I'm sure this topic has been brought up before but for my own needs I'll bring it up myself. Does anyone feel that PC's are able to recover from critical wounds with ease? A good nights rest, a fellow PC with First Aid trained and what do you know, the Nerve Damage I had or the Broken Rib I'd suffered is feeling peachy and I'm off to the races and ready for another night of hack and slash. I don't know about you but I've had a broken rib and it hurt for a month. I'm considering making some adjustments to this, and some may think I am cruel, but Warhammer is Grim and Perilous. I want to know if anyone else has tackled this, tested it, or have any opinions on it.

BigKahuna, if you read this, I read a lot of your posts and dig your opinion, which is often just to let the rules be but I can tell you are a flexible GM. I think as GM's we might share some similarities. What's your opinion on the fast recovery of criticals? I want criticals to last longer but I don't want to unbalance the death they cause. So, in quick strokes my thoughts are to use the Severity of a crit x 10 as a number of days until a PC is able to recover from a Critical as per the normal Rest and Recovery rules. Daily First Aid treatment can be used to ignore a critical but will also reduce days of healing if successful. Players suffering from these longer lasting Criticals will suffer from the negative modifiers of the injury but they won't count them towards Character Death. Does that make sense?

Example. Vragni the dwarf gets into trouble with some Orcs. After the melee he suffers a Critical. Severe Sprain with Severity 2. Under normal circumstances Vragni could fully recover from this Severe Sprain during Rest and Recovery with 2 successes on a Resilience roll. Not super challenging. (I've sprained my ankles many times, they do not heal over night) So, with my thoughts, the Player would have a Severe Sprain up to 20 days, Severity x 10 days, before official Rest and Recovery could be attempted. First Aid and Long Term Care can reduce these days and also ignore its effects on a daily basis but the injury is with the PC during all these days of recovery. This is the catch, and the save to its cruelty. Although the PC will have the Severe Sprain for up to 20 days, this prolonged injury does not count towards the Criticals required for Character Death. If the player gets the 2 successes during Rest and Recovery, the Player can consider the Severe Sprain a normal wound in regards to Criticals required for death but the Player still suffers from the Criticals effect until his ankle is better. Only fresh, untreated Criticals will kill poor Vragni, as per the normal case..

Thoughts?

Adding realism here is nice, and the way you propouse sounds good to me. It will add for sure a grimmer and more misery feeling to your players, and it is a good idea if combats in your games happen scarcely or they are not too lethal. On the contrary, if your players tend to find combat situations every day or your combats are very lethal, with this house rule you will be creating new characters every new scenario.

I agree that characters can recover from injuries too quickly, but it is actually a lot up to the GM. I have mentioned this before; WFRP kills characters through attrition. You do not generally go into a fight fully healed and then die. You accumulate Wounds, Diseases and Insanities over time which eventually wears you down. However, this only works as long as the GM makes sure the world keeps grinding at them. If the GM keeps giving them access to a soft warm bed and a healer they will keep healing the damage faster than they accumulate it.

So my tip is to keep up the pressure. Have them sleep in a vermin infested cheap tavern, huddle under a bush during a rainstorm or even sleep in the gutter. Maybe they get injured but time is running out for the adventure so they have to keep going through the night instead of sleeping. Maybe they go to sleep but something interrupts them during the night.

Proper care and a full nights rest in a warm bed should be allmost a quest in itself, not something that the characters have automatic access to each night.
Obviously, if you are in a city and you have characters that are well off, this is harder to accomplish, but you could have all the good inns be full because of a festival. The important part is to keep making the characters work hard to get a good nights rest.

Ralzar, I fully agree with you but I think even in the uncomfortable places that Players can find themselves, healing Criticals is still too easy. One of my problems is probably because one of my Players has completed Barber Surgeon and Physician so the PC's are always close to this help. My Warhammer is full of Disease and they have all had battles with Nurgles great and infectious influence. In fact last session the Priest of Morr in my group who already had a Disease received a second symptom, probably the worst one you can get. Purple Brains Fever with a Severity of 5. What i like about Disease is that they feel like they have a lasting effect. Crits do not.

