We talked way back when about pulling your punches. Easier said than done when your punches are fireballs. After all, there’s a reason that merciful spell metamagic exists. Same deal with boxing glove arrows. Whenever you’ve got mind-controlled villagers to save, mooks to question, or villains to redeem, delivering a gentle KO is the name of the game. But as is so often the case, you need buy-in from the guy behind the screen.
This is one of the reasons I find the 5e D&D approach to so interesting. Here’s a quick refresher for reference:
Knocking a Creature Out
When an attacker reduces a creature to 0 hit points with a melee attack, the attacker can knock the creature out. The attacker can make this choice the instant the damage is dealt. The creature falls unconscious and is stable.
It’s the melee-specific clause that sticks out to me. It seems sensible enough. We can all imagine striking with the pommel of a dagger or the flat of a blade. But you can almost sense the generations worth of goofy arguments buried within the rule. For example, “What do you mean you just ‘shoot him a little bit.'” Or perhaps something closer to today’s comic: “How exactly do you ‘scorching ray gently.'”? And because the tribe of gamers are a bunch of litigious reprobates, there are arguments to be had. Everything from, “I aim for the shoulder,” to, “I catch him with the edge of the AoE,” can come up in-game. As a GM, it’s on you to decide how accepting you want to be of these shenanigans.
So what do you say, Handbook-World? Are you going to let your archers and magic-users get away with one in the KO department? Is it OK to let them get away with an inventive description and just incapacitate an almost-defeated opponent for free? Will you make like Sorcerer’s GM and send your PCs to fetch ye olde broom and dustpan? Whatever your take, let’s hear about it down in the comments!
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Unless an archer is using bird-arrows, there will be blood.
Unless a spellcaster has a feat to make their spells’ damage non-lethal, there will be ashes.
Even a pommel strike, if it deals enough damage or hits a weak enough target, can kill.
Woe unto the player who argues with a GM who knows their rules.
“Unless an archer is using bird-arrows, there will be blood”
There can still be blood with a bird arrow if the archer does it right…
I’d say it depends on the tone. For most campaigns, you’re not going to get a nonlethal arrow or fireball without some specific feature that says otherwise, but in a more lighthearted and less realistic game, it’s perfectly fine if your Ray of Frost is set to stun. I could also see arrows being used to pin a target’s clothes to a tree or something, like the Yu Yan archers in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
On a related note, here’s a bit of silliness from Pathfinder 2e: The investigator class gets a feat that lets them make all their attacks nonlethal at no penalty, including with alchemical bombs. This means you can safely incapacitate foes by setting them on fire or hurling acid in their faces.
I think it’s all just a chance for creativity! The acid is modified to just be a very unpleasant fizzing, like dire pop rocks! The fire is not very hot, but extremely painful! That shrapnel grenade is firing the equivalent of staples. If that seems itself kind of brutal, well, nobody said nonlethal was the same thing as humane.
I think you have proven my point about creativity. The difference here lies in the fact that we’re supporting the rules rather than gaming the system.
Sorcerer should have taken Merciful Spell. It’s really on him.
Notably, bit of the the villagers are also on him.
Mal: “If anyone gets nosy, you know, just… shoot ’em.”
Zoe: “Shoot ’em?”
Mal: “Politely.”
Just a little shooting. As a treat.
“Don’t the bible have something to say about killing?”
“Oh yes, but it’s far more fuzzy on the subject of kneecaps.”
Not to be That Girl, but I think PF2 handles this nicely! There are lethal spells and nonlethal spells. There are weapons with the nonlethal trait, or you can take a penalty to attack nonlethally (shooting for painful but non-fatal areas, firing a gun up close to stun them). It’s a (marginally) more realistic approach, which can be annoying at times, but I honestly think the calculus of choosing to weaken yourself in order to not kill somebody is part of what makes the choice interesting to begin with. It reflects that violence is kind of inherently dangerous and bloody, and you’re swimming uphill if you’re trying to make it not so. If you didn’t want to kill them, you should have rolled for Diplomacy.
But I wanted my Diplomacy check to do lethal! 😛
Oh, please. Someone at 1 hp is just as healty and can function as well as someone at full hp. The only difference with non-lethal damage is that it heals faster.
There is no permanent damage from normal attacks and no mechanic for scars, and even in the unforgiven and slow low health of Pathfinder someone will recover their lost hit points in a few weeks at most without consecuences.
This means that any attack that doesn’t kill someone is a “non-lethal” solution.
