Instead of using toughness as a measure of the number of criticals a person cal suffer before being in danger of death I suggest a flat value - 4 critical wounds.

Tougness will already soak wounds reducing the number of criticals you get in some cases.

Ideas:

• Critical threshold is 4 for everyone. If you have more wounds than your wound threshold and four critical wounds - you die.
• If you get four critical wounds, each additional critical wound will inflict normal wounds equal to it's severity.

Comments and ideas please :-)

Looks good for play. It helps balance how broken a 5 toughness gets

jh

that's 2 lucky reckless cleaves

that's 2 lucky reckless cleaves

Yep, but whatever do you mean? As in it's too deadly? Since we have started playing when the game was released, not a single character has died. Toughness is broken for crit threshold. At toughness 6 you need 7 criticals to die - that's not balanced.

I think 4 is fair. That's a likely number of crits to get in a tough fight. Also remember soaked crits turn into normal wounds.

That is true, never saw a character die in my 3rd edition games.

What is the goal of that rule?

You can cripple or kill off a character easily if you like (corruption, insanities, diseases, permanent wounds).

That is true, never saw a character die in my 3rd edition games.

What is the goal of that rule?

You can cripple or kill off a character easily if you like (corruption, insanities, diseases, permanent wounds).

The goal is to even out the toughness imbalance. Getting 4 crits in a fight is quite possible. Once you go beyond 4 you start to take more damage when you take additional criticals.

The goal is to make death a threat because right now it really isn't.

Then I also want to help people with only 2 toughness. They have enough issues as it is without dying on three critical wounds. I think 4 critical wounds is quite fair and balanced :-)

But mostly it's to stop the imbalance of high toughness.

Toughness is too unbalanced. I tried to solve the matter in a similar but more definitive way....

FIXED STARTING WOUNDS (every body get wounds as for a Toughness of 3)

FIXED CORRUPTION THRESHOLD (every body get wounds as for a Toughness of 5)

after Gallow's advice I'll add FIXED CRITICAL THRESHOLD (every body get wounds as for a Toughness of 3)

In my house rules I ll increased the difficulty of healing ( roll to heal critical only after healing normal wounds and roll to heal severe critical only after healing standard critical + I changed first aid skill) so Toughness is already very important.

That is true, never saw a character die in my 3rd edition games.

What is the goal of that rule?

You can cripple or kill off a character easily if you like (corruption, insanities, diseases, permanent wounds).

The goal is to even out the toughness imbalance. Getting 4 crits in a fight is quite possible. Once you go beyond 4 you start to take more damage when you take additional criticals.

The goal is to make death a threat because right now it really isn't.

Then I also want to help people with only 2 toughness. They have enough issues as it is without dying on three critical wounds. I think 4 critical wounds is quite fair and balanced :-)

But mostly it's to stop the imbalance of high toughness.

Actually in our group I believe only one character has Toughness 5 ...rest has 4 or in my case 3 ... or am I mistaken?? I do like this rule as it helps lower T characters ....but its not as if we had had issues with every running around with T5+

But isnt it unlikely that a character has Tou5+ and WP5+? (unless you are on 50+ advances like valvoriks PCs were)

I started to flesh out my NPCs alot more when it comes to characteristics, actions and skill training. Most of them play like

normal PCs. They all have the nice action combos and are not afraid to use them. Our dwarven runesmith has toughness 5

and often goes close to dying, but just close - that is enough to remind him of his mortality. We will see how TGS will end for

them - the meteor is quite deadly.

Throw in disease checks when criticals happen. Use corruption to make checks harder (I like to subtract a corruption point

to make a corruption check harder - evil)

But I am interested in how this house rule will work for you.

Toughness is one thing in the game that is powerful at multiple levels, so hence each of those things also powers up with each increase in the characteristic:

TOUGHNESS
• Soak
• Resilience
• Wound Threshold
• Death from criticals determination
• Fatigue-unconsiousness threshold
• End of an episode/encounter recovery of fatigue
• Nightly recovery of fatigue
• Nightly recovery of wounds
• Nightly recovery of critical wounds
• Long term care additional wound recovery
• Maximum number of wounds recovered with a First Aid Check
• Disease resistance
• Poison resistance
• Corruption Threshold
• Mutation resistance
• Block defense

Look at other characteristics:

Strength
• Weapon Skill
• Damage
• Athletics skill
• Intimidate Skill
• Parry defense
• Encumbrance

Agility:
• Ballistic skill
• damage
• Coordination skill
• Ride skill
• Skullduggery skill
• Stealth skill
• Dodge defense
• Combat encounter initiative

Intelligence
• First Aid skill
• Folklore skill
• Intuition skill
• Nature Lore skill
• Observation skill
• Spellcraft
• Education advanced
• Magical sight advanced
• Medicine advanced

Willpower
• Discipline skill
• Arcane channeling -spellcasting
• Stress unconsiousness threshold
• "Influence" threshold (house rule)
• Fear/Terror effects
• Piety curry favor advanced
• End of an encounter stress recovery
• Full night’s rest stress recovery
• Insanity resistance to “Distress”
• Resistance to permanent insanity

Fellowship
• Shame threshold
• Charm skill
• Guile skill
• Leadership skill
• Animal handling advanced skill
• Invocation Spellcasting
• Social initiative
• Most reputation talents
• Haggling
• Influence

..

The severe effect always hits NPCs right away (some NPCs may function like players). Severe injuries also inflict a number of wounds equal to their severity rating against NPCs. If an NPC ever recieves four critical wounds it dies instantly. A nemesis NPC works like a player and will not die until it has four critical wounds and is over its wound threshold. It will take extra wounds for all criticals however, when it has 4+ critcals