Okay the following is perhaps a stupid question but we just want to make sure.

How does criticals and death actually work?

Let me explain what I mean.

You are Jo the Acolyte fighting George the Heretic. You have been going at it for a few rounds and as both of you see the concept of being protected are wearing full xeno mesh. Both of you are also TB 3.

Basically we are at the point where you, Jo, with the grace of the light of the Emperor are actually winning. George has 2 wounds left and its your turn. You shoot him with your shotgun and do 10 points of damage to his body. He substracts his armor of 4 and TB of 3 and takes 3 wounds on the body effectively going to 0 Wounds and Critical Body Impact -1-.

So the question is... what happens next turn when you shoot him again? Lets say you do another 10 damage! Does that mean that the 3 wounds that pass through armor and toughness add to the previous 1? Effectively taking him to Body Critical 4? Or do you start back from zero wounds and say that the 3 that are done take him to Body Critical 3?

Furthermore what if this second hit is on leg, hand, head? Do you go back from the start and now say "Okay, so Impact Head 3..." or go to Impact head 4 taking the 1 level of critical as an essential minus 1 Wound?

In our game group we basically add them... mostly for simplicity and because it seems reasonable. After many rounds of combat you end up at a critical 5 body and then the guy shoots you for another 3-4 damage after soak at the hand... you end up with Hand Critical 8-9 and die... Otherwise it would mean keeping score of yet even more wounded locations and people could end up with critical 6 head, critical 7 hand, critical 4 left hand, critical 6 body and so on and so forth... ie taking like anohter 40 wounds until they actually die!

Is that how it works?

arcona said:

Critical damage accumulates, and has to be healed, seperately from wounds. When you suffer a critical hit, you add the previous accumulated critical damage to whatever has resulted from the damage roll. Otherwise you'd almost never kill anyone...

Say he has 1 Critical Wound to the body, the next hit does 5 energy to his head. You would look up the result for 6 crit energy head.

Letrii said:

Correct.

I personally hate the critical system, but thats just my style.

Peacekeeper_b said:

Personally, with my group, I do an individual set per place. Only body wounds affect body criticals, etc.