So what you are saying is that, except for house-ruling it based on a personal understanding of how you think things should work (which is totally valid), you can provide no more substantiation as to why a non-helpless person would have his Defense Total capped. Is this right?
What I am saying is that logically it is not possible to have worse defense than no defense at all.
So far I have seen no counterargument to that.
I will take that as a "yes".
Now, addressing how a man can be worse than defenseless:
Pepper a man with 11 arrows. By luck or grace, each one inflicts only a light wound. He can still fight. Both arms, legs, eyes. He isn't incapacitated yet, in any way. But he has a -11 penalty. Does this really seem so contrived to you?
Now, scale this to 111 arrows and he has -111 penalty. I admit that this seems contrived. Any reasonable mind would say that there is no way for someone to get -111 arrows to his body and keep going. I'm not going to disagree with this. But what we are actually examining here are the rules themselves. I just scaled the amount of arrows. The principle should be valid.
But hey, give him a couple of wounds so that he has a -10 Defense Total (let's assume three heavy wounds). A few ribs broken, maybe a punctured lung. This guy is going to have a hard time staying alive after this fight, but he is alive right now. He can still hold his sword. He can still dodge. And you can be sure that he will, if you try to hit him.
Now, assume that this guy IS tied down. It should be obvious that any other strike against him should be more likely to kill him than a strike against his identical twin brother, equally stated, but unharmed, no? And bear in mind, I'm not talking about a coup de grace. I'm talking about a reasonable combat situation. Chopping their heads off isn't combat, it's an execution (call this a personal interpretation of mine, if you will). In actual combat you don't really have the time to aim carefully, you swing the best you can and hope, if you somehow end up inflicting a fatal wound, all the better. And in the case of an execution, just kill them. An action that can't fail shouldn't be rolled at all.
Now, let's say that an archer takes one shot against each of them, our -10 DT guy and his unharmed twin, both tied up, from a reasonable distance, in a combat situation. Can you see that one of them has a better chance of surviving said shot? If so, you should at least partially agree with me that wound penalties shouldn't really be caped based on an individual being defenseless, because you can, indeed, be worse than helpless. You can be helpless AND hurt.
Now, can you be not helpless, and still, due to wound penalties, be worse than a defenseless guy? Sure. Pick our lung-punctured twin. Give him a few more blows, so that he has a -15 Defense Total. Again, he can still stand. Move. Run. But your next blow hit his (already) hurt ribs, and a new wound opens, one worse than what it would have been if he wasn't damaged already. You don't even need to bee too strong. Even gently applying pressure to his torso could kill him, while this would surely be impossible for a defenseless, but unharmed target.
Anyone can probably find a few points to disagree with the interpretation above. I, on the other hand, could give a few more examples (I believe that most of them rest on the idea that if you are heavily wounded enough, any further strike should be much more capable of spelling your doom), and you can be worse than defenseless because defenseless isn't the same as being in the brink of death.
But as I said before, this is my understanding. I can see how some would rather rule that the Defense Total should be capped. I just happen to disagree with that interpretation. And there is nothing on the rules that support that. And if you cap it, the rule on p. 178 is irrelevant.
I'll wait a bit, read any opposing comment. And them we can address what you argue are examples for the wound penalties being included in the Defense Total formula, but actually are just descriptive text (you can disagree from this too).
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How did you get there? The point from the beginning is that the knight facing the child is going to take no action to defend.
Somehow??? Derailing??? Have you read what I've written??? That is the entire point and not derailing it at all. There is no rule that says you must take an action to defend. There is a rule for what happens when you take no action to defend. Meanwhile, Wound Penalties do not apply to a non-action. That is the entire point. If you're that wounded, you just take the blow rather than defending. You get a straight -10 replacing the Defense Total and Wound Penalty does not apply. If you're not really Wounded, then you're better off taking an action to defend. Show me one rule I've applied incorrectly here rather than something you would like different than it's written.
At this point the burden of proof is really on you all to show why Wound Penalty applies to something that is not an action, especially when we have the statement
Wound Penalty does not apply to Soak because Soak is not an action
which necessarily implies Wound Penalty doesn't apply to non-actions, on top of Wound Penalty being very specific that it applies to actions. I really don't get why you all believe Wound Penalty applies to non-actions.
I will take that as you not understanding what I write
That being the case, I am not going to argue with you any more. It is not worth the frustration.
We can talk edge cases forever. We have to remember the rules are a numerical abstraction of the world and wont work for everything. The SG needs to apply a degree of logic for edge cases.
The hand in iced water example, two ones and a seven on the first damage roll, somehow this person dies unless the SG intervenes (as they should). I don't think the child kick is the best of examples either, as it does need a ridiculous wound penalty set up, and the extremeness of the example distracts from what is a relevant point.
This derails your own argument. You've been arguing reality as a key point. Look at how meta that line is.
The weirdness of things achieving fatality when they shouldn't isn't something purely to do with accruing damage penalties, it's to do with die rolls and numbers being used to attempt to model an event.
