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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 2524027" data-attributes="member: 259">I disagree:  unless the characters have any way of knowing that ghouls are significantly above-average intelligent creatures, then the question doesn't involve the ghouls' intelligence at all.  Given the fact that ghouls live in graveyards and feast on the flesh of humanoids living and dead and are themselves dead and animated only by an evil force, the characters may safely assume that ghouls are motivated by something different from their own motivations.  If the characters assume that ghouls value their own survival as much as the characters value theirs, the characters may suffer as a consequence.As for a bite equalling a CdG, I think that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation:  a ghoul who sees a downed enemy may be overwhelmed by hunger and may temporarily drop his defenses as he scrabbles down to get at the lovely soft flesh of a throat or belly.  When he drops his defenses, that provokes an AoO; and he may spend a full-round action eating his fill instead of just gnashing at the flesh in a normal attack.An attack that causes a grievous wound, takes a full-round to inflict, and provokes an Attack of Opportunity is functionally identical to a Coup de Grace.  The differences are only in the window-dressing.As an alternative, the ghoul may not be motivated by hunger so much as by desperate hatred.  Here it is, shunned by humanity, inflicted with a terrible and unnatural craving for human flesh that has driven it insane, and relegated to the stinking crypt from which it was reborn; terrified to venture far beyond its crypt, terrified of sunlight, terrified of the living for which it hungers.  And, in this miserable last bastion, humans come in and try to kill it, and the ghoul, filled with maniacal loathing for itself and for these nasty murderers, may decide to taste flesh once more before its inevitable final death, may decide to let these nasty humans feel a bit of the misery in which it has existed for so long.It's kinda fun to come up with motives for inhuman creatures, and a lot of the fun is finding a way to rationalize those motives while keeping them terribly inhuman.Daniel</blockquote>

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