Hail Comrades, looking for answers about fate. I know that by reading the book that it gives an example in which someone avoids certain death with a las canon by burning a fate point. The GM believes that this implies that whatever the critical table describes is what happens (to a degree) but you survive. After this has happened to me several times I just can't see how this is correct. Many times this means finding bionics in the middle of mission, which in my experience is almost certain death. It would seem to me that after reading some like minded posts that if the players could offer a creative way in which they survive that it wouldn't always come down to losing limbs and organs. I know that it's reading between the lines but any feedback would be nice.

For my players, it's sort of like the Prince telling the story of his actions in the various Prince of Persia games. "No no, that isn't how it happened at all, let me go back for a moment." Then they get to describe how they managed to avoid the blow. Pin-point shots from the hip to vaporise the bullet that would have pierced their armour, a last-minute flick of the wrist that flips their Fury Interceptor end-to-end and kicking in the afterburners to avoid the blast from an exploding ship (Though he won't bloody shut up about it, claiming that he didn't lose a fate point, one was taken from him. That's what you get for being too close to a 10VU-wide explosion as a ship's reactor core ruptures.), et cetera. The point is that the event which would have killed them did not happen. Fate points burnt during ship combat are usually my purview, though.

Hmm, as it happens I found a good post regarding this to some degree. Sorry if it's a double post, as I can promise I tried using the forum search tool several times. Google apparently gets the win. I certainly could use some more support than the mentioned post that says 'everyone falls into two camps'

For my players, it's sort of like the Prince telling the story of his actions in the various Prince of Persia games. "No no, that isn't how it happened at all, let me go back for a moment." Then they get to describe how they managed to avoid the blow. Pin-point shots from the hip to vaporise the bullet that would have pierced their armour, a last-minute flick of the wrist that flips their Fury Interceptor end-to-end and kicking in the afterburners to avoid the blast from an exploding ship (Though he won't bloody shut up about it, claiming that he didn't lose a fate point, one was taken from him. That's what you get for being too close to a 10VU-wide explosion as a ship's reactor core ruptures.), et cetera. The point is that the event which would have killed them did not happen. Fate points burnt during ship combat are usually my purview, though.

well said as always mate

I agree with Errant.

If burning a fate point saved your life then there was some sort of divine intervention. Either the killing blow didn't connect, the enemy's gun jammed, or the round meant for you hit the wall behind you instead (pulp fiction).

Another method would be fate points spent to save your life always fore go critical effects when they would kill you outright. The damage and non terminal effects incurred should still apply if they wouldn't kill you.

An example would be having your arm blown off. In one critical effect you get a chance to survive, if you fail the save, burn a fate point and you don't die. In another, your arm is blown off and you are instantly killed. Since you burned a fate point, and the critical effect would have killed you outright, that shot never connected.

I think this method is fair and simple to follow without fudging things too much. As to how or what happens when fate points are burned one should be encouraged to be creative.

My thoughts anyway.

punkrawkz7 said:

That is indeed how it is written for both Dark Heresy as well as Rogue Trader:

"The result is that the character survives whatever it was that would have killd him, but only just. For example, if the explorer was shot with a lascannon and suffered a Critical Hit that would have killed him, instead he is only hideously burnt and rendered unconscious with zero Wounds. [...]"
- RT p233, Burning Fate

This is less divine intervention, it's more like what the characters would call a metric ton of luck (well, depending on how superstitious they are).

True divine intervention for burning a Fate Point to emerge unscathed from such an attack is actually a special purchasable high-level talent in DH called Miraculous Survival. I'm not sure if it exists in RT as well.

If this really happens very often in your game, something seems to be going wrong. Are the characters of your party constantly overpowered by damage that negate all their Crit Wounds in one go, do the enemies keep attacking characters that are already on the ground, or are the characters just too stubborn to consider retreating, or do they take too many risks for their own good? Maybe your GM is giving you too hard a time with those attacks - I don't think the rules for burning Fate are the source of the issue here; you shouldn't even get into this situation all that often.

That may well be, in DH it happened often as we all seemed to always be in a fight for out lives. But in RT it did happen to a couple players in our first session, we were facing a couple squads of Rak'Gol. Lets just say we all agreed we need to start out with some lesser enemies....