D&D 5E Attacking defenseless NPCs

Tony Vargas · Jun 26, 2019

Celebrim said:
I think this is a good point, and my typical response to this sort of thing is that every single time I've ran into complaints about this one, it's a DM complaining (explicitly or implicitly) how D&D's rules prevent them from easily railroading the players, since the players - when threatened - ought to act afraid and meekly submit to the NPCs and they just don't. And invariably this is all wrong because "realism" and they've got house rules to solve the problem.

IDK, I've heard it coming from players who (miraculously) get the drop on someone, too.

I've heard of DMs in 4e and 5e applying some ideas like that to the game, for example with a character that makes an attack which could kill a target being allowed to narrate the <result>, thus allowing the game to handle capturing targets better and not requiring all lethal combats to have lethal ends.
...
However, in the case of "knife to the throat", a HERO style "covered" status doesn't really address the general problem since you are still just holding 1d4 damage, the threat of which isn't necessarily significant.

If you combine the two, though - player control of the narrative as a reward for victory, with damage held in abeyance after an attack roll - you could get there. The character defeats an enemy and choses to hold him at knife point with his last attack rather than drop him (4e style), but then hold the damage of that last attack as the threat while the target complies/until a distraction gives him a chance to escape (Hero 'covered' mechanic).

The Crimson Binome · Jun 26, 2019

Ovinomancer said:
D&D has always had a hard transition into combat from other play.

Not really, no. I can't think of a single edition where there were actually different rules governing what happens in combat and what happen outside of combat. In 5E, specifically, the only differences are that we assume it's not important to track the exact passage of time outside of combat; and we assume that combatants are always alert, instead of facing in one direction such that you can sneak up behind them.

It's not like you can cast three spells in six seconds when you're outside of combat, or anything like that. It's just not typically important that you spend 18 seconds to cast them.

Celebrim · Jun 26, 2019

Saelorn said:
I wasn't just talking about snipers. I was also talking about critical hits, called shots, "vitality points", and many other house rules that give ways to bypass Hit Points. Such rules are universally bad, within the context of an HP-based system like D&D.

I wouldn't say that they are universally bad. I would say that they prevent you from playing D&D since they create random death opportunities from every attack and tend to create degenerate gameplay where combat is always avoided in favor of manipulating the new subsystem, which D&D in its other subsystems - because it assumes surprise while a big deal isn't that big of a deal - will generally allow with the greatest of ease.

That might be desirable in a D20 horror game where PC's have little or no access to D&D's plot altering magic system and PC lives are expected to be cheap and a ton of other systems have been changed to compensate, but it won't much be D&D any more.

Bawylie · Jun 26, 2019

Celebrim said:
I don't think I argued that, but ok, now that you mention it, the rope bridge scenario may meet your criteria, but it in no way represents the same problem for D&D that "knife held to the throat" does.

As Umbran has helpfully pointed out, the thing that D&D cannot cover by its standard rules is a called shot and in particular a called shot to the throat since "the throat" has no meaning to the rules. Whereas, everything about the bridge is, as I've already pointed out, things covered by the rules. That makes the two things different, even if they aren't different under your checkmate rules.

It is not at all obvious that the rope bridge needs "checkmate" rules nor can I see how applying the "checkmate" rules solves a problem there, since the same outcome can be achieved without them. Regardless of whether your criteria can cover the rope bridge scenario, that is at the least a categorical difference between the two.

Well, I mean, it's just not.

I suppose you could apply your "checkmate" rules to the bridge scene, but the point I'm trying to make is that to achieve the same outcome (everyone who falls without an answer to the fictional positioning of falling from a great height, dies) does not require special house rules, just a sufficiently deadly fall. D&D handles the rope bridge scenario just fine. There is one in X1 Isle of Dread, for example with a 2000' fall for like 5th level characters (surely lethal), and as D&D has acquired a more generic and universal skill system, the way to properly run the rope bridge scenario has become more and more standardized so that even the DCs and the sorts of fortune tests involved are specified explicitly by the rules.

Whereas, for the last at least 30 years everyone familiar with the game rules has encountered the "knife to the throat" scenario, been troubled by it, and often considered what sort of rules would need to be added to the game for the scene to play out intuitively. I remember talking to fellow players about this very same problem in like 1991, and there is still not to my knowledge a fully satisfying answer.

