r/WarhammerOldWorldRPG • u/Mr-AlRealHuman • 15d ago
Question About the Recover Action's Efficacy in 1v1 Combat.
I have been looking at the rules for combat in the Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Player's Guide, and I think I've found a potential challenge which makes one-on-one fights against most enemies unwinnable for the enemy.
Here is my reading of the rules:
Wounds and Damage: An attack can cause a wound, but a character can only suffer a maximum of one wound per attack, regardless of how much damage is dealt. When a character is wounded, they roll on the Wounds Table.
The Recover Action: The Recover action is a powerful tool that can be used on a player's turn. It allows a character to perform several beneficial actions, including removing the Staggered condition from themselves and treating a wound. The document states that treating a wound with the Recover action prevents it from adding extra dice to future rolls on the Wounds Table.
The Combat Loop: In a one-on-one fight against an enemy that only has one attack action per turn, a player character (PC) can be wounded during the enemy's turn. However, on the player's next turn, they can use their action to take the Recover action, which treats the wound. This prevents the wound from adding a penalty die to any subsequent rolls on the Wounds Table.
The Outcome: Because most non-Champion and non-Monstrosity enemies only get one attack per turn, a player can effectively reset the wound accumulation penalty after each successful hit from the enemy. This means a player character's risk of a catastrophic wound is never increased, making them effectively invincible in a prolonged one-on-one fight. A peasant with a staff could, in theory, eventually defeat a troll by constantly chipping away at its wounds during their turn and recovering after each hit from the troll.
Am I missing something, or does this make one-on-one fights against single-attack enemies trivial for player characters?
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u/obaobaboss 15d ago
Recover Action allows you to treat a wound, this means you have to make a recall check to succeed.
And:
"You can only treat an injury if you have the right
trappings to do so, like sutures to close a wound, or
bandages to wrap a field dressing. A well-stocked
Physicker’s Kit (page 99) contains all the tools needed
to mend most common injuries — otherwise you might
need to improvise, making a Survival or Awareness Test
to find supplies. Your GM may apply difficulty modifiers
when you Test to treat your own Wounds."
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u/Due_Instruction_4719 15d ago
In addition to the above I house ruled it that you cannot treat a wound with an enemy in close combat with you as I found it improbable you could safely bandage yourself with a bestigor all up in your face trying to murder you.
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u/Mr-AlRealHuman 15d ago
The lethality of combat seems to rely heavily on the GM's subjective interpretation of a few key rules. The ambiguity lies in how many injuries a well-stocked Physicker’s Kit can treat, and for which specific wounds on the table it is needed. This is further complicated by the fact that a player character with the Lore Anatomy automatically succeeds at treating a wound, negating the need for a Recall Test.
Additionally, it's worth noting that the initial 10 results on the wound table are fairly mild, which supports my point.
My argument is not that the game should be more lethal. Rather, the rules, as written, suggest that a starting PC could effectively stalemate a single Troll in a one-on-one fight by repeatedly treating wounds.
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u/Ori_Sacabaf 15d ago
In a vacuum, yes. In reality, no, mostly because the Physicker's Kit is a gold asset, so unless all your players miraculously rolled gold status characters (another example why letting players choose their starting career is a really bad idea in TOWR), by RAW they won't be able to treat anything until a silver status character gets the Anatomy Lore, then spends enough money and time to craft the kit.
And even then, only this character will be able to stall a troll ad vitam eternam in 1v1.2
u/another_sad_dude 15d ago
Tbh just treating a wound in the spam of a combat round is already stretching it. That's like 10 seconds ? You can't even diagnose an injury in that time.
Doubt even an action hero like Rambo could duct tape his wounds that fast 😅
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u/Spartancfos 15d ago
There is nothing in the rules that suggests D&D time combat.
I am treating a round of Combat as being a minimum of a minute. You get one attack roll, but it represents an entire exchange, culimnating in one blow that really mattered (which is common in my HEMA experience)
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u/another_sad_dude 15d ago
How far can you run in a minute? Pulling for your hema experience 🙂
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u/Spartancfos 15d ago
I take it this is a fat guy stereotype? I can run like 2-300m in a minute. When we did large field battles, it would often be less due to the need for caution around people trying to whack you.
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u/another_sad_dude 15d ago
No it was meant to showcase that by having long round times, other actions end up looking odd. Like being on fire for minutes without dying for instance.
