Is Iron Kingdoms too non-lethal?

Question

I've been playing Iron Kingdoms as a player for a few months now and one thing I have found is that it is incredibly difficult to finish off a player (or a NPC who the GM has decided to make use the injury table). It seems that you can survive for a long time while on 0 hit points. Our group has an Ogrun who is frequently 'dropped' in the first round of combat, but every time he rolls on the injury table, gets results like 'Horrific Scarring', which don't even take him out of the fight. Sometimes, the situation becomes farcical, such as when a group of people gang up on the villain who just won't die despite rolling 4 or 5 injury rolls per round.

So my question is this: Is there a way to make the injury table more lethal, or progressively worse the more you roll on it? Or are we doing thing wrong in some way?

Answer 1

An incapacitated character is out of the fight. They're down, unconscious, bleeding, and possibly dying. (At the GM's discretion, minor NPCs may be destroyed outright as soon as they're incapacitated.)

The rules for disabled, incapacitated, and destroyed on page 216 say that not only is an incapacitated character unable to act, but they may already be dead. Your Ogrun companion is definitely out of the fight. If they only roll "Battle Scars" on the injury table, that's what they get after they recover from near-death, long after the fight is over. They're still out of the fight and unable to do anything. Only the injuries Spitting Blood and Broken Limb allow a character to keep taking any actions, and then they have to spend a feat point every turn they want to do anything other that lie on the ground bleeding to death. The only other injury that keeps a character in the fight is Concussed, and then only if they're helped by an ally to remove the Concussed condition first.

As for the villain, an incapacitated opponent is unable to defend themselves. The combat encounter is over and now you're back into "story mode" (or whatever you want to call not-combat roleplaying). You don't have to keep hitting them to try to finish them off. They're at your mercy, and descending on their broken and bleeding body like a pack of ravening hounds means that if they're not already dead from their roll on the Injury Table, they will be as soon as someone slits their throat.