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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1106927" data-attributes="member: 5171">Hey, Psion,Well, first off, I'm fine with agreeing to disagree.  But I suspect that my position is not as inflexible as you make it sound.  I enjoy showing people that it's possible to make an effective nonlethal character, true, but I'm not against changes to the system.By the same token, if you beat a guy to -8 and he gets a Treat Injury check by an untrained person who rolls well, that person will be completely hale and healthy again in about a week without surgery or any further treatment.  This is not the same as being taken to a near-death situation by blunt-force trauma, which should require a great deal more bedrest and medical treatment.To be fair, I think that you and I treat this issue (what -hp really represents) from the other side.  I treat it by having -1 to -9 as "knocked out" and then added -10 to -19 as "nearing death", which adds House Ruled long-term injury potential.  There's little enough combat in my game that it's not a big change, but it IS a house rule on my part.  So my bad.Hm.  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.  I'm not arguing that fists should do more damage -- the difference in damage levels is accurately reflected by 1d3 versus 2d6.  But enough people are killed by single punches to the head that the "it's not life threatening" doesn't hold water with me.  Again, I differentiate based on flavor text.Schoolyard bully doing nonlethal damage: punches to the face, shoving, scuffling headlocks and other stuff that's going to give you a bloody nose but not kill you.Person actually trying to kill you: punches to the throat or temple, choking, continuing to punch once person is on the ground, throwing person into walls or other unyielding surfaces, and so on.In the former situation in real life, the fight can go on for awhile until somebody gets tired or gives up because they're obviously being beaten, even though they're not incapacitated.  Or, heck, they could get knocked out -- in a two-minute fight (20 rounds), at least one critical nonlethal hit is likely to come up.In the latter situation, two untrained people are going to be awkward (-4 to hit), but still, somebody is going to go down quickly and not get up.  Most genuine-wanting-to-hurt fights don't last very long, as is pretty well represented by two first-level smart heroes taking the -4 to hit, successfully hitting once every two or three rounds, and taking out their opponent after two to three hits.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?My schoolyard experiences were pretty pathetic, frankly.  I came home unhappy and once or twice with a black eye, but I never got knocked unconscious.  It was more of a schoolyard dominance thing (bully showing that he can knock me around) than a genuine combat -- which, in my opinion, is represented well by doing a bunch of nonlethal hits that don't knock someone out.If PCs are taking a lot of nonlethal damage and not doing any, but they're not in danger of having their massive damage threshold breached, they need to roleplay the fact that they're being smacked around by someone who's obviously better at fighting than they are.  Just because a bloody nose doesn't affect you in game terms doesn't mean your character should ignore it.Agreement and apologies on your other points -- you're right.  I do tend to rationalize rules via flavor text, but if you're attacking the logic of the rules, the flavor text isn't a great defense.  I DO use my flavor text to defend against attacks on the rules that come in the form of "I can't do this flavor text with this rule!", though, because using "my flavor text doesn't work" to change the rules is a bad idea.  You weren't doing that, but you the original poster did essentially give a flavor-text reason to change the rules.</blockquote>

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