Lan

I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you. Update #24 states: "Stamina and Health In Project Eternity's combat, players need to be concerned with two elements of a character's vitality: Stamina and Health. The majority of damage a character takes is subtracted from his or her Stamina. Stamina represents how much general abuse a character can take before falling unconscious. Characters lose it quickly and regain it relatively rapidly, even without assistance."

What if you are not wearing any armor or only light armor and you get hit by a bolt from heavy crossbow, should the majority of the damage (as Josh has stated) taken from your stamina? In my opinion weapons are made to kill/seriously hurt opponents, the bruises/greater stamina loss is understandable if the damage roll was not that successful (it hurts but no internal organs damaged, no heavy blood loss/broken bones) but shouldn't it be otherwise if the attack/damage roll was high enough/max? What I mean here is that in the example that Josh gave stamina and health was approx. the same (32/30), now if the rule is that attacks deal minimal (something like 3-4) damage to health and "much more" (15-20) to stamina, after 2 successful hits the character is knocked out although the health loss was minimal (20%). Is this realistic at all? We are talking about adventurers, fighters who have been trained to withstand pain, why would they collapse with such minimal health loss? The system could take into account the result of the attack/damage roll, the effectiveness of different weapons against different types of armor (armor piercing rules) and determine what portion of the damage should be substracted from stamina and the remaining would be taken directly from health. There could be different rules if you have lost 20% of your stamina/health (bleeding, dizziness, etc.) in a result of a single blow and so on... The other thing is why should knocked out characters be ignored in battle? Let's say there are 3 characters and 7-8 bandits attacking. Again, in my honest opinion they should not just ignore barely wounded enemies who are taken out from battle temporarily. In real world battles those guys could be ignored safely as they were no threat not even after the battle, their injuries were so serious that they bled to death, looters killed them or if they were lucky they survived and got treated after battle, in any case they could not return to fight. What about not-so-intelligent monsters who are after the party members' blood/lifeforce/soul, they should be very happy with some unconscious source of "food"... Perhaps there should be some feats / spells / whatever to give characters the option to fight to the last breath and the "ignore unconscious enemies" could be switched on/off...what do you think?