Instead of flat 2% chance of death in battle, I think there's a better way to determine the chance so extreme amounts of damage like couch lancing someone to the face or planting a javelin in their skull are more likely to kill them.
We could adjust chance of death depending on how much damage you take from the final blow that sends you falling to the ground, but there should be a base threshold so people don't die from small blows, let's say if you were hit for less than, say, 50 HP (or 1/2 of your max health) you will always be wounded. If you get killed by more than 50, death chance should quadratically increase until you reach 500 damage. If you take 100 damage (~10% of the way to max) you have a ~1% chance of dying. If you take 225 (50% of the way to max), you have a 25% chance of dying, and that seems reasonable because that's a really big wallop. If you take 500 or more, you should ALWAYS die. These numbers aren't final but just an example of how this system could work.
I always found wounding people in Warband by slamming a huge ass great hammer down on their head or crushing their ribs to be... hilarious, so although it would be nice to add lethality for ridiculous amounts of blunt damage (100% chance of death at 1000 damage instead of 500 to make it less lethal than cut and pierce), I think it's better for it to just consistently always wound enemies, at least in vanilla.
We could adjust chance of death depending on how much damage you take from the final blow that sends you falling to the ground, but there should be a base threshold so people don't die from small blows, let's say if you were hit for less than, say, 50 HP (or 1/2 of your max health) you will always be wounded. If you get killed by more than 50, death chance should quadratically increase until you reach 500 damage. If you take 100 damage (~10% of the way to max) you have a ~1% chance of dying. If you take 225 (50% of the way to max), you have a 25% chance of dying, and that seems reasonable because that's a really big wallop. If you take 500 or more, you should ALWAYS die. These numbers aren't final but just an example of how this system could work.
I always found wounding people in Warband by slamming a huge ass great hammer down on their head or crushing their ribs to be... hilarious, so although it would be nice to add lethality for ridiculous amounts of blunt damage (100% chance of death at 1000 damage instead of 500 to make it less lethal than cut and pierce), I think it's better for it to just consistently always wound enemies, at least in vanilla.