Nonlethal Damage

[Psion]

Hey, takyris. Just a few more nitpicks and we can get back to our state of cool disagreeance.

I disagree, although possibly this is my death ninja training coming into play. A bunch of punches to the temple, and your brain gets just as mashed up as if it were one or two whacks with a baseball bat.

Er, never said that blunt force trauma couldn't be considered lethal, or that unarmed attacks can't be lethal. It's just not typical. I am far more likely to crush veins and break bones with a baseball bat. But overall, I am satisfied with the -4 to inflict lethal damage rule to handle this.

Did you ever knock somebody out with a single shot? If you did, did you do it the first or second time you threw a punch, or did it take you awhile (ie, did it happen, say, about 5% of the time)? Were you ever knocked unconscious?

Knocked unconscious? No. Had the wind knocked out of me to where is was pretty clear I was the loser? Yes. In a condition where I knew if I pressed on I could get knocked unconscious? Yes.

It is not the intent of my house rules to have negative nonlethal strictly represent an unconsious condition, but also reeling/wind knocked out of you/battered conditions that are typical at the end of a fight. So point ceded there; I need to refine the D&D definintion of nonlethal damage there.

But having a sensible measure of accumalting nonlethal damage seems inherent to a fisticuffs style combat, and a situation where two people cannot harm each other short of permanent lethal damage I consider intolerable and too grossly innacurate a model.

 

[takyris]

Fair enough. Back to amenable disagreement it is.

And I do cede your point about how there is something fundamentally dodgy about the "it doesn't add up at all ever" concept. I've spent so much time defending it that I can now understand and support it as a rule in and of itself (a point upon which you and I will continue to disagree, I wager)... but even though I support it in the abstract, it just doesn't fit with the rest of the d20 hit point system. If ordinary hit points worked that way, too (ie, "You take a minor slash wound that hurts but isn't enough to take you out of the fight, and you can take a ton of those minor slash wounds, provided you make a Fort save each time"), then nonlethal damage would work well as a complementary system.

But it doesn't. It forces me as DM to use a different mental mechanic to have it make sense when I flavor-text it. And that's annoying.

Not annoying enough that I plan to change the system, mind you, but annoying enough for me to understand other people's points of view.

One House Rule that I'm considering, that deals at least tangentially with nonlethal damage: I'm thinking of allowing any nonflexible and non-pointy bludgeoning weapon to do nonlethal damage without penalty. For example, the club, the quarterstaff, or the three-sectional staff are really no harder to use than the tonfa when it comes to stunning people but not endangering their lives. The 'chucks are flexible, so I think that the -4 still makes sense, and something like a D&D morningstar should obviously keep the penalty.

Of course, this makes the tonfa less desirable as a weapon -- which, frankly, is fine with me. Nobody should use a tonfa when a perfectly good three-sectional staff is available -- unless they've got a lot more training with the tonfa.

I dunno. Maybe it'd help. Maybe not.

In any event, I definitely see both sides now.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Why wouldn't one just use the subdual damage rules from D&D?

Wulf

 

[jonrog1]

As somebody who originally peed all over the nonlethal damage rules, I have to say I've come around, primarily because of the great, GREAT rules in BLOOD & FISTS.

My one problem with the NL rules, which non of the system apologists (and again, I think it's generally spiffy) is the max unarmed damage. I mean, say my CON is 10. The STRONGEST GUY IN THE WORLD, with an 18 strength and a +4 mod, with NO training, can't knock me out until he hits me on an average of 20 times? (+4 mod + d3 unarmed = +7 max, NEVER forcing a save until the crit).

I HAVE been hit hard enough to be knocked out with one punch. And by a guy with far, far less than 18 strength.

Just for the record, without excessive record keeping (I'm a firm believer in "never create a new stat or number to track unless absolutely mandatory), using the rule of making a Fort save whenever the UA damage exceeds your CON or your current hit points plays like a frikkin' dream. Mooks go down, serious opponents don't. Try it, you'll like it.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I was only unhappy about one thing...nonlethal damage. The idea that two normal people could pummel each other endlessly with no effect...

Just thinking out loud here, but I'm wondering whether (for my own purposes) it might be worth inserting an additional house rule to handle the word which I've emphasised in the above quote.

Why don't people stand pummelling each other for ever in the real world? One of the reasons why they can't do it is that they get tired. D20 games don't really have any mechanism for tiring in combat, and most of the time it would be an annoying additional bit of record keeping, but just keeping on with the thought experiment here...

What if PC's could only fight non-stop without penalty for their CON in melee rounds? (+4 with Endurance feat, natch). Most combats will be up long before that, so it won't be relevant, but if a nonlethal slapping match is going on between two white collar workers the less fit one will end up getting tireder first. Now we could say "fatigued after CON rounds, exhausted after another CON rounds if he keeps on fighting".