And as in: “How do you make non lethal damage with a Firebolt?” The answer is easy:
“They are at full hit point, right? They will live.”
sorce: https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0929.html
You’re telling me that someone at 1 hp can eat a hit from a run-of-the-mill fighter? There’s a reason we did this one back in the day:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unlucky-crit
4E was kind of goofy with letting you do anything nonlethally.
As a DM, baby, I like it RaW.
So you like 4e’s anything goes while playing 4e but 5e’s “melee only” while paying 5e? Fair cop. They are different games after all.
It’s important to remember that “nonlethally incapacitated” doesn’t mean “put to sleep in a clean and pretty fashion”, it means “not literally dead”. This particularly applies in D&D 5E, where there is no “nonlethal damage”, just “dead” or “stable”, and all damage heals over a long rest. An NPC who is reduced to 0 HP by a nonlethal attack is, potentially, in the same condition as a PC who has been stabbed down to 0 HP and stabbed again, but then made three successful death saves.
This is why I’m happy to allow PCs to perform nonlethal melee attacks even with things like a greataxe or an *inflict wounds* spell. They’re not in a good way, but they’ll live. For ranged attacks, I’m moderately okay with the idea of making them nonlethal by taking disadvantage on the attack. Spells with saving throws, not so much – fireballs really are indiscriminate.
I guess inflict wounds would be a melee attack, huh? What does non-lethal inflict look like? Negative energy taser?
For distance weapons, this is where called shots come in. Since we use a D100 for most actions in my game, there are endurance shots and critical hits. A called shot requires a critical hit. There are other modifiers that can bring up the chance though.
I have specific spells in my world that do non-lethal damage just for this reason. So instead of “Cloud Kill”, you get the same area of “Knock Out Gas”. I also have spells specifically set up for interrogation of subdued enemies, so the players don’t have to go to the “hot knife to sensitive areas” route.
Melee have to state at the beginning of the round that they are going for subdual damage. This entails things like hitting with the flat of the blade, flipping the pointy sword around and smacking them with the pommel or even using a blunt weapon “gently”. Some weapons, like num-chuks, I don’t allow subdual damage. The character just can’t control those enough to try and NOT do killing damage. Using them as really short clubs brings in a whole new mess of stuff, so most players don’t even try.
This is what is so fun about a home brew that is a mish-mash of lots of different systems and your own imagination. You can tailor it to your needs :).
Do you ever get worried about consistency? I know I’d have some trouble recalling how I called chucks vs. three part staves vs. bludgeon-with-crossbow-butt.
Limited weapons list + three page weapons list with stats paper clipped to the left side of my DM screen. Plus I’ve got a fair knowledge of various weapons and types of weapons, so if I have to make an on the fly decision, then I write the news stats on an index card and add it into the weapons stats and print out a new list.
This is why Sleep is such a handy spell… wait until your allies have almost got them down, then finish the job with a no-save spell.
And admittedly, hope that you’re been keeping track of your allies health, and that you’re not about to put _them_ to sleep instead. But still, a very handy option if you’re looking for prisoners.
Especially helpful if your GM likes to give out handy descriptions like “on its last lets” and similar.
Which they should, since (absent deliberate deception), a combatant will have a reasonable idea of whether their opponent is in good shape, or about to fall over.
Of course, if your opponent is visibly in a bad state, calling for surrender may also be a good option. Morale checks *are* a thing, if not used as often as they could be, and we’ve had a few opponents decide that, yes, the bard has a good point… those broken ribs *do* hurt, and a term in prison *does* have a certain attraction compared to the likely alternative.
I always liked the White Wolf description between two damage types:
Subdual or Lethal
It doesn’t really matter the kind of damage you are doing, you are either doing one or the other and that simple way to differentiate always stuck with me as a sort of understanding of intent.
The way our own DM handles it, he says that the damage done is by the weapon chosen and if the weapon in question has no way to achieve dealing non-lethal damage (like the fireball above or an arrow shot from 400 feet away etc) then the choice is not yours and unless said otherwise, it is always assumed that your damage is intended to be lethal, because that is usually the point of dealing damage.
But our DM also doesn’t just instantly kill foes. Much like the hollows can drink an Estus in Dark Souls (hey, that is player only! – my thought the first time I saw that), our DM doesn’t like the idea that NPCs just die on the last blow. So EVERYone gets death saves and it has changed our outlook on fighting in general.
the first rethink we did about combat is how we even enter combat as now we are legit killing people (taking them down and then stabbing their unconscious bodies) or we are having to deal with them etc.
the second rethink is as described we have to keep in mind that a foe we downed might get back up (and it is especially troublesome when fighting regenerating enemies because we have to keep them down through their potential stabilization!)
