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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8418677" data-attributes="member: 42582">In Burning Wheel every character/creature has (what is called) a set of Physical Tolerances. These are a series of numbers from 1 (lowest) to 48 (highest - actually for other system reasons the scale is Black 1 to Black 16, Grey 1 to Grey 16, White 1 to White 16, but that can be ignored in what follows).The tolerances are labelled by wound severity: Superficial, Light, Midi, Severe, Traumatic, Mortal. And the tolerances are derived from the Power (= STR) and Forte (= END/CON) attributes, with possible modifications from Traits (roughly comparable to D&D feats).So a pretty generic character with Po 4 and Fo 4 (healthy and fit human average) will have Su 3, Li 5, Mi 7, Se 8, Tr 9, MW 10. (I won't bore you with the actual derivation formula.)Physical injury is numerically rated, and when suffered it causes an injury equivalent to the highest tolerance rating that is lower than the incoming injury rating. So if the character above suffers injury rated at 6, they take a Light wound. An injury rated below 3 doesn't hurt them at all. An injury rated at 10 or greater is mortal.BW has multiple ways to resolve violence - comparable, in 4e terms, to a single opposed check vs the intricacy of the full combat resolution process. When the simple approach is used, the upshot of the resolution will tell us who (if anyone) got  hurt, and how badly, and we move on. But in the full system, there are more moving parts!So first, injuries are debuffs, and can also trigger Steel checks - so in BW the equivalent of Inspiring Word is a character using Command to overcome hesitation that results from a failed Steel check.Second, armour in BW is not DR, but nor is it just a bonus to defence like AC (shields in BW do work more like a D&D AC bonus). Armour gives a distinct roll to negate incoming injury (and weapons have a Versus Armour rating that can make that roll harder than its default). If the armour check fails, the full injury comes in.And third, yes, this can make things very swingy. (Though BW uses dice pools rather than a linear roll, which flattens things a bit; and players have "fate point"-type resources which they can use to flatten things a bit.) The system leans heavily into "fail forward" narration to handle this - ie a PC takes an injury and/or fails a Steel check and so is in effect hors de combat, but rather than being eaten by the ghoul like the gnome in Gygax's DMG example of play, the PC wakes up in a prison cell with the evil count gloating about what will happen now to the PC's family  . . .</blockquote>

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