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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 3870456" data-attributes="member: 2268">That heavily depends on the players, their background in fantasy RPGs and different genre expectations, etc. My current group has one player who has had nearly no contact with stuff like that, and who constantly tries to apply real-world expectations to the game, which in turn makes me try to find rule applications that cover those expectations. I know she'd flip me the bird if I told her that a helpless creature can't be killed with one good stroke. The thing is that even new players will often try to go for very lethal attacks, hoping to get them through and kill the opponent in a spectacular fashion, so something like coup de grace is definitely useful. In contrast to that, save or die effects are mainly DM tools to equip monsters and special opponents with, and are a lot less intuitive to new players. In my experience, of course.Since Mustrum Ridcully brings that up as well in his post...a coup de grace following some sort of helplessness-inducing magic is not really default either, since it takes some good timing and maneuvering on the sides of the characters. Maybe I'm the only one who loves to integrate special environments in his adventures (I'm still dreaming of getting a group on a mystaran airship and have them adventure around with it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ), but then experience is all I can speak from either.I admit that I took the "hit points" angle a bit out of this thread's context. I simply read that "solution" so often recently, in connection with the save or die threads for example, that I simply reacted to it. For that, I apologize.I definitely like the coup de grace rule in so far as it is the first really clearly outlined rule for that kind of situation, where older editions often lead to heated discussions as to how arbitary the DM was allowed to kill off characters in "helpless" conditions, which lead to a few very wonky rulings in my first few years with D&D. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

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