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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Empirate" data-source="post: 5672687" data-attributes="member: 78958">First off, even a thousand skill checks won't do the assaulted person any good once the assailant has enough ranks in Hide/Move Silently. Skill checks can't auto-succeed or auto-fail. A high-level Assassin will always be able to sneak up to low-level goons unless the guard dog catches his scent. Many checks don't provide a check (hah!) to house rule abuse in this case.It doesn't take a check to notice that you're being grabbed to expose your vitals, or to notice that somebody just put the point of their dagger on your chest, right over the heart. At that point, you can react (likely by shouting in a slightly panicky fashion, and flailing wildly about) - which foils the coup de grace attempt, but is likely to still not help you escape unscathed --> sneak attack damage.Please don't bring specific timespans into this. How many tenths of a second this or that part of your action takes is no part of the D&D ruleset. You can do a full-round action (which takes roughly all of 6 seconds, but that's guesstimate and subject to circumstances), or you can take a standard action (which leaves you enough time in a roughly-six-secon-timespan to also move about a little, or draw a weapon or whatever). Those are the kinds of things you can do. Coup de Grace? Full round action, is all we need to know. 0.5 seconds or 6 seconds, it makes no difference to us.Also, where do you get the idea that coup de grace is only one strike? Sure, you can picture it that way. But it can also be roughly six seconds of madly stabbing the other guy's abdomen (I'd say you can get about a dozen stabs in in that time), or two savage cuts to the neck (one on each side) followed by a third to complete the decapitation, or a slow inexorable push of stiletto into eyeball, or a bash-bash-bash-BASH! of heavy mace on cranium, or carefully applying an armlock around the head and TWISTing, or what-have-you.Finally, there's rules for one-shotting an opponent, and that's the Death Attack class feature. You want to pull off that "sneak up, then stab to death in one swift motion" maneuver, you better take levels in a class that allows you to. OR you simply do enough damage with your first attack, which should be a given vs. low-level opponents most of the time anyway.</blockquote>

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