D&D 5E House Rule for Subdual, is it fair?

77IM said:

My house rule is pretty simple: You must declare your intent to do non-lethal damage before the attack, and if you roll a natural 20, it's lethal anyway.

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Makes sense. Very similar thinking lies behind my suggestion (post 13) for requiring a bludgeoning weapon.

declaring intent before making the attack is exactly right.

How about this:

Nonlethal attacks have disadvantage.
If the attack result exceeds the target's AC by 5 or more, it becomes a lethal attack. Oops.

Kobold Stew said:

declaring intent before making the attack is exactly right.

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This.

That's one reason for my -2 suggestion: you need to take it before you roll.

(The other is to give leniency a cost, as discussed previous)



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Why complicate things? Meaningless rulings like these that add nothing to the game experience in the name of 'realism' are a pox upon D&D.

77IM said:

As others have pointed out, you're actually giving players advantage on lethal melee weapon attacks, which seems backwards.

FWIW, I, too, have a problem with the RAW for knocking out. It violates my expectations for a player to say, "With a mighty roar, I swing my greatsword at my foe... [rolls a natural 20] for a massive 26 damage! His skull is cleft in twain... no, wait, he is just knocked out." The setup for that action really doesn't match the outcome.

My house rule is pretty simple: You must declare your intent to do non-lethal damage before the attack, and if you roll a natural 20, it's lethal anyway.

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You can just change your expectations by narrating it differently. "My barbarian hefts his greatsword and belts the foe across his jaw with the pommel for 26 damage, knocking him senseless."

Declaring beforehand is ideal, but I'm willing to retcon for a forgetful player. It's just a game after all.

I don't care for your house rule simply because at my table a natural 20 indicates the best possible result. Killing a creature you intended to capture is about as far from that as you can get.

Warmaster Horus said:

Why complicate things? Meaningless rulings like these that add nothing to the game experience in the name of 'realism' are a pox upon D&D.

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For the game you want to play I totally agree. But overall I believe the debate is how to allow subdual damage without it being abused. If we want to add realism but also keep it simple, I expect a variant rule could be developed for special damage. Like granting disadvantage to the roll, plus some other modifiers and having to exceed at least 50 percent of the targets total hit points to subdue them. Which means low level creatures and mooks are fair play, but forget about giants.

Ganymede81 said:

Fixed it.

Please don't pretend to be a spokesperson for the gestalt D&D community, and pretty please don't ping my notifications over it.

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Every edition of D&D has -- in the PHB, DMG, and MM -- focused on rewarding players with treasure in the form of gold and magic items. Indeed, early on, gold and magic items along with defeating monsters was the de jure method for earning experience points to advance your character. The reason the XP tables got so huge at high level was not because the levels were supposed to take so long. It was assumed you were finding a ton of treasure at higher levels. Every adventure ever published has included gold and magic items as a reward. There are spells, skills, and entire chapters of the DMG devoted just to rewards, gold, and experience. Most DMGs have as a large portion of the book devoted to magic item rewards that the PHB devotes to spells.

As far as prisoner management, I cannot think of any adventure -- even those where you have to capture an NPC -- where the focus of the adventure was, "What do you do when you have to manage prisoners?" Indeed, the entire challenge of scenarios where you're intended to capture a target results from the fact that almost all the rules and effects of the game are designed to be lethal. That's why the answer the PCs come up with is almost always, "we blindfold and gag them and bind them with rope," for long-term capture. That's the only solution PCs are likely to have that lasts more than about 10 minutes.

Given that this has been a pretty steady state of affairs across all of D&D as well as every other RPG -- both tabletop and computerized -- either 40 years have gone by where no professional game designer in the either industry noticed the lack of this apparently vital game design space, or, yes, most players are interested in adventures where they find treasure and magic items instead of adventures where they find prisoners to manage.

GX.Sigma said:

How about this:

Nonlethal attacks have disadvantage.
If the attack result exceeds the target's AC by 5 or more, it becomes a lethal attack. Oops.

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I don't understand why anyone would want a rule where, if they perform really well, the result is the exact opposite of what they intended.

Again, I submit the following:

Before you make an attack roll, you may take -2 on the roll. If you hit, and the target gets to zero hp, it is unconscious but automatically stable.

You can only do this for attacks. Fireball causes a save, and is therefore not precise enough. But weapons, ammunition and attack cantrips work.

Notice how this only becomes important when there's a risk of the target running out of hit points. This means there's no need for the penalty when you attack a relatively fresh opponent, except for the weakest kind.

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