Level Up (A5E) Critical hits and fatigue

[GKEnialb]

Any thoughts on how to handle creatures that are immune to the fatigue condition (like zombies) who suffer a critical hit? Are they not allowed to convert a critical hit to a normal hit because they can't suffer fatigue or can they always do it with no penalty? Neither seems great, but I assume the intent is for the former...

 

[Faolyn]

Option 1: For mindless ones like zombies, don't let them convert. They don't have the brainpower to try. For more intelligent ones, turn it into strife, maybe? Unless they're also immune to strife.

Option 2: Give them the fatigue anyway. Say that dodging out of the way or doing whatever it is that they do to convert a crit into fatigue caused them to strain/tear/break something, and the penalties from doing that are identical to the fatigue mechanics.

 

[Mike Myler]

If you are immune to a condition you can't choose to suffer from it (example: poison immunity means you can't get drunk, even if you want to).
In the same spirit, a creature that has immunity to the prone condition can't go prone to make it harder for ranged attacks to hit them (because they are immune to the prone condition).

 

[GKEnialb]

Yeah, but you can still drink the alcohol, just not suffer the consequences... A creature immune to fire isn't prevented from walking into fire. The description says, "When you take a critical hit, you can use your reaction to block it, turning the critical hit into a regular hit and suffering a level of fatigue", which makes it sound like blocking is the action and fatigue is the consequence and not that suffering fatigue is what causes the critical hit to become normal. But I do understand it wouldn't make sense to make that is immune to fatigue automatically immune to crits. How about a human with marathon runner? Would they not be able to prevent a critical hit until they've suffered a level of fatigue in some other way?