Hey VanGo. Thanks for the reply.
First off, you make a good point with trying the system as is before fiddling around with it. This is especially true for Savage Worlds, so I understand where you’re coming from.
As for the Toughness resist roll thing, I forgot that Toughness is a Defense (which is essentially a CR) and not normally meant to be used interchangeably with an action roll, hence my conflating it as a type of resist roll. Toughness stuck out to me because I thought the combination of fitness and willpower made sense to help determine whether or not one would succumb to injury.
Speaking of resist rolls, it took me a while to find it but I finally found out the mechanics for the Resist roll under the Resist Bane action in the Combat chapter. This was very confusing to me and would’ve been much clearer if every mention of a resist roll was instead changed to a Resist Bane action. But I digress. Moving right along.
As for the section you found most baffling, the purpose was to replace the mechanics of lethal damage (via the reduction of maximum HP) with that of applying levels of the Fatigued bane to represent long-lasting injury (which already has its own mechanics in the core rule book). Regular hit points recover to their maximum value either way. Reducing maximum hit points seems to just make getting into combat a more dangerous proposition, but don’t have any debilitating effects on the character’s actions otherwise.
In The Expanse RPG, Fortune Points serve as both hit points as well as a metagame currency used to modify dice rolls. If you don’t have sufficient Fortune Points to mitigate all of the damage you take, you make special rolls to see if you get injured, wounded, or taken out. It’s tangential to the topic at hand, but I figured I may as well elaborate on them.
I like your proposal of accomplishing a similar objective to mine, as it uses already existing mechanics in the game to more closely emulate the house rules I’ve posited.
Thank you for the reply, VanGo. You’ve helped me understand more about the design philosophy of the game and, due to this thread and the Search function, I finally found out how Resist rolls work.