The pacificist healer feat from the new Divine Power allows you to get a benefit ie improved healing ... but if you do "damage" to a bloodied target your guilt complex causes you to take damage.... I am a real big fan of skinning various powers as you pointed out that laser hit could be a heat wave... that fatigues the enemy eventually knocking them out.... the new feat is rather problematic for the house rule I had (for basically sleep magic) and doesnt really care how we skin it.
So I kind of think I need to change that feat... so the guilt hit relates to the final stroke instead of when bloodied.
Note the idea for a pacification damage type is just like the other keywords...I dont want to separately track like temp hit points and it would basically be something other feats could gear off... and more fair sleep spells or waves of peace etc can be built based on. Sleep as it stands is legacy save or die.
Okay, I didn't completely grok what you were getting at initially.
It seems weird that a pacifist would feel guilt over putting someone to sleep (especially if the alternative was death), but not really any weirder than when someone is "bloodied" by a sleep spell.
The pacifist healer feat doesn't seem like it meshes perfectly with the idea of pacification damage. The simplest approach is probably just to ban the feat in any game where you want to use pacification damage if you can't reconcile the concepts, though they work just fine on the mechanical level. I wouldn't reduce the stun to only when enemies are downed, because that significantly reduces the penalty. Pacifist healer makes the second half of any fight hell for the pacifist (once all enemies are bloodied, any attack the pacifist lands will stun him) whereas stunned by the finishing blow is much less painful (since it will usually occur less than once per enemy per fight).
I like your idea of modeling sleep, petrification, etc. effects as damage.
On the other hand, I'm not keen on pacification damage as it's own damage type. My approach would be to use existing damage types for pacifying attacks, with the keyword indicating that such attacks are always nonlethal in nature (you could even add that targets knocked out by the pacification keyword have to make a saving throw even after they are healed before they wake up, though I'd be careful using this against PCs as it's a lot more effective against them than monsters). A poison could easily be classified as pacifying (knock-out gas) and it isn't hard to imagine a heatstroke spell that is classified as fire damage (and thus ineffective against red dragons). I think this approach would require less general rework.
technically a true druid considers life and death quite natural and normal you shouldn't wastefully kill and he would like to join your hunting trip.
Yeah, this character is essentially a deluded priest whose beliefs are somewhat contradictory in nature. (The campaign setting has no established deities, so clerics are people who have, for various reasons, been inspired to believe/worship something greater than themselves). Excessive exposure to the sun can of course kill but because his view of the sun is as an impartial life giver, he ignores those facts that might inconvenience his personal truth.
