Once we saw a potential problem, we did this:
*Apply Wound Penalties to Defense. or
*Apply Wound Penalty to non-combat Soak (and also spell damage)
Otherwise, the high-Soak creature with lots of accumulated light and medium wounds can be killed with a dull knife, but not with a Pilum of Fire.
In this way, the penalty is applied once, and only once, in each calculation of how much damage is taken.
I fail to see the problem. Even a child may have the wits to stick the dull knife in the eye of poor victim, to make a killing blow.
Pilum of fire is not so discriminate. The spell applies the fireball to the whole victim, most of whom is covered by armour, so that only a little heat goes through to make real damage.
RAW seems well thought through, before Lords of Men came along and put a cap on bad defence.
I dislike the -10 for no defence being a cap, inclusive of wound penalties. As people have said before, the helpless person, if they already are wounded, they are more likely to die. Hit a person who already has a concussion, they are more likely to fall unconscious and not wake up. Lots of blood loss already, another serious hit is more likely to kill.
The -10 is fixing a problem which I've thought is mostly edge cases. If someone is helpless, anyone wanting to finish them should succeed, no roll needed. It creates a problem in making giant beasts near unkillable.
If wound penalties are not applied to non combat soak, it makes combat spells secondary to weapons, which seems against the general theme.
Ok. Before anything else, I'd like to apologize to callen for accusing him of derailing the discussion. It was an honest thought.
Until here I was still in the understanding that you were proposing a cap to the penalty, by analogy with the rule from LoM. It was only after this that your position was made clear to me. In my defense, I'll say that it took a good amount of time for your thought process to be explicited.
Still, I was harsh and unfair. I'm sorry.
Given my new understanding of callen's point, I can't really disagree with it, RAW. But it creates the weird case of a person, badly wounded, having more chance of surviving the next strike by dropping to the ground and staying still. This isn't a feature, it's a bug.
[EDIT because I was conflating two different things here]
I'll point that the original reading of the rules stated that penalties didn't apply to soak because it wasn't a roll. It had the advantage, in my understanding, of penalties being applied to non-combat soak. [/EDIT]
I disagree.
We have been exploring the corner case of someone with -100 penalties to the Defense Total, but for practical purposes a regular combatant would have no more than -20 or -30 total penalties (amounting to a -20 Defense Total), because after that, any strike is going to kill even if the attacker botches. There is no point to cap to -10 if the practical limit is going to be -20.
This only works for human targets, of course. For a dragon the penalties could rise more (and as you mention David, a cap risks certain opponents being unkillable by mundane means).
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I'm not against -10 Defense Total for helpless targets, but my complete opinion is:
This would require changes to the current errata and to LoM (about how rolls/totals/actions interact with penalties).
It's possible that we will have weird corner cases by applying penalties to non-combat soak? Yes. I fail to see how this is worse than someone, already badly wounded, surviving a blow because he decided to lay down and take it instead of trying to defend or dodge. Or having the same chance of surviving a fall than someone unhurt.
The problem is, that in ArM there is not the detail of targeted attacks nor rules for different armour coverage and weak spots.
A high attack og non-combat damage roll means a lucky hit.
A low defense or non-combat Soak roll means the damage hits a weak spot.
Non-targeted attack spells, which damage through a missile or some harmful element don't have the option of aiming for the eyes or where the armour does not cover.
Pilum of fire is not complete immolation of the body, this isn't really a point for any of the ignem spells. It is a thing for non-combat fire damage - the damage depends on how much is subjected to the fire, or acid for that matter. I think this is simplifiedfor spells, as to not bog down gameplay.
If you don't see how a pilum of fire could or should be able to kill an enemy with many accumulated wound penalties, then how about Dagger of Ice or Crystal Dart? Spells should work the same way. And the Dagger or Dart seems little different than a grog wielding a dagger or spear: If the enemy is hurt so bad he is virtually defenseless in the combat - anything doing proper damage should be able to dispatch him.
So the mightly hoplite, who can roast normal men with his fire magic, can't harm the defenseless stone giant with his spell, because of the unmodified Soak +25. But he can conjure up a board with a nail in it, which he has no skill in fighting with, and whack at the giant's Defense -50 and score a killing blow?
Do it if you want to, but that's not the way my Troupe does it.
Why?
If the character is incapacitated, unconscious, grounded, and totally immobile, he is going to be fairly easy to hit. What does it matter if he has three heavy wounds for a penalty of -15 or just one for a penalty of -5?
We are talking about combat or execution?
