So, nonlethal damage is an option presented in the Basic Rules. I've copied the full text of the rule below:
Sometimes an attacker wants to incapacitate a foe, rather than deal a killing blow. 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.
I think this rule is reasonable if you're going for simplicity and fast combat, but it's not great on realism. First of all, it doesn’t make sense that any sort of melee attack can be nonlethal. A paladin with a greataxe, swinging with all the power of a Divine Smite behind them, getting a critical hit and dealing 20 slashing and 50 radiant damage… can just casually say, “yeah, it’s nonlethal,” and now you have an unconscious and perfectly stable lich on your hands. That’s hardly realistic. Plus, you can end up in a situation (which happened in one of my campaigns) where the party decides to capture the Big Bad Villain and just casually punch him out every time he wakes up for the next month, so that he’s never conscious long enough to do anything. All this done of course, without any lasting brain damage. I think we can do better than this, and I see a potential solution in utilizing the Medicine skill, which is a much less useful skill proficiency to have right now relative to say, Athletics. That’s why I present the following modified rule:
Sometimes an attacker wants to incapacitate a foe, rather than deal a killing blow. When an attacker makes a melee attack which deals bludgeoning damage, they can declare the attack to be nonlethal. This decision must be made after the attack roll is made, but before any damage is dealt. If the attack brings a creature to 0 hit points, the attacker must make a DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check. On a success, the creature falls unconscious and is stable. On a failure, the creature dies. This check is made with disadvantage if the attack was a critical hit. The DC of this check increases by 5 for every time the creature has been knocked unconscious by a melee attack in the past 24 hours.
In summary, the differences are: -must do bludgeoning damage (though it can additionally do other damage) -decision is made before damage is rolled, but after the attack roll -you make a DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check to see if you were successfully nonlethal -you have disadvantage if it was a critical hit -the DC goes up if you keep doing this to them, because eventually they’ll just die
What do y'all think about this modified rule? Are there any changes/tweaks you'd make? Does anyone else find the RAW rule unsatisfying?
Requiring bludgeoning damage is reasonable. I have knocked myself unconscious, when I slipped and hit myself in the head with a tireiron, once. I can attest it works. You don't say how the DC goes up and is the DC per PC who makes a "non lethal attack" or for each person? It's going to add a lot of dice rolls, and my question is this. Will this improve drama in the play?
A simpler solution is to give every NPC death saves. The PC drop the monster, they have 3 failed death saves before they die. If they deal enough damage to the target to instakill it, then that happens. (remember that's negative their total hp)
The DC goes up by 5 for every time the creature has been knocked unconscious by a melee attack in the past 24 hours. I'm not sure what you're asking with "is the DC per PC who makes a 'non lethal attack' or for each person?" The DC doesn't scale with number of people involved. It's the creature being hit which can affect the DC, and that's only if they've had this done to them in the past 24 hours.
I concede that these rules are perhaps overly complex, but I don't think it'd actually add many dice rolls. In my experience, players aren't usually attempting to do nonlethal damage, and if they do want to, this adds one ability check that they'd made after the attack roll hits.
As to whether or not this will improve drama in play, I think it's more dramatic than the current rules! If the party has to knock out an enemy and capture them as an objective rather than just killing them, the added risk from this variant rule would force the players to choose carefully how they attack as the enemy gets low on HP. Hitting them with fireball is now counter-productive, when you want to make sure it's someone who's decent at Medicine hitting them with a bludgeoning weapon instead.
I think giving every NPC death saves is too much, but you actually made me realize a different way of handling nonlethal damage (and perhaps this is what you meant). Handle nonlethal damage as normal, wherein your players can just declare it as nonlethal, and they don't need to make a Medicine check at the time of attack. (Perhaps you can add the bludgeoning damage requirement as I proposed.) However, instead of the creature dropping unconscious and being stable, they start making death saves instead. That way the party has to go out of their way to stabilize them before they die, whether that be by Medicine check, Spare the Dying, or whatever. You'd only use death saves when the party decides to do nonlethal damage in this case. (Is that what you meant?) I think this rule will work better.
