FORUM

The notes section is probably enough for wounds. Anyway, basically you're "maimed" if you have any number of "permanent wounds," it's just another way of phrasing it. For every 3 permanent wounds you have, you lose 1 point of strength.

As far as how much gain you get from accepting a permanent wound, I'd personally probably rule it's a jump back up to 5 body, though I think it's intentionally left open to interpretation based on the severity of the wound. A scar on your leg versus a gimped leg are two drastically different things.

Theoretically, they should come up infrequently enough that complex rules shouldn't really drag the game down. Theoretically.

Yes, the intention is that you can heal up to your full body (5, 6, whatever that may be). The "or" in "maiming or permanent wound" is just meant to suggest that the history item you take doesn't have to be a physical maiming. It could be a mental wound. Flashbacks, a nervous tic, nightmares that make you sit up gasping for air, something like that. So the idea is: you take any sort of colorful handicap you want, and the mechanical effect of the handicap is that you lose one history/skill slot. In exchange, you can heal right up to maximum body.

This does indeed make combat more accessible. It's meant to have characters coming out of dungeon crawls transformed, changed by their experience in very real ways. Of course, there are high-level fixer and wizard options that allow a character to avoid permanent consequences like this, but they are rare.

On the accessibility of combat: the point of tough combat and scarce healing is to drive play towards social scenes, chase scenes, mass combat scenes, investigations and organization play during the healing time. At least, I hope that is what people look to! There are a couple of ways to play 12 combat scenes in a row if that is the goal: increase time scale of campaign, decrease level of competition, decrease competition's weapon quality so many hits don't do damage against PCs' armor, establish a culture of healing (the culture rules are left quite open, and kings can do a lot with the doom), use spells such as dramba's Salve Doll and transfusions like the fixer's carmotic plasma, and so on. As written, the maiming option is meant to be selected now and then. I intended it that way because dynamic characters tend to be more fun than static characters. But feel free to add in more healing (the easiest way to do it is to bump up the potency and frequency of availability of things like carmotic plasma) if that is how you like to play. The happiest I could be is if you took the rules and made them your own, for your style of play!

Heh well you can always send them the combat primer and see if that convinces them.

I hear you about "hack-n-slash" SK. One rule you might want to try is this: after every fight, roll a Strength check against the doom for every body point that you lost. For each check that you succeed on, you get one of those body points back. It wasn't a "real" wound, it was just a temporary shock, measure of fatigue, tweaked muscle, over-stressed joint or quick-healing bruise. I actually strongly considered putting this rule in the game. I've used it a lot when I wanted to heavily playtest combat. It rewards the melee-types especially, since they're the ones who should have high strength and should be taking most of the damage.

Thanks much for the response to my OP, Frank. It makes good sense.