But it also means we can be doing lethal damage in most cases, forget or not think about it, and still potentially save someone that we maybe needed to keep around.
Of course the whole more damage than they have base HP thing is still taken into account and when you are planning to Earthquake an entire temple into rubble to stop a ritual and part of that ritual includes a bunch of random NPC villager prisoners… well, sometimes a few NPCs gotta be sacrificed before they can be sacrificed… in a sacrificial way (I know what I said! And besides, we didn’t technically know they were in the temple, we just knew the sacrifice ritual required them to be killed to complete… it was complicated)
Sometimes you just gotta fireball an orphanage and srot through the ash later.
But what about Aggravated damage? Can we flamethrower the vampires non-lethally? 😛
I honestly forgot about “Aggravated” (also a good third damage type that covers most of “the rest” of the damage one could take – poison, acid, fire, etc).
I mean… it is not Lethal is it? ;D
Hypnotic Pattern, Entangle, Plant Growth and even Speak with Plants are solid no-kill spells that can take people out of a fight for a while. I generally have at least two non-fatal /incapacitation spells on any caster.
Plant growth can be especially effective, as it quarters movement, has 100ft radius, doesn’t require concentration & casters can exclude areas. Reminding an Ancient-Paladin that he can pretty much incapacitate an entire mercenary company with one spell was *mwa!* (chef’s kiss). Look on the DM’s face was priceless too.
My bard had it but traded it for Hypnotic Pattern once the campaign went urban & naval, so not truly meta-gamey, just remembering. That does get to why I swapped it: situationality. Deserts, caves, fortresses, artic, ships on the ocean (though it could apply to a sargasso), etc make it an useless spell. But in appropriate terrain it’s awesome.
So in general, I’m hearing, “Melee shouldn’t be knocking out people. That’s the casters’ job.” I dunno… I like the idea of putting more tools in the fighting-mans’ toolbox.
No, I’m good with melees beating people unconscious. I find it amusing that you only know a target’s hit points mid-swing, but such is game mechanics.
I was more critiquing Sorcerer for his shortsighted spell selection. As a bard player, I understand limited spells known but still managed to use a Secret on Fireball.
Sorcerer can afford do know one no-kill spell. I mean, he’s not Warlock.
After a series of near-TPKs with a group that notoriously rolled poorly (especially at low levels) it became conspicuous that so many evil wizards mysteriously knew the feats Energy Substitution (lightning), Nonlethal Substitution, and Born of the Three Thunders to deal massive amounts of nonlethal AoE (plus knock-down and stun) with every evocation spell. At some point the players began to scratch their chins at the frequent “catch and release” policies of the villains, but my away-from-the-table response to a couple of players was that we had about three options: a) they begin to roll better, b) we roll up new characters every session, c) everyone goes back to fighting rats in the basement, since even a band of your average goblins were like Tucker’s Kobolds to this crew. They agreed, and the “set weapons to stun” policy wasn’t questioned again.
Heh. I think we had this conversation recently.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/pulling-punches
🙂
For archers, there is no ‘I graze him with the arrow on purpose’ unless they want to accept that arrow graze is for 1 HP. For mages, it’s trickier. Just above here, I like Jay Graham’s solution of lightning attacks subbing as tasers. I’d be willing to allow that I think. But I’m a lot less ok with non-lethaling a Fireball. What even is that? Uncomfortably Warmball?
I do have a houserule where players are allowed to take mechanically identical spells that just use different elements. A request from a player to have a ‘stun bomb spell’ would be entirely inline with a request here.
Save vs. swamp ass!
You’re going to throw Uncomfortably Warmballs at some players aren’tcha.
If you want to take someone out nonlethally, you need something that won’t kill them by accident, like a sap or an incapacitation spell or a paralyzing poison. If you want a nonlethal attack with a deadly weapon, you’re doing d4 damage as you hit with the handle.
Every weapon is also an improvised weapon if you misuse it hard enough!
I’m of the opinion that spells are strong enough as-is and they do what they say they do. Nonlethal not a written option? Buy the metamagic, pal, it’s right there.
I do think ranged attacks should have the option by default though; if anything, the -4 penalty pathfinder imposes for making a nonlethal attack with a lethal weapon represents making a called shot to something that isn’t vital for surviving.
Otherwise you’d be reducing your 2d6 greatsword damage to a 1d4 improvised weapon pommel bash.
How do you like to flavor non-lethal ranged attacks? Grazed? Pinned to a wall? Warning-shot-across-the-bow-so-they-surrender?