The reason I was confused about the attacks and scaling DC, is I assumed that enemy hit points are hidden. So the party wouldn't know if the enemy is at 15 hp or 1 hp. In this scenario I imaged that a party member says "I want to go for non lethal", the makes a medicine check and rolls for damage. In the abovescenario depending on how much hp the target has and how the damage rolls go. I imaged the DC would be going up every time someone declared they were attempting non-lethal.
I envisioned a situation like this:
Enemy is at at 15 hp. Fighter attacks with great axe: "I want to do nonlethal!" Fighter rolls Medicine DC: 10 Fighter rolls minimum damage: 4, target has 11 hp. Rogue attacks with short sword: "I want to do nonlethal!" Rogue rolls Medicine DC: 15 ....
Under these condition bad damage rolls would increase the DC quickly
When I was proposing using Death Saves, I didn't mean actually roll Deaths Saves for every npc. That could be cumbersome. If a party wants to take someone alive and you assume everyone "has" death saves. Either: A) they stabilize long after the party is gone or B) they failed their saves. Then if the party wants to capture someone in the middle of a fight then they still have to spend actions/resources trying to keep them alive after they drop. Also they don't risk using AoEs over the body.
Ah yeah that isn't what I had been envisioning. Though maybe what you bring up is a good reason to allow people to declare a roll as non-lethal after finding out it's enough to drop to 0. However, I don't want to allow that, since I might be partway through describing their death, "The King's features shift and change color to the blue of a doppelgang... Oh it's non-lethal? *Cough*"
I think I'll probably change to something more like:
Sometimes an attacker wants to incapacitate a foe, rather than deal a killing blow. When an attacker reduces a creature to 0 hit points with a melee attack that deals bludgeoning damage, the attacker can knock the creature out. The attacker can make this choice the instant the damage is dealt. The creature falls unconscious and begins making death saving throws, or, if applicable, the creature dies by massive damage.
The default assumption would remain that most NPCs would immediately die upon reaching 0 HP otherwise. Thanks for helping me figure out something better than I had before!
Sometimes an attacker wants to incapacitate a foe, rather than deal a killing blow. When an attacker makes a melee attack which deals bludgeoning damage, they can declare the attack to be nonlethal. This decision must be made after the attack roll is made, but before any damage is dealt. If the attack brings a creature to 0 hit points, the attacker must make a DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check. On a success, the creature falls unconscious and is stable. On a failure, the creature dies. This check is made with disadvantage if the attack was a critical hit. The DC of this check increases by 5 for every time the creature has been knocked unconscious by a melee attack in the past 24 hours.
@FullMetalBunny It was stated that the DC only increases when the creature has been successfully knocked unconscious, not on an attempt to do so. And you only make the medicine check when the creature reaches 0 hit points.
As for possible changes:
-Any weapon with bludgeoning damage can do this.
-Any weapon without bludgeoning uses the damage die from the Club simple melee weapon (1d4 bludgeoning). The idea being you hit with hilt/pommel/handle instead of blade, but this makes it less effective.
-The sling simple ranged weapon does bludgeoning damage, so any attack that deals bludgeoning damage works. (makes slings more useful in spy/subterfuge/non-lethal campaigns if you don't have sleep darts or similar) However ranged weapons with piercing/slashing cannot be converted to bludgeoning in the same way as melee weapons.(unless you throw the weapon at them....)
-Be aware of the damage already dealt, e.g. NPC has taken 35 points of slashing damage (with the aim to kill) and 4 points of bludgeoning damage (non-lethal), medicine check succeeds, NPC is unconscious. But the NPC still has gaping wounds they're bleeding from. So maybe DM's discretion as to whether death saving throws/second medicine check to not bleed out/allow a low level healing spell(1st lvl max) to mend the wounds, without the NPC regaining conscious [must be stated before casting]?
-As for failed medicine checks on repeated knock outs, you could add it so the NPC loses intelligence score, even though (since he's stable) he stays alive. Too many of these and he hits INT 0 and is a vegetable.
