Once a player has gone over their wound threshold but they still have fewer critical wound cards than their toughness + 1, how do you go about finishing them off? Do you have to keep on attacking, ignoring wounds until you build up enough crits? What bonus does an attacker get for attacking an unconscious character?

There have been a couple threads on this already.

Essentially, the answer is: It is up to the GM.

If it isn't during combat, then the GM just says what he wants that furthers the story. Instant death is a possibility, or capture, torture, limb removal, left for dead, etc. Whatever fits the story and how the game is being run and the NPC's motivations.

If it is during combat, it gets a bit trickier. Personally, my NPCs will (for the most part) ignore unconscious PCs while there are other conscious PCs around. Otherwise, I favor the option that an attack on an unconscious person is a Simple (0d) attack and will automatically inflict one critical if it hits.

There is no rule in the rulebook for this, though.

Well, there are no official rulings on this. But common sense says that if you have no distractions (like a hectic combat) around you you should be able to auto-kill an unconscious character. It really makes no sense not to. I mean "Oh, I failed slitting the unconscious dude's throat" just feels stupid.

In hectic situations though I tend to go for what dvang suggests, ignoring the unconscious as they can be dealt with after the combat. No reason to stand around slitting throats while there are others around still fighting. If you still want to attack a simple check seems appropriate. and someone correct me if I'm mistaken but doesn't at least one wound convert into a critical if you recieve wounds while over your wound threshold?

I believe the rules actually say you convert a wound to a critical if you have enough wounds over that you go unconscious, implying the act of going unconscious causes the critical.

We now have an official ruling on this in the FAQ:

"Most of the time, when you’re unconscious you’re just at the mercy of the environment or the GM. The goblin can just climb on top of you and slit your throat if no one’s around to stop it; we don’t need rules for that. (But isn’t it more interesting if he ties you up and puts you in a cage?)

However, if you want to model additional damage on an unconscious character, each time a character takes damage above his wound threshold, one of those wounds is turned faceup as a critical (just like the blow that knocked him unconscious). If he then has more critical wounds than his toughness, he dies."

A reasonable ruling, and being a defenceless lump, defence/challange dice should hardly come into it, which would obviously allow an enemy to rack up a few extra criticles if need be, just to scare him a bit more...

This topic is discussed in the new ERRATA, etc. document.

jh

Emirikol said:

Yep, that's what I said. I even posted the text from the errata that referred to this topic because I'm all helpful and stuff