First a question: when the number of wounds you've recieved exeeds you wound threshold you're downed, unconscious. But what is the maximum number of wounds you can recieve (if you don't die of criticals, that is)? Do you stop handling out wound cards after reaching threshold or can you sit with, say, 30 normal wound cards even if your wound threshold is 12? Can't find anything about this in the rules.

Well, now to the point. Have any of you experimented with a bit more of a random element regarding death? To me the rules for death is a bit predictable - you die when you have a number of critical wounds that exceeds your toughness, if your normal wounds also exceed your threshold (i.e. you're unconscious). You also suffer one additional critical when you go down.

So, if your toughness is 3 and you suffer from 2 criticals when you recieve the final blow and go down due to normal wounds you can't die, since the number of cards won't exceed 3. It's probably even safer to lie unconscious as you won't recieve any more criticals (as long as no one attacks you on the ground).

A variant could be that the card you draw from passing out will add its severity rating to the number of criticals you already suffer from. A bit more deady, a bit less predictable. There'e always the risk of death when you're struck unconscious with this rule.

Haven't tried it in practise yet. Any thoughts? Too dangerous?

There is nothing specific in the rules regarding this. The intent, I believe, is that if you are unconscious most enemies will leave you alone to attack your conscious allies instead. If there are no conscious allies, you get coup de'grace'd (or other 'auto-effect', like capture, depending on the story) and there is no need to worry about additional wounds. Keep in mind that the PC will be unconscious until they can recover enough wounds to put them under their Wound Threshold, so those extra Wounds don't go completely to waste.

Regarding your other suggestion, <shrug> I don't see a reason to make death any easier. Criticals are relatively easy to come by, so using the severity seems a bit too brutal. If you really want some sort of random effect, I'd suggest implementing a Resilience check (similar to recovery check, so 2d for being critically wounded) each round (representing "bleed out") they are unconscious until the PC receives some sort of medical attention. A failure is another wound, and a chaos star on a failure is another critical wound.

I made a house rule for this.

I use the transformed 2nd edition criticals. Made a table for it. Similar to the crit tables in the 3E Player's Guide.

If (wounds > 0) AND getCritical AND suffered_damage > TO then make resilence check against the severity of the critical

If resilenceCheck = passed THEN get/draw light/normal) critical ELSE roleDice for location and role on heavy (2nd ED) Critical.

Generally: if wounds have reached negative wound-threshold rating then the character/NPC is dead regardless of number of criticals.

If someone has reached zero wounds he has to make a resilence check against the critical severity or become unconsciousness AND gets an heavy critical (role Location and role critical). If he passed the resilence check he gets a light critical.
If someone has reached zero wounds resulting from a hit with damage > 50% of his wound-threshold he is automatic unconsciouness AND gets an heavy critical (role Location and role critical).

For every damage > TO he gets while his wound threshold has a negative value he gets a heavy critical. This doesn't have to be only one hit.

For example:

An Orc with a wound threshold of 11 has received a hit with a sword which drops his wounds from 5 to -3. He has to make a resilence check against a difficulty of 2 (severity of the critical drawn). He passes. Now he has a light (standard) critical. Next round he receives another blow with only 3 dmg coming through. His TO is 4 , but he is at -6, so he get's an heavy critical with a result of him loosing his weapon arm and falling unconsciouness.

I know it sounds complicated, but if you did it once in the game is quite simple.
I will write to terms, wanted it anyway post on my website for our group.

I'm with dvang on this one... that death doesn't need to come easier.

In 2nd edition the players had fate points and you have to take them into account when considering this issue. When a player dies in 3rd ed. it's over. No fate points.

For an average player with 3 toughness it really isn't that hard getting 3 criticals and dying (gets the 4th automatically when going over wound threshold). Remember than you don't have to get all the criticals in one fight. Some criticals may be left from older fights. The mage in our group (Toughness 3) has begun several fights with 2 or 3 critical... then he's just 0 or 1 critical away from death.

Yeah, I guess you're right...

I am not really looking for ways to kill the characters more easily, just wanting to add some risk to losing all your wound even without criticals. I kind of like dvangs bleeding suggestions; it makes looking after your fallen friend an important option even if there still are enemies about, and the fallen player has at least something to do (Resilience checks) and worry about extra damage or eventually death.

Lautrer: interesting ideas, but a bit too complicated for my game right now.

I don't think it's a bad idea at all. To me the criticals are very predictable and its' easy for a player to justify fighting on because he knows there's no way he can die. This leads to players rarely if ever surrendering or running, or ever really fearing for their lives. With some additional factor beyond "you get 1 crit wound when you go down" it will lead to characters who have taken a lot of wounds being more apt to try to withdraw from combat, which I think is more realistic. That being said, inflicting a number of critical wounds equal to the sevarity of a critical would card drawn is probably too harsh (I believe severity goes up to 4, and if the player already has some criticals on him, this can have an outcome of certain death being the most likely event).

