Easy Non-Lethal Damage

Keeping track of two types of damage annoys me. Even worse is splitting damage rolls in half when the PCs are using "the flat of the blade" during impromptu prisoner subdual. In any case, if you kick a guy in the gut to wind him, and then stab him in the throat, he's not going to "be subdued." He's going to die.

Nonlethal damage is treated exactly as normal damage, except if the killing blow is nonlethal. If a creature's last hit points are removed by a nonlethal blow, the creature is knocked unconscious for 1d20 minutes, instead of dying. Before then, nonlethal damage has the same effects, and removes the same hit points, as regular damage - thus, if a 7HP creature takes 6HP of nonlethal damage, and then 2 HP of lethal damage, it is killed, rather than knocked unconscious.

Weapons used to subdue roll for damage as normal, but treat even numbers as nonlethal damage, and odd numbers as lethal damage.

Fun

Finally, a post with labels that are precisely descriptive!

Last night, the gang returned to the junglified Caves of Chaos. They'd cleared out the goblin lair over the last two sessions, and were on the hunt for more gold. Everyone's still level 1, because of a TPK early on and a small platoon of mercenaries I gave them as a quest reward, which suck up XP even at half shares.


Entering the ogre cave, they attempt nonverbal communication, but nobody speaks Adrastian jungle ogre. So Benesek, the faithful mercenary, rolls a 74 on his death chart - losing his face and most of his jaw. Now he's Benesek the Ugly, who heroically took the ogre's 1 attack before the mob brought it down.

They search the cave for 20 minutes, after I accidentally say "There isn't anything you've found yet," instead of "There doesn't seem to be anything there" and discover the secret door. They take the staircase up to the hobgoblin caves, and kick down the door at the top, finding a large room and surprising the 13 hobgoblins there.

They kill one, win initiative, and kill another one. There's six goblins in melee combat with the mercenaries' front line. 5 hits, roll for damage.

Four sixes and a five.

The entire front line goes down. The PC's - a ranger and his warhound, a cleric, and a wizard, now have to pull swords and jump in. More mercenaries are incapacitated. One loses an arm - roll for % of arm cut off, starting from wrist? 0-0. A hobgoblin prepares to stab the dog, and the ranger opts to take the blow. I inform him that the goblin does 1d6 damage, he has 5 HP, and the dog has 7, but he does it anyway.

Max damage. Rolled a 95. Now his gray matter is really getting that chance to commune with nature. Not quite dead, but 50-100% memory loss. (By the way, the roll for additional memory loss? 0-2. Only 52%.) He starts rolling up a new character.

The party kills all but the last two hobgoblins, does triage, feeds two healing potions to the ranger, and then scrams.

Drama and die size

For the past few sessions, I've been using the Good Hits and Bad Misses table, from Delta's D&D Hotspot for everyone's critical hits, and running handling death as no fighting at 0HP, bleeding out each round until -10HP, when you die.

I've noticed that the act of scrambling for percentile dice and looking up the result tends to add some drama to each critical or fumble - which is usually incommensurate with the fact that about 60% of the results are simply x2 or x3 damage. Which has made criticals and fumbles fairly anticlimactic.

On the other hand, death and incapacitation has been fairly low-key - the goblins and bats the PCs have been fighting never take more than a few rounds to kill, and it hasn't been difficult for someone in the rear of the party running back and stabilizing wounded individuals. Especially since I keep forgetting to keep track of people bleeding-out. I'm going to try to reverse these situations by using d20 tables for criticals and fumbles, and then using the Arduin Grimoire critical hit table as a 0HP "death and dismemberment" results table.

You roll a d20 on the appropriate table for crits and fumbles. "Special" results can be healed as a light wound, forgoing HP healing. When you hit 0HP, roll on the d100 table and apply the results. I reorganized the table so that, generally, worse effects are higher up on the list, allowing damage in excess of 0HP to be added to the roll. To my mind, this removes the need for an instant death threshold - the more overkill, the fewer merciful options available and the more likely it is you'll get Irrevocable Death. The tables are here.

Depending on the effect, I'll require a save vs. Paralyzation to retain consciousness, and since all the effects are actual injuries, I can leave healing/stabilization up to player decisions and creativity, in addition to my fading knowledge of First Aid merit badge.

Hopefully this retains the uncertainty and drama of crits/fumbles in combat that Delta discusses and makes hitting 0HP dramatic and terrifying.