All that aside, really like the idea. (and personally think the original post was clear on rules and stuff)
- Using any weapon that deals bludgeoning damage is an interesting idea. I know one of my players is playing a pacifist who uses a boomerang, so she'd love to have that as an option. I think that's a valid adjustment to the rules, although I'm not sure I'd allow it personally. I think that you need more control over the nonlethal strike than you'd have at range.
- I think that being able to use non-bludgeoning weapons in a bludgeoning way is a great idea! Bonking someone over the head with the hilt of your sword to knock them out seems like it should be an option. That seems like it's an improvised weapon rule though, not something that should necessarily be covered in the rules for nonlethal damage. The DM can decide what damage die to use, whether it's considered improvised or not, etc..., and it'd still fit in this framework.
- Oof. I think that keeping track of damage already dealt and having that affect nonlethal effectiveness would be realistic, but not something I'd actually want to implement, since that'd be significantly more work. I definitely don't think you can cast a healing spell with the intent of not waking up the healed target, since the rules seem pretty clear that if you get healed, you wake up. You could tie them up then heal them if you wanted, but now they're conscious and probably mad.
- Decreasing INT could work, but that seems like something that'd be weirdly exploitable, ya know? Like, let's knock out our wizard enemy a few times so he's dumb and sucks at magic now. We didn't technically kill him, so if the plot demands he remain alive but heavily nerfed, we did it!
Thanks for all the ideas!
W/ regards to repeated knockouts, I intend to address that as it comes up in the future, and I'll just tell players outright that it won't work long-term.
I'm revisiting this because I played in an Adventurer's League session this weekend where nonlethal strikes were relevant. We were fighting a treant, which was down to 10 out of its 138 HP (although we had no idea what its health level was). The 9th level Vengeance Paladin in the party hit the treant twice with his Flame Tongue Greatsword, critting once. He had already used Hunter's Mark; he had a belt of giant strength for STR 23, and he spent a divine smite on both. In the end, he was rolling something like 15d6+12d8+12 damage, with 6d6 of that being fire damage, which the treant was vulnerable to. We were trying to knock it out nonlethally, but he straight up killed it by massive damage in the end. If he had rolled lower on his dice, but otherwise done the exact same attack? It wouldn't have killed the treant. Just... it was weird to actually experience an even more hyperbolic damage case than I described in my first post.
Now, onto another issue a player of mine brought up with the variant rule where they get knocked down and start making death saves:
My player is playing a monk who specifically tries to seek nonlethal resolution to conflict. They have proficiency in the Medicine skill, and pretty much all their attacks are melee attacks that deal bludgeoning damage. They've pointed out however, that by changing the rule for nonlethal damage such that the target is not stable, but rather is bleeding out, someone has to spend another action to stabilize them. This increases the total number of actions necessary to knock someone out, making nonlethal knockouts a less attractive option than just killing the enemy outright. Given how much D&D incentivizes straight-up murdering your enemies, and given that I want to encourage players to seek nonlethal resolutions to conflict, I need to make sure that the action economy can at least be on the same level for both options, at least for PCs who have specifically trained to knock people out. That's why I suggest the following edit:
Sometimes an attacker wants to incapacitate a foe, rather than deal a killing blow. When an attacker reduces a creature to 0 hit points with a melee attack that deals bludgeoning damage, the attacker can knock the creature out. The attacker can make this choice the instant the damage is dealt. The creature falls unconscious and begins making death saving throws, or, if applicable, the creature dies by massive damage.
If the attacker is proficient in the Medicine skill, they can attempt to use their training to stabilize the creature as part of the same action used to make the attack. The attacker makes a DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check. On a success, the creature is stable.
The rule in the PHB specifically states that the attack has to be a MELEE attack in order to qualify to be non-lethal. Not a spell. Not a ranged attack.
I played a game recently where I cast primal savagery to do a melee spell attack, and the DM ruled it didn't qualify for non-lethal and ended up killing the creature. To be honest, I agree with his ruling.
The bludgeoning requirement is not novel (not saying you thought it was). It is used in other systems I've played. I think 3.5e had that requirement. My point is it was an established rule and when 5e was designed, it was evidently intentionally dropped to make things simpler. I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think the restriction that only melee attacks can choose this option is enough, seeing as a lot of classes just are not going to be able or willing to get in close to use that feature.