I've talked to my Players and they agree and like the idea of the changes. When a world is dangerous, Players will think more creatively and not always charge into battle at the slightest provocation. My intention is not to kill players. Players tend to kill Players by making bad choices. (we have had one Player Death and it was completely his fault) i am lucky to have Players who are Roleplayers.

I should also point out that I have re-introduced Fate Points. Fate works in conjunction with your Favour and you may burn a Favour, permanently to act like a Fate point of old. Once burned the Player will never get the Favour back and slowly their Favour weakens until they have no more Fate or Favour.

So in the event that Vragni our hero from above is struck down by an Orc and recieves a death blow, he could burn 1 of his 3 Favour like as a Fate Point, and we figure out a clever way he survives from the attack but from that point forward he'll only have a maximum of 2 favour. So, although the world is more dangerous due to the more challenging Criticals, the Gods are also looking out for poor crippled Vragni.

Yepesnope. Of course, session after session of fighting would make this very brutal, and so it would too if you went out in real life with a sword and got into melee. This, I hope gives them pause, makes them consider the real consequences of fighting. Like I said above I have good Roleplayers who appreciete this kind of intensity. I also like to mix up sessions. We go entire sessions with no combat at all, to a dungeon crawling like session, to sessions where we barely even touch dice. We've even played a board game, as the Players, during a session. So, yah, you need to monitor the conflict, keep it fresh, but give it a sense of urgency and realism.

It sounds like quite a good change, especially in combination with allowing PCs to burn Fortune points. It does, however, feel like quite a big change in terms of game balance, so do let us know how it goes in your game.

p.s. how do players regain burnt Fortune points? Is it through XP or through GM award?

Players gain Fortune as normal, every session or when Fortune refreshes but if they Burn one as a Fate Point they do not get that back. Ever. At the start of the next session, they start with 1 fewer Fortune. Sure, maybe the GM might reward them with one, but that is a rare, rare event. In 1st addition, Fate Points were used to save a Player from certain death. They could use them to ignore a Critical hit, survive a deadly fall etc. They were powerful. Fate Points were not recovered, excepting very special events, like divine intervention or a campaign completion and once a character ran out they could no longer cheat death.

With my house rule, your Fortune and Fate are tied together and you need an available Fortune Point to burn. If you've used your Fortune up in a session, you do not have a Fate to burn. For example, our Hero Vragni has 3 Fortune at the beginning of a session. It's a challenging session and he's uses 1 Fortune to gain a white dice during a melee strike, and later uses another to help recharge an exhausted Talent and then again he gets into trouble with a nasty Orc and uses his 3rd Fortune to add a white to his attack action. Now he has 0 Fortune, and temporarily 0 Fate. So if at that moment Vragni were to be struck down and recieved a death blow, he'd have no Fortune/Fate to burn. Someone call a Morrian Priest please. If Vragni however had not used his 3rd Fortune and was then struck down by the Orc, he could burn it and he would survive. Then at the start of the next session he would start with only 2 Fortune.

I think the best place to start when it comes to critical wound healing is double checking to make sure your running the rule right and making appropriate adjustments to the difficulty. When you say "its too easy", I find myself scratching my head because in my groups my players consider the critical wound system way too tough and almost see critical wounds as "permenant injuries" because they are so hard to shake. In particfular wounds with rating 4 or more

First thing to note about Critical Wounds is that you get only 1 Resiliance check per full nights rest at a minimum of 2d difficulty and the conditions of where you rest should be adjusted using challenge not misfortune die.

If you note in the players handbook it says "The Difficulty (aka challenge dice) is based on the characters injury level. The GM may modify the difficulty based on the conditions and surroundings. 2d difficulty presumes a pretty average place to rest (aka something with a bed). Anything less than that and you should be increasing difficulty. Out doors somewhere my be 3d, anything more stressful should be 4d.

Now thats not to say misfortune dice don't play their part here, penalizing properly is the key. Unless the players are again in a inn with clean water available and for the most part ideal situation you should be stacking misfortune. Is it cold? Definitly a misfortune die. Is the floor hard and or sleeping location uncomfertable? Another misfortune. Does the person applying first aid have any tools? Is it noisy, are the players in a stressful situation? Is there anyone taking care of the player or is the surgeon taking care of more than one patient? More misfortune die.