Getting your wind back? Perhaps take a full-round action that provokes AoO to get your wind back (optionally with a DC15 Fort ST to "reset" your personal endurance clock).

In almost all serious fights the rule won't come into effect because melee is over more quickly. In longer fights I quite like the idea of a PC or NPC stopping to grab a breather and get his wind back. It would also prevent the idea of two people swinging ineffectively at each other actually going on all day.

I quite like this idea, and will float it with my other players. Can you see any glaring stupidity or elegant simplifications that could be made to it?

Cheers

 

[Brad Hindman]

Why don't people stand pummelling each other for ever in the real world? One of the reasons why they can't do it is that they get tired. D20 games don't really have any mechanism for tiring in combat, and most of the time it would be an annoying additional bit of record keeping, but just keeping on with the thought experiment here...
Cheers

I have always felt that d20 games modelled getting tired in combat through the loss of hit points. When your hit points are low and you are no longer able to defend yourself as adroitly because of fatigue, that is when your opponent sticks ya. Of course this doesn't help your problem with the nonlethal combat system in d20 Modern.

 

[takyris]

Plane Sailing, that's a great idea, and one that I've kicked around a few times. The question ir raises, though, is "What counts as a round of activity?"

If it's two people full-round-attacking each other toe-to-toe, that's easy. But what about someone who does one attack at the end of a move? Or someone who double-moves for that round? Would a double-move-only round reset the tired clock, or just count as 2 or 3 "minus" rounds, so that if you were at 8 rounds and would become fatigued at 10, you could double-move and be back to 5 or 6 rounds...

What about guns? Should someone be able to shoot indefinitely, or should there be an emotional/psychological fatigue factor that sets in, all that hand-eye stuff slowing them down? In real life, guns are a fair amount easier to use than melee weapons, so perhaps gun-users shouldn't suffer from fatigue at all unless they're running while shooting.

And what penalty would you use? Fatigue? Exhaustion? Fatigue seems pretty wimpy to me most of the time -- golly, not a -2 to Str and Dex! That's like a -1 to hit and to Defense! It does seem, flavorwise, to be the obvious choice, though -- and while I'd love to eventually see something like "only a move or an attack action per round" for a very tired person, I don't know that the game supports it mechanically right now.



Fundamentally, I agree with you -- but it does bear some more thought to make sure that it's balanced.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Plane Sailing, that's a great idea, and one that I've kicked around a few times. The question ir raises, though, is "What counts as a round of activity?".

To my mind simple is good.

I'd count every melee round, everything that was being done (because even "standing still and watching" probably involves adrenaline, ducking, looking around etc. So it would only reset when the character specifically takes a "catch wind" action successfully.

I've only once had a D&D combat go on for more than 10 rounds (40 goblin barbarians attacking four 4th level heroes in a fortified church) so most of the time this rule simply wouldn't come into play.


To be honest, my first thought was exhaustion rather than the wimpy fatigue, because the -2/-2 doesn't seem like much, but I believe fatigued persons can't run either and that might make a difference. It could easily be a case of "exhausted" after the activity to make it a little more brutal, but the current suggestion would have an average joe getting fatigued after a minutes hard exercise with the adrenaline pumping, and exhausted after two minutes.

It would rely upon sensible players who could honestly track their own status; that wouldn't be a problem for my group but might prove a problem for others who need to lock down the group to stop cheating or something?

Naturally it would open the door to arguments about "realism" and people who could easily hold off a dozen mooks for 10 minutes without breaking a sweat I lean towards playability over realism (after all, I play D&D right )

BTW, the nearest thing I can think of to "only a move or attack action" is when you are disabled at 0hp, which I can't really use. I agree it would be nice though. It's pretty difficult to hit that magic 0 in order to get someone disabled but neither dying nor fully capable!

Cheers

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

We decided to reintroduce the subdual/nonlethal damage of D&D 3.0/3.5 into D20 Modern.
The base idea might have been nice, but it proved some problems: If a DM or a players want to take characters alive, it is near impossible unless the NPC or PC took the right feats.

It might have worked if the changed the base assumption: Unarmed nonlethal Damage is 1d3. Maybe it would have made more sense to let it start with 1d6. Since the two damage system differ since they don`t use all the same statistiscs (one uses only Con, the other mainly hit points), why not change the base damage?
I am not sure it is that better, but it should achieve more of what is desired by DMs and players from nonlethal damage.

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Psion]

Is it just me, or does the idea of winning a fight by "outlasting your opponent and not wearing yourself out with throwing punches" sound like a certain Simpsons episode to anyone else?