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I wonder why the developers thought that overall it would be better to change the penalty from the first wound to -1. We are pondering making a house rule about it returning to the previous ruling (just like with durability, number of karma per day), and wondering wether we are missing some aspects.

There are a couple of thoughts going on with the change to wound penalties.

Part of it is to make the bookkeeping a little bit easier, but part of it is also a knock-on effect from the changes to how armor works. Since armor now always reduces damage, rather than being ignored from time to time, the likelihood of a character suffering a wound is reduced a little bit, and adds another factor into the cost/benefit calculus for how heavily you want to armor yourself.

There's a number of small-scale (but notable) interactions with that whole part of the rules.

Thanks!

The bookkeeping aspect is something we dont agree with at all. Of course, we are long-time players, so we are used to the old rules, but i even state, that it makes it "worse" (in the sense that its not bad at all) on the GM's side: a great deal of monsters dont live long enough in a battle to be alive and have two wounds, so most of the time the GM didnt have to keep track of wounds.

Also, as a player (no doubt, habit plays a role here) i find it very annoying the get a -1 penalty to all my subsequent rolls the first time i get an unlucky roll. I miss that buffer, that mitigated the effect of (un)luck.

Oh, good catch with the Resist Pain ability. Also, I think that with armor-defeating-hits "removed", your Armor is now a direct buffer against Wounds (your opponent must roll your WT+Physical Armor to cause a Wound), which tends to mitigate how many you take per combat. Unless your opponent is scoring way, way over your Physical defense

Right, and if that is happening you probably have much bigger problems than Wounds.

I have to know, how come a recovery test always heal a minimum of 1 (p.381)?

It makes sense that an heavily wounded namegiver couldn't heal by himself, that he could even die if he's not taken care of. Historically speaking, some people could die days later. Not because the wounds got infected (that could be a major concern), but a direct result of the untreated wounds draining away his life-force.

Imagine you have 4 wounds. Every time you take a (raw) recovery test, you have a penalty of -4 on the result. Rolling a "2" for example would mean that the wounds are draining your forces (and you loose 2 more points). This would also result in the fact the it's a serious problem that need to be dealt with fast. Since any namegiver MUST take a recovery test after a night's sleep if he as any points of damage (p.381), sitting on all those wounds starts to be a gamble.

This would also make any wound causing effect even more deadly, and every talent/skill that remove that even more useful.

ED4, Page 33: "Regardless of modifiers, the minimum result on any test is 1."