Do Monsters become Disabled, Dying?

[Kyrail]

I've been told several times monsters die at 0 hitpoints, end of story. But some things like the spell Death Knell makes me question this.

Do they live to -9 hitpoints like PCs?

 

[Fieari]

I've always played that they do. But of course, for most monsters, no one is going to tend to the injured and they'll die anyway once at -1.

 

[Knight Otu]

Most monsters die at -10 hp, just as characters do.
Constructs and Undead do die (are destroyed) at 0 hp.

 

[Alduk]

Right. And there was a topic on this exact subject not long ago, I had just seen it in my trek through the last 20+ pages of topics. (I should really lose this habit of letting threads accumulate for 2 months before reading them...)

A shame I didn't save the link for it, though.

 

[dcollins]

I've been told several times monsters die at 0 hitpoints..

The rules for Disabled and Dying conditions are for everybody -- not just PCs. You'll note that the Undead and Construct types have special rules saying that they are destroyed at 0 hp.

 

[Len]

The practice in my group (and many others it seems) is to assume that monsters reduced to -1 hitpoints either die or are finished off by us at the end of the battle. If we want to keep an enemy alive (to question him for example) we tell the DM to keep track of HP and stabilization so we can ask at the end of the fight if anyone is still alive.

Note that in any case most monsters aren't assumed dead until -1 hp, not 0 hp. You can still act at 0 hp (unless you're undead or a construct, as others have noted).

 

[Alduk]

In the same thread I mentioned above, I picked up a nice little "house" rule for speeding up the proccess of determining whether a mook dies or not. Unfortunately I can't remember the original author to credit him, but if anyone remembers, please tell us.

Basically, you roll percentile dice based on the current HP of the creature when it falls unconscious:

Negative hp...probability of dying
1.................0.39
2.................0.43
3.................0.48
4.................0.53
5.................0.59
6.................0.66
7.................0.73
8.................0.81
9.................0.90
10................1.00

 

[Zoatebix]

Ooh - that's a good chart. I'm assuming the probability meshes exactly with the dying rules in the PHB?

Now I need to go look stuff up...

 

[Dog Moon]

Generally, for normal monsters, I generally assume that the group will finish them off and don't bother calculating their hp below zero. For important NPCs, they got to negatives just like the PCs.

One time the group dropped an important NPC and quickly fled to chase after the other one which had fled. Well, I checked to stabalize and the NPC stabalized. The fleeing NPC (a cleric) ditched the PCs and circled around to heal the fallen NPC. The group was surprised to return to the fallen NPC and find him gone.

 

[Alduk]

Ooh - that's a good chart. I'm assuming the probability meshes exactly with the dying rules in the PHB?

Now I need to go look stuff up...

Yes, it does. That's the beautiful part.