How much subdual damage can something (e.g., a Troll) take?

[Forrester]

Can one do 500hp of subdual damage to a troll, making it so that you don't have to worry about it getting up for a few minutes?

Juuuust curious.

TIA!

K.

 

[novyet]

I'm pretty sure you can. I don't remember seeing anything that says there is a limit on subdual damage. Anyone else see anything on that?

 

[Henrix]

I suppose you can.

I gets a little silly, but there's nothing in the rules against it, ASFAIK.

It would still have a 10% chance of waking up (staggered) each minute, though.

 

[Macbrea]

He would be staggered for a few minutes though.......

Guess, the troll shouldn't drink that much!

 

[Taloras]

Hmmm...why would you want to keep him down? why not just light him on fire? (we were lucky in our last session.....we dropped 1 troll w/ a spell and slowed the others...otherwise we would have been dead.....thank god for Phantasmal Killer and bad rolls for saving throws from that troll)

 

[frankthedm]

-500 hp would look like a pile of troll goop that would take a good deal of time to reasemble [and not properly in all likelyhood].

you shouod have enought time to run to town and bring back it's funeral pyre.


oh wait this is "TO THE EXTREAM! (tm) 3E, that willl only take 10 minutes for ththing to be walking again.

 

[Cloudgatherer]

I don't have any hard and fast rules, but I warn my party that they risk beating a prisoner to death if they use that sort of tactic.

They say "Gee, we don't want him to wake up. So we'll deal subdual damage to him every hour or so."

I say, "You might kill him that way..." as I see it, if you are beaten on a regular basis, or to an extreme, it runs a the risk of death don't you think?

 

[kreynolds]

as I see it, if you are beaten on a regular basis, or to an extreme, it runs a the risk of death don't you think?

The rules already state that enough subdual will kill you (and it makes sense), so this should already be a fact that your players are aware of. If not, let them learn the hard way. They won't forget it after that. Still, that should be player knowledge.

 

[Negative Zero]

The rules already state that enough subdual will kill you (and it makes sense...

could you you post the relevant rule book page that says this? pleeze?

~NegZ

 

[hong]

The rules already state that enough subdual will kill you (and it makes sense), so this should already be a fact that your players are aware of. If not, let them learn the hard way. They won't forget it after that. Still, that should be player knowledge.

That only applies to subdual damage due to suffocation, starvation, etc. It doesn't apply to subdual damage taken in a fight.

As to what a troll with 500 points of subdual damage would look like: there's a scene in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions that fits this exactly. In the book, the heroes encounter a troll in the dungeon. They chop it to bits, but the bits keep crawling around and fighting back, with guts trying to strangle people, hands clawing, the head biting, etc. The fight only ends when they gather up all the body parts and throw them into a bonfire. Nasty.