I hope some game designer would have a look on the wound/healing design in EotE.

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/95702-exceeding-the-woundstrain-threshold/

I haven't bought AoR beta so perhaps it's already fixed? I hope so

No. I don't think they see it as an issue.

Much the same with the current auto-fire rules and how the Jury-Rigged talent can be used to push auto-fire back into "cause for concern" for some GMs, the current Wound Threshold system isn't seen as being an issue by the design team. For them, it's working exactly as planned, as it's only very specific scenarios that cause the high WT characters to be out of commission for longer time frames than they're less burly party members. Given those types of scenarios in many other RPGs would lead to a character being dead where this system requires a specific set of circumstances (namely a critical injury result of 150+ on a percentile die), they're getting off lucky when they'd otherwise be rolling up a new character.

Much the same with the current auto-fire rules and how the Jury-Rigged talent can be used to push auto-fire back into "cause for concern" for some GMs, the current Wound Threshold system isn't seen as being an issue by the design team. For them, it's working exactly as planned, as it's only very specific scenarios that cause the high WT characters to be out of commission for longer time frames than they're less burly party members. Given those types of scenarios in many other RPGs would lead to a character being dead where this system requires a specific set of circumstances (namely a critical injury result of 150+ on a percentile die), they're getting off lucky when they'd otherwise be rolling up a new character.

And the guy with the low WT is "getting off luckier" which I see as a poor mechanic whether the design team can see it or not..

They aren't wrong. The wound system is pretty weak.

It's a narrative system. Why don't characters heal up to full after every encounter? Only critical damage need really be tracked.

If we think about it, wounds are the cuts and bruises that don't really amount to anything (otherwise they'd be crits). Do GMs really run encounter after encounter with not enough time to heal up? If so it might be better to model it as one giant marathon encounter. That's what's really going on narratively speaking.

They were so specific about the narrative nature of the game everywhere else. Why did they half-ass it here?

It's not such a big deal that the sky is falling, but I think it's pretty clear they messed up on this one. Someone's pet peeve overrode common sense and we got bad design.

Nah. I don't think they see it as an issue needing addressing. Not everything needs such definition.

If you wanted to house rule it, I would say don't track wounds at all past the character's WT, especially of the GM doesn't intend to kill the PC if that character's wound exceed twice it's WT.

If you wanted to house rule it, I would say don't track wounds at all past the character's WT, especially of the GM doesn't intend to kill the PC if that character's wound exceed twice it's WT.

For those folks that feel the current Wound Threshold mechanic penalizes those with a higher value, this is probably the simplest solution.

Much the same with the current auto-fire rules and how the Jury-Rigged talent can be used to push auto-fire back into "cause for concern" for some GMs, the current Wound Threshold system isn't seen as being an issue by the design team. For them, it's working exactly as planned, as it's only very specific scenarios that cause the high WT characters to be out of commission for longer time frames than they're less burly party members. Given those types of scenarios in many other RPGs would lead to a character being dead where this system requires a specific set of circumstances (namely a critical injury result of 150+ on a percentile die), they're getting off lucky when they'd otherwise be rolling up a new character.

And the guy with the low WT is "getting off luckier" which I see as a poor mechanic whether the design team can see it or not..

And how many combat encounters do you have where the PCs are taking so much damage that the high WT characters are even hitting that "twice WT" cap?

Unless the GM is in the constant habit of pointing large, starship-scale weapons mounted on Silhouette 2 vehicles at his PCs on a routine basis, it's not going to come very often, if really at all. Most PCs don't get very far past their Wound Threshold to begin with, since the rules state that PC is incapacitated once their Wound Threshold is exceeded. So unless the GM is a royal jackass and has his NPCs keep attacking downed characters, it's not going to be very common to go much more than five points past one's Wound Threshold. Also bearing in mind that particularly at earlier stages in the character's life that a high Wound Threshold (15 or more) is typically accompanied with a high Brawn Characteristic, which means they're taking less damage to begin with, particularly if they've also invested in some armor, particularly padded armor. There's also the fact that those high Wound Threshold PCs are more likely to have a chance to take advantage of a stimpack before they reach the "danger zone" of being knocked out, which cuts into the odds of them being pushed all that far past their Wound Threshold. Unless again the GM is in the habit of going overkill with things like starship-scale weapons or repeated attacks on a downed PC using Auto-fire weapons even after the PC's been taken out of the fight.

