First post, so bear with me

I've cooked up some changes to the DH damage system that I thought I might share. The grounds for the rewrite are that my players generally like really deadly games and most are veterans of the Mech-warrior RPG system. So after playing the "vanilla" version of DH we came up with this...

Everything follows the standard rules except for...

1: Your total wounds equal TB x 3 (Sound constitution still adds to these)

Any damage taken is substracted from total wounds (of course) =)

2: Each location now has a Wound Threshold as follows: Head TB x 1, Body TB x 2, Arms and legs TB x 1,5 (round up)

If damage to a location exceeds the treshold, you take critical damage in that location.

3: If your Total wounds are reduced to 0 any excess damage goes directly to Fatigue. Each level of fatigue is followed by a -10% penalty.

If fatigue exceeded you must take a Toughness test (with penalties) or fall unconscious.

(unnatural Toughness simply multiplies the values by the rating of the trait)

Example: Garulf, a rather foulmouthed feral guardsman has a Toughness of 42. His total wounds is 12

His wound thresholds are

Head: 4

Body: 8

Arms/legs: 6

After shooting of his mouth (again) he takes a 12 point hit to the right arm. Reducing damage by TB (4) 8 points gets through, causing 2 critical on his arm-location and reduce his total wounds by 8.

Simple and deadly for the gorejunkies and i makes headshots more effective. (did change the mod for shooting head(and hands/feet) to -30)

This has proved to be very deadly indeed (though no PC has died from it yet) and one-shot take-downs do happen without RF.

Well.. there you have it

This actually looks quite interesting! My own campaign has been going on for quite some time now, so it's a little late to start changing things, but I'll seriously give these rules some serious thought before my next campaign.

One downside is that it seriously adds to the bookkeeping though.

Serious bookeeping? Not really. Just one thing... players gotta keep track off WHERE they got their wounds... that's about it. The rest is simple math for the GM to register damage to "the bad guys".

Not hard at all really.

I can see it working, I remember something like that from some old games. It is pretty sleek, it would get slowed down wuite a bit by toughness changes (drugs or poisons) but that doesn't often happen. It would benefit from a new second half of the character sheet.

But my concern is, after playing for a while is that now people are just starting to get some nice gear. Likewise it's expanding the badguys and their gear. But this means theres a very good chance of characters dying from the first shot of a combat. I could dumb down the bad guys again but part of the fun was letting some of 40k universes bad asses turn up.

DH isn't lethal enough for you already?

Letrii said:

I have a four player group who tells me "No".

Their gaming style is very concentrated on investigation and not so much "hardcore" combat, but they feel that when they do have to pull out the hurtware, mutilated bodies will be flung around like ragdolls on fire.

Perhaps I should mention that we (Me as GM and players) decided that all die rolls are "open" unless the roll specifically calls for secrecy. No fudging.

Of course the door swings both ways and getting your character caught in mosh (Ambush/autofire) is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But knowing this full well promotes caution, tactical approaches and even players backing down from fights (just to return later with help or ambush teh suckaz).

Edit: typo's

Serialkilla said:

I feel like the game is plenty lethal as it is. I usualy play with 2 friends (and we have had more than a few NPC with us), after, I don't know, maybe 10-15 sessions we have lost 5 NPCs (and been betrayed by one... never trust a Tech-Priest), and like the PCs they can survive as long as they have Fate Points, so they've "died" between 2-4 times.

Me, I've burned 2 Fate Points to be alive as this point and my other PC friend has burned 4 (I'm an adept and he's a guardsman so he gets in line of fire more often). We've each earned 1 Fate Point during the game up until now, I started with 3 so I have 2 left, and my friend also started with 3 so he's in real danger now... oh and so far we've both have to get Cybernetic Eyes because we've been permanently blinded, I had to get a Bionic Respiratory System installed and my friend had to get a new right hand, and I'm not gonna list the number of replacements our NPCs have had.

Not to mention me and my friend have suffered enough critical damage to reduce both our Fellowship characteristics to 7 (after I raised it from 2) and 8 respectively. We both started between 25-30. So to make the game more lethal would require us to have a few backup characters made every now and then... but then we might have a few more firefights behind us so far.