The idea of 1 minute rounds is good, but other actions suffer somewhat as a result.
2
u/Spartancfos 15d ago
So the one minute round is from Chainmail and OG D&D, there is no specific timing attached to a turn in this game.
FFG's Star Wars also used 1 minute turns, to great effect, becuase it allows more diverse solutions to problems to be viable. You can't hack a mainframe and shutdown a droid attack in 15s, but you could feasibly do it in 3 minutes. It also translates really well into zone based movement.
I think conditions are one of the areas where the GM needs to take care, but bearing in mind in this system Ablaze is like 2 wounds per turn if you are not dealing with it, which is serious shit.
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u/BlockImpossible2896 14d ago edited 14d ago
Why would you let the wounds escalate? You always treat your wound the moment you get it. No need for a Physicker's Kit or a difficult test if 7 out of 10 times you only need to catch your breath.
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u/k4f4r4 15d ago
Yes, I have the impression that no one has tested 1v1 combat in this system. Does this skill make you heal indefinitely? Not necessarily, first of all it usually takes a test to treat a Wound unless you have Anatomy Lore. Secondly, it requires the right equipment. The doctor's kit has a few items that are used for healing but some of them also wear out, so the GM should say stop at some point.
An extreme case of your observation is a 1v1 fight with a Flagellant who can use the Recovery action to REMOVE a Wound (not treat or heal). Unless you have a Sword of Justice, Hochland Rifle, or a gift from the god of Chaos, you will not inflict more than one Wound on him with a single attack, and it may be impossible to defeat him in a 1v1 duel. Of course, there are other items like a vessel of oil that you could set on fire and throw at such an opponent, in which case Hazard Fire can inflict a Wound in a turn while you are inflicting a Wound with your Attack.
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u/BlockImpossible2896 14d ago
Yeah this seems like a problem that makes combat very easy. As soon as the players outnumber there foes they can just recover all the time and the enemy has no chance to stack wounds to more than 1 Dice.
A simple solution is that the + 1 Dice persists. You can still treat wounds but the extra dice stays for the scene or combat. There is still Fate and running away so it should not be to hard and after all this is warhammer a rather lethal system.
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u/Uber_Warhammer 15d ago
Yes! I think that someone didn't test 1 vs 1 combat...
And imagine what happens when your opponent is flagellant with this Special Action:
👉 Feel No Pain: The bite of a Flagellant’s flail their
flesh has rendered them insensate to
enemy attacks. When a Flagellant is Staggered, they may choose to be Wounded instead. A Wounded Flagellant automatically heals a Wound when they take the Recover action.
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u/Spartancfos 15d ago
This is a problematic rule IMO. Automatic healing feels at odds with the Wounds table.
I have a feeling the Wounds table was rushed out for printing.
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u/froggymojo 13d ago
As a GM, I would not allow a 'recover' action to even take place in this scenario (1 versus 1), because a NPC/monster isn't going to pause its attack to let a PC drop a knee, rummage through its leather bag for a healing kit, ponder/recollect the treatment protocol, and then go to work on the wound... That simply wouldn't make sense, right?
I think this marries up nicely with the chart presented on page 110 of the Player's Guide. Is the outcome unclear, thus requiring a test? No. The outcome is very clear. If you are essentially combat-idle and therefore defenseless, then you will be cut down. No dice roll needed. This is akin to a coup-de-grace in other games.
That being said, I would absolutely allow the PC to 'give ground' or attempt a 'retreat', so they can in turn perform a 'recover' action... but only once out of harm's way.
Curious to hear how others would approach it.
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u/clone69 15d ago
Remember the Recover action takes your action for the round. Sure, you recovered, assuming you have the trappings and don't run out of those, but since players always go first, you recover then the enemy gets another action to attack again. Assuming they wound every round (for instance, they are using a big weapon that automatically exceeds your resilience), you will be spending all your actions recovering, only by spending Fate can you get a second action to attack after recovering, and that's capped at 5 times if you were lucky enough to roll an extra Fate point and took the Lucky talent.
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u/another_sad_dude 15d ago
I don't think this post was ever about winning combats, but about not losing.
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u/BlockImpossible2896 14d ago
Its also about epic boss fights were a party faces a single elite enemy. The players cant loose in this scenario no matter if the boss wounds every turn.
