Is Coup de Gras too weak?

[hamishspence]

Coup de grass

Coup de Grass: what happens when a plant creature overthrows his ruler, a more powerful plant creature

 

[Harr]

I've donde the 'rouge' thing a couple times, it's a bit embarrassing but not a big deal. Especially in the frantic-typing mode that often sets in when playing in a mmorpg or mud without voicechat.

Look on your keyboard at the layout of the letters O, U, G, and E. They're almost in a straight line. So people position their fingers to type 'rogue' but it's very natural for them to actually fall in order to type 'rouge'. And most people are not OCD-ly concerned with stuff like that so you see it a lot.

As for coup de grace, I just call it 'killing blow'. simpler is best.

 

[lukelightning]

I just say CDG. It stands for Crush Da Goober.

 

[Dausuul]

For a pretty specific reason. Sleeping characters die very quickly with auto-death coup's. Having had it happen before it sucks totally.

The proper solution to this is not to make attacks against sleeping characters less lethal. It's to make it harder to catch PCs asleep. The rules ought to be written on the principle that anything which makes a target unconscious is equivalent to making it dead; and important characters should have a chance to wake up at the last second when somebody tries to attack them in their sleep.

I thought that they'd fixed the spelling to Coup de Grace in 4e?

I thought that was how it was spelled in the 3.X books. As far as I know, it's always been spelled Coup de Grace.

 

[frankthedm]

Rather than make CDG less deadly, they simply should not have powers that can make significant foes helpless.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There's an incredibly simple fix for all the potential problems, here, imho and ASTOUNDED that WotC didn't go with it.

Make CdG much more lethal as per various suggestions.

However, make it so that anyone with an Action Point can spend that Action Point to automatically not die and instead merely take the heavy CdG damage (or even "wake up just in time" or whatever, but this works with paralyzed/magically unconscious situations too, where that might not make sense).

Is that not fixed?

All major characters, all solo monsters, all elite monsters (iirc) have an Action Point, so none of them will be auto-murdered. It slightly damages versimilitude if you're going for realism instead of a cinematic situation (where the big bad is never simply killed in it's sleep unless it's already been effectively neutralized).

Normal monsters will still appropriately be dispatched by CdG some of the time, rather than almost universally being able to survive it.

This has the side-effect of making people more keen to press on to milestones before resting, I suspect, as that way they can be assured of avoiding sleepy-murder.

 

[Praesul]

I just say CDG. It stands for Crush Da Goober.

I like it, nice!

 

[Torchlyte]

There's an incredibly simple fix for all the potential problems, here, imho and ASTOUNDED that WotC didn't go with it.

Make CdG much more lethal as per various suggestions.

However, make it so that anyone with an Action Point can spend that Action Point to automatically not die and instead merely take the heavy CdG damage (or even "wake up just in time" or whatever, but this works with paralyzed/magically unconscious situations too, where that might not make sense).

Is that not fixed?

All major characters, all solo monsters, all elite monsters (iirc) have an Action Point, so none of them will be auto-murdered. It slightly damages versimilitude if you're going for realism instead of a cinematic situation (where the big bad is never simply killed in it's sleep unless it's already been effectively neutralized).

Normal monsters will still appropriately be dispatched by CdG some of the time, rather than almost universally being able to survive it.

This has the side-effect of making people more keen to press on to milestones before resting, I suspect, as that way they can be assured of avoiding sleepy-murder.

That's a very good house rule. Bravo.

 

[grolch]

As per the rules you can coup de grace anyone. As a DM i would dislike having my big bad villain from hell instantly killed after the rogue had rolled high on his dex vs fort (read knockout daily 9). How about saying a surprised sleeping character/monster/npc starts out restrained? getting coup de graced till he escapes?

 

[Christian]

I thought that they'd fixed the spelling to Coup de Grace in 4e? I was sure I saw "grace" and not "gras" ....

PHB 3.5 pp. 153-4. Correctly spelled as coup de grace in all instances.

PHB 4 pg. 288. Correctly spelled as coup de grace in all instances.

Internet, virtually anywhere: misspelled in many amusing ways.