I haven't found anything about this in the rules. If you want to have a not-fighting-to-kill bar brawl (or if you just end up fighting unarmed), how do you do it? If you can fight somehow trying to deal only normal wounds then it wouldn't result to anyone getting killed, right?

Yeah, the rules as written cover unarmed brawls pretty much perfectly by default. 'Unarmed' is covered on the melee weapon table, and it has low damage and high crit score, so is likely to end in lots of knock-outs and few deaths.

monkeylite said:

Oh, now I found it. I've scanned through that melee weapon table so many times but I've always sort of expected to find it from the beginning of the list, next to the gauntlet and the dagger so it's just evaded my eye. There have been a couple of unarmed fights in my game so far and I've treated them as Improvised, so not too far off the mark.

I think having unarmed attacks as weapons would mean your fight may take quite a long time. There are going to be no one punch knockouts. I am going to try a different tactic with unarmed combat and see what happens. Instead of dealing wounds (that will take a long time to recover from) I am going to have it more like a toughness combat. Create an action card for unarmed combat were a blow deals fatigue in order to have a chance to make the other side pass out. This seems better than having someone knocked out and taking several days from recovering in every unarmed combat fight.

Danur Longbeard said:

I'm not sure I understand what the problems with using wounds is? Wounds are not that hard to recover from. If you get knocked out in a fistfight you will have ~12 wounds and probably 0 crits. With appropriate rest you will heal this without any medical attention or checks in 4 days (with Toughness 3). That seems perfectly fair to me. Being knocked out by reaching your wound limit in an unarmed fight should have some kind of lasting effect. If you base it on fatigue alone, the player will be up and running again the next morning (or after ~10 minutes if you use rallying phases and fatigue recovery actions/talents), I think that's not very fitting for the theme (it's certainly not very realistic, although realism is perhaps not very interesting).

Well to me it is much more realistic that someone knocked out in fight wakes up fairly quickly afterwards as opposed to having to waiting a full day of rest to recover. I just think if you start dealing wounds to a PC hes going to make dang sure the NPC is dead at the end of a fight. While forcing fatigue checks will cause the PC to understand this is a battle of toughness and not life or death. Most fist fights last until someone is knocked out or they are too tired to fight. Having to use a healing draught after a fist fight just doesn't seem to be a way to keep an adventure flowing. Would be much easier if the group says ok its time to rest we are tired.

Someone KO'ed in an all out fist fight may wake up shortly, but ask a boxer how they feel 10 minutes after a fight they lost by KO, or the day after, or two days after. I doubt they have totally recovered and feel just fine, crack ribs and internal hemmoraging doesn't feel better in the morning, and those are people with gloved fists. It gets even worse when you end up with things like ruptred spleens.

As far as being quick paced and suitable for the game, well wounds already exist in the game it won't take any longer to recover from a fist fight than any other fight. If you want a way for someone to quickly KO an opponent and have that opponent be out for just a short time with relativley little long term effect then use the perform a stunt action, or make up a new action card that will allow quick KO, call it "Sucker Punch" or "Sleeper Hold" or something like that:

" Haymaker " Recharge 2

Athletics vs. Reslience

Sucess = target gains a the status effect "Knocked Silly" and adds a number of tokens to this effect equal to the number of success generated. If the target already has the "Knocked Silly" status effect add a number of tokens to it equal to the number of success genereated.
2x Boons = take a free maneuvre
3x Boons = add 2 extra tokens to the targets "Knocked Silly" status effect
2x Banes = leave your self wide open, while this card is recharging you suffer -1 defence and -1 soak
Comet = add your strength to the number of token added to the targets status effect
Star of Chaos = Suffer -1 defence -1 soak (stacks with penalties for rolling banes) and cannot use active defences while this card is recharging.

Knocked Silly Status effect

While this effect has traking tokens on it, add the number of tokens to your total Fatigue and Stress when determining how many misfortune dice to add to your dice pools. If the number of tokens on it exceedes your toughness you become unconcious and can take no maneuvers or actions.

Remove 1 token during rally steps, at the end of an act you may make a resilence check remove 1 token for each success generated.

A first aid check can be made to remove one token from this status effect per success genereated on that first aid check. A commet on that check allows you to regain conciousness reguardless of how many tokens remain, however the penalty for tokens still applies, if you gain any additional tokens that results in a total greater than your toughness you become unconcious again. After a nights rest all tokens are removed from this status effect.

If at any time there are no tokens left on this status effect, the status effect is removed.

That's something I just came up with right now, seems like a lot of extra rules, but to me its a better alternative than changing the base mechanics of unarmed combat.