How do you become not Unconscious? I can't find it in the rules.

Get back to 0 wounds is how I am handling that. That could happen with bed rest, spell or potion.

Fabierien

Yeah, I think it can be inferred that if you are above 0 wounds, you are conscious. Though you could force them to make a Toughness check every 10 minutes; or perhaps easier, roll a number of green conservative dice equal to toughness, and for each delay add 10 minutes to their unconsciousness.

Yeah, I'd go with removing any conditions that made them unconscious. So reducing wounds to wound threshold or lower, fatigue of 2T or lower and stress of 2W or lower.

Fatigue and stress are reduced by T and W respectively at the end of an encounter, or by a single point each at a rally step. Wounds can be healed by a First Aid check or a healing draught if you allow them to be fed to unconscious characters, in addition to the other methods mentioned in this thread.

First Aid is a basic skill so anyone can attempt it, although it'll probably be a 2d check as characters acquire a critical wound when KO'd. A character can benefit from one successful First Aid check per encounter or "scene", so you can keep trying. There's no chance of killing a character with a failure.

Agree with everything jaj22 said. There is nothing to stop you from repeatedly trying and failing First Aid checks until you get a success. Note however, that it is possible to damage your patient. If you fail and there are two banes they take a point of Stess and Fatigue, and in addition it will cause a normal wound if treating a Crit. so it is possible to kill someone, although rather unlikely. You would have to be treating a Crit of a patient that was at their Wound Threshold that already had Crits = T. Failure and two banes would cause a normal wound, which would knock them unconscious, convert a normal wound to a crit, which would then cause them to have more crits that T and die. Since treating a Crit with First Aid doesn't remove it, it only allows the character to ignore the negative effects for a day, it doesn't make sense to be treating a Crit for a character that is already at his Wound threshold, since recovering normal wounds is more important in that case. However, it is still possible that you could knock them unconscious again if they had only recovered enough Stress or Fatigue to bring them back to their threshold and you fail and roll two banes. Continuing to try and fail with two banes could pile on the Stress and Fatigue such that they would still be unconscious after recovering Stress or Fatigue from a full night's rest. Again, if the character is this bad off however, you are better off leaving them alone and allowing normal rest to get them back on their feet. You would only risk continuing First Aid if remaining where you were was too dangerous and you couldn't carry the PC to safety without further endangering the rest of the party.

Thanks for the feedback. I find it odd that there are a few ways listed in which a character can go Unconscious, but they never addressed how to recover from the state.

In my game, I house-ruled that characters stay Unconscious until they have no more effects that would cause them to become Unconscious.

The problem came up when we finished a combat with a character who had been knocked out due to an excess of Wounds. Since the encounter was over I allowed 1 first aid check but it did not remove enough Wounds. The characters did not want to continue with an Unconscious companion so they waited, and we scoured the book looking for what to do, and could not find any listed rule.

Anyway,

Thanks!

Page 62 says that when passing out from fatigue or stress the character remains unconscious until they recover from enough stress or fatigue to bring them below their threshold. Curiously, there is not a similar statement about needing to recover wounds to bring a character below their wound threshold when they are KO'd to regain consciousness; however, this is how we have been playing it too.

The rules on page 65 say:

Each character can only benefit from one successful First Aid
check per Act during an encounter. Outside of a structured encounter,
a character can benefit from one successful First Aid check per
scene, or per the GM’s discretion.

So in your example, if the character was still unconscious after being KO'd and didn't receive enough healing from First Aid to bring him below his threshold, then you would normally need a change of scene to make another First Aid attempt or have to wait for a night's rest to recover more wounds without the GM's discretion allowing another First Aid attempt for some other reason. I'm not sure where the combat encounter took place in your example, but if it was possible for the other characters to carry/drag the unconscious character to another locationa place of relative safetyI would consider that a scene change and allow another First Aid attempt to be made. Alternately, if one or more of the other characters tracked down a Priest of Shallya NPC and convinced her to go with them to render aid (roleplayed out including any necessary checks to persuade her to come modified by the size of the donation the PCs were willing to make), I would allow the NPC to render First Aid. However, if the injured PC still didn't recover enough after this second attempt, then only a night's rest would allow them to recover more. I wouldn't allow them to just continually drag a wounded character from one location to another and consider that a change of scene or allow them to have an endless parade of NPCs render aid.

I'm wondering what the combat effect of being unconscious is. If they are attacked by an NPC is it just an unopposed attack? If they are wounded, how many hits does it take to kill them? I must admit I'm not sure if there is any way to die apart from the critical thing which seems odd - though I have not completely finished reading the rules.

By the strictest interpretation of the rules the default challenge of any attack is <P> and attacking a prone character adds [W] to your attack. An NPC could stand over an unconscious PC and repeated do damage without killing him since the only time you check for death is when a PC falls unconscious from exceeding his wound threshold after converting a normal wound to a crit. If the PC is already unconscious, even additional criticals wouldn't kill him, since you wouldn't make another check unless the PC regained consciousness first and was knocked unconscious again. I'm sure that doesn't make sense to most people. The rules were written with the assumption that the default challenge rating was for fighting a conscious foe. Unconscious foes are not defending themselves in any way and should be able to be hit automatically without any check being necessary. However, the rules also assume that NPCs don't bother to attack downed PCs and focus on the upright ones that remain a threat. If all the PCs are unconscious at the end of the combat, the NPCs would be free to kill them in story mode rather than taking them prisoners, if that is what the GM wants to have happen, but as long as one of them is still alive and kicking, the NPCs should be focusing their attention on the remaining threat rather than poking at the unconscious characters. Personally, I'm not looking for ways to make the game more deadly and have higher PC turnover, so I as long as one PC survives, they all do (assuming they didn't die when they went down as already covered in the rules).

TonyACT said:

TonyACT said:

I would run an attack on a unconscious PC the same as I would anywhere else. Wounds above and beyond the threshold add recovery time, and with any bonuses awarded for attacking prone and unconscious targets they should be able to get a couple of criticals. You could also house rule it such that a successful attack is guaranteed at least 1 critical, or something similar.

Of course, if the PC is unconscious and there are no other friendlies engaging the attacker or defending the downed PC, you can allow the attacker a coups de grace as their action...