subdue rules?

[Holy Bovine]

Yep, you can fry someone with a lightning bolt, burn them with radiant energy, stab them with multiple sharp implements, crush their bones with various blunt objects or fry their minds with awesome psychic powers and all of it can be considered non lethal if the last point is called to be non lethal.

Hawkeye

Well - no not really. It is still damage that must be healed either through rest or magic. And if a player tried to tell me he was only doing 'non-lethal' damage to the Kings Guard when he attacked them I would laugh in his face.

 

[Black Knight Irios]

Well - no not really. It is still damage that must be healed either through rest or magic. And if a player tried to tell me he was only doing 'non-lethal' damage to the Kings Guard when he attacked them I would laugh in his face.

Me too b/c there is no non-lethal damage in 4E.

 

[Johnnii]

Also, you take them out of the fight, it says nothing more. While they won't be having any lethal injuries, nothing says that the downed opponent hasn't suffered some serious permanent and debilitating injury (loss of limb, shattered limb bone, 3rd degree burns that will keep them scarred for the rest of their life etc).

 

[Hawkeye]

Well - no not really. It is still damage that must be healed either through rest or magic. And if a player tried to tell me he was only doing 'non-lethal' damage to the Kings Guard when he attacked them I would laugh in his face.

Martial healing is magical? Second wind is magical? I agree with your point that it's all damage, but not all healing is magical in 4e. The last point of damage being what determines what is or isn't lethal is one of my little nits with 4E.

Hawkeye

 

[Hawkeye]

I think that using magically dealt-damage is probably the weakest way to argue this point. After all, it's magic. There's no logic stopping the fighter from resisting being disintegrated by sheer bloody mindedness or grit (and then being mentally or physically fatigued from doing so, something which some words of encouragement could definitely help with), and there's absolutely nothing stopping the disintegration from simply not disintegrating vital organs in order to incapacitate. Hell, 3e even had a feat to allow precisely that.

Replace disintegrate with a 2 ton boulder. It

Hawkeye

 

[mneme]

Also, you take them out of the fight, it says nothing more. While they won't be having any lethal injuries, nothing says that the downed opponent hasn't suffered some serious permanent and debilitating injury (loss of limb, shattered limb bone, 3rd degree burns that will keep them scarred for the rest of their life etc).

Eh. That's a dick move.

The rules have a way to subdue an opponent. Unless you've negotiated some other rules, turning around and punishing a player for following the rules by making their character less heroic (particularly in situations where the player is trying to avoid exactly that) is just rude.

Wizards does seem to occasionally use "this opponent will fight to the death" as a clue that certain foes aren't subduable -- and will always be destroyed when knocked to 0 hp regardless of an opponent's desires.

 

[mneme]

Replace disintegrate with a 2 ton boulder.

Ok, that's simple: You can't use a boulder non-lethally.

4e lets you subdue rather than kill whenever you reduce an opponent to 0 HP with a power.

It explicitly -doesn't- let you do so with ongoing damage (which you don't have control of) or traps (likewise). Find a non-magical power that drops a 2 ton boulder on someone and you'll have a case.

Effectively, when you're fully in control of the effect, you can use it to knock them out, scare them into submission, disarm them, drop them into a cave and fill it in under them; destroy their clothing selectively and put them out of the fight as they try to put themselves together, etc. This is the case when you're attacking with a weapon, or when you're using a spell.

If you're not fully in control of the effect, you're not fully in control of the effect.

 

[The_Fan]

So that fireball that just blasted your party only hurt your feelings?

Hawkeye

No, but none of the blows up until that point were particularly serious. They might've been light scratches, blows to armor that knocked the wind out of you and left bruises, a power hit to your shield that left your arm feeling numb, a flash burn that singed your hairs but hurt the skin no worse than a sunburn, a really tiring dodge (think a slow motion haircut), etc.

When you get bloodied, you've taken a more serious wound, because of the number of effects that key off it, but still something recoverable. Pressure cuts, a burn that's blistering, a bleeding gash to your bicep (that missed the major veins and arteries), etc.

This is an ongoing argument though, and pretty much any damage thread will come back to it eventually.

Back to the original post, only the last point of damage really matters, and if dealt by you (and not terrain, ongoing damage, or an aura), you can decide whether it killed or not. If you don't kill, you can decide exactly how it incapacitates. However, the DM is still able to veto. If the DM says the opponent can't be taken peacefully, he's still fully within his right to do so, though the DM should inform the players of that. Simply saying after the fact that guard with a wife and kid that the player intended to peacefully incapacitate is now crippled for life seems like a bit of a dick move.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

People are completely correct about 4e's rules on subdual: only the last point of damage matters, you can freely decide to make it subdual instead of lethal.

