Armor converting hpt damage to Subdual

[CuriousBard]

CdG means Coup de Grace. The only way to die by Subdual damage is to fall unconscious and have your enemy Coup you.

One thing that I've noticed also with accumulating Subdual Damage, is the rediculous amounts of it that you can gain.

I'll expound on that:

Our Barbarian in the party was facing off against a Troll. He's wearing BreastPlate armor that gives him +5 to the AC and will degrade the first 5 points of incoming damage from hpt damage to Subdual. Now a troll that hits with both claws and a bite can effectively do 3d6+15 (not including Rend damage). The Barbarian was somewhere around 20hpts and suffering from 18 Subdual damage. He was also in the midst of a Rage (which was accounting for 8 of his 20 hpts). The Troll hits and does somewhere in the neighborhood of 20pts of damage in total. 15 of that is taken as subdual so how he's up to 38 subdual and down to 15 hpts. He goes unconscious, comes out of his Rage and hpts drop to 7. So now he has 7hpts, but has 38 Subdual points of damage.

My question then becomes.......just how many pts of subdual can a person have before it begins to become actual damage? I mean technically I could punch someone unconscious.....but if I kept going, I could eventually beat them to death. The rules, as far as I can tell, don't take that into account. It could be feasible to be lying unconscious with 1hpt and 100 subdual points. Does this make sense?

To solve this, I'm thinking of 'capping' Subdual damage at some level. Maybe once a person goes unconscious, they begin taking 1hpt of actual damage in place of 2 subdual pts on any Round AFTER the one in which they dropped unconscious.

Then again I really don't want to bog things down with rules and math. I could be just as happy to declare Medium armor as having a DR of 1 and Heavy armor as having a DR of 2. Then just forgetting this whole Downgrading Damage thing. lol

 

[whatisitgoodfor]

My question then becomes.......just how many pts of subdual can a person have before it begins to become actual damage? I mean technically I could punch someone unconscious.....but if I kept going, I could eventually beat them to death. The rules, as far as I can tell, don't take that into account.

Subdual Damage can never kill a character, with the exception of environmental subdual damage.

When you beat someone unconscious and then beat them to death, what you are actually doing is knocking them out and then performing a Coup de Grace.

There is no upper cap on the amount of subdual damage you can take, but adding extra subdual will only lengthen the time you remain unconscious. It's entirely possible for a high level rogue to put some poor commoner into a coma for several days with a sap sneak attack.

BTW, I like the system.

 

[Dristram]

Hey CuriousBard,

We've been discussing this idea for a while in my gaming group and couldn't find something that worked. You solved our dilemma with simply having the DR represent subdual damage instead of no damage! But, our system works a bit differently than yours. Here's how.

1) Armor and Natural Armor no longer provide a bonus to AC. Instead they just provide DR like you listed.
REASONS
- We figured your going to get hit just as often with armor as without. It's just that the armor provides protection, ala DR.
1) We've adopted a sort of "Defense Bonus" to AC. All it is, is the Reflex Save goes towards your AC.
REASONS
- It just made sense to us that the Reflex ability to dodge out of the way should apply to combat. This also allows the Feat, Lightening Reflexes, to affect AC. Who wants that Feat now
- And we liked the Defense Bonus idea of SW and were desperately trying to find a way to incorporate it into D&D without having to change much. We like this now because it's simple. Reflex Bonus essentially equals Defense Bonus.

We playtested it last night and it seemed to work just fine. Oh, and guess what? It was implemented just in time. They fought trolls

So, thanks! Your idea got us past our hurtle