Then again, if you really want to get technical about it, the whole notion of "hit points" (which is what Wound Threshold ultimately boils down to) is a major fallacy, since fighter-types get screwed on the whole "getting fully recovered" in comparison to rogues and spell-casters due to the fighters having a much higher total hit point value. So from that perspective, the whole entire thing is utterly borked as the frailer characters will recover to "fully healed" a lot faster than the tougher characters ever will, and it's a core problem that's existed since the earliest days of D&D. It's simply one of those "acceptable breaks from reality" that come part and parcel since the inception of table-top RPGs as we know it.

And I'm sure these are things that the FFG design team considered when doing the initial design of this system. And as mouthymerc has quite aptly noted, just because a couple of posters (i.e. a vocal minority ) are decrying it's an issue because of a very uncommon scenario doesn't mean the FFG design team considers it to be an issue that needs fixing.

It's not such a big deal that the sky is falling, but I think it's pretty clear they messed up on this one. Someone's pet peeve overrode common sense and we got bad design.

Naw, it's fine, some people just want an abstract specificity layer cake and would rather complain than make a house rule. So here is a solution for those who care:

You track damage to 2 x WT, after which you can kill them off if that's the kind of game you want. This means those with higher WT live longer. If you don't want to kill them off, it's still a mechanism to track criticals.

Option 1: after the encounter is over and the healing begins, characters recover 1 + Brawn Wounds per day until they reach WT. If you give them stimpacks or other healing, they add the higher of Brawn or Resilience ranks to these healing events until their Wounds reach WT. Below WT, they recover the normal + 1 per day, plus an additional Wound if Brawn > 2, plus an additional Wound if Resilience > 3. Any other healing is a bonus.

Option 2: after the encounter is over and the healing begins, a character immediately recovers Brawn + ranks in Resilience Wounds, though they can go no lower than WT. IOW, the best they can do is regain consciousness. Below WT, they recover the normal + 1 per day, plus an additional Wound if Brawn > 2, plus an additional Wound if Resilience > 3. Any other healing is a bonus.

Option 3: after the encounter is over all extra Wounds are dropped, and a character is considered to be at WT + 1 (unconscious), and can make an immediate Average Resilience roll to gain regain 1 Wound. Below WT, they recover the normal + 1 per day, plus an additional Wound if Brawn > 2, plus an additional Wound if Resilience > 3. Any other healing is a bonus.

If you don't like those numbers, tweak.

We pretty much have been just going with the idea that wounds that don't cause crits are too trivial to track and the NPC doctor patches you up. No muss, no fuss. We don't track ammo because it's boring. Why would we want to track wounds from night to night?

For us this seems to be keeping with the spirit of the rules if not the letter. The idea is that characters with high brawn and toughened are tough. They can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'. They get healed at the end of the night and we move on. They then get to be tough the next session.

Critical hits are taken seriously. They get tracked until healed. That reminds players that the character is mortal.

Let's face it. Not playing is boring. If you are bored you shouldn't be playing. Having your PC incapacitated is the real penalty, because then you don't get to play. Death and healing wounds is useless record keeping. I do not play games to play with spreadsheets.

I find that the tracking of wounds makes for additional stress perceived by the player, even knowing that it may take some time to heal. Makes for interesting choices - and interesting choices are the soul of RPGs.

I find that the tracking of wounds makes for additional stress perceived by the player, even knowing that it may take some time to heal. Makes for interesting choices - and interesting choices are the soul of RPGs.

I totally agree that interesting choices are the whole point of playing, but I don't see how wounds get us there.

First off, what are wounds? Everyone at the table has to agree on this before wounds become a meaningful part of the collective imagination. Wounds are poorly defined in the book, I'm guessing various groups have even less understanding.

Someone either didn't get injured in sports enough or didn't remember what it was like when they wrote these rules. Incidental cuts and bruises often go unnoticed during the game. Adrenaline overrides us noticing them and within a day those sorts of things fade. Real injuries impact our ability to perform, but the system clearly defines these as critical hits that come with an attendant penalty.

Most players I know play wounds like hit points as Donovan points out. While that maybe how some grognards demand it be played, grognards probably aren't playing this system anyway. Catering to them is silly. Hit points are silly. Not even narrative reality in movies works that way. The hero in dramatic actions falls when drama demands it. Not when some arbitrary threshold is reached.

The only real advantage that wounds offer (and it is a huge advantage) is a way to knock a PC out without killing him. It means that when the assassin droid made our trandoshan eat a missile he didn't die in a single explosion.

So while we should probably keep some sort of wound mechanic, we should ditch the record keeping part of it.

When you get hit and are above WT, or taken above WT, in addition to being KO'd, you take a crit, without a crit needing to be triggered.

So, why is tracking it worthwhile? It encourages not engaging in further combat. Which means the decision to engage is made under duress... specific, against the duress.

