Archer said:
A mechanic to handle overall damage (accumulation of damage in all body parts) is needed, to account for chock and bloodloss. Obviously MRQ has such a system, the question that remains is just what it is. The person who did the playtest never said what it was...
Actually what I said (briefly) was "The impact of damage is pretty much like previous RQ except that everything is skill-based: no CON rolls, just Resilience rolls to avoid death and unconsciousness, for example."
There is no central hit point pool, just hit points in each location. And, frankly, after running with it I can now see why for all practical purposes it's an unnecessary complication (and from an improvement perspective a great help as characters don't die quite so quick any more).
Archer said:
...that is why I asked if I understood him right, that what drops a character is the accumulation of damage in all body parts, not just damage in the individual body parts.
Hit locations are fully functional right up to the time they have 0 or less hit points, at which point things start slowly going wrong - the character loses a combat action. At -ve hit points in a location a character loses his next 1d4 combat actions and, like previous versions, cannot use the damaged limb. Resilience rolls to avoid unconsciousness kick in for head, chest and abdomen damage and must be made until the injury is treated.
When (starting hit points * -1) damage is exceeded in a limb the Resilience test must be made to avoid unconsciousness; in other locations the test is to avoid death (from shock) or unconsciousness. The test is repeated until the location is healed or the character dies (which will happen unless he is healed).
So it has a gradual degradation, conceptually by threshhold as suggested (by atgxtg?), but with Resilience tests
not being modified by the damage, as was suggested elsewhere, just forced by damage exceeding those threshholds.
Whilst the "punch bag" location issue was also suggested as being necessary, the total HP was still there in old RQ and ime it made no real difference, apart from making characters brittle. Personally, I'm quite happy with the new approach because it's abstracted nicely and
works, but then I prefer things gritty, character-playing (rather than item-playing: nice point, SteveMND), and simple.
Hope this helps!