Hey everybody

I have a little problem, In my DH and RT group everybody but me dosn´t like to use the Culminative critical damage. Like they say that if a person is hit in the head and get critical damage, and then hit in the arm the critical damage should be reset because its not in the same place.

But if you did that, shouldn´t wounds in general be split out over the body? I am having a hard time explaining why the culminative critical damage is best, I know it in my gut but I just can´t come up with a good explantion. Any ideas?

The simple answer is that it cuts down on book-keeping.

I think, but I don't know for sure having not played WHFR, but from other posters I get the impression that critical damage is reset for each hit.

I've not had a problem with the critical damage system as is yet, but perhaps that will change when I throw a bit more lethality at players in the coming campaign. Sure it is not 100% realistic to take a more severe injury to your leg if you've suffered a concussion but as long as people have fun, its all good.

It doesen't really make sense, but when you think about it no RPG system that uses wounds/hit points make sense. In real life a well-placed bullet can be lethal, while 100 scratches are still scratches. Sure several small wounds can lead to cumulative bleeding, but the last attack does not make your head explode or whatever as it often does in this game.

If we wanted to make it more realistic we'd had to have critcals depending in the amount of damage delivered in a single attack rather than damage added together, but in that case most weapons would be fairly nonlethal or outright unable to seriously damage even a normal human.

For example, a normal man in light flak armor would soak 6 damage, which means a laspistol would at the most do a level 6 critical hit, which on the Energy table is quite nonlethal. Once you talk about tough guardsmen or carapace-toting arbitrators they would almost be immune to damage (something which already is a problem to some degree).

Thus to have such a system you would have to up the damage of most weapons, or rule that once at 0 wounds you don't benefit from TB anymore.

A system which uses some element of this is the old Merp/Rolemaster system, in which you either take hits (very minor damage and bruising) which can eventually knock you out, or if a good enough hit is made (based on a hit roll rather than damage roll) you take criticals which can outright kill you or cause severe damage). It was fun, but ALOT more bookkeeping, table-thumping and time-comsuming that the WH system.

But yeah not having critical damage be cumulative for different body parts could help narrow it down, and will reduce the chance of tiny pistol blowing apart peoples heads "Bloody Mess" Fallout style. This at the cost of a little more bookkeeping and a little less dangerous combat.

As a GM you could always simlify it by only having PCs and major NPCs track seperate critical damage though.

To me, system wise, it's a pretty simple system. You have your regular wounds, say 1-10, and then you have potential critical wounds, which are essentially -1 through -10 wounds (though you'll die before 10). So in essence, no matter where you're hit, you're still beating up your core wound supply.

Called shots are really only helpful when avoiding cover, armor, or trying to get a desired effect of a critical wound (though some of the tables kill people at a level or two better than other locations). The to-hit system to me feels mostly like flavor, to add a little randomness to the game (oooh, you hit him in the head where he has no helmet!) and to make the descriptions of critical damage more hilarious.

If you modify the critical effects system, you should probably consider modifying the whole to-hit system and come up with secondary effects for called shots, and distribute the wounds somehow across the body. Daze the person when hit in the head, have them weapons if hit in the arm, etc. Otherwise you end up with essentially bonus wounds from the critical table. Though that said, if your campaign is super deadly, bonus wounds may not be that bad of a deal for your players.

In WHFRP they don't have cumulative Crit damage, it's not even tracked. Instead they take the Crit damage level 1 to 5+ and then have another roll determine the effect which will then produce the 1 - 10 effect. If you wish to have a similar style simply take the crit damage and add 1d5-1 to the damage and that would be your effect. No book keeping really just more rolling.

I've thought about having it where if you do less then or equal to the existing crit damage you add one to it or take the highest.