The rule in the PHB specifically states that the attack has to be a MELEE attack in order to qualify to be non-lethal. Not a spell. Not a ranged attack.
I played a game recently where I cast primal savagery to do a melee spell attack, and the DM ruled it didn't qualify for non-lethal and ended up killing the creature. To be honest, I agree with his ruling.
"Melee attack" includes both melee weapon attacks and melee spell attacks. Attacks can be "melee" or "ranged" in addition to being "weapon", "spell", or special (grappling, shoving). Following the RAW for knocking a creature out, spells which involve melee spell attacks (such as primal savagery and spiritual weapon) can be used for nonlethal strikes, since they fulfill the "melee attack" requirement of the rule. (See page 11 of the Sage Advice Compendium).
The bludgeoning requirement is not novel (not saying you thought it was). It is used in other systems I've played. I think 3.5e had that requirement. My point is it was an established rule and when 5e was designed, it was evidently intentionally dropped to make things simpler. I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think the restriction that only melee attacks can choose this option is enough, seeing as a lot of classes just are not going to be able or willing to get in close to use that feature.
Interesting to hear that previous editions of D&D had it as a requirement! I think it was a good design decision on their part to make the rules simpler. I've been DMing a campaign with this house-rule since September, and it's been interesting. 2 of my 7 players are playing characters who abhor murder of intelligent creatures, and there's been multiple instances already of needing to non-lethally take down an enemy over 5 sessions, so this rule has come up frequently. Overall, it's worked pretty well, but it's been a problem once so far.
I was setting up a boss encounter with a demon-possessed humanoid (my setting's take on lycanthropy). Initially, I was going to set up the encounter so that they'd have to nonlethally take down the werewolf while avoiding being infected by its bite (they wanted the possessed individual to survive exorcism). Given the nature of nonlethal strikes requiring melee distance and the reach of bite attacks, it was set up to be a bad time. Additionally, 2-3 party members have non-bludgeoning melee weapons. The party would need to get their weapons silvered to do any damage to the werewolf, and this would present a problem to those 2-3 party members: what weapon do I get silvered? This didn't seem like fun problems for the party to be solving, so I changed how the exorcism worked, so that it didn't require nonlethally taking down the werewolf. I just made the actual demon tougher to compensate.
Considering my reasoning behind that change to the boss encounter and the other experiences with nonlethal damage in this campaign so far, I'm considering removing the bludgeoning damage requirement. I'll present the following two options to my party and let them choose what they'd rather have be the rule:
Keep the bludgeoning damage requirement for the sake of realism. Explicitly tell the party that any weapon which normally does slashing or piercing damage can be used in a non-standard mode (hit someone with the hilt, pommel, or flat of a sword for example) to deal 1d4 bludgeoning damage instead of its normal damage die. When using a silvered, adamantine, or magical weapon, using the weapon in the non-standard mode still keeps the special type for purposes of bypassing resistance or immunity to mundane weapons.
Remove the bludgeoning damage requirement for the sake of simplicity and less restrictive gameplay.
