This is my first time on these forums so i'm not sure if this has come up before but we use a system we call the Quick Death system where each wound taken from a single blow over the targets toughness bonus also causes a criticle of that type on that location. We have found that this makes the weapons feel alot more dangerous and reallistic as a bolt pistol doing 9 wounds to a tb 3 enemy does 6 levels of explosive criticles to whatever area usually resulting in death or extreme injury.

It also gets round the problem of losing all your wounds to a bolt pistol and recieving no lasting penalties and then having your leg ripped off by a club which just doesnt seem to make much sense.

In order to offset this making it to difficult it has been coupled with increasing the regeneration rate of fate points (you can come up with you own way but we have been regenerating at midnight local time).

I didnt come up with this system and take no credit for the idea but I was wondering what the community at large thought of it although I can imagine there would be quite alot of people who disagree with it.

Kaihlik said:

I've suggested something similar several times, actually. I don't actually use it in my own games (the lethality RAW is quite sufficient for the purposes of my campaign, but I've presented the idea for others to consider and use if they want to).

Essentially, instead of subtracting Toughness Bonus from damage, your Toughness Bonus determines how many wounds you're allowed to spend reducing the lethality of a given attack - so if you take a hit dealing 7 damage, and have a Toughness Bonus of 3, you can use 3 of your wounds (if you still have any left) to reduce the damage by 3, and then take the remaining 4 points as Critical Damage.

I should probably mention that wounds are taken as normal in our system and when you reach zero you take it all as criticle damage just like normal. Since it doesnt require any player input we have found that it doesnt slow down out game and makes us a bit more respectful of our opponents.

Kaihlik said:

Welcome aboard! I use a similar system in my campaign which is more investigative than combative if that makes any sense. First off, I track wound damage and critical damage seperately. A character's total wounds is reduced by the level of critical damage suffered. For example, a health character with 6 wounds is critically wounded for 2 points. Until the 2 points of critical damage is healed, the character is treated as having a fully healed wound level of 4. I apply critical damage to a location only when a Righteous Fury result is confirmed. The amount of crititcal damage equals the amount of bounus dice the initial Righteous Fury invokes i.e. a standard RF that yields one bonus d10 equals 1 critical damage point, two bonus d10 equates to 2 critical damage points and so forth. All of this is only applied if the attacks damaged is in excess of the target's TB and armour and, of course, all critical damage is cumulative but remains location specific. After some playtesting I had to add my "straw that broke the camel's back" rule: If you somehow acrue more critical damage than wounds then the total of all critical damage from every affected location is applied to the current attack, ensuring a fatal result. This actually happened due to the fact that wound damage and critical damge heal at different rates (core book pg. 211). Additionally, when you recieve your first point of critical damage, you are afflicted with 1 point of fatigue, which can be healed normally. If you currently posses at least a single point of critical damage then you gain a point of fatigue at the instance of your first wound. When you acrue points of critical damage in excess of your TB then you are fatigued (1 point) until your critical damage is less than your TB and all instances of fatigue stack with any current or future levels. Convoluted I know but it does make combat a bit more dramatic and allows for called shots to play a larger role in combat.

I neglected to mention that critical damage acrues normally as per the rules (you accumulate critical damage once wounds are depleted, applied to the location of the attack). The bit about applying critical damage in the occurance of a Righteous Fury is in addition to this. Like I said, convoluted I know...

I really like the OPs version. I don't know that I would use it in my current campaign, where the characters are supposed to kind of be a cut above the rest, but it could make for a very tense campaign involving low level characters and tech. You'd be a lot more scared of a guy with even just a regular stub gun if you were worried about this kind of critical damage and didn't have much armor to help you out.

It could also be used as rules for "mooks", to get the critical hit charts being used more often/

I have actually found that it makes the characters more powerful equiptment more devastating (as the critical damage means that we can take out large numbers of enemies quite quickly) but means that we cant be too silly about how we go about it. In our game 1 good shot can cripple or kill an enemy with little armour so our heavy stubber weilding guardsmen can take out multiple people in one turn if he is lucky. It also makes my bolt pistol increadibly effective as the explosive critical tables are very nasty combined with the high pen means that if I hit I tend to cause a big mess (well ironically I seem to cause more of my damage at long range and keep missing when I get close). Since our team tends to be better equiped than the enemy it makes our weapons seem even more special, if you get what I mean.

I would suggest people try it in a one off scenario before using it in a proper campaign to see if it is for them as it can be quite brutal. The main advantage of this system is that is really easy to apply to anyone and there is no extra bookeeping (since it is all based on the damage of the attack) and it fixes some of the problems with some weapons seeming underpowered.

