Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2774321" data-attributes="member: 32740">That is a design decision.  Remember that D&D is not really meant to reflect a terribly realistic vision of combat.  It's heroic combat where the rules are designed more to enable the PC's to do spectacular things without being realistically vulnerable.  And -1 to -9 isn't much to a 10th level fighter, but to a 1st level wizard it's enormous leeway.  The 10th level fighter doesn't NEED additional "unconciousness" spread because he's got tons of additional hit points that keep him conscious and fighting long before he gets to that margin.The only problem with it is that it's effective.  It becomes MORE effective to simply knock someone out than have to conduct additional regular combat.  But then if you start to water it down any more it's INeffective and nobody would ever try to just knock someone out with a single blow because it's more effective to beat them into unconsciousness over several rounds of combat.Simply because of the way D&D combat, hit points, etc are designed it is problematic at best to deal with combat that is NOT just straight-forward hit points.Well it means that the massive damage knockout effect will really only apply to higher level characters because only higher level characters are going to be facing 50 hp damage from single attacks.  And it rather removes the sting from criticals which means that being knocked out is only likely to apply in the real knock-down drag-out fights where cumulative non-lethal damage will exceed current hit points.Good ideas as far as they go but as I said D&D is just not built to handle well anything but direct-damage kinds of combat effects.  Any mechanic you come up with needs to be powerful enough to make it worth bothering with in at least a few cases, weak enough not to suddenly make "knockout specialist" PC's a viable approach, and easier and more sensible than, say, grappling rules?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification