Hi,

I enjoyed the unpredictability of death in WHFRP 2nd edition and there's been many good alternatives posted here in house rules as well.

Here's a simple table called Death-check to simulate uncertainty. Basically, it is Resilience-check with difficulty based on primarily number of criticals and secondarily on exceeded threshold. There's a small change of dying without criticals as well even though if you follow the rule of turning one wound into critical at KO this is a rare incident (f.e. PC is well over wound threshold and gets cured of criticals but does not become conscious yet).

Please note the following check situation:

1. When first wounds exceed WT (KO situation)
2. When additional damage is gained
3. After a healing check is performed

The last one is much in line with the house ruled healing. This means if the character is left to his own devices over night, he performs first the "unattended night rest" check with Resilience only and then Death-check if he still remains unconscious. I like the idea that a dying characters fate is greatly dependent on the care he will receive. You will want to make that First Aid check with all the fortune added ;-)

Link to PDF

.. and changed it to focus on total severity of critical wounds instead of number of critical wounds.

This way a small scratch critical (severity 1) is not as lethal as deep wound (severity 5).

I tweaked with statistics and sampled with To 2 and To 3 + Resilience trained. Now it looks more like I wanted. There's always a change of dying when over WT and it rises dramatically when critical wound severity is above 10 which is 3-4 critical wounds on an average.

Also, I changed the death-check to be rolled at the end of the encounter to emphasize the importance of First Aid. It's better to roll AFTER first-aid than no first-aid at all.

As part of the Healing house rules, I also added the Sigmar's Comet option to ignore the death-check. As Sigmar's Comet may only be achieved via trained die, this gives more importance on getting skilled physicians help when PC is dying.