If you have some codified rules that you can apply to generate or arbitrate "checkmate" scenarios, I'm inclined to think that either they are entirely arbitrary or else that ignoring them will work better for the bridge case. That's because if the bridge ropes are easy to cut, then no elaborate contest to achieve "checkmate" is necessary to defeat enemies "automatically" on the bridge. Why in this case is "automatically" a needed thing? Declaring, "I cut the rope." is enough. In most games, "I hold an action to cut the rope." also works just fine with no special rules and no "checkmate" required. And certainly, if we did have such a contest on the bridge and want to make it interesting and high verisimilitude (something you seem to require in all this discussion), we'd have to take into account how far apart the rope cutter would be from whatever he's trying to "checkmate", what weapons and tools he had available to him, and what weapons and abilities his foes have, and all of that can be easily handled by D&D's normal process resolution. To handle all the factors that D&D's normal process resolution handles at least as gracefully as D&D's normal process resolution, if it "checkmate" was applied to the bridge scenario as well as the knife to the throat scenario, then your "checkmate" system would either have to be at least as complicated as the whole of D&D's normal process resolution, or else incorporate the whole of D&D's normal process resolution as a subsystem.

But, if it incorporates the whole of D&D's normal process resolution as a subsystem, and the subsystem itself can handle the bridge scenario, and then adding the checkmate system adds nothing to the bridge scenario.

So at this point, I can sum up my whole opinion of how this discussion has gone, by "Your bluffing. You have no cards in your hand." I call. Copy paste your "checkmate" house rules to the board for us to analyze.

You summed up your opinion by calling me a liar. I am not a liar.

Here is the rule I use: “When you create circumstances to defeat an enemy such that there is no reasonably effective defense, that enemy is defeated.”

For examples, I use the knife-to-the-throat case, the avalanche-over-a-cliff case, and the unwary-NPC-who-is-totally-unaware-of-your-presence case.

Celebrim · Jun 26, 2019

Bawylie said:
Here is the rule I use: “When you create circumstances to defeat an enemy such that there is no reasonably effective defense, that enemy is defeated.”

Well read 'em and weep.

1) System depends on complete fiat. (In fact, so much so that it's not even a system.) Check.
2) Rule adds nothing at all to the rope bridge scenario. Check.

I'm feeling completely vindicated. I have a pair of Aces, and you have a busted straight.

The given rule doesn't even do anything to handle the "knife to throat" scenario, which makes it even thinner stuff than I thought it was going to be, since it doesn't address how the knife to throat circumstances could in fact be created by the attacker, which has always been the stickler here. Everyone agrees if the system had a way to decide fairly whether a knife could be held to a victims throat and then used, that the "coup de grace" rules (for the relevant edition) could be applied. The problem has never been the need for figuring out what slitting a persons throat ought to look like. The problem is, how do we get to the situation through a fair process of play, where "I slit X's throat" is a reasonable declaration for the fictional positioning. D&D has always presumed "helpless" is that circumstance where there is no reasonably effective defense, but if "helpless" is that situation then your rule no more adds anything to the "knife to throat" scenario than it adds to the rope bridge scenario.

It's not even a freaking rule, which means your hand was emptier than even I thought it was.

Bawylie · Jun 26, 2019

Celebrim said:
Well read 'em and weep.

1) System depends on complete fiat. (In fact, so much so that it's not even a system.) Check.
2) Rule adds nothing at all to the rope bridge scenario. Check.

I'm feeling completely vindicated. I have a pair of Aces, and you have a busted straight.

The given rule doesn't even do anything to handle the "knife to throat" scenario, which makes it even thinner stuff than I thought it was going to be, since it doesn't address how the knife to throat circumstances could in fact be created by the attacker, which has always been the stickler here. Everyone agrees if the system had a way to decide fairly whether a knife could be held to a victims throat and then used, that the "coup de grace" rules (for the relevant edition) could be applied. The problem has never been the need for figuring out what slitting a persons throat ought to look like. The problem is, how do we get to the situation through a fair process of play, where "I slit X's throat" is a reasonable declaration for the fictional positioning. D&D has always presumed "helpless" is that circumstance where there is no reasonably effective defense, but if "helpless" is that situation then your rule no more adds anything to the "knife to throat" scenario than it adds to the rope bridge scenario.

It's not even a freaking rule, which means your hand was emptier than even I thought it was.

A rule is not a system. Was that in dispute?