My point is that the default rule really shouldn't be that easy unless the players find themselves in ideal situations all the time. Which depending your campaign may or may not be the case, but this is a circumstance of your campaign. Another words you have to ask yourself, is the rule the problem, or is it simply that for these character, in this particular campaign, the situation seems to always be idea.

For example in my campaign their is no surgeon in the party. Most of the members of the party are relatively broke and can't really afford to stay in Inns. The characters in my party often spend time away from comfertable situations and are often not given the oppertunity for "a full nights rest" in the course of adventures so healing criticals is something that generally happens in between adventures (if they are lucky).

A typical resiliance check in my group looks like this.

2d Difficulty (default)

+1 Difficulty (For not having ideal sleeping conditions)

1 or more Misfortune: For suffering from multiple wounds (1 misfortune for each critical wound they are suffering from)

+1 Misfortune to any situation that opposess a healthy, stress free, healing enviroment (cold, noise, lack of tools, wet, suffering from other conditions that might cause sleepness like insanities, diseases, stress, fatigue etc..).

Generally speaking on average a player recieves 3 purple dice and 2-4 misfortune dice unless they are sleeping at an inn for their resiliance checks.

I would say resiliance checks are failed 70% of the time in my game and most of the time even when successful they are only able to shake the minor criticals with ratings of 2-3 at best. Anything 4 and up and they are going to spend several weeks trying to get rid of it.

It may seem that I'm being a tough GM, but if you really analyze the rule and look over the difficulties and how they should be applied, it all makes perfect sense. I think GM's are often to timid about setting appropriate difficulties, so they adjust the rules to make it more difficult. Which is kind of counter productive, I mean, if you want something to be harder because you feel it makes sense you don't need to do much more than throw in some extra challenge dice and misfortune dice. No need to go fussing with the rules.

Now if you do want to create a more griddy and realistic theme with critical wounds in terms of "how long it takes" to heal. I think the easy change is to make it so that each time you succeed a resiliance check you may remove 1 wound rating from a critical wound (instead of removing the wound) tracking with tokens until the wound is healed. Hence if you had a wound with a wound rating of 3 days. The first day you would need 3 success, the next you need 2 success and on the final day you need 1 success to remove the critical wound. This basically leaves the "system" in tact meaning you don't have to change any balancing mechanics.

That said I didn't note anything wrong with the system you have created, I think it would work just fine, certainly more griddy and realistic. Just be sure that when your creating the house rule your doing it for the right reasons. Another words, make sure that it really is the rule that is too easy and not your campaign that you have made too easy. Like I said at the start here, my players moan everytime they make their resiliance check because they find the rule so tough, but I think its only tough because the situation in the campaign they are in is very tough. I mean at an Inn with a surgeon.. ya these rolls would be much easier.

Thanks BigKahuna. That's what I was looking for. The Bigkahuna slap to the face of reason. I totally get ya. I can see the errors of my ways already and it all has to do with the difficulty modifier . I've only ever used the 2 purple dice challenge level , for Rest and Recovery because I logged into my brain that the only dice I should be adding to the Resilience check for added difficulty is misfortune. The misfortune are a nice touch but they do not make massive impact like challenge dice. One purple dice is worth a hand full of misfortune. But, to defend my position, I get this out of the book. I'll explain, although I think I like your angle.

PG 42 Core Book

Misfortune

While challenge levels represent the default difficulty of a task, (1 challenge for a normal wound, 2 challenge for critical are the default challenges) few tasks are attempted in a vacuum. A variety of other factors influence success and failure. All the niggling complications that undermine success are referred to as misfortunes. Misfortune can represent a variety of factors - bad weather, lack of equipment, being pressured and out of time, the effects of a critical wound, or being vastly outnumbered are just a few examples.