That said, I really dislike this rule from 4e. In my experience, there are basically four types of D&D games with regard to subdual: games where PCs would never want to subdue enemies; games where the only reason to subdue enemies is characterization (to play a less bloodthirsty character); games where PCs almost never want to subdue enemies, but do occasionally in rare circumstances (we mostly fight bad guys, but once in a blue moon we have to fight past the good guards, or the dominated ally, or whatever); and games where subduing enemies is very common and useful, often for interrogation purposes. 4e's approach works great for games in the first two styles--if you kill everything, it doesn't matter, and if everyone kills everything except for Joe the Peaceful as color, that doesn't matter either.

But I don't like it's effects in the other two types of games. It means that when the PCs end up fighting a good guy, the importance of not killing them is just fluff without any consequences. And it means that in an investigatory style game where prisoners are more useful than corpses, there are always as many prisoners as you could possibly want, unless the GM (rather cheesily, in my opinion) declares that the enemies all happen to have died. In previous editions (most notably 3.X), you could gain the benefit of subduing by either taking a disadvantage to your attacks or by wielding suboptimal weapons that gave you that added flexibility. I like that trade off, and I miss it in the game that I run.

I do like that spellcasters can be as nonlethal as weapons-based combatants, and I can understand that sometimes the old nonlethal rules were overly complicated for the benefit, especially if they come up rarely. And it means that you can write an adventure where the PCs are seeking a prisoner to interrogate where carelessness with damage can't derail things. But I do dislike the notion that taking prisoners is totally free, especially in a context where people are flinging around fireballs and slicing people up with swords.

 

[Gothire]

My method of non-lethal damage

I have a fairly simple set of house rules for non-lethal damage:

You must declare before an attack is made that you are targeting a non-lethal area of the body (yes, I know people can bleed to death from almost anywhere, but this is drama, not ER). If you're doing an area attack, you can specify that some targets will be attacked lethally and others won't (I figure if you have to make an attack roll against each target and you might miss or hit each individual, you must have some basic control over how an area attack fills an area; also, for example, an elven wizard could use elven accuracy to reroll an attack roll against one target in an area, but not the others, again implying some degree of control). If the target is not bloodied, there is no penalty to the attack roll. If the target is bloodied, there is a -2 penalty (the logic being that once you're bloodied, you're fairly injured and there are fewer nonlethal areas left for you to be injured in). If the attack that brings the target to 0 hp or lower is a nonlethal attack, hit points are still lost as normal (including going to negative HP), but the target need not make any death saving throws: they are automatically stable as if the Heal skill was used on them. However, remember that you still die automatically at negative HP equal to your bloodied value, so super-powerful attacks used on a very weak target may still kill it even if they are declared "non lethal," and using fireballs in areas with fallen allies will reduce their HP further, possibly bringing them to negative HP equal to their bloodied value and killing them. Also, any lethal damage taken while KOed will start the death saving throw process as normal.
Exceptions/clarifications: If you're using an attack that does ongoing damage, the ongoing damage is considered to be lethal or nonlethal based on whether the main attack was lethal or not, and it cannot be changed later (if you do ongoing fire damage for example, you can light their beard on fire rather than their flesh). If the ongoing damage is what brings the target to 0 HP or lower, the normal rules for lethal or nonlethal attacks apply as normal (keeping in mind that ongoing damage or a KOed target could eventually bring it down to its negative bloodied value in HP and kill it anyway). Zones which do damage are always considered to be lethal unless the DM rules otherwise. Since minions only have 1 HP and hence no Bloodied value, an non-lethal attack on a minion will always KO rather than kill them, but any lethal damage (a poorly placed fireball, for example) while they are KOed will kill them. At the DM's discretion, certain creatures cannot be attacked nonlethally, but in that case the damage is treated as normal, not ignored (classic examples of such creatures would be undead and constructs).


The reason I did it this way is that I wanted to not make the PCs constant murderers. I figure, if KOing someone is just as easily as killing them, then those who always choose to kill (as most PCs would) now look like the bad guys, and those who KO now have to deal with a bunch of prisoners constantly, which is a headache. This way, you have the option, and it's not too difficult to take it, but you have a reasonable excuse why you don't always subdue (because it's harder and you risk your own life and the lives of your allies if you do).

Of course, this house rule lead to a PCs death, but that's a story for another day...