Clumsy Bob,
To actually answer your question with some general points:
- With Brawl, Power Attack, Streetfighting, and Melee Smash Strong hero abilities, it's pretty easy to get up to 11+ nonlethal on a regular basis. See other threads with titles like yours for, say, 3rd-level Strong Heroes I've built who can force a save about half the time they hit a standard-array human opponent.
- Remember that even if they save, they lose their next turn (Dazed even if they make the Fort15 save) -- this is part of the reason that the designers made it not-easy to get there without training -- it IS more powerful than standard massive damage, which has a Fort15 save and does NOTHING if the person succeeds
- The designers felt, right or wrong, that somebody without combat training (ie, somebody who doesn't have the appropriate feats) should only be able to knock somebody out by actually doing real damage to them -- this led some people (me) to think of nonlethal stuff as more like light-tap knockouts, pressure-point shots, and so on, than the burly-brawler flavor text that we get by default in the book
- The folks at WotC said that they left out subdual to make less number-tracking
- The folks at WotC said that two accountants (Str10, Con10, no combat feats) wouldn't actually be using Nonlethal and never hurting each other -- either one of them would switch to lethal, or someone would eventually give up, or someone would pick up a weapon. The system is designed to work for combat people, and they as much as admitted that it breaks down noncombatants. (bolded so that nobody says I'm not admitting this)
- To be fair to the WotC people, noncombatants aren't usually knocking people out with one shot to begin with -- and if they are, it's not usually a painless, "fine in a couple minutes" knockout.
- Regardless, for whatever reason, it's designed specifically not to work unless you put feats into it. If you wanna add in Subdual damage, you're probably fine, and you can leave this just like the lethal massive damage threshold. Otherwise, the "Con OR current HP" rule is elegant and simple and involves no new numbers to track.
