Sevenless wrote:It would make more sense if say fresh water had a KO effect, ocean water had a Permadeath effect. Because it's the same type of gradient system like boar -> bear in terms of danger.
TBH I just want to see a KO wound type for drowning, a more severe one for ocean drowning, to bring it in line with other damage types.
Just some thoughts.
Hitting some level of exhaustion may trigger the character to automatically swim to the nearest (and reachable) safe place, I mean, in an
uncontrollable way. Kind of a "panic" (not sure that's the right word) when the char tries to survive instinctively. Perhaps it should happen earlier than halfway between being healthy and being dead, so that anybody would be able to return back alive if tried to cross a water too big. OTOH, if you made more than half, you'd make it to the other side, second part in "auto mode".
Maybe this level should be when the char runs out of stamina and start taking asphyxiation damage. Then asphyxiation wound can be adjusted to take a bit more time to kill the char than needed to deplete char's stamina by swimming, and ticks of asphyxiation made to auto-direct the char to a nearest safe place. For those who want to keep control (and responsibility) at all times, a new switch can be added, "Reckless Swimmer", that disables the auto-swim trigger. Maybe even not as an additional switch, but instead of the current one, if the mechanic turns out to be really fail-safe (I'm not sure yet).
Upd.: I guess a character can't swim with 0 stamina (hasn't tried), so maybe an exception can be made, to allow swimming (or at least auto-swimming) when taking asphyxiation damage.