It also helps to be a bit more flexable with spending fate points(allowing it to be used on things it normally wouldnt be) as this gives the players a bit more staying power when compared to the NPC's.

Kaihlik said:

Am I missing something here? In your initial example you say something like "9 wounds against a TB 3 enemy deals 6 critical".

Are those 9 wounds what remains after deductions for armour and TB? If so, then TB actually counts twice against these incidental hits.

How about those borderline situations? Let's assume the target above only had 2 wounds remaining. Under RAW he should take a 7 critical. If he had 4 wounds remaining, that would be a 5 critical. Do you apply the highest critical, the lowest critical or both criticals?

Kaihlik said:

What do you mean by this? Could you give us some examples?

-K

kjakan said:

Its after deductions so yes TB counts twice. As for your example if the character had a TB of higher than 2 it would just use the normal system for counting criticals. If say the character had 4 wounds and a TB of 3 you would start applying after 3 wounds and then after that obviously it would be the normal system (as he would have lost all his remaining wounds).

We have in the past used Fate points to make opponents reroll hits or wounds as our system means that one lucky hit can kill a character. I am a bit uncertain about whether this is necissary or good but it certainly helps the characters survive especially at the start. There has been other one off situations that I cant remember at this moment in time that we have allowed FP to be used in order to do things but these were very much unique events dictated by the GM. The limit we have imposed is that we can never make PC's reroll something and more important enemys are usually immune as well, it essentially stops us dieing easily to grunts. We have occasionally alowed FP to be donated when a character is in trouble, usually if they are in an unfair fight for some reason or another.

I can understand people being iffy about doing this and I have to admit I am unsure about whether we should do it sometimes as well but it really does help agiant that fluke shot that kills your character.

Thanks for the interest and I will be happy to answer any questions. I am also curious to see if other people would use this system and like to know of any experiances they have of it.

Sorry about the quotes on the last post, I have no idea how it came out like that.

Hi Everyone,

I use a similar house rule but instead of using Toughness I use Wounds instead:

Every character has a "Massive Damage Threshold" equal to half his remaining Wounds (rounded up).

Any damage (after Toughness and Armour) that exceeds the "Massive Damage Threshold" causes a Critical Hit equal to the difference.

Example:

A Character with 12W (Massive Damage Threshold = 6) takes 8 points of damage. His wounds are reduced to 4 and he takes a Level 2 Crit.
He now has a Threshold of 2 (half of his remaining 4 Wounds). The next round, the poor bastard takes another 7 points of damage. His Wounds are reduced to 0 and he takes a level 5 critical.

Design Notes:

There are a number of reason why I decided to use Wounds instead of Toughness:

1) I don't want to overload Toughness by counting it multiple times.
2) In RAW, Wounds only have two meaningful states: 0 or more than 0. In this system, it does become important exactly how many you have left. You become more vulnerable to criticals as Wounds deplete, which adds to the tension of combat...
3) Toughness scores usually fall into a relatively narrow range (Citizen: 30, Carnosaur: 58) compared to Wounds (Citizen: 10, Carosaur: 40) and I want to emphasis the difference between a 80kg person and a 8000kg dinosaur!
4) If you want to you change the Massive Damage Threshold to 1/3rd of remaining Wounds for things like Headshots.

We havn't really found that it has overloaded toughness but I can see why people might be concerned that it would.

Your example is a bit flawed as a Carnosour has unnatural toughness (x2) so an effective TB of 10 which means 10 off of each attack and then another 10 more wounds to start causeing critical damage which means that to cause critical damage you are going to need a Heavy weapon or a good emperors fury. It kind of depends how vunerable you think a creature to be to weapons. I feel that you could kill a Carnosaur with a single krak missle as it is an anti tank weapon that would devastate any normal living thing and so under our system a single krak rocket would down a Carnosaur with one average hit but some people might not like how easy that is (although i feel if the acolytes bring anti tank weapons to fight a dinosaur they shouldn't have much difficulty). Normal weapons will still only scratch it a little and if you think the creatures are too easy to kill then you can always change their stats.

Kaihlik

We use a similar system as we had the same problem with the RAW. It started in WFRP 1st edition where we just applied the very same critical result corresponding to the wounds lost. Very simple, but in bigger fights (ie. more combatants) in can become a little difficult to keep track of it. In DH the criticals are a little more deadly and only reach 10 (as compared to 16 in WFRP 1st ed.) as well as using D10 (instead of D6 for damage calculations), therefore we just half the critical corresponding to the wounds lost. So when you suffer a Damage 12 hit and have 4 AP and TB 3 you lose 5 Wounds and suffer from the respective 3 critical. Simple as that. Even then we always wonder how most shots seem to bounce of the temple...