What we want is some degree of consistency. To me a helpless person doesn't get -10. If someone is near a helpless person and wants to kill them, it is over. Knife across the neck, sword to the heart, pilum to the eyeball, it's done. No roll.
The big question is, how bad should a brace of wounds affect someone, and should it affect for all attacks? P171 of the core rules, the attack and defence totals do not include a (- wound penalties). I consider that makes it clear a botch sets the attack total and/or defence total to 0 before factoring in wound penalties. P178 specifies no maximum to wound penalties. Going to a non-core book to work around that, well, that's a house rule. Nothing wrong with house rules, but it's good to be clear.
To go back to the question in the OP:-
if there is no cap to how bad a defence score can go due to wound penalties
if would penalties do not affect a soak roll
for big monsters, the boom spells are not finishers, they just weaken the beast for a grog to finish, which seem off.
I've seen this in action. I have an archer companion and we fought a size 3 giant with something like 12 soak. We needed 21 damage to get better than a light wound. By the time he had 3 - 4 arrows in him and a few sword cuts, he's on his way down. Once the wound penalty is -8, attacks that bounced off his soak are light wounds, the old light wounds are now heavy, etc.
The mage with his 3 multi cast pilum of fires which are usually devastating is second string. All he is doing is weakening the giant so my archer can do the finisher.
If the core rules don't support wound penalties affecting the soak roll then I would house rule they do in games I ran, however, I consider combining what is written on P116 and P181 in the core books, suggest wound penalties affect the soak roll. I appreciate this isn't clear, and for the 20th anniversary edition 
clarifying wound penalties, and putting the P116 & p181 together would be good.
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If I'm understanding callen correctly, they're saying that while wound penalties would apply without limit to your defense total, you could simply choose not to defend yourself and thus set your defense to a flat -10. In this way, there is no contradiction, but the interaction of the two rules means that in practice your defense total will never go below -10. Is that correctly understood?
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Let me take the other side of the argument, that of callen and ErikT. As I said, I disagree with it, but there is a chance I might makes things clearer.
Most rpgs have a gauge of how close a character is to incapacitation/death: body levels, health levels, hit points etc. There may be (but in some famous cases there are not) penalties to the "functioning" of the character, including his ability to defend himself, as this gauge moves from healthy-as-a-fish to dead-as-a-doornail.
ArM5 takes an innovative tack to that. There is no gauge, only the penalties, inflicted by individual wounds - the most grievous of which might be instantly lethal. And non-lethal ones can accumulate impairing the wounded character's defensive potential, making it easier to inflict a lethal wound (non-lethal wounds can also kill after combat, which is indeed how most people ended up dying from combat wounds until very recently).
And here's the catch. We might be tempted to interpret the total wound penalty as the missing gauge of how close a character is to immediate death. But it's not. It's a gauge of how close he is to inaction (more specifically, to inability to take non-automatic actions). This means, in particular, that a wound that would not be able to kill the character when healthy but e.g. sleeping, will not kill him no matter how heavily wounded he is. Which appear problematic: you can't incapacitate or kill a sleeping, tied-up, defenseless person with a single whip-lash, but you can certainly whip him to death in an hour so.
The crux here is that in Ars Magica you generate Attack Totals with a stress die. Every 300 rolls or so (so a single person whipping for half an hour) you'll roll a 32+. A person with Dex-1, Str-1, and the most basic ability to handle a whip - a weapon skill of 0(1) hits a defenseless one (Defense Total -10) with an Attack advantage of 42, and thus generates a Damage total of 38-Soak, meaning that even an exceedingly tough (sta+5, Tough), Large victim will be Incapacitated on the spot.
The system is, of course, not perfect. If you are lucky, by the rules you can kill a healthy, fresh person - in fact, a healthy, fresh dragon - with a single whiplash. Also, someone/something very large, and with a very high soak, can be brought very quickly to a point where they can take no non-automatic action (say -50+ to all actions), but then take a long long time to be incapacitated. The latter is particularly problematic because SGs will typically create "boss" opponents that can be wounded (PCs should be able to win, after all) but not killed in a single shot (PCs should not be able to win too easily) so the situation is more frequent than one might like. And the fact that no defense at all means a Defense Total of -10 should be made clear in the corebook, not hidden away in a chapter about optional combat rules in another sourcebook.
But the alternative is also problematic. Should you be able to fairly reliably (prob. > 75%) kill with a single kick on the spot a(n unarmoured) Weary character who's taken 2 heavy wounds and 2 medium ones? Even if you (and your victim) are pretty average in all stats (0, including Siz) and have just basic familiarity with Brawling (1)? Probably not, but that's what you get if you assume that the Defense Total can't be capped.
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If we want to talk reality then lets for a moment consider 2 men tied to a chair. One is uninjured, the second is conscious but has been beaten bloody. You then strike the two men equally- or if we want to go to well documented but less medieval cases, apply an electric shock. It is fairly consistent to say that the electric shock would have greater potential lethality to the injured man, and as such consistent to say that wound penalties are applied to the -10 fiat for having no defense.
