All credit to @2P51 for bringing up this method in another thread. If you want a new level of immersion for your game try keeping track of wounds and strain for your players and simply informing them how hurt or psychologically stressed they feel through description instead of through a number.

I would like to discuss in this thread what you see (or know) as far as obstacles to this way of tracking Strain and Health. I am using this in my games now and the first outing of it was really fun. I didn't mind the extra accounting because it helped my players to stop playing the numbers and start playing their characters. I have discussed this topic recently in other forums and one of the objections that gets raised is that it is too much work for the GM.

Also, some people seem to object to the idea of the player not knowing exactly where the character is as far as the game resources. I contend that this is only an issue if the character is always supposed to behave like the mechanics are somehow known to the character, and that characters must always go down as a result of the player subjecting the character to a situation where the numbers line up (tough fight only faced if full health, etc.). As you read this, do you know exactly how many Wounds and Strain you have? And would you know how much you lost if you stubbed your toe, broke your finger, or got yelled at by your boss? I think you would just have a general feeling of how good to go you are. The GM can convey that information by translating the numbers into descriptions.

To do this successfully I believe you have to have a strong concept as a GM of what the damage looks like (in your interpretation for your game) as it is done to the character, and being able to leave room for some abstractions such as luck/The Force, deflections from angles and materials, and other ways that a hit does not directly connect with 100% transference of damage to the player character's body. This is mainly in the form of variation of description. A 7 point hit from a blaster could be described as a burning wallop that hits the character I the breastplate, or the effect of catching a lot of the spall from a duracrete column that partially explodes from a blaster bolt as the character uses it for cover.

The Basic Human (Character)

Wounds 10+2=12 Strain 10+2 = 12 Soak:2

A Blaster Pistol is designed for killing and does 7 points of damage minimum (As the one Success it took to hit counts toward damage) but will encounter at least two points of soak usually and so it actually does 5. This means the average unarmored person can probably take 2 hits from a Blaster Pistol as far as non-Crit wounds. By comparison a Slugthrower Pistol such as we have today will do 5 points of damage minimum but hitting the 2 soak will be knocked down to 3.

Because this is not really the way weapons work (Their function is to kill efficiently) it can be supposed that most average people are Minions . For example a Nerf Herder has a Soak of 2 and a Wound Threshold of 3. A Slugthrower Pistol with a good hit could kill that person in one shot.

To me this seems to suggest that Wound Threshold is not really representing any kind of serious physiological wounds until it is registering negative numbers. When a character hits negative numbers in Wound Threshold the book says they are "defeated" which the book says "usually entails death" but can mean incapacitated. Getting shot full on or having significant blood loss will generally make a person stop functioning unless adrenaline and willpower combine with the nature of the specific wound to allow the person to continue to function.

The player is supposed to track their wounds until they reach a maximum of twice their Wound Threshold in negative numbers (-24 for our Basic Human Character) for the purpose of knowing how much healing they need to become conscious if the call was made that they were just incapacitated and not dead. So negative wounds on an actual Player Character represent life-threatening injuries. It could have killed you, but you are hanging on to life. Also when you initially go below your wound threshold you automatically get 1 critical injury.

Critical Hits

Critical Hits Kill minions. Critical hits also stay on all non-minion characters until healed, which means that Critical Hits are serious physiological wounds. Critical Hits can kill Heroes instantly but they put this type of critical numerically high on the list where even a maximum roll will not hit the result unless a lot of Vicious, consecutive Crit bonus to the roll, or Talents are applied. Any time a Critical Hit occurs this needs to be a description of a serious and possibly debilitating injury if Death or Dying isn't indicated.

The passage I reference from the core rulebook does refer primarily to NPCs from what I can tell. Unless there is something in the errata that covers it better it looks like the devs abdicated most of the responsibility for killing a PC to the Critical Tables.

I am getting ideas from the discussions around more narrative combat.

Implementing the blind wound/strain system I think i could also add some more narrative to the combat. I have to say, I had no problem with number crunching, but some ideas are very exciting and dramatic which I like very much.

The Idea is that I wait until the end od round to narrate the whole round knowing all the rolls, and actions before translating it to the narrative. They can still make decisions, just not based on the actual round.

Does this brings too much problem, what do you think?

I have tried my hands at this during D&D 3.5 and had mixed feelings about it. While it added a sense of insecurity sometimes, with the players not knowing when their character would drop and start dying, it didn't always work as intended. Of course, the players are highly aware of their character's total hitpoints (and I would assume this to be the case with Wounds and Strains in Star Wars too) as it is a constant on their character sheets. Tension about this wanes as and when players, intentionally or not, keep track of their character's hitpoints just as well as the GM does. While this is harder to do when the GM doesn't mention specific damage numbers, guestimates can be made. With randomized results in D&D this is a lot less difficult to blurr, than it is with Star Wars, where damage numbers are set, only modified by number of successes from (often) openly visible rolls, and maybe a talent or two.

1 hour ago, Rimsen said:

I am getting ideas from the discussions around more narrative combat.

Implementing the blind wound/strain system I think i could also add some more narrative to the combat. I have to say, I had no problem with number crunching, but some ideas are very exciting and dramatic which I like very much.

The Idea is that I wait until the end od round to narrate the whole round knowing all the rolls, and actions before translating it to the narrative. They can still make decisions, just not based on the actual round.

Does this brings too much problem, what do you think?

