Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5191924" data-attributes="member: 3448">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.</blockquote>

Verification