I don't want to belabor a point, but the crit part of running out of wounds is incidental. Who cares? You are unconscious and out of the fight until the party has a chance to heal you. The penalty is that you are stuck twiddling your thumbs for some time.

Now that your character is out the fight will take longer, because you aren't there dealing the pain to finish off the bad guys. So you're twiddling for even longer. That is way more suck than, "Oh my totally awesome character has a broken arm." A broken arm is neat flavor, but you can contribute. Unconscious means go play video games until the fight's over cause you're bored .

It's a game. Game penalties are the most important influence on players. Rules that make the game boring are horrendous.

Maybe in your game you want people to poke everything with ten foot sticks to avoid the trap you might have left there. Most folks find that tedious. They want players to do stupidly brave things because it's fun. Things that make them not do stupidly brave things are not fun.

Maybe in your game you want people to poke everything with ten foot sticks to avoid the trap you might have left there. Most folks find that tedious. They want players to do stupidly brave things because it's fun. Things that make them not do stupidly brave things are not fun.

I generally support having active and heroic action, but there is a line between brave and stupid, and some players just don't care about crossing that line at all.

I don't want to belabor a point, but the crit part of running out of wounds is incidental. Who cares? You are unconscious and out of the fight until the party has a chance to heal you. The penalty is that you are stuck twiddling your thumbs for some time.

Which generally doesn't take more than a round, two at most, as a stimpack will instantly restore 5 Wounds, which in most instances will be enough to bring a PC down past their Wound Threshold and thus back into the fight.

It's only if they've been piling on the stimpacks that it becomes an issue, but the deeper issue is the GM perhaps throwing too many combat encounters at the PCs in the course of a single day; unlike most other RPGs with a hit point system, combat in this game is far more dangerous, and that's not something a GM who is used to running d20-based games will be used to; Garrett of the Threat Detected podcast (a live-play recording of his running of a Saga Edition Dawn of Defiance campaign) remarked himself during the EotE Beta period that stormtroopers in this game were a lot more dangerous to the PCs then they ever were in Saga Edition.

The crit part is there both to accommodate the fact the PC just took a major injury as well as ensuring that being taken out during a fight has a lingering consequence; in the D&D and d20 in general, there's no real penalty in being restored from zero/negative hit points to a positive hit point total, leading to the term "yo-yo combatants" being applied to players whose approach to combat is "charge in and let the cleric worry about keeping my PC alive" as said PCs tend to get dropped pretty regularly, and the cleric (or other party healer) then has to worry about healing said PC back up to positive hit points, and other than burning the cleric's healing resources (which can be very limited at times), there's real consequence, particularly not to the player who engages in that tactic. And in my experience, that player tends to really annoy the rest of the group, as they have to worry about keeping that dumbass alive on top of managing the resources of their own characters.

So, the lingering critical injury is there to make the above tactic have a more lasting consequence. Which if you stop and think about it, makes sense for the setting. In the original films, the only hero we see generally standing out in the open and not heading for cover is Luke Skywalker, and that's in Return of the Jedi in the wake of his taking several levels of badass to the point that Jabba's goons are little more than a mild speedbump and his lightsaber provides as much (if not more benefit) than seeking cover might provide. But for the most part (and until F&D is released), the PCs in this system don't have those kind of defensive powers, so having a mechanical means to re-inforce the notion of "don't get hit" by having a penalty in place for when PCs do get dropped adds a greater element of suspense to combat encounters as well as cuts into rampant player stupidity.

It's not such a big deal that the sky is falling, but I think it's pretty clear they messed up on this one. Someone's pet peeve overrode common sense and we got bad design.

Naw, it's fine, some people just want an abstract specificity layer cake and would rather complain than make a house rule. So here is a solution for those who care:

You track damage to 2 x WT, after which you can kill them off if that's the kind of game you want. This means those with higher WT live longer. If you don't want to kill them off, it's still a mechanism to track criticals.

Option 1: after the encounter is over and the healing begins, characters recover 1 + Brawn Wounds per day until they reach WT. If you give them stimpacks or other healing, they add the higher of Brawn or Resilience ranks to these healing events until their Wounds reach WT. Below WT, they recover the normal + 1 per day, plus an additional Wound if Brawn > 2, plus an additional Wound if Resilience > 3. Any other healing is a bonus.

Option 2: after the encounter is over and the healing begins, a character immediately recovers Brawn + ranks in Resilience Wounds, though they can go no lower than WT. IOW, the best they can do is regain consciousness. Below WT, they recover the normal + 1 per day, plus an additional Wound if Brawn > 2, plus an additional Wound if Resilience > 3. Any other healing is a bonus.

