Death related questions

[DarthBrooks]

I've been reading over the rules and trying to determine how a character dies besides the Coup De Grace action taken by another character upon an unconscious one, or reaching Bleeding Out +10. Is the only other way to kill someone to keep hitting them until a severe critical occurs to the head or chest with a value of 19 or higher? 

[solkan]

From page 301:  "If this damage would reduce the target to 0 Wounds or lower, then the target suffers a Critical Effect (ref) and must check for unconsciousness (ref)."

Note the important implication:  A character can be reduced to negative Wounds, and can remain conscious in that state.  But if an attack does enough damage to take the character's wounds to 0 or less (even if it was already 0 or less), then it causes a critical.

For instance, say Bob has 4 Wounds.  Sue attacks Bob with a great sword, succeeds, and flips Severe damage.  That's 6 damage, putting Bob at -2.  Since Bob's negative, that's a critical effect and it's a Severe critical effect because it was Severe damage, whether or not Bob passed his Unsciousness check.  So Sue flips a card and adds 2 to it to see which Severe effect happens, getting a result from 2 to 16.

Let's say instead that Bob had been wounded, reducing him to 1 wound.  Then he gets hit for Severe damage of 8.  That takes Bob to -7, and the flip for the Severe critical effect is going to be at +7.  It only takes a 12 or better at that point to get Amputated, and or  is going to be instantly fatal.

But let's say that Bob survives, and then takes a weak damage flip of 2 points.  That puts Bob at -9, so the Weak Critical is at +9.  If you flip a 6 or better on that Weak Critical, you get a 15 and reflip on the Moderate chart.  If you flip a 6 or better on Moderate, that gets you a 15 or better and you reflip on the Severe chart.  And once you're on the Severe chart, you're flipping at +9, so you only need a 10 or better for Amputated or worse.  Take away point:  At a few points negative, Weak and Moderate crits start getting re flipped onto the Severe chart.  And it becomes pretty easy to push Bleeding Out up to 10  from the Severe chart and kill the character that way.  Especially since amputating an arm or leg is 5 points of Bleeding Out.

And then it continues.  But the important thing is that being at negative wounds doesn't automatically make the character unconscious.  Boring peons and minions might automatically fail their Unconscious check, but Fated with a positive AV for Toughness could stay standing and die from Bleeding Out.

The math exercise for the reader is working out how many points of Poison it takes to kill a 6 wound character.

[CrazyCatLadeh]

4 hours ago, solkan said:

From page 301:  "If this damage would reduce the target to 0 Wounds or lower, then the target suffers a Critical Effect (ref) and must check for unconsciousness (ref)."

Note the important implication:  A character can be reduced to negative Wounds, and can remain conscious in that state.  But if an attack does enough damage to take the character's wounds to 0 or less (even if it was already 0 or less), then it causes a critical.

For instance, say Bob has 4 Wounds.  Sue attacks Bob with a great sword, succeeds, and flips Severe damage.  That's 6 damage, putting Bob at -2.  Since Bob's negative, that's a critical effect and it's a Severe critical effect because it was Severe damage, whether or not Bob passed his Unsciousness check.  So Sue flips a card and adds 2 to it to see which Severe effect happens, getting a result from 2 to 16.

Let's say instead that Bob had been wounded, reducing him to 1 wound.  Then he gets hit for Severe damage of 8.  That takes Bob to -7, and the flip for the Severe critical effect is going to be at +7.  It only takes a 12 or better at that point to get Amputated, and or  is going to be instantly fatal.

But let's say that Bob survives, and then takes a weak damage flip of 2 points.  That puts Bob at -9, so the Weak Critical is at +9.  If you flip a 6 or better on that Weak Critical, you get a 15 and reflip on the Moderate chart.  If you flip a 6 or better on Moderate, that gets you a 15 or better and you reflip on the Severe chart.  And once you're on the Severe chart, you're flipping at +9, so you only need a 10 or better for Amputated or worse.  Take away point:  At a few points negative, Weak and Moderate crits start getting re flipped onto the Severe chart.  And it becomes pretty easy to push Bleeding Out up to 10  from the Severe chart and kill the character that way.  Especially since amputating an arm or leg is 5 points of Bleeding Out.

And then it continues.  But the important thing is that being at negative wounds doesn't automatically make the character unconscious.  Boring peons and minions might automatically fail their Unconscious check, but Fated with a positive AV for Toughness could stay standing and die from Bleeding Out.

The math exercise for the reader is working out how many points of Poison it takes to kill a 6 wound character.

This is fantastic!! Thank you so much! 

[DarthBrooks]

Cool, that is what I thought, but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss something. Thanks for the quick reply!