Handling defeated foes: dead or unconscious, and what to do about it?

I think what the various abilities dealing damage actually does can be very abstract, especially considering the "fluff" and "crunch" related to abilities in 4E can be quite separated. Thus I think an alternative way to the normal rules could be that each X damage overkill (damage past 0 HP) increases the chance that the enemy is killed instead of unconscious, and you can probably weave in some houserules about decreasing the chance of inflicting lethal strikes by taking a damage/to-hit penalty to attacks.

If the players agree with it, you can work through the powers/characters to determine who have the most "lethal-risk" powers and tendencies in combat. To throw a bone to whoever end up with "very high lethal chance", maybe grant a bonus effect for killing targets with much overkill (like making enemies prone to panicking take penalties when the overkilling guy is around due to them being scared out of their pants, etc.) That way there's kinda an upside to both playstyles.

I have considered having two conditions for every spell which can defeat an adversary ...

A sleep spell might have a natural but hard to break sleep and an eternal sleep (that counts as an affliction requiring either that level 8 ritual or a well defined condition such as a nobles kiss to remove it)

Oh your version of the sleep spell doesn't cause hit point loss? now that is a missed opportunity

Interesting item pertinent to the discussion here: Gloves of the Bounty Hunter, "When your attack causes a target to be reduced to 0 hit points or below, and you choose to knock out rather than kill it, the target is restored to 1 hit point after an extended rest (normally this occurs after a short rest)."

I think what 'reduced to 0 hit points' means can be very flexible. It could mean the goblin is utterly demoralized by your clearly superior prowess and runs away/begs for mercy (either way you may have the choice to cut him down). Other possibilities may well exist too, situationally. You might also allow the infliction of 'damage' as a form of morale loss in some predetermined situations, leading to enemies which become defeated due to things like their leader dying, etc. This can have some obvious implications in the fabled 'combat grind' that sometimes happens at the end of certain encounters (IE the monster just 'drops dead' mechanically from morale damage).

AbdulAlhazred said:

I think what 'reduced to 0 hit points' means can be very flexible. It could mean the goblin is utterly demoralized by your clearly superior prowess and runs away/begs for mercy (either way you may have the choice to cut him down). Other possibilities may well exist too, situationally. You might also allow the infliction of 'damage' as a form of morale loss in some predetermined situations, leading to enemies which become defeated due to things like their leader dying, etc. This can have some obvious implications in the fabled 'combat grind' that sometimes happens at the end of certain encounters (IE the monster just 'drops dead' mechanically from morale damage).

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Yep no grind when enemies high tail it demoralized it is something I have done as a DM role playing the enemy for a long long time.

It could be implemented explicitly with minions and others taking psychic damage ( ie hit point loss) when the body count for their sides get bad etc..

Garthanos said:

Yep no grind when enemies high tail it demoralized it is something I have done as a DM role playing the enemy for a long long time.

It could be implemented explicitly with minions and others taking psychic damage ( ie hit point loss) when the body count for their sides get bad etc..

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This is the kind of thing I think would make for a great addition to the game.

Everyone has their personal twists and takes they prefer - but this is the kind of thing I believe would benefit the edition as a whole. A sort of prominent "Optional Rule" (that we highly suggest you use).

A frank discussion of what the game intends hp to mean, with many clear examples of 0 hp. Rules for moral ([psychich]/[untyped]?) damage
when certain conditions occur - or built right into (leader) foes. Nothing that takes away options for those looking for a different take, but a proposal for an approach, I firmly believe, those of us who appreciate 4e have taken to heart -not "narrative", but something ~kinda~ leaning that way... ~kinda~... (It hard for me to describe exactly what I mean, but others usually have the words I'm lacking.)

This also opens up a story-world-building-rich design space : uncaring foes have resistance (or immunity from said effect), rage-bound foes get a buff along with the damage, etc, etc. This is one of the aspects where 4e shines : in making the mechanics birth story!

MoutonRustique said:

This is the kind of thing I think would make for a great addition to the game.

Everyone has their personal twists and takes they prefer - but this is the kind of thing I believe would benefit the edition as a whole. A sort of prominent "Optional Rule" (that we highly suggest you use).

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Generalized rules might handle some of it....

But specific powers are perhaps meat - I have been designing Warlord controller powers which deliver psychic damage against enemies who have been tricked into harming their allies your uncaring trait enemy might take less and deliver more damage to their allies instead of taking some themselves for instance.

Garthanos said:

Generalized rules might handle some of it....

But specific powers are perhaps meat - I have been designing Warlord controller powers which deliver psychic damage against enemies who have been tricked into harming their allies your uncaring trait enemy might take less and deliver more damage to their allies instead of taking some themselves for instance.

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Right, but [MENTION=22362]MoutonRustique[/MENTION] is right, you need SOME SORT of infrastructure to hang that on. Keywords can obviously 'attach' the whole thing to the narrative side of the game, but someone has to at least specify their mechanical interactions up front. Also, if it is left to each power, then you end up with a soup of overlapping implementations of basically the same thing, which adds complexity without adding expressiveness (and in fact can harm expressiveness as people are forced to grapple with various realizations of the same narrative concepts).

So, I have done this for HoML, although its an area of rules design that hasn't 'gelled' that much. In effect creatures have a sort of 'morale defense'. At first I thought this might be its own thing, but then with more thought I concluded that WILL serves that purpose pretty well. So, that lead to the determination of different reasons why WILL might be higher or lower. Highly trained and motivated combatants have high WILL (relatively to their levels). Thus they resist the types of 'psychic' attacks which are being discussed here, as well as intimidation tactics (which I argue do psychic damage instead of 4e's clunky and not very good intimidation system).

The upshot being that your opponents may well take damage if they witness the deaths of large numbers of their compatriots or of key leaders. Exactly what the parameters of that are can generally be left to the scenario, but I have been working on a 'morale level' concept to express it succinctly so it doesn't have to be spelled out in game terms for every encounter. That way goblins may have a 30% morale factor, or something like that, so they tend to start losing hit points to morale at 30% losses. Of course defining exactly what 30% means is another question, and maybe there's a better way to express that. I'm open to ideas.

As for the effects of morale loss... I have pretty much left it alone. The enemy goes to zero hit points and the normal debates can then begin. If you have some enemy which gets crazier when its desperate, just give it a bloodied effect. That might come about due to morale loss, but it seems equally applicable when the creature is personally feeling injured (IE bloodied) so it seems appropriate to me.

For undead or such you can simply give them a 0% morale rating, they fight to the death with no quarter given or expected and never suffer morale loss. You could also give them immunity to WILL-based attacks, but of course that does lead down various paths 4e avoided.

AbdulAlhazred said:

For undead or such you can simply give them a 0% morale rating, they fight to the death with no quarter given or expected and never suffer morale loss. You could also give them immunity to WILL-based attacks, but of course that does lead down various paths 4e avoided.

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For this latter bit one can actual make death of the team impact the controlling enchantment or the summoner too not as morale but something else perhaps.... where things unravel faster.

And will battles against the monster are actually you fighting the will which controls them.

darkbard said:

Interesting item pertinent to the discussion here: Gloves of the Bounty Hunter, "When your attack causes a target to be reduced to 0 hit points or below, and you choose to knock out rather than kill it, the target is restored to 1 hit point after an extended rest (normally this occurs after a short rest)."

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That i think might be more realistic aside from the fact that any trauma capable of knocking one out is very dangerous we have heroic tropes at work.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TapOnTheHead

Admittedly one probably doesnt want too realistic.