It struck me as a little odd that as the vanilla DH critical damage rules work (don't know if the erratas address this yet) you can almost hack someone's arm off and then tap them lightly on the head and their head explodes. This strikes me as a mite stupid, as the critical damage effects are all location specific, whereas the critical total isn't. Is it therefore a good idea to have location-specific totals for determining critical damage to ensure that you have to actually land a hard blow on the head to knock someone's head off, rather than a hard blow somewhere else and then a light one to the head?

Also, in another thread that I now can't find, there was complaining about the "hit points" system of wound damage. One of the most innovative solutions I've seen to this is the WoD system, where each level of damage incurs a penalty to actions, with particularly tough creatures having multiple numbers of levels with a relatively low dice penalty. I'm aware this won't translate exactly into DH, but to simulate it could it work that for each time a character's toughness bonus is exceeded they take an additional level of fatigue? So a character with a toughness bonus of 3 would take a level of fatigue after 3 wound damage, two levels after 6, three after 9 and so on.

Do either of these ideas work?

I'd like to say having location specific totals would be a good idea, but unless you're using called shots its just going to prolong combat. While that may be the point of such a system the cumulative crit total is really more about the fact your guy is on his last legs already having taken more this his wounds in damage.

When it comes to crit damage then the actual strength of the hits become less and less important as long as the character continues to suffer critical damage he just becomes less and less able to avoid them (stacking fatigue and injuries). A killing blow to the head then is just that you hit him in the head, but this time it hit him such that it exploded in a rain of blood.

We use location specifik critical damage. We like it since it makes the characters little more than walking meat and tubes and the adventure´s end. When you have between 2-4 crit in every body part the effects really start to show.

Also, it is much more bad ass to be shot to pieces and still keep on going.

In the groups I GM we also found the wound/critical system a bit annoying (read "not excessively violent"). And with the "epic" -high fantasy games in the "been there, done that" -zone we made the following changes to DH (and RT/DW)

A characters total wounds are determined by TB x 3 (multiplied in case of unnatural T)

Each hit location has a wound threshold as seen below. When the threshold is exceeded you take critical damage to that location.

Head: TBx1

Body: TBx2

Arms/legs: TBx 1,5 (round up)

Taking more damage then your total wounds adds 1 fatigue pr excess wound. If fatigue adds up to TBx2 you fall unconscious/incapacitated.

Sound Constitution: adds 1 wound and +1 to location tresholds (Max amount of Sound con = TB)

And of course... RF 4 every1

Keeping track of damage to each location is of course a bit more book keeping, but this system solved A LOT of issues we had with the system. Now you suddenly want to snipe the badguy in the head in the first round of combat, knowing you can blow his head of with one clean shot. PC's suddenly wince when someone sticks a handcannon in their face. The combat feels "realistic" as you can now break an arm and a leg and still take a hit to the head without it exploding into tiny bits from a 2-damage hit. Usually when players and npc lose a fight they end up whimpering and bleeding, but rarely in several pieces as they are overcome by fatigue instead of gettting killed outright.

It's bloody and brutal but not OVERLY deadly, so far (nearly 2 years) only one player death. He decided to charge a Nob with a powerKlaw...

Anyhoo.. just thought I would share this.

It's certainly food for thought... what tends to happen to stop fatal combats with that, though? Are the PCs just good at running away or that much better than the mooks they face that they never lose? I know this is a separate issue to the system itself, but I'm rather used to combats where one side winds up the definite winner, whereas with DH it doesn't seem quite so decisive (or that that decisiveness is really necessary).

How to stop players from being butchered? That's the players job to keep from getting butchered... I.E. Investigate, know your enemy, rarely storm the front unless you know you will win. And I have very good/clever players who also know me as their GM through years of roleplaying. Meaning: Open dice, for players and GM alike, unless absolutely critical that it is a hidden dice roll. And that as a GM I am not the "God" of the setting, I just tell the story and let the dice decide. It's up tho the players to "load the dice in their favour".

However, with the before mentioned mechanics we DO get quite epic battles where the players really beat the odds and come out as bigshot heros. Why? Because they are never 100 % certain of winning, no matter who they fight, so kicking the butt of some major badboy is very thrilling.

My group uses a system where each of your body part has independant wounds up to your wound maximum. and, after you subtract your armour and toughness to get the final damage, that number is halved and the critical result is applied. So all damage done is 'critical' but most of the time is falls in the area where 'the shot numbs the limb' or 'the shot breaks 1d5 ribs' and with a biomancer with psyrating 4 healing isn't much of an issue its surviving the encounter at hand, which a single guy armed with a handcannon and some manstoppers turns into quite the struggle.

some drawback to this system is that the enemies are also harder to kill which sometimes drags combat out longer than really need be, but in the case of nameless low level dregs and such it's all damage is critical, but that happens to rarely that when it does it's more of a treat for players to boost their confidence before fighting the big bad boss of the session.

The way we've been doing it, for a few years playing our characters now, is to first subtract armor and toughness bonus from the damage, then take wound equal to toughness bonus, and the rest goes into criticals. Criticals are also tracked by location.

So, if a character with a TB of 3 and armor of 3 takes a 10 damge hit. He would get 10-3 for TB and -3 for armor, leaving 4 damage where 3 goes to wounds and 1 goes to critacal on that body location.

This makes having a higher toughness and the True Grit talent very beneficial though.

Playing a character critted to hell and back, but not yet dead, is very entertaining to play.

Serialkilla said:

I actually think this would make for an interesting game and it seems like it would be a working mechanic without buffing anything too excessively. The one thing that makes me cringe is applying your unnatural toughness to your hit points. Basically this would mean that when it comes to damage you're applying that bonus multiple times, and when the creature has more than just a x2 it gets really messy.

For instance, I have a character (near ascension level, but the point is valid), that has a toughness of 70, and now has unnatural toughness due to a mutation. By this system he would have 42 wounds, hardly what I would call balanced. That is only with a x2 and not including his advances in sound constitution which would put him nearly to 50. I would say you should leave the unnatural toughness out of the equation for determining hit points to make this system more viable. 28 is much more reasonable for a character than 49 hp.

One last thing, I don't really understand that last bit, "RF 4 every1"? Is that supposed to be meaning that all characters and NPCs get righteous fury? If that is what is meant, then I can say that we allow righteous fury for some, but not all. It makes sense for a champion of khorne to be watched and granted favor by his demi god, but not so much with some hive scum ganger. We apply righteous fury for main characters and NPCs only, just like we don't read every critical strike for every little mob out there. It makes things drag on and tends to have the acolytes leaving trails of blood behind them with the last baddy they popped with a 10 on the crit table.

Catachan said:

with this system you can only ever take your TB in wounds does this make taking lots of sound const. pointless. i guess if they take lots of little hits it is still important to have lots of wounds but having a high TB is really important.

it is just that i have one character (Carvel) with TB5 AP5 on all and 4AP modern shield so 14 Damage reduction(DR) so if he took a 20 damage hit it would be 20 minus 14(TB and AP) leaving 6 thus 5 to wounds and 1 to crit

then nax TB3 AP3 same hit. 20minus 6leaving 14 3 to wounds 11 to crit so he is dead. even though he would loose 14 wounds normaly and be at the start of crit tables.

just thinking in type. i like it but not sure if it would break for my characters