My books are at a friends house, I have not run a game since September, and I need to remind myself of two rules before a game I plan on running this Sunday.
First of all, when it comes to NPC action cards, all NPCs use the same action card (and if any NPC uses the card all must wait until it recharges), correct?
Second of all, can someone remind me what the conditions for a player death are again?
Cyber-Dave said:
My books are at a friends house, I have not run a game since September, and I need to remind myself of two rules before a game I plan on running this Sunday.
First of all, when it comes to NPC action cards, all NPCs use the same action card (and if any NPC uses the card all must wait until it recharges), correct?
Second of all, can someone remind me what the conditions for a player death are again?
It's very much up to you as a GM, but NPCs who do share a card share the recharge as well. You may have some minions sharing cards while the main NPC villain has his own cards.
yup same creature type share actions.
I see this as intended to (a) encourage variety in combat; (b) prevent pile-ons of a particularly nasty signature action.
If different creatures happen to have same action, don't rule it as shared however.
PC's die when they fall unconscious from wound loss (their wounds having exceeded wound threshold) and have more critical wounds (by number, severity is irrelevant) than their Toughness score (number value, fortune dice on To irrelevant). Remember the process of falling unconscious from wounds causes a wound to be turned into a critical - thus any PC who has Critical Wounds in number = Toughness score is at risk of dying immediately if they suffer wounds over threshold in an encounter.
IMO, I think the main reason for the sharing of action cards (by NPC type) is purely for the ease of GM tracking. You might only have 1 action card, but 5 NPCs using that action ... you would need to track recharge separately for each NPC that used the action ... which can add up to a lot of different recharge tokens to keep track of. Thus, IMO, FFG just said "NPCs of the same type share the card", which streamlines GM tracking immensely. Most encounters only have 1 or 2 types of NPCs, thus rather than needing to track 5 or 10 different recharges on "melee strike" or "Dodge" (etc.), the GM only needs to track 1 or 2.
That said, do it how you want. If your PCs are pretty powerful and you want to add to the combat difficulty, then go ahead and allow each NPC to use an action card tracked separately. Just be prepared for the bookkeeping.
Alternately, just give the NPCs more A/C/E and throw dice, rather than cards, at the players.
