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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gailbraithe" data-source="post: 4363804" data-attributes="member: 39048">A few months back the DM of the campaign I play in did a coup de grace on a player character.  The PC had been caught by a Hold Person spell in the first round, and was CDG'd the next round.  The other three members of the party were all active, unwounded, and we outnumbered our foes (two gnoll barbarians and a gnoll priest).  Also, the PC was currently altered self so that he looked like a gnoll.  I should also point out that we, the players, had never CDG'd a single monster in our careers, and had been fighting these gnolls quite honorably (my PC is a LG Knight) for several weeks in game time.It didn't make tactical sense, it didn't make role-playing sense.  It was just one of the most disgusting examples of a DM bitch slap I've ever seen.  It was so clearly vindictive and mean that it almost ended the game entirely.In the campaign I DM, I never CDG downed, let alone held, characters unless the entire party falls in combat, and the monster simply wouldn'[t take prisoners.  Even if the cleric keeps popping them back up -- then they just focus on killing the cleric.The CDG mechanic is useful for killing people in their sleep with a dagger in the throat, giving a nice end-run around the abstraction of hit points, but using it in combat on PCs is needlessly aggressive and antagonistic.</blockquote>