Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7586682" data-attributes="member: 82106">Feathers run into the 'granularity problem' of hit point abstraction, but of course you can expect to be damaged/killed by enough feathers. Again, no such distinction as 'non-lethal' damage exists. As for punching, I beg to differ! A punch to the head is quite dangerous and MANY people have died from them. Usually the puncher claims lack of homicidal intent, but that is either ignorance or self-serving. I knew a kid in grade school that died from a punch. Ain't even that hard to accomplish. Beyond that, the 10th punch to the head? Yeah, tell me that isn't lethal damage. It is still money. Anyway, what is this analogy accomplishing? The penny is an analogy for what? A sword? And the $100 bill is an analogy for a fireball? Both of them are serious weapons in a D&D game both can absolutely kill. Generally it is probably more likely in 'classic' D&D that the later would accomplish killing someone, all other things being equal, but that doesn't mean fighters don't expect their sword blows to kill.No, there need only be a provision for damage to knock people out instead of killing them. Your statement here is literally counterfactual. It bears no resemblance to the actual game it purports to describe.It is a very wooly and almost never used thing, that doesn't even hold water when you start trying to use it. First of all it claims to describe some subset of monsters (why a subset?) which can be subdued. That tells me immediately there isn't a 'special kind of damage' but that there is a special kind of MONSTER! Note how PCs are explicitly excluded from this rule! So, while Gygax uses a phrase 'subduing damage' that IMHO doesn't (and we never played as if it did) suggest that the damage itself was of a different type, only that the intent was different.And calling it a 'rule' is pretty dubious. I mean, technically maybe, but that whole system, which is mainly drawn from The Dragon #11 IIRC, is completely bonkers and should NEVER be used in play (it clearly wasn't playtested for even 5 minutes). It is basically throwaway filler, one of the few such things in 1e core books. Attacking to subdue clearly is a function of some sort of 'morale' (though oddly disjointed from the normal morale rules, great thing about Gary and rules...) because it works differently on different targets, etc. I just don't buy that there is anything besides 'real damage', even in AD&D. The very fact that it describes pulling blows and such, and the actual damage is 25% says it all to me. You can still kill with these attacks! Some monsters are just bound to surrender when they are used long before that happens.</blockquote>

Verification