My group is looking at branching into Only War and some of the other players are pushing me to play an Ogryn. As I was looking through that specialty I found a bit of a potential issue. As we know Ogryns get a heavy penalty to their Intelligence characteristic at character creation causing the very real chance of a single digit Intelligence score. What happens if they frenzy and get hit with another -10. Both Fierce Loyalty and Frenzy (go figure) cause a character to frenzy and thus suffer that penalty? Do you slip into a coma as indicated under the table for Effects of Zero Characteristic and thus forcing a player to make sure the Ogryn has at least a score of 11 if they intend to use anything that could cause the Ogryn to frenzy?

This issue came up in beta. It ws worded poorly in the errata for the beta (at one point reading that it was only a bonus to "Tests," therefore meaning it did not add a bonus to melee damage).

In the book now, it has wording explicitly in it (the same sentance really), that this is not characteristic damage, and cannot reduce a stat below 1.

Aye, basically the penalties from being Frenzied are simply penalties to related tests and NOT a modification of your actual Strength, Intelligence etc thus you cannot drop anything to 0 by being Frenzied.

This seems as good a place as any to mention my first OW character, an Ogryn, who started with an intelligence of 24, and was labelled, with considerable rapidity, "Professor Ogrynstein". Easily one of the funniest games I've ever played, with the immortal quote:

"To be, or not to be. I forgot da question." - Professor Ogrynstein

Thaddux said:

This is why i love random statistics.