A dwarf in my troupe has 4 toughness, armor with 2 soak and a shield with 1 soak. That's 7 soak total.

If he is hit with an attack dealing 7 damage and +2 critical hits, then it would result in only one critical hit or can critical hits not be soaked?

Both criticals get converted into normal wounds, p.59 Rulebook. Gallows, having a good bit of actual play experience, do you feel that's a little soft? What do you think about criticals remaining criticals even if they're soaked?

Interesting question: Should combat be grim and gritty... (crits stay crits)

or

Should combat coddle munchkinizer players with high soaks?

I'm bloodthirsty, rat-bastard GM, so I'm always inclined to go towards more PC danger..afterall, my biggest pet peeve is whiny players who say crap like "I almost died."

I go with "Crits Stay Crits." In fact, I just house-ruled: CRITS ARE NOT SOAKED. Did you just get 2 crits, but you have a soak of 15? Awwwww, poor baby!

jh

donbaloo said:

I was merely curious as we have our own house rule for criticals, but when looking through the book I just couldn't find the official rule. Thanks for the hint. Yes I think it's too soft. Our critical wounds work like this:

• Critical damage:
  Critical hits deal a number of hits equal to their severity, so if you draw a critical with a severity of 3, you would draw three additional normal wounds. If the total damage is below 0 after soak and a critical wound was rolled, then the target will suffer this critical wounds and the extra severity wounds can't be soaked. If two or more criticals were inflicted then just one gets through.
  

Emirikol said:

Think about it. If player gets crit and this crit is converted into normal wound due to high soak so that must be only a scratch. How this could broke your nose?

donbaloo is right. As listed in p. 59, Criticals are not soaked, but they are downgraded to normal wounds by high soak values. So even if the character in question had 15 soak he would still gain both critical wound's severity rating in normal wounds.

Seems fair enough to me. Characters should have some advantage to having a high Soak rating, but the effect of a critical wound should not go unnoticed.

Lexicanum said:

Just to make things clear. By RAW you get one wound per critical (if you soak all damage), not one wound per severity rating. That was Gallows house rule

gruntl said:

Yeah, I made the house rules to make criticals and the dice results to get them more important than just successes. I find this balance things well, because successes are so easy to come by, when less emphasis is put on the number of successes. Besides core rule criticals aren't really feared... my rule helps a bit with that. Death by critical is very rard if you have 4+ toughness and not something the player have to worry too much about.

We did have a killer fight in the weekend session though. Thousand Thrones in the swamp. The players said they were catious by moving to the ruins, because of the swamp, but made no effort to hide. They were ambushed by one of the mutant brothers and the other brother joined in. It was a tough fight bu they took both out, but then the other three cultists had noticed them and rushed in to attack. The leader had an arcane bolt (Expert NPCs ToA, wizard). It didn't do enough damage, so it was always one wound to the dwarf warrior. It did however give him one stress each time as well and after 3 rounds the dwarf had more than twice his willpower and he was knocked out. He just managed to take one of the cultists out before though. The other group member an apprentice wizard was hit that round and had 12 wounds... exactly his wound threshold. He made a channeling action and got a great result ending up with a lot of extra power. He fired off his fireblast and almost roasted the cultist near him... but not quite. The cultist attacked him and both players were aware that this would certainly be the end for them both. But the cultist had a freaky roll and missed (I roll openly so the players can see the roll). The dwarf was still down and he could not remove stress because his talent was still recharging. He used a party talent to remove two recharge tokens from the talent that could remove stress. The mage finally fired at the apprentice wizard but counterspell saved the day. The next round the dwarf got up again, still right on the edge with stress, but he managed to cleave the cultist, spend 3 fatigue to move and engage the mage cultist. The mage cultist fired at the dwarf but failed to give him a point of stress this time. The appretice wizard started channeling again and finally the dwarf attacked, spent three fortune points and made a power attack that almost killed the cultist leader. At that time the cultist leader dropped to his knees and surrendered. The characters rested for a few days in the ruins, with the cultist leader locked in a big chest. When they had healed a bit they interrogated the cultist leader and killed him lying in the chest and locked it. It was an incredible fight and both players and I thought they would die... they were awarded fortune points after that fight, because luck had certainly been on their side in that fight... almost scary how lucky they were. Except for the apprentice wizard who won a colony of lice after resting in the cultist leaders bed for a few days.

by the way, how long last unconsciousness ?

willmanx said:

Until you recover stress/fatigue. You are allowed to roll after an encounter, but durring the encounter you can only recover stress/fatigue from talent cards, spells or perhaps first aid.