I think that it could work depending on your group. If I am understanding you correctly, you and your players would accomplish all dice rolling before you issue a summary of what happened. If the flow is halting and disconnected it would be bad, but if you are able to do it as fast as normal resolution I think it could work.

15 minutes ago, Xcapobl said:

I have tried my hands at this during D&D 3.5 and had mixed feelings about it. While it added a sense of insecurity sometimes, with the players not knowing when their character would drop and start dying, it didn't always work as intended. Of course, the players are highly aware of their character's total hitpoints (and I would assume this to be the case with Wounds and Strains in Star Wars too) as it is a constant on their character sheets. Tension about this wanes as and when players, intentionally or not, keep track of their character's hitpoints just as well as the GM does. While this is harder to do when the GM doesn't mention specific damage numbers, guestimates can be made. With randomized results in D&D this is a lot less difficult to blurr, than it is with Star Wars, where damage numbers are set, only modified by number of successes from (often) openly visible rolls, and maybe a talent or two.

Thanks for the reply. I think that if you have players who are determined to play the Mechanics no matter what you are gonna get that. There is a spirit of playing the mechanics that is a part of this game, but I feel that it doesn't need to be the defining characteristic of this game. In this game you don't have truly random damage so yes, the players are going to be able to eyeball it easier, but if they are they are fighting the process instead of trying to change their focus onto narrative aspects. Strain was the one I was really worried about but it was actually fine. I noticed that they were a bit more conservative with Strain but I liked that because it wasn't just the straight economy of how many times can I get a 2nd Maneuver before I run out of points, but How much can my character do mentally in this situation.

I believe it was 3rd edition D&D that I originally tried this idea in as well and it was so long ago that I don't remember why I stopped doing blind HP but I think it was because of convenience. It's definitely easier to let players track it and just play mechanically, but I also don't find resolving the combat mechanically all that fun any more. Occasionally the dice and numbers thing is fun, but what is usually more compelling to me is the story the players are making.

The approach I am leaning towards now, which I think is that intended, is that I roll the dice, then narrate the result.

So I don't describe to the GM exactly what I am doing. I ask for the difficulty for the attack, roll the dice, and narrate the result, which could be success or failure, glorious or embarrassing. If I leave the result to the GM, the GM will be narrating the result, not me.

1 hour ago, Darzil said:

The approach I am leaning towards now, which I think is that intended, is that I roll the dice, then narrate the result.

So I don't describe to the GM exactly what I am doing. I ask for the difficulty for the attack, roll the dice, and narrate the result, which could be success or failure, glorious or embarrassing. If I leave the result to the GM, the GM will be narrating the result, not me.

I believe that is the way it is described as being intended by the rules. Are you saying that you are ok with your GM not telling you the numbers when you are using Strain and when Wounds are taken because the GM narrates the result? Just trying to make sure I understand

1 minute ago, Archlyte said:

I believe that is the way it is described as being intended by the rules. Are you saying that you are ok with your GM not telling you the numbers when you are using Strain and when Wounds are taken because the GM narrates the result? Just trying to make sure I understand

I really am struggling to see what advantage that brings, unless the players are not bringing the narrative themselves, and instead playing the mechanics.

4 minutes ago, Darzil said:

I really am struggling to see what advantage that brings, unless the players are not bringing the narrative themselves, and instead playing the mechanics.

Oh I see. Yeah the advantage I see to it is that the player is making decisions for the character base don the narrative versus based on the numbers. I notice that when people are busy playing with numbers and how far their figure moves they tend to have less interest in description and action from the actual viewpoint of the character.

Description is unobtrusive, it relates more closely to our own perception than integer counts. By getting rid of those things and letting the GM describe them you allow yourself to be closer to the character's viewpoint.

2 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

Oh I see. Yeah the advantage I see to it is that the player is making decisions for the character base don the narrative versus based on the numbers. I notice that when people are busy playing with numbers and how far their figure moves they tend to have less interest in description and action from the actual viewpoint of the character.

Description is unobtrusive, it relates more closely to our own perception than integer counts. By getting rid of those things and letting the GM describe them you allow yourself to be closer to the character's viewpoint.

I can certainly understand that perspective. It's why at University I used a "generic" system which involved me giving players dice and I'd just base narration on what happened, with no system in the way.

I don't really understand why in a collaborative narrative why it is important for the GM to control access to the players knowledge of their characters.

2 minutes ago, Darzil said:

I can certainly understand that perspective. It's why at University I used a "generic" system which involved me giving players dice and I'd just base narration on what happened, with no system in the way.

I don't really understand why in a collaborative narrative why it is important for the GM to control access to the players knowledge of their characters.

I think freeform stuff is fine but for me I start to want some clunk after a while so that it feels like there is some external check on what is happening and how.

This method is really one of those things where players would have to be on board with playing like this. Now the guy who is primarily a card game/wargame player may feel like this is madness, but I truly feel that it really is information the player does not need to control an adventurer in fantastic Star Wars games. Like I said I the OP, we have no idea ourselves of what our real wound thresholds are and because of that we gauge our condition based on how we feel and what we see. Once you have a non-numerical language in place for this then you can engage in adventures in the manner that someone might base don their psychology versus the whims of the external player manipulating the numbers to gain the most advantage.

But I feel again I need to stress that this would work best if you have buy-in for doing it this way, and players who are looking to have a different experience from the usual risk computation of looking at their wound threshold score and thinking about the number of likely damage they will face if they do something exciting.