In this above ruling, I'd say the sleeping conditions, being cold, wet, hungry, flea bitten or all of the above are levels of misfortune, which can be interpreted as a change in the default difficulty , but not changing the default challenge level of a Rest and Recovery roll. I'll buy into your ruling that sleeping conditions modify the challenge level although the book says the GM can change the difficulty, not the challenge. I think if we are talking rules, sleeping conditions count as Misfortune.

pg 64 under Rest and Recovery : the GM may modify the difficulty based on the conditions and surroundings, but it doesn't say the GM may modify the Challenge Level .

So, the question is, what does that mean? Does it trump what the rule book explains previously on PG 42? Does it matter? Yes, some. Rules are meant to be broken, but you need to know what the rule is in order to bend it. And then, by how much? Certainly what I am proposing is a significant change, and what you are doing, by the book or not, is probably the better solution.

That's why I wanted your response. I'm gonna think on this, but I am leaning towards what you're suggesting. The added Purple will make a big difference in the Critical Recovery. Going to bed now to dream about Critical Wounds…

I split this reply in two because I wanted to make sure their was a clear divide between my first post and this second one, because I find often we confuse rules with desired campaign effects.

For me the rule works fine, but its because I run WFRP 3.0 for the most part as the designers intended effect on the game. In our example above with critical wounds, the intent of the rule isn't really to create a reaslistic mechanical representation of healing wounds. Its intended to be a simple, easy to track system for something that is really just a small part of the game system as a whole. More importantly a part of the game system which if designed realistically would have deterimental effects on the overal ability for us to create and run a fantasy world campaign in which heroic characters are swapping paint with zombies on a day to day base it. I mean lets face it, if you break a leg you are in a cast for 4-6 months. If we created a mechanic to handle injuries like that realistically our game sessions would boil down to 1 fight and 4-6 months bed rest for our characters and thats assuming the injuries are as minor as a broken leg.

Anyway the point here is that you always have to remember that while as a role-playing world we like realism to some degree, strictly speaking realism is the kiss of death of role-playing games. Its the most sure fire way to ruin it. Simply put, reality sucks and realistically speaking everything in the world of warhammer that makes adventuring parties and adventures tick is simply completetly out of the realm of realism, even in a fantastical setting of magic and dragons. When a sword cuts you in the chess not only are you likely to die from that wound alone but even if you recover its unlikely you'll ever be able to fight again.

My point is that realism is not what we are shooting for here, we are looking for "fun realism" and in the spirit of fun realism, healing up quickly and getting the party on their feet and adventuring is what you want and thats what the WFRPG critical hit/healing system is designed to do. HOwever it does give you the flexibility to control the difficulty with purple and black dice and so if you want to make it harder for your players you need do nothing more but simply increase the difficulty. What you definitly dont want is for healing to be too much more complex or take too much more time than a few nights rest, else your campaign will come to an all to realistic crawl when real injuries happen.

Well I suppose rules are always up to some level of interpretation. To me it made sense that the base challenge of healing/resting was an inherently dynamic thing. You will always get more rest at a hospital than you will in a cold wet cave, thats not something that some good luck will change. Which is why in the case of resiliance I apply a higher challenge rating rather than misfortune to represent this very static kind of difficulty to a situation.

Just to referee the last post of BigKahuma. I had a bunch of house rules to add "realism" to my games. Many where clearly in favour of the PC's, a few (while not intended) worked agains the PC's. After some games, we have decided to dump them all.

Indeed, the dice pool, improvisation and common sense is all you need. Though some times it can be difficult, specially if you are like me, a fan of mechanics.

What a great game!

Yepesnopes said:

Well its as I have always said about GMing, you can offer all the advice in the world, literly paint a big X on someones forehead but at the end of the day all GM's must go through their own creative process to come to the right conclusion, but in my experiance all good GM's ultimatly come to very similiar conclusions and thats because I believe very firmly while their is no right and wrong way to GM, their is such a thing as a universally smart way.

My own take and experience.

Yes, critical wounds don't linger the way insanity and disease do - that is in part the greater threat of those effects (along with disease's spiral potential/talent disabling). A range of flavours. The right blessings (even if you are rigorous on no spamming, if it doesn't work first time it won't - which I am) also particularly whittle down the CR3 and lower ones.