Similarly it would make sense in terms of system shock for wound penalties to apply to a soak roll when there is no way to evade damage.
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I think yes. A heavy wound is the one before incapacitated. I'm thinking hairline fractures, broken ribs, an impressive slash causing significant bleeding, etc. Incapacitated but not dead is the punctured lung, compound fracture, etc. It never explicitly states what a wound is (at least to my knowledge) so that's just an interpretation.
To get to -16, that is 2 heavy wounds and the 2 mediums. Multiple broken ribs, or maybe a severe concussion. Unless the kicker is a complete moron, he aims for the already damaged area. The existing damage is so extensive, the blood loss so high, if he falls unconscious he doesn't wake up. There's a reason one of the key first aid advices is to keep the patient awake until the paramedics arrive.
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Are they both conscious? It seems like it's so since you didn't state it.
I only argued that in one spot: non-Combat Soak Total. And there only as an added point because some people refuse to accept RAW on it. My real basis there is RAW says Soak doesn't get Wound Penalties.
Reality hasn't been a point at all. I've just been arguing written rules. I think you've confused me with another poster who is arguing that and using the -10 for that reason. So, no, I have't derailed my RAW argument by sticking to RAW.
Wound Penalty does not apply to Soak because Soak is not an action
But, yes, you are totally welcome to do it as a house rule.
Yup. That's exactly it.
Slightly OT, but since we're talking a realism... Could
make an immediate Recovery roll for his most serious wound
be adjusted to kill with spells?
If that Recovery roll is made with Wound Penalties, you end up applying it indirectly, after the Soak has been applied. Someone being slowly roasted over a fire will end up with worsening wounds and die after some time.
If the RAW are a problem, we can change them…
Wound Penalties should not be double-counted in combat. That seems to be agreed.
The –10 for no defence needs to be in the core. That seems reasonable. A note that your defence total cannot be lower than this would also help fix most of these problems. Would it also create the problem of making certain opponents effectively unkillable?
What should be the situation with Wound Penalties on non-combat soak?
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This is an edge case, but in a home campaign, I have a storyteller who is fond of size + 7 to + 14 dragons. Now, a size 10 dragon - an average one, has wound brackets of Light Wound 1-15 Medium 16-30 Heavy 31-45 Incap 46-60 Death 61+ before we factor in soak. I'm not sure he's run the math because those creatures often are used to force social interactions and there is an uneasy truce with the Order. Nonetheless, size+7 is canon for small dragon. So... it's worth asking - How many pilum of fire does it take? 
Assuming a very reasonable soak of +8, with a max wound penalty of -10 to spell damage, I need to roll an unmodified 59 to kill it which happens 0.07% of the time. I'm sure that logic applies to swords too where there is just no possibility to generate an attack advantage large enough to kill it. With an incantation of lightning, assuming it penetrates, I still need to roll 29 which happens 0.7% of the time - not that great a odd either. Yeah, a max wound penalty pretty much makes very large creatures invulnerable to damage spells and swords.
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This is all very frustrating.
I was never a fan of WW wound boxes, but I'm beginning to see their appeal now 
. I'm beginning to wonder if it might not be worthwhile to state that reaching -xx in wound penalties make you lose consciousness :-/ Well, at least, this would be coherent with the "no defence" rule.
We did exactly that. At -6 you are no longer combat capable and keel over, whether from fatigue, wounds or a mixture thereof.
It has the advantage of making the fights mostly not to the death, and to interogate/spare/capture/willingly execute the opponents. Which is generally more interesting. Bandit mercs working for an internalist most just got dirked, but named NPCs would live to give important info. Similarly it limits the chance of player magus death, which is not really a desired outcome, from our groups' point of view.
It also keeps combat from taking forever since it is not the most interesting aspect of the game.
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I agree that that should normally be the case, but because I think most fighters at that point would keel over for lack of willpower or a wish to survive. That's how I play 98% of NPCs, both having them keel over and having them leave keeled opponents to their own fate. I still think that the rules are right to allow determined fighters to fight till death.
So i know that this is a digression, but "how do you kill a dragon/giant bad guy?" is a very relevant question for an RPG.
DnD: I whack it with my swird until it falls over.
Call of Cthulhu: the world as you know it will end when they are summoned into this dimension, as they devour all living beings.
ArM: you spend years collecting arcane connections to the dragon, find out its true name and spawning place/date to make accurate horoscopes, one mage develops a Perdo spell with AC rabge to kill the dragon, your whole covenant boosts their Vi to cast a decent wizard's communion and while the aura is favorable you cast the spell while snorting a mountain of Vis.
But I also like the more narrative version, where after doing some Magic Lore/area Lore, you figure out where Siegfried's sword is buried, have a faerie quest for it using faerie lore, only to get the two halves of the blade, then get it to a Verditius who will repair it and finally the champion will wield this magic blade to kill the dragon, and treat it as an instant kill weapon so long as the champion follows the parameter of the story.
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