Wounds and Wound Threshold

A wide variety of items and actions can inflict physical damage: gunshots, an angry bear’s claws, frag grenades, falling, etc. Damage to a character’s physical body is tracked using wounds. Each point of damage inflicts 1 wound on a character. A character can only withstand so many wounds before becoming incapacitated. This is represented by the character’s wound threshold.

  Exceeding Wound Threshold

  When a PC suffers wounds greater than their wound threshold, they are knocked out and incapacitated until their wounds are reduced so that they no longer exceed their wound threshold (likely through healing). They also immediately suffer one Critical Injury. In some rare and dire circumstances, this could result in the PC’s death.

  When non-player characters and creatures suffer wounds greater than their wound threshold, they are defeated (unless they are a high-level opponent such as a nemesis). Being defeated by exceeding their wound threshold usually entails death, but the overall interpretation is up to the GM. The GM can decide that they pass out due to shock, are so injured that they can no longer fight, are knocked unconscious, or suffer any other option that fits the GM’s plans for the ongoing narrative. Since non-nemesis NPCs do not track strain separately, but apply strain damage as wounds to their wound threshold, what happens once they are defeated may also depend on whether they were defeated due to strain damage or wound damage.

When wounds exceed a character’s wound threshold, the player should track the number of wounds by which their character has exceeded the threshold, to a maximum of twice the wound threshold. The character must heal wounds until the number of wounds they are suffering is below their wound threshold before the character is no longer incapacitated.