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u/DexterDrakeAndMolly 10d ago edited 10d ago
You can't treat a wound in direct combat, so you first need to exit the fight, then treat it, then rejoin. If you try to treat a wound in combat you get automatically hit, and the wound does stack since you haven't yet treated it. Narratively you may get some lull in fighting where all the action goes elsewhere and you get a chance to treat the wound of course, but never while you are directly in the middle of the fight.
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u/GoblinLoveChild 9d ago
anyone trying to take a recovery action to "treat my wounds" while being wailed on by an enemy combatant is just taking the piss
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u/Spartancfos 15d ago
I think you are missing a couple of nuances.
For a start, the Recover a wound part is described as being a test. Which:
a) Needs to be Possible. There is nothing in Warhammer medicine that gets you over a cracked rib, nor any of the nerve damage ones. Anything which doesn't explicitly call out that it is recoverable or "Catch your breath" in terms of healing feels like it will persist.
b) Needs to be passed. So there is something to be said for keeping going in a grit and determination type, but it is not a foregone conclusion. This is not healing word.
The game has a narrative focus. You can only attempt things that make sense in the fiction.
Each time you do this, the enemy gets another chance to make an attack. So I do not rate the Peasant with the polearm against the Troll, no. Once the Troll rolls higher than a 5 on its wound, the Peasant's recovery doesn't help them. Which leads to the higher level wounds, where recovery gets even harder.
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u/Mr-AlRealHuman 15d ago
In regard to:
"Each time you do this, the enemy gets another chance to make an attack. So I do not rate the Peasant with the polearm against the Troll, no. Once the Troll rolls higher than a 5 on its wound, the Peasant's recovery doesn't help them. Which leads to the higher level wounds, where recovery gets even harder."Could you tell me why the peasant's Recovery wont help them here?
If the Troll rolls above 5 he wounds the Peasant. The Peasant roll on the wound table and rolls 6 - "Stomach blow Your splutter and gasp as the wind is knocked out of you. You are Drained until the end of your next turn."
On the Peasants turn he/she uses the Recovery action. Granted, if the Peasant do not have Lore Anatomy, he/she will have to make a Recall check. But if they have Lore Anatomy, they will automatically succeed and treat the wound, which resets the Wound table (no +1 die).
The only way for the Troll to kill the Peasant, would be if the DM rules that the Peasant is out of bandages. :P
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u/Spartancfos 15d ago
I misread - I thought the entries were numerical, but numbers 1-3 are all the same. So I think I technically meant "Rolls above an 8", which does favour the peasant slightly - but it does seem like what happens is:
- Troll hits (statistically likely)
- Peasant recovers 80% chance they can recover. They may need to make another test.
- Troll hits again
etc etc, until the Peasant fails a test, then the numbers go up.
I can see the argument for something like excess damage should be applied to the Wound Roll. Equally, the simple fix is "You can't recover in a meaningful way without becoming defenceless to the Troll you are fighting".
I don't think the interaction is "broken" per se, but I think it is quite poorly worded and doesn't do enough to remove ambiguity. It is the type of thing I would like to see patched. Honestly I think the Wounds Table feels very last minute rushed.
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u/Ori_Sacabaf 15d ago
Honestly I think the Wounds Table feels very last minute rushed.
I wouldn't say "last minute rushed", but it feels like so many aspects of the game: they had a great idea, but once they got into the details, they had trouble getting it right. The end result is something that could have been great, but is just "good enough" because it's badly to oddly executed. Like the recover action or the coin system.
I still really like TOWR, but I'm think I'll still have to go into deep houserule to get it right for me.
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u/Spartancfos 15d ago
I agree with what you are saying, but I think that is a sign it was rushed.
I kind of like the Coin system, I just wish it wasn't used for balance purposes.
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u/BlockImpossible2896 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yes the Coin system seems good in play. What people need to rember is that they need downtime every few sessions so the players can heal, level or use Coin.
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u/Spartancfos 14d ago
I love Blades in the Dark, and I feel this game has more than a few nods to that game's style of play.
The use of Downtime is key to that.
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u/sigmumar 15d ago
One-on-one combat has several minor but annoying issues. The strictly RAW solution to this one is the "GMs may apply difficulty modifiers to treating your own wounds" - and that only works if the anatomy lore isn't in play.
There are several easy houserule fixes for the anatomy thing. Best one in my opinion is that treating a wound while someone is actively attacking you just isn't possible unless you want to die.