Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 3168654" data-attributes="member: 8835">I've seen several folks come up with 'coup de grace' rule as being the answer.  Now maybe giving one free round of ranged coup de grace to dozen ready crossbow men versus unready PCs might be a threat, but in my experience, coup de grace in a one on one situation can be useless if the victim is higher level than the attacker.It becomes a matter of the attacker's max damage is not capable of killing the victim's high amount of HP.at 15th level, a fighter has 10+5.5*14 hit points (statistical average, no con bonus). That's 87 hit points.  A heavy crossbow does 1d10 damage, double for crits.  Max damage then is 20 damage.  That's a drop in the bucket.Oddly enough, none of this is the real problem with the situation.  From a storytelling standpoint, the hero suceeds when the story demands it, and the hero fails when the story demands it.  Wolverine heals at the speed of plot.  The USS Enterprise travels at the speed of plot.  In an RPG, one risks railroading if the DM has the ability to force PCs into doing something simply by surrounding them with bad guys (because as DM, he can spontaneously spawn a dozen guardsmen anytime he wants).  In fact, the biggest railroad mistake is when the adventure says, "the PCs will be surrounded and captured by a dozen guardsmen."Now, Henry is onto something.  If the DM is given the latitude for a "railroad moment to advance the story" and the PCs are given something in return ("get out of jail" card), it'll all work out, and a possibly interesting story can be told, and players can be reassurred that they are not being permanently screwed over.The point is, GMs would like to have moments where they can say, "you get captured, or whatever" because realistically and storywise it makes sense.  Players are on the other hand, keen on not having anything bad happen to them, so resist such attempts, and really hate it when it seems that they can't even try to succeed.</blockquote>

Verification