I've been looking at the High Pain Tolerance quality, and I'm finding myself scratching the back of my head, with regards to how I'm suppose to in terpret the effect.

With regards to wound penalties, you normally don't suffer penalties for the first two boxes worth of damage, where after you suffer -1 from the 3rd-5th box, then increasing to -2 etc. Obviously the High Pain Tolerance Quality says that you ignore the quality's level worth of damage boxes, before you start taking penalties from damage. However...Once you cross over the threshold, which penalty do you suffer?

I.e. A character with High Pain Tolerance (3) won't be suffering penalties from damage for the first 2+3 boxes worth of damage, but from the 6th box whe will suffer a wound penalty on her actions. Here's my question: Which penalty does she suffer? -1, because it's the first level of penalties you suffer? Or -2 because you are already dealing with the pain from the damage you've taken, but once you cross over the edge of your tolerance, it REALLY hurts?

Sorry if this question has an obvious answer, but my search-fu seems to have failed me thus far...


/Kyrel

He would suffer a -1... Basically, you ignore the Pain Threshold Boxes for Damage Modifiers. and then adjust the damage modifiers... HPT 3 would ignore the 1st 3 boxes... so -2 becomes -1 (At 6 boxes of damage), and -3 becomes -2 (at 9 boxes of Damage)...

Assumming an HPT of 5, you would follow the progression... at 8 boxes a -1, at 11 boxes -2, etc.

Hope that this helps...

My reading of the rules: Treat the number of damage boxes that you have as though it were (HPT Rating) less than it's actual value for determining wound penalties. So HPT rating 3 and 5 boxes of damage would mean no penalties, and 6 boxes of damage would be -1.

EDIT: NINJA'D!

Excellent Thank you very much people. I'll assume your interpretation is correct, until someone can point me to a place in the rules that contradicts this.


/Kyrel

Hmmm...based on the above comments, I've been giving my players a lot bigger benefit.

With no HPT, every 3rd box warrants a -1 wound penalty, but what I've been doing is that a HPT 1 extends that not to just the first threshold, but all of them. So, it would be every 4th box warrants a -1 wound penalty. Something like HPT 5 would have a -1 at 8 boxes, a -2 at 16 boxes and a -3 at 24 boxes.

That's how I have been interpreting it, thus far.

No, HPT lets you ignore (As in pretend they aren't there) X boxes of damage when determining penalties. Other than that, everything works exactly like normal. Easiest way to do this, is literally cover the first X boxes of damage, and then calculate wound penalties as normal. The other way to think of it (if you simply use numbers instead of boxes), is that you take your boxes of damage, then subtract X, then do everything completely normally.

Yeah, looks like I have interpreted this incorrectly. I gave SR4A another read through and it makes more sense the way other's here have described it working.

The way I found to most easily wrap my brain around it was to imagine that, while the PC didn't have any more boxes than he should based on his BOD/WIL, the first row was more than 2 boxes long - one extra box per level of HPT.