the hit "inflicts critical damage". The hit does 3 Wounds, only one of which is a critical.

c) Effects say that the hit "inflicts critical damage" as well as "+1 critical". The hit does 3 Wounds, TWO of which are criticals.

dvang - thanks for clearing that up. There's at least one PC action card with that line on it. Was looking a little over-powered.

Appreciate it.

np, I had the same confusion and thought. FFG cleared it up when I asked them the question.

Could someone post an example or three of the Critical Hit effects that are out there.

Maybe one minor, one major and one "instant death"?

Of the top of my head, the most "minor" critical is the "Flesh Wound". It has no real effect, except to be a critical, and doesn't give you any negatives. However, it's severity is the number of Flesh Wounds, and severity is how hard it is to heal away. So, the danger of flesh wounds is that you only need to be knocked unconscious and have # criticals > T. So with 4 flesh wounds, although you have no penalties to actions, they are hard to get rid of and you are much more likely to be killed (in fact, just going unconscious will kill you).

There are criticals that give a to any roll involving the stat, and there are a couple for each stat.

There are some more dangerous ones, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.

So there are no instant kill criticals ? Decapitations, showers of blood etc ?

Death, it seems to me, will only happen as per the Crits > T rule when you down to 0 wounds. Which is sad. Isn't it ?

If "Instant Death" crits are in fact absent, I would agree with you.
I always felt that the unpredictability of crits added much to the Grim-n-Gritty feel of WHFRP.

I would hate it if there were, as Fate Points seem to be gone and you can get a Critical Hit from the very first time you get hit

Jericho said:

Insta-crits would make the new system insanely lethal and random since you risk getting a crit from a minor hit now. GM's have no control over which crit you get and if any random hit could kill you then you risk losing control over the game and making the players way to scared to go into combat.

However I do think you can Insta-kill people, from the very beginning of combat, if you do enough critical wounds in one attack - now since I don't have the game I don't know how often that's likely to happen, but I guess it isn't that often.

phobiandarkmoon said:

I see. No insta-kill, then.

Getting 4 or more crits in one blow seems very improbable in the present ruleset.

I agree that without Fate points, a lucky blow that kills off your fully armoured knight of the inner circle could be frustrating indeed.

Removing Fate points was a very bad idea IMO. They were one of the best inventions of WFRP. Because they enabled the game to be very lethal, without spoiling the fun. Losing a FP was a very scary thing for players. It almost really hurt ! No other mechanic conveys the fright of coming close to death as well as FPs do.

So now basically, it's back to RPG normality, PCs are hard to kill, and the game provides ways to resurrect them (in this case, most combatants will fall unconscious at 0 wounds and be "resurrected" by first aid). It's not bad, but I thought FP were way better.

For example, in a total party kill situation, FPs would save the day for everyone. In this version, once everyone is unconscious, the enemies just finish everyone off and the GM has got a major problem !!! So to avoid this, PCs will be made tougher and the opposition will have to be toned down, to give the PCs a fighting chance in every situation, because a total party kill as not an option for all sensible GMs.

I'm sure to bring back FPs at some point, but I don't want to make PCs invulnerable in doing so. That's why I hope that criticals stay nasty, and that insta-kills can happen as regularly as in V2, which means rarely, but a few times every adventure.

In WFRP 1 and 2, PCs had to be at 0 wounds before they had any crits at all; I don't recall anything that could "insta-kill" you. Someone remind me of something.

In this system, you suffer from crits as you are wounded. If you hit 0 wounds and have too many crits, you're dead. I fail to see much of a difference other than the v3 system being a more realistic representation of actually being wounded during a fight.

Mordenthral said:

Yeah, I think that's the point. At the end of a fight you could have 1 wound and it could be a crit. Then you have to get that patched up. The first aid/medicine rules are pretty tough too. It takes a while to recover if you get beat up pretty good.

NezziR said:

Yes, I was pleased when I read the recovery/healing rules after playing in the demo. I like the new system. Now combatants have to worry about wounds, crits, stress, fatigue, strain and insanity all at once. In previous editions, there was basically only wounds and insanity; crits were nearly 100% lethal in all the times I saw one dealt (especially 1st edition.)

Mordenthral said:

A single blow could score multiple extra damage rolls, resulting in a critical that would kill a PC or (more commonly) an NPC. In 2nd Ed it was called Ulric's Fury, and was less likely to occur than in first edition.

All you needed to do in 2nd ed was take a hit of wounds + 5 in damage and its guarenteed death, realistically anything over wounds +3 was likely to kill you.

For most starting human characters thats realy only 16 damage excluding armour. So around 4-5% of the time.

So it wasn't the crit effects doing an insta-kill.. it was a lucky damage roll. Got it.

With expertise dice, I can see one hit doing a few crits all at once in this system; but I don't see someone taking so many wounds at once that they meet their wound threshhold in one hit. But that's my impression from a brief look at the rules.

I say less likely to occur in 2nd edition than first because it is substantially less likely to roll a 10 on d10 than a 6 on d6.

The chance of an Ulric's Fury hit with a beginning character (WS 33) is 0.33%, assuming you grant them the initial hit.

From my reading of the rules, PC's can have an unlimited number of critical hits as long as they do not go unconscious. At that point, if they have more criticals than their Toughness rating, they are dead.