I just got my copy of Unchained today, and one of the things that caught my eye was Wound Thresholds.
I really like the Wounds & Vigor rules, and like the idea of the Wound Threshold rules from Unchained.
The question is, I kinda want to use them together, so how should I go about this?
I kinda see 3 options open to me right now:
1) Wound Thresholds only affect Wounds, after Vigor has been eaten up.
2) Wound Thresholds affect Vigor, and the penalties continue on through to Wounds
3) Use either Wound Thresholds OR Wounds & Vigor.
I like option 1 a lot. I might be trying that in my RotR campaign soon.
Considering that in wounds&vigor -system Wounds represent the constitution bonus to hit points (and lack of them in Vigor) as well as negative Hit Points, I'd go with having wound threshold penalties apply to vigor alone, and, in the case of Disabled, the character would remain Disabled from 0 Vigor to negative Con modifier into your Wounds total, since in W&V you don't have negative Vigor value. But the penalties still do affect negative hit point total, so it would apply to Wounds as well.
So yeah, 1) for me too.
So, I like having gritty Wound Thresholds apply to Wounds only. It's a really cool way to handle things. However, to combat the low HP at high levels, I add the con modifier to Vigor. I think it works, because when you start taking Wound damage, it can become a death spiral. With the additional Wounds, it also makes low level characters a little more survivable (though they tend to get messed up a lot).
A bit of advice: don't use Wound Threshold system. It is simply bad design: this makes easy fights easier and hard fights harder.
Have you used it much?
I'd advice combine the wound threshold (and W&V) with Armor as damage reduction, as with the Defense system, getting hit with the same bonuses as normal becomes eventually trivial. Adding a little more edge on the math might be tedious, but if you fancy your game as realistic as possible, I strongly believe it's worth every penalty. To get it even more interesting, consider called shots too. With Defense being a lot lower than AC, called shot penalties are not that bad. Again, all this results in more math, but then again, it might be fun in the end.