l too have always disliked the knock out rules as unrealistic, so I have a home brew as follows:- Any weapon that is Bludgeoning can be used, but some weapons like a mace, might need a new damage catagory like ‘Crushing’ rather than just bludgeon. Any weapon that pierces the skin cannot be used, just like reaching for the baseball bat to stop an intruder rather than a carving knife! Bludgeoning damage that reaches the same amount of damage as a character’s CON stat or alternatively reaches half the character’s hit points is enough to knock them out. I use CON stat as even the toughest character can bludgeoned unconscious when hit from behind with a pool que or chair! This can keep the character’s hit points still in a reasonable state even though they were knocked out. The character then has to roll a CON saving throw to gain consciousness on their turn. This allows in game for some characters and NPC’s to recovery being flattened quickly, and sometimes not. Advantage can be given to this role if a character is tended to by a friend and a successful medicine Ability roll. The best of this is it opens up storylines, as it really helps when someone’s knocked out. Peace Siggy
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So, nonlethal damage is an option presented in the Basic Rules. I've copied the full text of the rule below:
I think this rule is reasonable if you're going for simplicity and fast combat, but it's not great on realism. First of all, it doesn’t make sense that any sort of melee attack can be nonlethal. A paladin with a greataxe, swinging with all the power of a Divine Smite behind them, getting a critical hit and dealing 20 slashing and 50 radiant damage… can just casually say, “yeah, it’s nonlethal,” and now you have an unconscious and perfectly stable lich on your hands. That’s hardly realistic. Plus, you can end up in a situation (which happened in one of my campaigns) where the party decides to capture the Big Bad Villain and just casually punch him out every time he wakes up for the next month, so that he’s never conscious long enough to do anything. All this done of course, without any lasting brain damage. I think we can do better than this, and I see a potential solution in utilizing the Medicine skill, which is a much less useful skill proficiency to have right now relative to say, Athletics. That’s why I present the following modified rule:
In summary, the differences are:
-must do bludgeoning damage (though it can additionally do other damage)
-decision is made before damage is rolled, but after the attack roll
-you make a DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check to see if you were successfully nonlethal
-you have disadvantage if it was a critical hit
-the DC goes up if you keep doing this to them, because eventually they’ll just die
What do y'all think about this modified rule? Are there any changes/tweaks you'd make? Does anyone else find the RAW rule unsatisfying?
Jazz Jungle Japes is Best Jungle Japes
I think they are interesting, but overly complex.
Requiring bludgeoning damage is reasonable. I have knocked myself unconscious, when I slipped and hit myself in the head with a tireiron, once. I can attest it works.
You don't say how the DC goes up and is the DC per PC who makes a "non lethal attack" or for each person?
It's going to add a lot of dice rolls, and my question is this. Will this improve drama in the play?
A simpler solution is to give every NPC death saves.
The PC drop the monster, they have 3 failed death saves before they die. If they deal enough damage to the target to instakill it, then that happens. (remember that's negative their total hp)
The DC goes up by 5 for every time the creature has been knocked unconscious by a melee attack in the past 24 hours. I'm not sure what you're asking with "is the DC per PC who makes a 'non lethal attack' or for each person?" The DC doesn't scale with number of people involved. It's the creature being hit which can affect the DC, and that's only if they've had this done to them in the past 24 hours.
I concede that these rules are perhaps overly complex, but I don't think it'd actually add many dice rolls. In my experience, players aren't usually attempting to do nonlethal damage, and if they do want to, this adds one ability check that they'd made after the attack roll hits.
As to whether or not this will improve drama in play, I think it's more dramatic than the current rules! If the party has to knock out an enemy and capture them as an objective rather than just killing them, the added risk from this variant rule would force the players to choose carefully how they attack as the enemy gets low on HP. Hitting them with fireball is now counter-productive, when you want to make sure it's someone who's decent at Medicine hitting them with a bludgeoning weapon instead.
I think giving every NPC death saves is too much, but you actually made me realize a different way of handling nonlethal damage (and perhaps this is what you meant). Handle nonlethal damage as normal, wherein your players can just declare it as nonlethal, and they don't need to make a Medicine check at the time of attack. (Perhaps you can add the bludgeoning damage requirement as I proposed.) However, instead of the creature dropping unconscious and being stable, they start making death saves instead. That way the party has to go out of their way to stabilize them before they die, whether that be by Medicine check, Spare the Dying, or whatever. You'd only use death saves when the party decides to do nonlethal damage in this case. (Is that what you meant?) I think this rule will work better.
Jazz Jungle Japes is Best Jungle Japes
The reason I was confused about the attacks and scaling DC, is I assumed that enemy hit points are hidden. So the party wouldn't know if the enemy is at 15 hp or 1 hp.
In this scenario I imaged that a party member says "I want to go for non lethal", the makes a medicine check and rolls for damage.
In the abovescenario depending on how much hp the target has and how the damage rolls go. I imaged the DC would be going up every time someone declared they were attempting non-lethal.
I envisioned a situation like this:
Enemy is at at 15 hp.
Fighter attacks with great axe: "I want to do nonlethal!"
Fighter rolls Medicine DC: 10
Fighter rolls minimum damage: 4, target has 11 hp.
