If you have a Wound Threshold of 12 and takes 15 damage, do you keep 14 wound cards "face down" and 1 wound card "face up"?

yes, as soon as a character has more wounds than their wound threshold they are KOd and immediately choose one of their wounds at random to flip to the critical side.

so if that last his put you to 15 wounds, you would choose one of those and flip it to critical side.

What about attacking an unconscious target ?

if you're not able to do critical hit it, it doesn't die and it takes unlimited normal wounds ?

Or Do you continue to convert 1 of the wound in critical because you are over the damage threshold ?

willmanx said:

I'm pretty sure you continue to convert one wound to one critical every time a terget is hit and the number of current wounds is over his damage threshold.

If a player has 1 wound left and is hit for 5 damage he would take 4 critical wounds instead of one. That's no official rule, but it's good

Gallows said:

so an unconscious guy dies quickly and that's logical. good suggestion Gallow.

willmanx said:

If we don't have that rule then GMs will be in a tough spot. Either players just won't die unless they already have too many critical wounds, or the GM has to finish them off when they are on the ground which is a situation a GM should never put himself in.

We've actually been playing it that your wound threshold is just that, a thredhold, it cannot be exceeded. Therefore, if you have a WT of 14 and have a total of 10 wounds, if you took 6 additional wounds, first off you would draw 4 new wound cards, then the remaining 2 wounds would get converted to crits. Now since this method is fairly quick and deadly, this rule has replaced the rule of converting 1 crit when KO'd, so under our rule, if you only gained 4 wounds, and exactly met your WT of 14 you would become unconcious, but have zero crits, that is unless you gain any additional wounds.

Honesty so far it hasn't come up, the only time anyone has gotten to their WT, they already had enough crits to be lethal. In fact we had a guy die because his 5th crit (he had To = 4) was the 2nd concussion he suffered so even though he was not at his WT, he was unconcious and had crits > Toughness.

This brings me to another question, which I will post in a new thread...

BCA said:

No because if you have a wound threshold of 14 and get 14 wounds then you don't become unconscious. Being knocked unconscious requires you to get MORE wounds than your wound threshold. This means that when you are knocked unconscious you'll always gain at least one critical wound.

Ah, you are absolutley right, I completley missed the "more than" clause, but that really doesn't change the way we run our system, other than to possibly make it even more lethal. I'm not sure as a character with 14/14 wounds I would want to be concious, I think I would want to be KO'd. Infact my Dwarf student survived a fairly veracious encouter only because when he reached 13/15 wounds he feel to the ground and pretented to be dead or at least no longer a threat (not that he ever was one to begin with).

FAQ should try some ruling on this. Excess damage over threshold does not seem logical - what's the upper limit to this? How do you convert excess damage to criticals?

3rd edition designers wanted to make criticals and wound thresholds something that allowed a player a change to live better than in 2nd ed but now it is very confusing and everyone is left guessing how deadly they should make going over WT.

My groups said that it is too easy to stay alive in 3rd ed. That's pretty strong stuff coming from the players.

Maybe we go with the ruling also that WT is a maximum and any wounds over that are converted to criticals. That will finish off basically one one who is near death and receives a deadly blow.

Page 41 of ToA has a sidebar discussing how to handle unconscious characters. It implies that if you take the time to attack an unconscious character - he is immediately dead ... a coupe de grace of sorts. Sounds logical to me - I mean, how hard is it to slit the throat of an unresisting target?

I don't let monsters do this mid-combat (like the sidebar suggests) but if all PCs are unconscious then well, new characters everyone!

Roy.

That would make sense, but I'm more worried about things like AE attacks, or enviromental damage, or bleeding wounds or something other than a direct attack that may effect an unconcious character. So some official guidance would be nice.

I make things a little easier. If you're unconscious and an enemy attacks you, you die.