I made this rule to be in effect at least until omens of war.

Critical Wound, critical effects
Whenever NPCs are hit by critical wounds you roll a number of misfortune dice equal to the highest severity of the criticals you inflicted with that attack. Only banes count. Three levels of critical effects are possible.

• 1 bane: you may either give yourself a fortune die to your next attack against that NPC or give the NPC a black die to his next attack. Your opponent is slightly unbalanced.
• 2 banes: You severely injure the NPC. You knock him prone and rob him of his free maneuver. You can instead inflict any negative condition on him that makes sense.
• 3 banes: You may kill the NPC, completely immobilize him, knock him out or whatever you like to do to him.
  

Sounds reasonable enough. Any experiences of using this? Or ideas how to incorporate this to the single attack roll?

doc_cthulhu said:

I've thought of many different options, but this seems the most balanced an easy to use.

I have thought about other simple things like having the NPCs simply die when they get more critical wounds than their toughness or die when the severity of their criticals is higher than 3xtoughness.

I do like other options than just dying though. I have also thought about being able to buy some effects for severity rating when you inflict criticals. Lets say you inflict three criticals with a total severity rating of 7. That would allow you to knock the NPC prone and take his maneuver. Then if you gave him three criticals with a total severyty rating of 12 you would be able to kill him in one blow. I just want it to be fairly standard rules without any book keeping or looking in tables.

New rules suggestions for critical wounds:

Buying critical effects
When hitting NPCs with criticals you can buy critical effects by adding up the total severity of the criticals you inflicted with one attack. Average severity of the critical wounds is 2,3.

• Total severity 5: you may either give yourself a fortune die to your next attack against that NPC or give the NPC a black die to his next attack. Your opponent is slightly unbalanced.
• Total severity 7: You severely injure the NPC. You knock him prone and rob him of his free maneuver. You may instead inflict any negative condition on him that makes sense.
• Total severity 10: You may kill the NPC, completely immobilize him, knock him out or whatever you like to do to him.

NPC death by critical severity
If a NPC has critical wounds with a total severity rating equal to or greater than his wound threshold, he dies.

Fortune favors the brutal
A character killing a NPC with a critical effect or the total severity gains a personal fortune point.

Gallows said:

Interesting.

My take on that is this :

When any number of Crits are inflicted in any one blow, add the Severity ratings and substract the target's To.

If the result is a positive number, the target is overwhelmed for that number of rounds.

If the result is a positive number that exceeds the target's To, the target is falls unconscious and bleeds 1 normal wound per round until Medical attention is received.

If the result exceeds 2*To, the target is killed outright.

EXAMPLE: Gorg the Black orc inflicts 11 Damage and 3 Crits on Hans the unfortunate Scribe. Hans suffers 8 Wounds and flips 3 to reveal Critical Wounds. The Severity ratings are a 2, a 3 and a 5... OUCH ! 10 - Han's To of 3 = 7... Hans is down and bleeding... If he is isn't treated rapidly, he will exceed his Wound Threshold and suffer an extra Critical as per RAW. That 4th Crit will kill him, as per RAW.

Statistically, having such a result will be very rare. But multiple Crits in the same blow will often result in a few rounds of being Overwhelmed, in addition to the Critical effects. It makes Criticals game changers and adds some good drama to your fights.

That idea about being overwhelmed is awesome. I'm going to blend that with my own rules, so there is always incentive to get a critical even though you can't get an effect.

I'll keep the flat numbers for the severe effects though as having a difference of 1-3 times toughness creates a huge difference between an average characteristic and a high characteristic. With 5 toughness have to be hit with a total severity of 15, which requires at least 4 criticals, but most likely 5-6. Then with 2 or 3 toughness it would only be 6 or 9 to kill you outright which is way too deadly. It's not easy to balance

In the example you gave he would actually be killed since 7 is more than 2x3

A flat number is how it works with severe injuries in OoW as well.

Bit the overwhelmed idea can stay in effect after we get OoW... I like it!

Well, the factor that makes it not too deadly is the fact that only the Severity ratings of the Crits taken in one blow (one attack from one aggressor)

are taken into account. In OoW, the total Severity of all Criticals, even old ones, is used.

So a To 2 character would need a total severity of 7 to die instantly. (5>(To*2))

To get that total, on average, you will need to inflict 3 Criticals in one attack. That should be a pretty rare event.

This said, I continue to use Fate Points as in V1 and V2. As I've written before, Fate points are a great invention and as I like my combats short and bloody, the Fate points protect us from continually introducing new characters.

In my game, I want combat to be furious and volatile. It should rarely end as was planned. Freak events happen all the time in melees.

When the PCs do succeed at executing a plan from start to finish, they can feel really great about it, since it rarely happens...

Because of added risk (even with Fate points in play), I see that players get pretty emotional when discussing if a situation warrants the use of violence or not. Of course, we all like a good scrap, and rolling handfuls of dice, but they really get hesitant if they can't identify what their tactical advantage is going to be. Strait out melees tend to go awry in my games...

But toughness 4+ characters will never be hit by this. It's dangerous for wizards yes, but not those actually at the frontline engaged in melee

I just mean a flat number is better balanced for everyone... and I'm sure that's the reason they made it a flat number in OoW.