Rogue attacks with short sword: "I want to do nonlethal!"
Rogue rolls Medicine DC: 15
....
Under these condition bad damage rolls would increase the DC quickly
When I was proposing using Death Saves, I didn't mean actually roll Deaths Saves for every npc. That could be cumbersome. If a party wants to take someone alive and you assume everyone "has" death saves. Either: A) they stabilize long after the party is gone or B) they failed their saves. Then if the party wants to capture someone in the middle of a fight then they still have to spend actions/resources trying to keep them alive after they drop. Also they don't risk using AoEs over the body.
Ah yeah that isn't what I had been envisioning. Though maybe what you bring up is a good reason to allow people to declare a roll as non-lethal after finding out it's enough to drop to 0. However, I don't want to allow that, since I might be partway through describing their death, "The King's features shift and change color to the blue of a doppelgang... Oh it's non-lethal? *Cough*"
I think I'll probably change to something more like:
The default assumption would remain that most NPCs would immediately die upon reaching 0 HP otherwise. Thanks for helping me figure out something better than I had before!
Jazz Jungle Japes is Best Jungle Japes
@FullMetalBunny It was stated that the DC only increases when the creature has been successfully knocked unconscious, not on an attempt to do so. And you only make the medicine check when the creature reaches 0 hit points.
As for possible changes:
-Any weapon with bludgeoning damage can do this.
-Any weapon without bludgeoning uses the damage die from the Club simple melee weapon (1d4 bludgeoning). The idea being you hit with hilt/pommel/handle instead of blade, but this makes it less effective.
-The sling simple ranged weapon does bludgeoning damage, so any attack that deals bludgeoning damage works. (makes slings more useful in spy/subterfuge/non-lethal campaigns if you don't have sleep darts or similar) However ranged weapons with piercing/slashing cannot be converted to bludgeoning in the same way as melee weapons.(unless you throw the weapon at them....)
-Be aware of the damage already dealt, e.g. NPC has taken 35 points of slashing damage (with the aim to kill) and 4 points of bludgeoning damage (non-lethal), medicine check succeeds, NPC is unconscious. But the NPC still has gaping wounds they're bleeding from. So maybe DM's discretion as to whether death saving throws/second medicine check to not bleed out/allow a low level healing spell(1st lvl max) to mend the wounds, without the NPC regaining conscious [must be stated before casting]?
-As for failed medicine checks on repeated knock outs, you could add it so the NPC loses intelligence score, even though (since he's stable) he stays alive. Too many of these and he hits INT 0 and is a vegetable.
All that aside, really like the idea. (and personally think the original post was clear on rules and stuff)
- Using any weapon that deals bludgeoning damage is an interesting idea. I know one of my players is playing a pacifist who uses a boomerang, so she'd love to have that as an option. I think that's a valid adjustment to the rules, although I'm not sure I'd allow it personally. I think that you need more control over the nonlethal strike than you'd have at range.
- I think that being able to use non-bludgeoning weapons in a bludgeoning way is a great idea! Bonking someone over the head with the hilt of your sword to knock them out seems like it should be an option. That seems like it's an improvised weapon rule though, not something that should necessarily be covered in the rules for nonlethal damage. The DM can decide what damage die to use, whether it's considered improvised or not, etc..., and it'd still fit in this framework.
- Oof. I think that keeping track of damage already dealt and having that affect nonlethal effectiveness would be realistic, but not something I'd actually want to implement, since that'd be significantly more work. I definitely don't think you can cast a healing spell with the intent of not waking up the healed target, since the rules seem pretty clear that if you get healed, you wake up. You could tie them up then heal them if you wanted, but now they're conscious and probably mad.
- Decreasing INT could work, but that seems like something that'd be weirdly exploitable, ya know? Like, let's knock out our wizard enemy a few times so he's dumb and sucks at magic now. We didn't technically kill him, so if the plot demands he remain alive but heavily nerfed, we did it!
Thanks for all the ideas!
W/ regards to repeated knockouts, I intend to address that as it comes up in the future, and I'll just tell players outright that it won't work long-term.
