According to the rules on drowning, you lose 5 endurance a round. However, reaching 0 endurance only makes you Weary... so what happens next?

It came up in our game last night and I ruled you died when you reached your body in negative endurance.

How would you rule this working?

The character will probably have shed equipment (letting it sink or taking stuff off before taking to the water), lowering their encumbrance and thereby the fatigue threshold. You become weary when the endurance drops below your fatigue threshold and the subsequent (Athletics) rolls become harder due to the loss of the 1 to 3 range on the success dice. Once you reach zero endurance, you become unconscious. Unless you are hauled out of the water before this you will drown as you will start to breathe water and, eventually, sink.

So you'd make this an exception to the rule that you need a wound and 0 endurance to pass out?

I've just sent this to Murphy's Rules.

When you reach Endurance 0 you became Unconscious.
The problem is that when you are Unconscious you can stay with the head underwater for an unlimited amount of time or can be punched for an unlimited amount of time (since it can't do a piercing attack).

I use the house rule that once you reach a negative number of Endurance equal to your maximum endurance you gain 1 wound.
All those negative Endurance points go away when you regain 1 Endurance point.

Once you reach 0 endurance, you're unconscious. If you are at 0 endurance and have a wound, you're dying.

You will gain wounds swallowing water. One wound per round I would say, after losing consciousness. You will soon get to the 2 wounds and you're dead/dying. The moral is to get to the person when they're thrashing about.

I think this is a good idea - if not at least a good start.

The question then becomes when does a "drowning victim" actually die?

Despite being anticlimactic and anti-heroic for a TOR character to die in this fashion, it is quite a plausible scenario to unfold.


Building off of what LukeZ stated here, I would add:

Once you gain the Wound and are unconscious, you effectively restart the clock of the Endurance loss of 5 per round (as if your Endurance was full again - but you're unconscious). This loss continues until a comrade successfully administers a Heal skill check on the victim. (This is the equivalent of resuscitating the unconscious victim).

If the Endurance runs out (the second time) before the heal check is administered successfully then the character dies.


Robert

I'd simply add that "once unconscious and underwater, the player-hero dies after a number of round equal to its body attribute".

That would also cover situations when a player-hero fall in a body of water while (previously) unconscious.

Glorfindel

I agree with this idea, but I would say that the Loremaster's word is always final. There does not necessarily need to be a hard rule for this, because unless the story ends with a hero drowning, the Loremaster probably has greater plans in store. He can always intervene in some way.

I did a little research and found that in real life, people can survive 2-3 minutes underwater (roughly 20-30 rounds) and sometimes even longer (up to an hour or more) in cold water. Amazing!

So, there is a great amount of wiggle room that a Loremaster can use to save a character from actually drowning.

Reaching 0 Endurance makes your character Unconscious, Endurance falling below Fatigue makes you weary. Once your character is unconscious I would say it's Lore master Fiat what happens next. Do the characters wash ashore somewhere? Are they dead and new characters need to be made?

If you don't trust you Lore Master to do whats best for the group, including letting the players have some say, then come up with a house rule. The nice thing is it's about a game of imagination and this should be pretty easy to solve. In my group, the Lore Master would decide. Your mileage may vary...

If a hero is unconscious and still under water, You can treat the water as an opponent who administers a coup de grace. So, the hero is killed within one combat turn. See AB p. 144.