Option 3: after the encounter is over all extra Wounds are dropped, and a character is considered to be at WT + 1 (unconscious), and can make an immediate Average Resilience roll to gain regain 1 Wound. Below WT, they recover the normal + 1 per day, plus an additional Wound if Brawn > 2, plus an additional Wound if Resilience > 3. Any other healing is a bonus.

If you don't like those numbers, tweak.

Even though we disagree on this subject - I find your option 3 playable I was thinking about something like that myself.

It’s funny how some people find this rule to be really great, and others (like me) find it like a disturbance in the Force.

As a player or gm I am not very fond of the idea of players needing tons of stim-packs (healing potions) when they go on a long mission (quest). And I am really not fond of the idea that a character could lay unconscious for 22+ days (a Hutt crime lord would lay 60 days) with perhaps only a minor critical injury, if of cause they are left untreated.

I know a gm always can make his or her own house rule or make something happen to change this. But that doesn’t change my point of view about it. It’s the only bad rule I found reading the core rules, and I hope there will be an official alternative ruling (so we all can have it our way ).

And I am really not fond of the idea that a character could lay unconscious for 22+ days (a Hutt crime lord would lay 60 days) with perhaps only a minor critical injury, if of cause they are left untreated.

Don't worry, during multiple days of unconsciousness, dehydration will kill most characters (unless someone is there to provide care for them).

I plan on running this as RAW. Granted, I haven't had a chance to run as much as I would like, but I suspect this won't come up much.

I don't want to belabor a point, but the crit part of running out of wounds is incidental. Who cares? You are unconscious and out of the fight until the party has a chance to heal you. The penalty is that you are stuck twiddling your thumbs for some time.

Which generally doesn't take more than a round, two at most, as a stimpack will instantly restore 5 Wounds, which in most instances will be enough to bring a PC down past their Wound Threshold and thus back into the fight.

That's in the rules I guess, but it feels very un-Star-Wars-y to me. Where in any of the fiction do we see "Slap a patch on me and I'm good to go!"

I'd rather go with the idea that eating a missile is bad enough that you don't get back up for a while, then instant regeneration. I'd rather that meds fix strain then that they fix health. The only super healing that we really see in movies involves Bacta/Kolto, and the non tank versions all came from role playing games.

I'm actually with the crowd that wants damage to suck, I just don't want to do a lot of record keeping to do it. I see the critical and stain mechanics doing this well and the wounds mechanic being too boring.

I don't want to belabor a point, but the crit part of running out of wounds is incidental. Who cares? You are unconscious and out of the fight until the party has a chance to heal you. The penalty is that you are stuck twiddling your thumbs for some time.

Which generally doesn't take more than a round, two at most, as a stimpack will instantly restore 5 Wounds, which in most instances will be enough to bring a PC down past their Wound Threshold and thus back into the fight.

That's in the rules I guess, but it feels very un-Star-Wars-y to me. Where in any of the fiction do we see "Slap a patch on me and I'm good to go!"

I'd rather go with the idea that eating a missile is bad enough that you don't get back up for a while, then instant regeneration. I'd rather that meds fix strain then that they fix health. The only super healing that we really see in movies involves Bacta/Kolto, and the non tank versions all came from role playing games.

I'm actually with the crowd that wants damage to suck, I just don't want to do a lot of record keeping to do it. I see the critical and stain mechanics doing this well and the wounds mechanic being too boring.

The idea of using stimpacks was remarked upon quite often during the EotE Beta as feeling too much like a video game aspect. The fact that said mechanic is in both the EotE core rules and the AoR Beta should say something about how strongly the FFG design team felt about having healing and damage work they way they do.

Stimpacs and medpacs were in the WEG d6 version from the word "Go," so there's historic inertia at work as well. In d6, each successive use was harder and harder to heal the patient, with a night's sleep (I think, or maybe a day w/out using one) to rest the check to "easy."

-EF

Easy enough to drop stimpacks if you don't like them. It is the RPG genre though. Any game with fantasy or sci-fi elements tends to have ways of instant healing to greater or lesser effect. Even some modern settings with their medics. Personally i don't mind it as it keeps people in the fight and engaged in the game rather than taking them out.

I don't hate them with a passion or anything, but I do feel that they are too gamiest for me. They work for me as a stop gap -- a means of staying in the fight. They can heal you from anything short of going down. Once you go down you should stay down.

I said before that I want players to do stupidly brave things. You can't be brave if there is no fear. Fear of twiddling thumbs is one of the great motivators for players to play their characters. People should be taking cover rather then just blazing away.

I just not mention to the other players that a stim pack might get them back up. What they don't know won't irritate me.