Hi people!

I'm preparing to run my first Dark Heresy scenario with my group and it seems that I'm missing something, as I can't seem to understand the mechanic that governs damage and wounds.

One of my players created a techpriest who has 7 wounds.

In the free demo scenario (which I am using to practice) there is a fall that can cause 1D10 + 5 damage. The scenario also explains, that if the character takes 5 points more damage than he/she has wounds, the character dies. Does this mean, that the player must keep track of his/her damage? Does the character ever lose "wounds" or just become lightly, heavily or critically wounded. The manual also says, that as the character recovers, he/she removes points of damage at a certain rate.

Am I correct in my assumption, that points of damage and the number of wounds do not correlate?

How does a character lose wounds, or do they?

Hod do they recover lost wounds if they do?

In the above example (about falling), can someone explain how the damage is done to that character? Lets say the character has 7 wounds and suffers 8 points of damage. What happens?

Thanks to anyone who bothers answering!

-WHAM

In your example about falling you substract your toughness bonus from the amount of damage(armour doesn't provide protection against falling) and substract that number from your wounds. So if the techpriest has a toughness bonus of 3 he would lose 5 wounds, bringing his total to 2 wounds.

see page 210 of the core rulebook

In most cases, unless stated otherwise, you also get to substract your armour point of damage you receive. So if the techpriest has a toughness bonus of 3 and 2 armour points on the location he's, hit he would only lose 3 wounds if the attack dealt 8 damage.

If your lightly wounded (equal or less than tougness bonus x 2 wounds lost) you regain 1 wound per day. If you spend this time resting you regain your toughness bonus in wounds

If your heavily wounded(more than toughness bonus x2 wounds lost) you regain 1 wound per week. If you spend this time resting you regain your toughness bonus in wounds. this continues until you're lightly wounded

If you're critically wounded(you have lost more than all your wounds) you won't heal without medical attention. If you get medical attention you regain 1 wound per week, but you have to spend this time resting. This continues until you're heavily wounded.

see page 211 of the core rule book.

It's probably part of the scenario you're playing but you don't necessarily die from taking 5 more wounds than you can.

see page 201 of the core rule book

You can also regain wounds with a succesfull medicae test in the form of on the field surgery or first aid.

see page 104 of the core rule book

Hope that answers your question

Great! That answers nearly all my questions about the matter. Just one more:

Lets say that the techpriest just suffered 2 wounds from a total of 7. Does this mean that if he/she now suffers 6 damage in the next round, he/she receives 1 point of critical damage and in the following round has 7 wounds out of 7 and all damage is now critical?

Firstly, I recommend that you scrap the demo adventure - it's generally considered one of the weakest to ever be published.

Other than that, wounds are essentially hit points. When a character receives an amount of damage, you usually subtract armour and the tens digit of the toughness bonus (though armour doesn't protect against falls). The resulting amount gets deducted from the character's wounds. If these wounds ever reach zero, he'll start taking critical damage, which is the damage that actually means something (the "You're dead at 0" is a simplification for the demo adventure) - everything before critical damage is essentially "It's just a flesh wound"-territory. Think of critical damage as wounds going into the negative numbers. When a character takes damage that puts him into the negatives, you take out the hulking crit table of the rulebook (202-209), take a look at what body part was hit with what kind of weapon and read out the critical effect to the poor sap.

An example: Our standard guardsman private Redshirt has a toughness of 37, full guardsman flak armour (4 points of armour everywhere) and 10 wounds. He suffers a bit of bad luck which results in him first being stabbed by a mutant (10 points of damage to the left arm), then falling down a small chasm (7 points of damage to the chest) and finally being shot at with a big gun twice (12 points of damage to the right leg, then 13 points of damage to the body). That results in:

The mutant stabbing deducts three wounds after being reduced by seven (3 points for the Toughness and 4 for the armour), leaving the guardsman with 7 wounds

The fall deducts four wounds (armour does not count, but toughness bonus does), leaving the guardsman with 3 wounds.

The first shot deducts another 5 wounds after being reduced by seven. The guardsman drops below 0 wounds to Critical 2. We look up Critical 2 by an Impact weapon (gun) on the right leg and arrive at "A grazing strike against the leg slows the target. The target halves all movement for 1 round and takes 1 level of fatigue."

The second shot deducts a final 6 wounds after reduction, dropping the guardsman to critical 8. Crit 8 by an impact weapon to the body reads: "The force of the attack ruptures several of the target's organs and knocks him down, gasping in wretched pain. The target suffers blood loss and 1d10 levels of fatigue."

All in all, our guardsman has by now taken 1d10+1 levels of fatigue, meaning he's most likely unconscious (you fall unconscious when taking more levels of fatigue than the tens digit of your toughness). He's also suffering from blood loss, meaning he has a 10% chance of dieing every round. Bad times.

Thanks for clearing that up. I think I have the jist of it now. Maybe I'm just stuck in my old ways and the mentality that 0 points of health = death.

And Cifer, don't worry. I'll spice up the demo scenario and add elements to create a starting adventure, which will familiarize my players, who don't know a thing about W40K, with the 40K universe, as well as create a few nice loose threads to start investigations and plotlines off of.

In any case: Thanks to the two of you for your help!