Mostly just hitting them, but not at body-dropping center of mass. Instead of putting an arrow through a lung, heart, or other vital organ, it was a smaller target like a leg or something. Still a wounding shot for sure, but it’s not going to kill someone on its own.
Ignore that, logically, they should still be bleeding out; most PCs don’t spec into bleed damage.
The way I handle it with my group is that the spells or attacks hit individual targets the player can pull the damage from that blow to just knock them out. If it’s an area of effect, then it just does what it does. Magic missile, choose per target. Fireball is uncontrolled splash damage.
I guess it all depends on how you handle “death” of NPC’s. I assume they’re dead unless a player says otherwise. For example, if a friendly NPC is caught in the crossfire, then they are assumed dead unless someone tries to save them. If many rounds have gone by, I’d roll retroactive death saves to determine their condition.
Good on ya. It’s always been a pet peeve of mine as a player to discover that all of the monsters are instantly dead at 0 hp, even when I want to revive and question ’em.
I wonder where this scene is taking place.
Have we ever seen this place of large crystals before?
Only 903 comics to check! Report back with your findings. :3
My willingness to accept my players’ arguments for X being nonlethal is more or less proportional to how much effort they put into it. If they just say “I set my arrow to stun” or “I fireball them nonlethally,” I’m not going to take it, but if they put any effort into thinking of how to keep someone alive I’ll probably accept it.
I’m especially likely to be lenient if “keep them alive” is something the players decided on their own than if it’s an objective I intentionally directed them towards.
I’m amused at the prospect of “set arrows to stun.” Now that I think about it though, that wouldn’t be a bad magic item as a quiver.
I’d allow archers to do nonlethal damage; either by “nonvital part but faints from shock” to situational damage (“you shoot an arrow near his head, he tries to jump out of the way and bumps his head on the wall, knocking himself out” or “in the last moment you change your aim and shoot a metal pot on a shelf above his head that falls down and knocks him out”)
For magic, well, megamagic or evoker’s sculpt spell would do it, otherwise it’s magical energies doing what they do at best.
BRB. Writing up a new flavor of metamagic.
“in the last moment you change your aim and shoot a metal pot on a shelf above his head that falls down and knocks him out”
This is a job for the Riviera Kid!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnLDt0RFOjU
Bludgeoning melee weapons can knock people unconscious, no penalty. Slashing melee weapons can do the same, but they only do half damage. Anything else can’t be used to knock someone unconscious. If you want to do a called shot to wound them (ie shoot them in the leg to slow them down), sure, but that won’t knock them unconscious. Anything else is pretty silly.
First time I’ve seen “half damage with slashing” as a solution. How does that work in-fiction?
Most slashing weapons have long/large blades. You’re hitting your target with the flat of blade, which has a fair bit of speed and mass but is spread out inefficiently, compared to cutting with it. Hence you roll normal damage, then halve it. Piercing weapons are too thin on average to have an appropriately shaped “flat” to smack someone with.
I should clarify that I’m merely stating what goes at my table, not a ruling for others!
Pull punches? Sure, everyone can reduce how many dice damage they roll, unless they are using a weapon that can’t be controlled that way, like a firearm or laser sword.
But K.O.? Nah, you want to take someone down and not injure them? Break out the grappling rules or cast a Sleep spell (or some higher tech equivalent to a sleep/KO spell).
I would allow a specialty ammunition to allow for non-lethal attacks at range, but it would basically confer resistance to the target and probably be a more expensive ammunition to boot.
Magic would require a feat, or probably an arcana/religion/nature check against your own spell DC and/or plus spell level being cast. There are already nonlethal spells, they’re called sleep, hypnotic pattern, hold monster, etc.
Not having that sort of fine-tune in-the-moment control is part of what brings martials on par with casters late game.
We had a bit of discussion recently on whether a melee attack that deals negative energy damage can be nonlethal. GM ruled that it was okay, so I flavored it a little and said “I’m gonna atrophy their knees”.
… Whole table looked at me in horror, and I think someone shouted “woah, calm down”, before I explained that I only meant to do nonlethal damage. Funny how that bit of description made it worse, somehow.
As per your citation: Knocking a Creature Out
“When an attacker reduces a creature to 0 hit points with a **melee attack**, the attacker can knock the creature out. The attacker can make this choice the instant the damage is dealt. The creature falls unconscious and is stable.”
5e is pretty consistent with the phrase “melee weapon attack.” Melee spell attacks exist and as most of them are spells like shocking grasp and inflict wounds (easy to imagine a taser effect or the wounds in question being nonleathal), I’ve never had issue with the argument that RAW these melee attacks were intended to be included as options to subdue the party’s targets.