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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6679323" data-attributes="member: 4937">I treat non-lethal damage as being largely the sort of thing that 4e DMs have to treat all damage as - largely non-meat, very superficial contusions and abrasions, fatigue, soft impacts, and so forth.  If you've played 'paintball', think of the damage inflicted by a paintball as being an example of 'nonlethal'.  They can hurt - hurt a lot if they hit an ear or a temple.  They can often leave bruises.  But the average person can absorb a lot of these and still walk home.  Most people have experienced what I consider equivalent to the game's concept of non-lethal damage in various forms over their lifetime.   If you've had sunburn or mild heatstroke, chances are what you have is nonlethal damage.  If you've taken a hard fall and limped for an hour or two, but then been fine except for at most a bruise, that was 'non-lethal damage'.   If you had a cut that scabbed over after an hour and then didn't bother you, then it was probably how I imagine 'non-lethal damage'.  Actually having experienced in real life what I'd call lethal damage in the game in any real form is relatively rarer, and save for a few broken bones most people have never taken what I would describe in game as more than 1-2 lethal damage from any source (broken bones being also an example of _ability_ damage).  Granted, most of us are normal, not heroes.  Athletes are probably counter examples, where you hear of athletes 'playing through the pain' and 'playing at 80%'.   Interestingly if damage could be uniformly measure - same sized cut for example - for heroes, many things that count as lethal damage to them, would only count as non-lethal damage to a non-hero.   Of course, eventually you are going to run up against limits of how well any game mechanic translates to real life.  Realistically speaking, there might not be just 2 or 3 categories of damage but a half-dozen that cripple to different degrees and heal at different rates and differ in how effective they are depending on the sort of tissue that they hit.  But eventually you have to accept the limitations of any simulation.I do not allow non-lethal damage to be inflicted by a ranged weapon unless it has the nonlethal property.  This is a 'realism' judgment to me.  It's not possible to be accurate enough at range, or to pull your punch when striking someone with a projectile.  Presumably you could throw a leather sack loosely filled with pebbles or lead shot or the equivalent, or in a modern setting fire 'rubber bullets' or beanbags from a shotgun.I do not allow the non-lethal substitution feat, though there are a variety of spells that produce non-lethal damage in my game.If a critical hit is made when attempting to inflict non-lethal damage, one multiplier worth of damage is considered to be lethal.   If the amount of non-lethal damage you absorb is greater than your remaining hit points, half of what you continue to absorb is considered lethal.   If the amount of non-lethal damage you absorb is greater than your hit points plus your dying reserve (normally 10 hit points), all non-lethal damage you absorb is lethal.You don't bring up what I consider to be the biggest problem here.In 99% of cases, nonlethal damage is just as lethal as lethal damage.  Once a target is unconscious, and therefore helpless, you can slay them at your leisure.  So there is really nothing to privilege 'less deadly' damage in the game because PC's - if they could inflict it - would abuse it.   And I say PC's, because it's most often players that adopt the absolutely ruthless stance in the game of winning at any cost or by any means, often ironically out of fear the DM has the same stance.   This is the reason I make no effort to encourage the use of 'less deadly' damage, and probably why the game does not.   In point of fact, lethal + nonlethal tends to drop the target as effectively as lethal alone.</blockquote>

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