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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6309054" data-attributes="member: 5143">I don't think they were disabled for the same reason everyone else said.  They were just made more useful.  You don't have to take minuses, use special equipment or have a special build to be able to non-lethally fight someone.  If the group wants to keep an enemy alive, they will be.  If they choose not to, the person doing non-lethal isn't punishing the party.It really isn't any different.  In 3.5e, if someone was doing non-lethal it just meant we had to hit it another time or two with lethal damage to kill it.  It was still possible for someone to accidentally kill the creature that had non-lethal on it.  After all, if a creature had 50 hitpoints and had taken 35 lethal and 10 non-lethal, an attack for 15 lethal still killed the enemy.Because 95% of the standard D&D plots exclude all those other ways.Here's the average D&D scenario involving that dragon:The PCs are asked to recover a powerful magic item hidden in a dragon hoard by the King.  The dragon discovered the item recently and picked it up and brought it back to his lair.  He loves the item and finds that it completes his collection completely.  He will not give it up for anything.  He is a dragon, he is extremely overconfident, capable of defeating almost anything to come into his lair and he knows it.  He's also Chaotic Evil which means he loves causing chaos and suffering whenever possible.  The more chaos and suffering he creates, the happier he is.  If the PCs want the item, he'd tell them no just because it is more fun to see them suffer.  The dragon hates intruders and loves his privacy.  He loves killing because he loves the look on people's faces as they die and the sounds they make when they scream, being Chaotic Evil.  He regularly makes trips to the nearby villages in order to capture and eat villagers to sate his hunger and there are bounties on his head from at least 5 different villages.  The King is amongst these people and will offer a larger bounty than all the other villages if you bring back the dragon's head.The item is in a magically locked chest in a secret chamber at the back of his cave since he valued it so much that he locked it up specially.  His lair has wards on it that inform him when any creature enters it.  It will even wake him from sleep.  The wards detect even invisible creatures.Now, if you have a DM who runs that as written, find me a group of adventurers where that DOESN'T end in combat.  Half the party will want to kill the dragon simply because it is in the way and talking to it takes effort.  The other half will want to kill it simply because they are good aligned and don't want the dragon taking any more lives.  Even if you get the rare group who is extremely uncaring and yet diplomatic who want to talk to the dragon and don't care that it is slaughtering people....then you have the bounty on its head which means they might just do it for the money.  Even if you get past all of that, the dragon isn't willing to negotiate or befriend them.  It wants them out of his house and doesn't want them to come back.  Or, more likely, it wants to kill them just to hear them scream.  There might be a brief negotiation followed by the dragon trying to kill them.Is it possible that there's a scenario where you sneak past or befriend a dragon?  Sure.  But it's likely if that scenario exists, it is because your DM planned for it to be a non-combat encounter all along.  I've almost never seen a situation where a combat encounter was turned into a non-combat encounter.  Most D&D combats are set up to be nearly unavoidable on purpose.  You don't see Conan negotiating with the Evil Cultists about to summon their Ancient God for a reason.</blockquote>

Verification