I've not had a chance to run a game yet, but I am concerned about how common character death will be?

For example a Reiklander with Toughness 2 will have a Wound Threshold of 11. So when he takes 12+ wounds he falls unconscious; what is the likihood that 2 of theses wounds will have been Critical? As a character gains another Critical Wound when his WT is exceeded this situtation is immediately fatal.

Two Criticals + exceeding WH = Death

On paper this seems likely. The probelm I see is a high Toughness becoming virtually obligatory for PCs, which imo is an unwelcome distortion to the character generation process. However, I'd like to hear from people who have actually played.

Yeah, at least for me Toughness seems a bit too crucial characteristic. It's impact on survivability completely overshadows the rest, and in addidtion it influences your maneuverability.

Well, a character with Toughness 2 has no business taking damage in the first place. With that low toughness you really have to do your utmost at avoiding taking that damage in the first place. Being engaged is a big no-no, and if the enemy has ranged weapons you'd better make sure that you're taking cover. The more we play the more I realize that dump stats is really something you should avoid in this game.

In our first encounter (a beastmen encounter) our troll slayer got 4 criticals (with a toughness of 4) but had something like 5 wounds remaining. It was a pretty close call. But the beastman action (think it's called Savage strikes or something) does criticals very easily so I guess you don't get that kind of damage in all combat encounters. And if you have better armor+a shield I guess you will avoid the damage better.

Since all physical characteristics can become fatigued I don't really think Toughness is that much more important than the others. Toughness is only used for one skill (Resilience), I think it's perfectly valid that the characteristic is important for other stuff.

High T is only important if you expect to get into a lot of combats. Characters with low T should be avoiding combat, but hopefully the GM is giving them plenty of other opportunities to shine. T only becomes a critical characteristic if the GM is lazy and running a lot of combat encounters rather than social encounters or investigations. That being said, the players and GM have to be on the same page as to what type of game they are playing. If all the players are focusing on S, T, and Agil because they want to be good in combat, then you're missing out on what makes WFRP such a great game.

Leaving Toughness at 2 is really just begging to "play how you die" between wound, crit and soak implications.

People really need get their heads early around the idea that you look at each other wound card piles (one of the benefits of physical token tracking) and see where they stand, and you use first aid, healing magics before they fall unconscious and particularly if they are approaching To in # of criticals. To-1 criticals = dead next time you take wounds over threshold = in really bad shape and that first critical at To 2. Be prepared to retreat.

An alternative style campaign more "call of cthulhu investigative" in nature would see Wisdom and insanities the threat areas to manage. One too many horrid crime scenes etc.

Rob

Your formula is somewhat flawed, you don`t die if your Knocked out in combat and the number of critical wounds cards don`t exceed your To.

However when you KO`d from wounds you also convert one of your normal wounds to a critical wound. So the right formula would be

To = Critical wound cards + KO`d = You`re dead!

Good gaming

gruntl said:

Well... In theory, but even in largely social campaigns things can get messy. Eventually an ambush, trap, coach crash, area of effect or swarm of rats is going to hit the party - maybe at the same time. Classically the Mr. Glass character is the mage and they are often a prime target for intelligent opponents. Mr. Glass is not going to be able to hide behind a rock for every encounter.

It seems the consensus is that a Toughness 2 character is absurdly fragile - for an adventuring life in the RAW.

It sounds like exceeding your Wound Threshold is highly dangerous even for Toughness 4 characters; as Combat is filled with Criticals. It is fairly safe bet that combat encounters for more advanced PCs will be filled with more opponents with Critical-likely attacks. So this situation is just going to get worse...

I have some issue with unconsciousness and damage threshold :

You take a number of wounds exceeding your Damage Threshold = unconscious until you have a number of wounds under it AND one of the wounds is turned critical.

What happens next ? If you take damages again, do you have to turn one wound critical each time ?

I haven't considered a solution yet, but I do feel that toughness has too great of an impact on survivability. The best armor you can get is 5 soak... only just as good as a tough fighter being hit on naked skin. That's just weird. The old rolling method where you roll your soak and make successes cancel wounds isn't viable either because with the fairly cinstant damage rates that roll could decide more than the attack used.

Perhaps use half toughness rounded up as soak? The dwarf in my troupe had made some attacks with 17+ damage though, so even with 7 soak (4 toughness and 3 armour) 10 wounds will get through. had that been half toughness then 12 would have gotten through. I don't know. It may be worth looking at... but cloth users will be in a world of hurt as their stamina may already be low.

willmanx said:

It is my belief that the system presumes that once a character is down for the count, enemies will ignore them to focus on the more immediate threat of his still upright companions, so they wouldn't take damage again after falling unconscious due to wound loss. The PC would need to regain consciousness again and be considered a threat once more to be attacked and suffer additional wounds. If all the PCs are down, the GM has to decide if the opponents would just slay them outright, take prisoners, or just leave them for dead (may depend on the opponents and needs of the story).

If the story calls for an opponent to ignore the still threatening companions of the fallen PC to focus on the one they took down, then the PC is just dead. No need to bother with making attack rolls, they are hit automatically. If the PC is unconscious, the opponent can just stab them in the heart, cut off their head, rip their throat out, or whatever is graphically appropriate for the opponent in question and be done with it.

Good call, Mac40k, as always. Until then I used to capture them or let them here (looklike deads)

Also, per RAW, 2 Toughness is below average. So if a character with 2 Toughness die much easier, I believe it's intention of the game.

All in all, I think the game is designed so you need have a some what balanced characteristic in order to survive the different challenge that GM may throw at you.

For those who think To is too important for survivability, I think they are missing the point. Low To makes fragile characters. That's OK. It's interesting even, to see the scribe run for cover as soon as there is a scrap ! But what for those unlucky situations where surprise makes the scribe suddenly extremely vulnerable and risk losing a loved PC to a bad die roll ?

Fate points !!! Bing them back.

They were the best thing since sliced bread. Do get why FFG took them out... Keeps the game lethal and the characters alive to fight another day...

Jericho said:

Never liked fate points. Why? Because it's in the GMs power to award new ones. This means that character death is once again in the hand of the GM and not the players.

I use open rolls to make sure that the fate of the characters isn't my descision (do I fiddle with this rolls and save the characters). It may result in characters dying, but it also empowers the players to be masters of their own fate.

Gallows said:

Well, one could argue that fate points would make even more sense to use with open rolls. The players themselves control their fate, instead of a GM that mollifies the dice results. And then never award new fate points to get around the GM power issue.

It's not exactly hard to house rule the use of fate points in 3ed, just let each player a couple of them and use them as extra lives, a player may pay a fate point to avoid death and instead just be knocked out (and then ignored by enemies for the rest of the encounter).