Resolve, Dying and Death

[Tryn]

Hi there,

I re-read the CRB yesterday and are a little bit confused about the dying/stabilize rules.

As far as I understand you have to spent one quater of your resolve points (max. three) to stabilize when your hp drop to zero. If you don't have a quater left you loose one RP each round and if you are at zero RP you are dead.
This means if you don't have the "quater RPs" you will die within a few rounds.

Example:
Low-Level Character: 8 RP (3 from level, 5 from Attribute), you need at least 2 RP to stabilize, if you don't have them (so you only have one), you will loose this one point and next round you are dead.

High-Level Character: 16 RP (8 from level, 8 from attribute), you need at least 4 RP to stabilize, if you don't have them (so you only have one), you will loose one point each round and will be dead in three rounds.

So basically if you don't have your RP you only have a few rounds to stabilize or get some help. Compared to PF this is a very quick death...

Or did I miss something?

[Ascalaphus]

CRB p. 251 wrote:

Stabilize

If you are dying and you have enough Resolve Points, you can spend a number of Resolve Points equal to one-quarter your maximum (minimum 1 RP, maximum 3 RP) on your turn to immediately stabilize. This means you’re no longer dying, but you remain unconscious and at 0 HP. If you don’t have enough Resolve Points remaining, you cannot use this option and continue to lose Resolve Points as normal as per the dying rules.

So your example isn't quite right: a character with 16 resolve still pays only 3 resolve to stabilize.

So yeah, you could die very fast if you don't have a buffer of resolve left. But in practice, it doesn't go so fast because you don't accidentally run out of resolve. One quarter of your resolve points is one quarter rounded down (because we always round down everything), so if you have 7 resolve you only pay 1 to stabilize.

Also, everything else that costs resolve (apart from some extreme spells) costs only 1 resolve. And you're never forced to spend resolve, it's always your choice, so you don't get surprised by running out.

One of the interesting things about resolve is that almost all healing abilities cost either spells per day or resolve, so there's a (fairly generous) maximum number of times a party can heal during a day. That means you can do attrition in a scenario by doing multiple encounters, but it doesn't go too fast so you don't have to quit after just 1-2 encounters. Just reload your guns, spend one resolve to heal all your Stamina, and you're good to go. If one person is always front line and taking hits, and another is healing, they're both spending daily points, so it's not as much that one PC has to stop for the day while the other wants to keep going.

Yeah, healing stamina. That's efficient, more efficient than stabilizing. Actually getting knocked out is not a good thing.

[ParaheliZ]

One thing that you missed is that you only lose Resolve Points at the end of your turn each round, and you only die at 0 RP when you need to lose Resolve Points, but you don't have any left.

So, in example 1, you would hit 0 HP, it would come around to your turn, you don't have enough to stabilize, you'd lose the 1 RP that you have, and then another round would pass. You'd only die when the end of your next turn hit, if someone hadn't managed to stabilize you by then, when you needed to lose one RP and didn't have one to lose.

So, while the time is short, I think it is at least a round longer than you might think.