We're just starting today but am curious to hear from any GMs out there with a game or more of W3 under their belts. What's the PC mortality rate like? I know that sometimes poor decisions on the player's part will lead to the death of their character, but I mean more in general terms. For example, in our D4 games it's hard as heck to get killed. I've managed to do it twice in the past 18 months but that was mostly because I was reckless and I think that we've had maybe one other PC death in D4 (falling into a river of acid will do that to you). Anyway, have combats in W3 been ultra deadly or just mostly painful on the PCs?

thanks,

Mark

Mark Theurer said:

I've had one character die in the first two seessions I ran. It's more likely to get knocked out than die, but it's VERY possible to die.

The wizard in my group isn't dead but he has a severity three critical wound and knocked out and he has one insanity. Since I have only run two sessions the system seems gritty enough for me. I would say it is easier to go insane in this edition because they have removed insanity points and since all of the damage values have increased it is easier to take damage and thus easier for a character to die.

Since we've been playing with the (mostly) final rules, we've had a 3 PC TPK. Another PC death. And on three separate occasions, PCs going unconscious who got rescued. That's in 14 sessions.

Since we've only just started playing, actual play experience has yet to bear this out, but I hypothesize that you are more in danger of losing a character to Insanity than wounds. You don't die from individual crits, just the accumulation of them. Similarly, accumulating Insanities is bad. However, recovering from crits is much easier and faster (in game time) than removing permanent Insanities, so you can "manage" crits more easily than Insanities. If you have too many crits, you can just take a short time off to heal. If you have too many Insanities, you're talking months of down time. In either case, continuing to push yourself when you are treading close to your threshold runs the risk of taking your character out of the game, but you are far more likely to risk that with Insanity than crits.

I've run 4 full sessions so far, which isn't a lot. But I have yet to have a character fall, and no one near death (he had 1 crit at the time he was about to KO, but he moved out of combat and the others moved in to cover him). No insanities yet.

BUT - I've been slowly ramping the players up. Introducing parts of mechanics, and introducing the reality of the setting. Two of my three players have never played WFRP before, and one has never played an RPG before.

The next session, the kid gloves come off!

In our first session "A day late..." we had 4 PCs (2 ranged, 1 hth, 1 support) and two fights that seemed very quick. Overall we had a couple of crits on PCs and two of the four get about halfway down on wounds, but no deaths.

Mark

I hope its slightly more than our 4e game was. We had 8 Fatalities in 30 sessions, which is a tad lighter than I would like.

D&D 4th edition is very very very player-friendly and very very very difficult to have an actual death. I don't really compare any system to D&D 4th edition in terms of fatalities because it was designed to be easy for the players to live and accomplish things.

My limited experience with WH 3rd is that it's a lot easier to kill a character than in 4th edition D&D, but that's also like saying that it's easier for a professional fighter to kick the teeth in of a primary school novice.

I think that this edition of Warhammer is also a lot friendlier to characters than previous editions, though player stupidity or over stressing oneself can lead to bad results. That's a player issue... smart players I think will find it's a bit trickier to off them. I find that to be the general trend of many games these days.

Well, last week I ran the "An Eye for an Eye" Scenario. It was my first time GMing this system, so I got some rules wrong and stuff, but mostly I did OK. We had the 2 main fights and in each of them one of the PCs went down in the second or thirf round. From there, the PCs got more careful on exposing themselves, but still got nicked pretty good. All the PCs ended with critical wounds left over for next adventure, but none were too close to dying that I can tell. Still, they'll have to watch out for the next adventure or I can tell a couple of them will go down in flames.

I ran two games over New Year's and with 5 total characters (3 first game, 2 the second), we experienced 1 death and one KO with a fudged ruling to keep him alive.

The rules specifically said that once critical severity exceeds Toughness, the character dies. My player running a Trollslayer had crits equalling his Toughness, so I let him live. However, the healing check shortly after combat was failed miserably, so technically he died there...but the game was over at that point...

OK, we had 2 deaths out of 5....

Jaysin1414 said:

Not quite true. The rules state that the *only* time you check for death is once a character is unconscious from taking more wounds than they have wound points.

So, if I have 13 wound points and a toughness of 5, it doesn't matter if I have 5, 6, or 10 crits as long as I don't fall unconscious by taking that 14th wound.

Jaysin1414 said:

Following up on Sunatet`s correction. It is not the severity rating of the critical card that decides if your character lives or dies when knocked out. If the number of critical cards exceeds the character`s Toughness rating, than he is dead. Severity rating is only used when treating a critical wound.

have a good game

I wiped a Troll Slayer from the map with a wargor last night. It felt good.

jh

[simulating a GM power trip]