For a non-combat situation where a execution is going on, you don't even need the roll IMO. If the character is as you described and you can carefully aim to avoid armor and stab him in the head, this isn't combat, but execution, and I go even further: any wound is irrelevant, don't even roll, just kill him.
I have already argued above that you can be helpless and hurt, but still in a combat situation, and that this should be, IMO, worse. It's just that.
If defenseless gives you a fixed Defense Total of -10 (as current RAW says), then large creatures (like dragons) will be almost impossible to kill. This can be seen as undesirable.
If the Defense Total is instead -10 + Wound Penalty, then eventually the Wound Penalty will grow large enough that any attack (even a child's kick) will cause a deadly wound.
It is a bit silly and unrealistic that defenseless creatures will be easier to hurt just because they are already wounded, but having them be near impossible to kill is worse.
That's not a problem, that's an abstraction, as you also explain.
Lucky rolls hit weak spots.
Wounded characters are less capable of protecting their weak spots, and thus less luck is needed.
This works. It is both playable and plausible.
That's what RAW says, and it makes sense under (at least) one particular interpretation.
Of course, you can make your house rules for whatever reason, but core remains plausible and playable on this point.
I agree that LoM messes this up. There is no cap in core so let's stick with core, and then it is both playable and plausible.
Core also does not say what the Defense Penalty is for a defenseless creature - the normal calculations make no sense for that situation. So defining that is a good thing, but the LoM defintion might benefit from being changed.
Good point, so I guess the assumption is no roll required if truly incapacitated, which is how I play it anyway.
If you're not at least trying to defend in combat, it is an execution (though perhaps by another name).
Any (semi-) competent combatant will kill you if you take no action to defend yourself.
Not -10. Just Death.
I think @RafaelB makes a good point here. There is a difference between quickly finishing a foe in combat before the next foe is upon you, and an execution where you can take several rounds to prepare the blow without anybody caring.
If the situation is a warrior attacking the rear end of an unconcious dragon, they won't be able to just kill it automatically - the head is not reachable. Enough attacks at the rear should kill the dragon from shock and blood loss though - and those attacks should be rolled.
If the opponent is a knight in full armour it is also not so easy to just kill them automatically - not unless you take the time to remove the armour first.
Not quite.
Think of someone shooting an arrow against a defenseless target (but not at point blank range). There is no guarantee that the shooter will K.O. the target, but it surely is easier to hit, and the -10 for defenseless account for that.
Someone closer, using a sword, but having to defend against another opponent(s) also won't have the time for a sure-kill strike. Again, -10 for defenseless target, but no guarantee of deadly strike on a weak spot.
If you can take aim and be sure to cut of the head, shoot in the eye, slice the throat, etc, then there isn't really any chance of (a human) target surviving. But this isn't combat anymore, it doesn't make sense to use combat mechanics to solve this.
Oh, while we're at it.
How about... the core minor virtue that decreases wound penalties by 1 (sorry, serf's parma)?
It hasn't been changed between editions, but the wound system has.
How do you deal with it?
You mean Enduring Constitution?
I don't see any need to change it.
It would not. Let's work with the given Size +14 dragon, but let's bump its Soak to +20. Do remember a Size +14 Dragon weighs in the ballpark of 8,000,000 lb or 4000 tons, which is about half a modern destroyer. A sword shouldn't even be able to reach the dragon's heart from the outside. How long would it take a person swinging an axe to sink a modern destroyer? And do we want green grogs or magi fresh from gauntlet to be able to manage this easily? It's certainly possible, but should it be easy? As for actual results against this dragon now at a set -10 penalty and no non-Combat Soak penalty, let's see a few (all damage already taking Soak and Attack Advantage into account).
I'm sure there are more methods. That's just a handful off the top of my head. And this is the sort of opponent that you might develop a spell to handle and cast that spell with Wizard's Communion, right? So even this Size +14, Soak +20 dragon is not effectively unkillable under the current rules; it just becomes too trivial to kill if we change them.
I would say never. Falling damage already usually gives you a chance to avoid it, which is an action that is penalized. So the rules already make falling more likely to hurt you more if you're already wounded. Same with anything you can dodge in any way. If you can't dodge it at all, just stuff like your foot is in a fire or your body is in ice-water, then things get super-unrealistic instead of slightly so if we add Wound Penalties to non-Combat Soak Total.
Something that the rules don't include is reducing falling damage with an Athletics roll (which would be penalized). People really can safely fall distances that the rules would nearly have kill them if they know how to land.