As to too easy, I add misfortune die (or dice) to the overnight check if heroes are not in a decent resting place (say an inn or a 3 success+ result on Nature Lore with find camp speciality). I've had a PC on a week long boat trip miss the recovery of a critical because of one bad misfortune result (rocking boat not best place to rest).

Also, for "serious adventures" I go for interludes of only 1-4 days, very much like the structure in Gathering Storm. That way there's a decent chance to heal some critical wounds but also a very good chance that some will carry over to the next Act. If you're running "short adventure - a month of downtime - "short adventure", then yes crits will not build up (unless a Mortal Wound is in play).

So, for example I've got 4 PCs with over 60 advances, 2 of whom picked up criticals in a fight with beastmen, and going into their next encounter 2 days later still have them. It don't expect them to have either in another 4 game days.

Upshort, I've not been tempted to tinker with rules on this even though criticals do come and go routinely.

I think criticals stay with a character long enough, if I read the rules correctly you can heal a maximum of one critical each night of rest. My players often receive a couple of critical hits each every serious fight they get into. Many of the creatures have actions which can easily inflict critical damage and the use of expertise dice in combat gives a drastic boost to the number of critical wounds I get to deal to the players. I've had fights where the enemies dealt at least three criticals to each player character.

Combine a high number of criticals dealt to the players with a few misfortune dice if they do not find a decent resting place it will take days before they are rid of all their critical wounds. Also, I'm careful not to give them fortune dice on their recovery check, if they are in an inn for example they do not receive any fortune dice since I rule that "normal" resting conditions (so no misfortune of fortune), to get any fortune dice at all it has to be a better (and more expensive) inn as well as more rest than just a nights sleep. Traveling or adventuring while trying to get rid of criticals also add one or two misfortune dice to the rolls. Lastly I generally do not allow my players to rest and recover for any length of time (if they try to stay inactive orcs will kick down the door, or something else might happen that requires their attention).

In general at least one of my players have a critical wound and they think that to "only have one critical" is a great thing.

My tip be harder against the players when dealing out misfortune and award less fortune on the recovery checks, and never let them rest for any length of time. If there's a healer of some sort, make sure to enforce the "only one heal per day"-rule.
Make seeing a doctor really expensive and while Shallyans might give the players healing for free Shallya herself might expect the players to make a generous donation to the local temple when they recover if they wish to benefit from any Shallyan blessings in the future.
But most of all, deal critical damage freely and often in combat. The risk of criticals really makes combat feel dangerous and perilous. Use the creatures expertise dice and use actions that inflict critical damage easily. This also increases the risk/chance of permanent injuries, and that's really fun.

valvorik said:

Wow! 60 advances? Just caught my attention but just out of curiousity how often do you guys play and how many advances do you hand out per session? And how in the world does anyone survive that long in this game lol! Im starting to think Im a pretty tough GM!

Thanks for all the feed back. I agree with almost everything in here. Bigkahuna I too run Warhammer 3.0 as close to the book as possible, thats why I specifically asked you about this because I know you do too. It is actually a challenging game to modify because of all the cards and the way they interact with each other. You change one thing and you think it's working great and then suddenly you read a card you'd never seen and it puts a stick in the spokes of the house rule. So, I've done very litte in House rules except the Fate Points and make everything else up on the spot. Like I've read in other threads, a improv by a GM one night does not mean the Improv exists the next. No two situations are ever exactly the same and good players know this and accept it. The dice in this game are very flexible and dynamic. I'm surprised I got caught up in the "rule" actually.

I might test out some of my ideas about Criticals anyways but I think it's been answered here. I need to adjust the Challenge Level with more frequency instead of just Misfortune for Rest and Recovery. Again, one of my problems stems from the Physician in the party, but that's the luck of the dice. Maybe he'll have to die…

Grayzen said:

Well keep in mind too that each character in the adventuring party brings some great benefit to the group, this is the charm of the profession system and part of the spirit of role-playing games. There is always something a character will be really good at (this is a reward for the player). In your case you have a great surgeon. As a GM its tempting to try to "curve" the advantages players create for themselves through cleverly designed characters, I often see GM's talking about certain characters in their adventuring group that are "too good" but this is part of the fun for the players and its not something you really want to "crack" per say, even if the advantage is a bit mechanically unbalancing. Let them have their advantages and remember that you are the GM, you have the power to twist and turn everything and anything in the story in any way you want, you don't need to change the rules to screw with your players.

