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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6685625" data-attributes="member: 42582">Of fantasy RPGs that I know, Rolemaster goes the furthest in trying to address this. Its critical charts (which really are best thought of as damage charts because they are consulted for nearly every successful attack) have results ranging from "light bruise, -5 penalty" to "shattered bone" to "arm severed" to "you're dead". And the healing system has a comparable degree of granularity. (I should add that RM is a d% system, so -5 is a very light penalty.)This goes to the issue of time in the campaign, and how the system handles it.In my last Burning Wheel session, one PC suffered a mortal wound. She spent the requisite fate point to live, but healing time will be in the neighbourhood of 18 months. Another PC suffered a "midi" wound, which has a healing time of around two months. Burning Wheel has other mechanics to support a "slowing down" of play (eg practice rules, earn-money-by-getting-a-job rules, etc) which try to integrate these "realistically" long recovery times into the play of the game, rather than make them headaches for play.It also has advancement rules which can sometimes make it easier to advance a stat or skill when making a check with it at a penalty. Which means that it's not always a strictly bad thing for a player to have his/her PC make checks while at a penalty.Of course many of those penalised checks will fail, but BW also has rules and techniques to handle frequent PC failures - as one of the pioneer games for "fail forward", failures thwart a PC's immediate desire but nevertheless propel the game forward in the general dramatic/thematic direction that the PC and his/her player care about.Whether or not one actually enjoys this particular system implementation, I think it is an illustration of how the relationship between crits and the broader game have been thought through in thorough detail, rather than just patched on without any regard to how it will affect the broader dynamics of play. The same can't be said for most D&D crit systems, once you get beyond the simple "max/double damage on a natural 20".</blockquote>

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