Rule adds nothing to the rope bridge scenario. Again, not really important. My claim was that the rope bridge scenario qualified, not that it was impossible to resolve by any other application of the rules.

Finally, it does address the knife to the throat scenario, at the time the knife applies to the throat. The prerequisite is that you must create that circumstance through play. The consequence is that the reward for doing so is defeating the enemy, and not a measly d4.

It’s very easy to win an argument when you get to play both sides, isn’t it?

“Yes, Brad it is. I concede.” - Celebrim.

Tony Vargas · Jun 26, 2019

Celebrim said:
1) System depends on complete fiat.
2) Rule adds nothing at all

Now we're just straying into immemorial failings of D&D. ;P

Seriously, though, a rule (of thumb) that if the player's action declaration boxes the victim into a certain death scenario, the victim dies, isn't even really a variant, it's just the 5e describe-declare-resolve cycle. The player declares the action that initiates the inescapable-death-scenario, the DM narrates success, no reference to mechanics required.

It's not even a freaking rule

It's a ruling, yes.

Bawylie said:
A rule is not a system. Was that in dispute?

Probably not worth splitting that tree-trunk.

Finally, it does address the knife to the throat scenario, at the time the knife applies to the throat. The prerequisite is that you must create that circumstance through play.

That kicks the uncertainty upstream in the process. The question becomes "how do you get that knife to the victim's throat?" Which is, I think, a better question, because it might be resolved using more of the game's resolution systems, in more functional ways.

Bawylie · Jun 26, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
Now we're just straying into immemorial failings of D&D. ;P

Seriously, though, a rule (of thumb) that if the player's action declaration boxes the victim into a certain death scenario, the victim dies, isn't even really a variant, it's just the 5e describe-declare-resolve cycle. The player declares the action that initiates the inescapable-death-scenario, the DM narrates success, no reference to mechanics required.

It's a ruling, yes.

Probably not worth splitting that tree-trunk.

That kicks the uncertainty upstream in the process. The question becomes "how do you get that knife to the victim's throat?" Which is, I think, a better question, because it might be resolved using more of the game's resolution systems, in more functional ways.

I think my last example of sneaking up on an unwary NPC suggests an answer to that question.

If you sneak up on someone who isn’t on guard duty (or perhaps is on guard duty but is otherwise distracted) and approach them such that they are unaware of your presence, a simple Dexterity (Stealth) check may well be sufficient to get you into a knife-at-throat position.

How about in-combat? Couldn’t you do the same to an enemy that wasn’t aware of you and had it’s attention on the party fighter? It may well be harder to do, but it’s possible, isn’t it?

What if you were the fighter? Might it be possible to overpower an enemy you’ve grabbed such that you can position the knife to the throat? Are we saying that’s totally impossible? I don’t think it is impossible. I think a Strength (athletics) contest versus the defender’s Strength or perhaps Dexterity could resolve the uncertainty. Maybe the defender has advantage on the roll? It isn’t easy, but it’s likewise not impossibly hard.

But since you know that the stakes for getting into that position is certain defeat of your enemy, you may have enough incentive to try that instead of sticking to HP attrition.

Likewise you might be a little more cautious about swarms of ankle-biters like goblins and kobolds who might try to overwhelm and drag you down. Since they can put you in a bad spot too.

Celebrim · Jun 26, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
Now we're just straying into immemorial failings of D&D. ;P

Seriously, though, a rule (of thumb) that if the player's action declaration boxes the victim into a certain death scenario, the victim dies, isn't even really a variant, it's just the 5e describe-declare-resolve cycle. The player declares the action that initiates the inescapable-death-scenario, the DM narrates success, no reference to mechanics required.

It's worse than that. Because either we only know if it is a certain death scenario if we can project out the scenario using the normal rules, or the GM either decides in arbitrary abrogation of the rules that this is a certain death scenario.

So either this rule does nothing except saying if there is no chance of survival after rolling the dice, you don't need to roll the dice, or else this rule basically means the GM can decide for any reason whatsoever that something is just dead bypassing hit points.

"First level Town Gaurds come up on you unaware. They have their crossbows pointed at you so you've been defeated. You must surrender your weapons or die."

Does that sound familiar?

Celebrim · Jun 26, 2019

[MENTION=6776133]Bawylie[/MENTION] Keep talking. You are doing a better job of explaining this than I am.

I mean, why don't we just resolve all combats with an opposed athletics check?