I played another session yesterday where this really came into play. The party was scaling a mountain in a storm while some had criticals and got some more on the way up. Whenever they were resting for the night, the scout of the group searched for a good spot to rest. The storm added 1 Challange Dice, the fact that they are resting on a mountains side added 2 Misfortune. Based on how good a spot the scout found, they could make the healing checks easier.
The scout even rolled a Comet and a Chaos star once, which let him find a cave (-1 Challange Dice). However, the Ymir who lived in the cave returned during the night

No one managed to heal up properly during the climb, but at the top they found a cave with a Hidden Shrine where they got some bonuses to resting. The players were really relieved that they finally found a proper place to rest and actually managed to get rid of a couple of Criticals. If they had been able to heal normally all the way up the mountain, they would not have really cared about this temporary sanctuary I gave them at the top

BigKahuna said:

This is a great point. If your party chose to have a skilled healer they should get the benefit of that. If nothing else they gave up a different skill set for it. It also points out that they may want to keep in tip top shape. I think the game is designed with the assumption there won't be someone with Medicine on hand during regular play, which may be why the OP feels like recovery is too easy. I mean, look at it this way…

"Of course the party is recovering easily, they're traveling with a doctor."

Oh I completely agree. I was only joking about killing the healer. Warhammer's career system has always made it special and I got nothing truely against the Physician in the party. I've been playing and GM'ing Warhammer since 89/90 so I get it. I know how to channel a players strong points and let them excel and I also have no restrictions on a players character choices and career as long as it is backed up with a solid history. The pursuit of character development, regardless of their career, is paramount to me and by development I don't mean skills, talents etc I mean their nature and demeanor. The pursuit of why and who they are.

I totally get that total realism is poison to an adventure in Fantasy but thanks to this thread I think I've solved the "problem" I was having.

Just an update. We've played a few sessions since I began this thread, and I took your advice BigKahuna and adjusted the Challenge Level instead of the long term injury idea I had. I'm sold. 3 days of Resilience failures are making the critical wounds perfectly significant. : ) I should have seen it before, regardless of how I read the rules. The dice in this game are so versatile and the more you roll them, play with them and make stuff up with them the more creative you get with them.

Anyway, again thanks for the feedback.

BigKahuna said:

Sorry for delay answering, missed the question. We play weekly but miss a week every 6 or so. I give 1 advance a session, never more or less. We have had one fatality and one near-party-TPK that was narrowly averted (though I was not reading some rules right at that time and might have killed at least one if I had done it 100% right). We've got missing fingers, some building corruptio0n and a bit of insanity sprinkled about.

I see the game system as about "messing up" the PC"s more than "killing them".

The game is designed around game time (real time in real life) more than around in story time (narrative hours and days that the PCs go through). As with the Story mode, where recharge tokens recharge roughly when everyone around the table has had a say (just like a round in encounter mode).

At first I thought that wierd that cards would not recharge at the same rate in narrative time, but in use, we don't even notice the discrepancy. Players like to act and the pace of "turns" around the table is much more important to keep the game flowing than narrative time.

Same for Crits. My adventures are very compressed in narrative time. During climaxes, many dangerous scenes might happen in a single day of narrative time. But we play once every month in real time. Which means that a single day in the story might play out over three to four months of real time. That means that in my game, Crits linger a very long time in real time. Even if the player heals it on the second or third Resilience check, he has been playing with it for three or four sessions already. Which seems like a long time for the player. Which is what counts, in the end.

In my game, imposing realistic healing times would mean possibly playing a whole year with the same Crits… That would be more than nagging, that would just be not fun anymore. The game lives because stories evolve, the state of characters evolve, change brings interest and excitement.