Maybe something like this, roll a misfortune die, on a blank result you get the 1 crit, on a failure you get 2, and on a bane you get 3. Basicly that means half the time you're getting 1, 2/3's the time 2, and 1/6 times 3. Another possibility is to use your original idea but allow the player to spend fortune points to cancel critical wounds (only the extra wounds recieved from your rule). Though this leads back to the original problem of characters with a lot of fortune not fearing loosing their wounds because it's not going to kill them.

Another solution is to inflict a number of critical wounds equal to the number of wounds that exceeds the characters wound threshold.

A player with a wound threshold og 15 has 14 wounds. If he suffers another 5 wounds he would also get 4 critical wounds. This means dropping below your wound threshold is very dangeroudn though. A character will always die if he exceeds his threshold by more than his toughness.

That said, if a player fights a beastman for 4 rounds he is very likely to get enough critical wounds to be in trouble with an average toughness of 3. If the GM spends expertise and gets a sigmars comet and enough boons to trigger the CR of the weapon then a beastman can inflict 2-4 critical on one hit. A ghoul can potentially inflict up to 5 critical wounds in one hit. The Aigle Strike action card easily inflicts 2 criticals (only 2 successes and 1 boon I believe). The GM just has to remember to use all options to inflict critical damage.

Players should fear going unconscious. It takes their character out of the action, and if their friends should also go unconscious, or flee, then they are dead (or worse).

As Gallows said, it isn't too hard to gain critical wounds during a combat, and it is difficult to get rid of them. So, as the adventure goes on, PCs will end up entering combats possibly starting with a critical or two already. That means one lucky hit by an enemy can put them over.

I don't really see how players could NOT be concerned about going unconscious, just because they might not technically die from doing so. Unless their allies eventually win the fight, unconscious = dead. I you as the MG feel your players need to fear being unconscious more, for whatever reason, you could always threaten to have the NPCs cut their throats while they're down, or abduct them, etc, in the middle of the combat while the other NPCs keep the other PCs busy. Personally, I haven't had anyone (other than ones playing crazy troll slayers) who wasn't concerned about going unconscious, so that mentality seems odd to me.

If you want to make things a little tougher the GM's guide optional rule for more damage will help KO characters quicker. Essentially damage becomes calculated as STR+DR+Card+1 wound/extra success up to max Melee/Balistic skill (or in the case of monsters expertise dice).

So a brusier hits with 5 success, but the card maxes out at 2 success so instead of those 3 success being wasted they add extra damage.

If you want to make criticals a little more common yet not to the insta kill level. I'd suggest that extra wounds from an attack that takes you past your wound threshold get turned into criticals according to the CR rating of the attack.

I think the people who think the game isn't lethal enough are missing the point. If you kill your PCs, then you can't have them develop into diseased, insane, crippled mutants. What fun is that?

I think the lethality thing stems from past editions of WH, and realism. In past editions the game was very lethal, in fact players would often try to avoid combat due to the risk of death. This really isn't much of a threat anymore. On realism, if two people are fighting with swords and axes and one goes down, it's unlikely he'll get bandaged and have a "ringing ear" when he wakes up...or at the very least death is certainly a more likely outcome than being hacked into unconciousness.

That being said, it can certainly be disruptive to a story to have a main character killed, it can also be disruptive to have characters not afraid of the possibility of death. It's not that players don't "fear" going unconcious, it's just fear might not be the right word when compared to death. If your character goes unconcious you're likely temporarily out of the game, but assuming your companions pull through you'll be back up, though worse off for a bit. One can argue that death is similar, you're temporarily out of the game (assuming you make a new character), but there is a sense of loss and feeling of loosing something irriplacable, it's very different than going unconcious.

A PC's decisions will vary greatly when facing a threat of unconciousness or death. If you're fighting a group of orcs, you're near your wound threshold, but the rest of your companions are doing well, and you know the next hit will very likely take you beyond your threshold and KO you. You're very likely to stick in there and do as much damage as you can before you go down, knowing your companions will pull thought. Now if you have the exact same scenario, but going beyond your wound threshold has a fair chance of killing you...you're far more apt to think of a way to withdraw yourself from the situation and have your companions cover your retreat. That's fear.

I don't think making the system more lethal means pc's necessarily die more often, but it does have an effect on how they play and that effect adds more realism to the game, and to me that is the point of adding more lethality. However it's a fantasy game and realism may not be what you and your group wants. If you prefer scenes of 4 heroes wading through dungeons of orcs and such then this is definatly not the thing for you.

Asmuth: that's exactly what I'm after here - the fear of death and behaviour according to that. Not necessarliy the difficulty of the fights, making the game harder or more lethal, but making death for each and every individual a constant threat. Unconsciousness is dangerous in fear of total party kill but a tPK is not very funny for either the players or the GM as it ruins the story. Death of a single character on the other hand can be rewarding and memorable.

