Do Monsters Dream of Vampire Sheep?

[lukelightning]

In my own houserules I reseve the right to Declare Dead any NPC sent into negative HP by lethal damage.

Me too. If the players ask if anyone is dying and wants to stabilize them (to capture them or whatever), then I'll check vs. an ad hoc percentage someone is alive.

 

[Felnar]

careful, not allowing NPCs their stabilizing rolls will upset the carefully balanced rules of 3e

 

[IanB]

Strike to subdue. If someone can't bring themself to take -4 to hit someone, they obviously feel that foe is too dangerous to be left alive.

My beef with -10 is that it started out in basic or 1e or dragon magazine as a chance, not an assurance for a PC to stay alive. Save vs death each round until you pass on, make the save and loose 1 more HP. Dead at -10 no matter what. In 3e is it now a guaranteed buffer, something that gets expected and taken for granted.

Situations come up where doing non-lethal damage is just not a viable option. In 99% of cases it doesn't matter if you check for stabilization for NPCs or not anyway - why not retroactively check it if a player has a reason to care if an NPC is still alive?

 

[seans23]

I make stabilization rolls for NPCs. They're not dead; they're dying. If you leave dying corpses around, you shouldn't be surprised when they return, looking for revenge.

 

[pallandrome]

There are only two situations where I care about negged NPCs.

1) If the players specifically stated that they would try to take prisoners. If they neglect to do so, I roll 1d4-1 to determine how many of the baddies have even the slimmest chance of being stabilized.

2) If the baddies have a healer. Nothing is quite as amusing as watching the evil cleric drop a Mass Heal on his army of minions, and half a dozen "dead" bad guys get back up...

 

[Simm]

I make stabalization rolls, heck I have monsters which arn't in combat make untrained heal checks to recover their comrades. In fact due to my description of goblins making untrained heal check the manouver has become known as kicking to stabalize.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I have my monsters and NPC's die at -10 just like the PC's. They also have a chance of stabilising. My PC's have used this to their advantage on a number of occasions by stabalising dying NPC's or monsters so that they can question them at a later date.

Everyone is happy with it so I see no reason to change.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Notmousse]

I make the rolls retroactively if it matters, but often times the enemy is killed (outright, not left in negative limbo land) with the final hit in my games.

 

[Li Shenron]

BTW, having a monster/npc "come back" in the same fight because someone healed him doesn't require to roll stabilization checks usually: its healer is going to revive it whether it was stabilized or still going down towards -10. It is extremely rare that you need to check it during a fight (perhaps in the rare case where it is close to -10 already when the cleric tries to heal it).

OTOH, having it come back later in the campaign is something that is relevant only for notable monsters/npcs (who cares if goblin #24 comes back 3 weeks later?). And that is something that I rather decide myself and not roll randomly. But even if I want to roll randomly I definitely believe it's not worth to go through the process of 1 roll every round and then rolls every hours etc. but instead I'd just assign a flat % chance and roll a single dice, the net effect is the same.

The stabilization rules are designed to help the PCs, or at leat to give them the impression that the can survive even without help. Actually, it might be there also to give players something to do even when their PCs are out of the fight They aren't definitely there to bog down the whole combat as the DM rolls them every round for each fallen orc...

 

[Starglim]

The stabilisation roll is the same always, regardless of stats, so it shouldn't be hard to resolve to one percentage roll the chance that an NPC stabilises before he dies. In fact, I've just done it:

Hitpoints when dropped / Stabilisation
-1 / 61%
-2 / 57%
-3 / 52%
-4 / 47%
-5 / 41%
-6 / 34%
-7 / 27%
-8 / 19%
-9 / 10%

Edit: Based on this, if an NPC always does the equivalent of taking 10 on this check, all NPCs dropped to -1 to -3 survive for at least one hour and all NPCs abandoned on -4 or lower perish. I'll leave the question of how many survive and recover (after 9 hours) for someone else.