I like the idea of threatening a partys life AND limb, but most limb loss occurs moments before death by critical damage.

I think this misses out on some fun. So does anyone have any house ruling on how to threaten limbs without outright killing party members?

Well I often have damage bypass wounds in certain circumstances, like when the character is incapacitated. And I tend to track critical damage separately for each body part, so an example would be a character having to reach their arm deep into some mechanism to proceed, and failure would result in the mechanism collapsing around their arm for 1d10 + 2 critical damage, mitigated by toughness, of course.

I don't currently have any house rules on the subject, but I do agree that it's very difficult to lose limbs without dying in Dark Heresy. In fact, the option to lose limbs doesn't even exist in most RPGs. As many war veterans in both fiction and real life lost a limb from their injuries in battle, I feel that this should be corrected.

When players burn Fate to survive, you could rule that they lose the limb that was struck by the lethal attack. This would be a lethal injury for "normal" people, but the Acolytes are anything but normal. If they are hit in the head, make them lose an eye or go deaf rather than losing their whole head

Aaah now theres an idea! I like that =D

Sadly the only fate point burnt so far was for one of my players to recover from an epicly failed fear test. I guess that could be a permanent loss of bladder control?

Aaah now theres an idea! I like that =D

Sadly the only fate point burnt so far was for one of my players to recover from an epicly failed fear test. I guess that could be a permanent loss of bladder control?

How do you burn a fatepoint to recover from fear? I thought the only way to BURN fatepoints was to use them as your extra lives.

Because if he didnt burn it there and then, the Flamer of Tzeench was going to take out the last remaining guy would was in critical wounds and the dude who burnt the fate point was rendered catatonic for 5 hours. Seemd a fair use of 'use it to avoid dying'

Aaah now theres an idea! I like that =D

Sadly the only fate point burnt so far was for one of my players to recover from an epicly failed fear test. I guess that could be a permanent loss of bladder control?

You're attempting to punish your players for rerolling a Fear check, instead of taking the failure and ending the game in a TPK. Not the same as burning Fate to survive an injury.

Attempting to punish a party for not suffering a TPK? Interesting....

My way of making critical damage is the following. Characters can't go anymore under the 0 wounds. When they reach 0, they die. But when they suffer wounds (after damage reduction of all types),compare it to their toughness bonus: any wounds lost in excedent of the toughness bonus is also critical damage.

An example: Jonas, guardsman (T30 + guard carapace armour all 4, 15 wounds) suffer a lasgun hit of 10 damages. He suffers 3 wounds, after reductions, which is the same amount as his toughness bonus, so no critical.

Then, he suffers another lasrifle wound; doing 16 damage. He loses 9 wounds, which are 6 in excess to his toughness bonus, so he suffers 6 critical damage.

It makes character not losing limbs with low rate damage, but make them also losing parts when being hit by a strong attack, while not necessarily dying.

In general in the real world losing a limb means that the grim reaper is not far off.

Loss of a limb doesn`t nessecarily mean its torn off there and then just that it is useless. A broken broken hip, shoulder, knee or similar would all acheive this effect without having to pose much risk of being fatal.

For example a nervous injury that paralyses an arm from the shoulder down. A character might get the arm amputated and replaced with a bionic down the line but it`s loss didn`t endanger their life imminently.

A quick house rule I often use for NPCs is that if a single hit (after reductions) inflicts an amount of damage equal to a half of their total wounds then the limb is crippled. In the event of this happening to the head they die and in the chest they pass out. Some variation of that might be good.

If death is averted by fatepoint, I usually see this as an excuse to take some limbs

The arm is gone, but somehow you still managed to survive what would have killed lesser Acolytes. Congratulations!

Now better start saving/requisitioning those bionics!

If you really wanted to, you could just adopt the BC/OW Righteous Fury mechanic and make the Crit roll d8 rather than d5. People will start losing body parts quickly.

The way limbs are lost in the games i have played have come from burning fate. The way i have always played is that when fate is burned, your character only survives, nothing more. When a character is getting torn in half from demons and burns fate, rather than getting torn in half, they would suffer harsh crits to the targeted area and (most likely) lose their limbs. The loss of limbs has played the role of scarring as the result of burning fate.

What everyone else said. Burnt fate points often lead to lost limbs. Though I would like to comment on a post from over a year ago and say. If a fatepoint was leading to a TPK, wouldn't you just use rather than burn it for a reroll? Then maybe burn it if you failed again?