The thing I think the rules of the new edition lacks is the unpredictability that combat is and has been in the last editions. As long as you don't suffer from too many criticals you can fight on without fear, and if you suffer from enough you know that your dead if you go down. It's almost like the system with hit points i D&D; you know that you have a certain amount of hit points and as long as monster x only does 2d6 you know you're safe.

I think the system in 3rd edition is great, but I'll think of adding a bleed effect or something, just to make going unconscious a litte more not-so-safe.

Windupboy said:

I felt the same since my first game. Here is 2 proposition to make the game more deadly without changing the death and unconsciousness rules.

• Each damage under 0 WP is an automatic critical wound. No infinite damage, you may die in the same hit that make you unconscious.

OR

• Each Critical Wound is an extra unsoakable wound so : 1) Damage Reduction doesn't affect it (To+Soak) ; 2) You don't flip a regular wound card but you take one more wound ; 3) when you hit but your regular damage are totally reduced, minimum damage are 1 regular wound + (extra unsoakable) critical wounds.

I played each of these and they are great. Now we definitly prefer the second one, because it's more "Power Of The Yes" : Critical Wounds count for everybody, even against a massive Nurgle Plaguebarer or an Iron Breaker dwarf. Moreover, I tend to let minor NPC die as they get to 0 Wounds, so the first solution was a bit unfair for my players.

In my opinion, lethality of the game is set at good level. If you think oppositely, you can always house rule (although I'm even not sure if it would be a house rule or just an interpretation of rules) that whenever a character (NPC or PC) falls unconscious, enemies engaged with the knockouted character can perform a manoeuvre to cut his throat/stab his heart/ect. If a NPC performed his free manoeuvre this round or is engaged with a PC, he should suspend judgement. However, IMO, this attitude assumes that everyone performs a coup de grâce manoeuvre after defeating an opponent, regardless of who kills - players of NPCs, to keep the balance.

Moreover, it is writen in the Game Master rulebook that if players don't fear fights anymore, a GM can or even should give them a lesson, by any means necessary.

On the other hand, a solution presented by me doesn't make the death more unpredictable.

Cheers!

You as the GM have control. If you want them to fear going unconscious, keep having the enemies keep hitting them after they go down. Make it now a Simple (0d) difficulty plus add 2 fortune dice (which I do for being someone prone and being attacked in melee). Chances are pretty good that the enemies will hit, and get another critical. Even if they don't they'll add more wounds, keeping the PC unconscious longer.

After re-reading the corruption rules I think I've found a great way to handle this. Having the enemies just continue hitting the pc's or slitting there throats misses the point of the thread. The issue isn't that it's impossible to kill the pc's it's just very predictable, which can greatly effect role playing. The point isn't to change how you roleplay by having the npc's all turn into psychopathic butchers on the battlefield. The point is to add realism to the game, and the idea that swords, axes, and whatnot tend to kill people, not knock them out at least more often than not.

The corruption rules work like this when someone goes over their threshold they draw a corruption or insanity, and remove corruption equal to the severity to bring them under their threshold, if the severity doesn't remove enough to bring them other you draw another and repeat until it does. This exact rule can be used with wounds.

Say your character has a wound threshold of 13, you've taken 11 wounds and are are hit for another 5 bringing your wounds to 16. Using this rule you'd take your wounds to 16 then draw a seperate one as the critical (instead of flipping one of yours over). You would then remove a number of wounds from your character equal to it's severity. If after doing that you have 13 or less wounds you stop, though this isn't actual healing so the PC is still unconcious even if his would level is now less than his threshold. If after drawing this crit, the characters wounds are still above his threshold draw another crit. Repeat the process until it's below.

In this way a player who has more wounds (is closer to his wound threshold) is in more danger of death than one who isn't, which would change the way they play the character to one who is in greater fear of death. It still makes it very unlikely to get a completely random death (ie: your still not going to die if you have no wounds and a goblin henchman sticks you), if you want that you'd have to come up with a way to make damage open ended. It does mean if you're 1 wound away from your threshold and your up against a troll or other creature that hits very hard you better get the heck out of there, cause things aren't looking good if he gets his hand on you.

I have started to require a disease check when players roll one or more chaos stars trying to recover from critical wounds. This alone will make critical wounds worse.

Gallows said:

Great idea, Gallows, as usual.

Asmuth said:

I think you're onto something here Asmuth, this is exactly in line with what I'm looking for. Will try it the next session. Thanks.

Gallow's disease check for infection risk sounds like the perfect addition. Now we're starting to talk Warhammer!

I also like the disease check thing...especially while recovering in sub-optimal conditions. I think they did an awesome job with the diseases and would definately like to see them used more. Let me know how the rules go in your game Windupboy, I have a game I'll be running pretty soon, and I may end up using it as well.