I'm revisiting this because I played in an Adventurer's League session this weekend where nonlethal strikes were relevant. We were fighting a treant, which was down to 10 out of its 138 HP (although we had no idea what its health level was). The 9th level Vengeance Paladin in the party hit the treant twice with his Flame Tongue Greatsword, critting once. He had already used Hunter's Mark; he had a belt of giant strength for STR 23, and he spent a divine smite on both. In the end, he was rolling something like 15d6+12d8+12 damage, with 6d6 of that being fire damage, which the treant was vulnerable to. We were trying to knock it out nonlethally, but he straight up killed it by massive damage in the end. If he had rolled lower on his dice, but otherwise done the exact same attack? It wouldn't have killed the treant. Just... it was weird to actually experience an even more hyperbolic damage case than I described in my first post.
Now, onto another issue a player of mine brought up with the variant rule where they get knocked down and start making death saves:
My player is playing a monk who specifically tries to seek nonlethal resolution to conflict. They have proficiency in the Medicine skill, and pretty much all their attacks are melee attacks that deal bludgeoning damage. They've pointed out however, that by changing the rule for nonlethal damage such that the target is not stable, but rather is bleeding out, someone has to spend another action to stabilize them. This increases the total number of actions necessary to knock someone out, making nonlethal knockouts a less attractive option than just killing the enemy outright. Given how much D&D incentivizes straight-up murdering your enemies, and given that I want to encourage players to seek nonlethal resolutions to conflict, I need to make sure that the action economy can at least be on the same level for both options, at least for PCs who have specifically trained to knock people out. That's why I suggest the following edit:
Jazz Jungle Japes is Best Jungle Japes
The rule in the PHB specifically states that the attack has to be a MELEE attack in order to qualify to be non-lethal. Not a spell. Not a ranged attack.
I played a game recently where I cast primal savagery to do a melee spell attack, and the DM ruled it didn't qualify for non-lethal and ended up killing the creature. To be honest, I agree with his ruling.
The bludgeoning requirement is not novel (not saying you thought it was). It is used in other systems I've played. I think 3.5e had that requirement. My point is it was an established rule and when 5e was designed, it was evidently intentionally dropped to make things simpler. I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think the restriction that only melee attacks can choose this option is enough, seeing as a lot of classes just are not going to be able or willing to get in close to use that feature.
"Melee attack" includes both melee weapon attacks and melee spell attacks. Attacks can be "melee" or "ranged" in addition to being "weapon", "spell", or special (grappling, shoving). Following the RAW for knocking a creature out, spells which involve melee spell attacks (such as primal savagery and spiritual weapon) can be used for nonlethal strikes, since they fulfill the "melee attack" requirement of the rule. (See page 11 of the Sage Advice Compendium).
Interesting to hear that previous editions of D&D had it as a requirement! I think it was a good design decision on their part to make the rules simpler. I've been DMing a campaign with this house-rule since September, and it's been interesting. 2 of my 7 players are playing characters who abhor murder of intelligent creatures, and there's been multiple instances already of needing to non-lethally take down an enemy over 5 sessions, so this rule has come up frequently. Overall, it's worked pretty well, but it's been a problem once so far.
I was setting up a boss encounter with a demon-possessed humanoid (my setting's take on lycanthropy). Initially, I was going to set up the encounter so that they'd have to nonlethally take down the werewolf while avoiding being infected by its bite (they wanted the possessed individual to survive exorcism). Given the nature of nonlethal strikes requiring melee distance and the reach of bite attacks, it was set up to be a bad time. Additionally, 2-3 party members have non-bludgeoning melee weapons. The party would need to get their weapons silvered to do any damage to the werewolf, and this would present a problem to those 2-3 party members: what weapon do I get silvered? This didn't seem like fun problems for the party to be solving, so I changed how the exorcism worked, so that it didn't require nonlethally taking down the werewolf. I just made the actual demon tougher to compensate.
Considering my reasoning behind that change to the boss encounter and the other experiences with nonlethal damage in this campaign so far, I'm considering removing the bludgeoning damage requirement. I'll present the following two options to my party and let them choose what they'd rather have be the rule:
Jazz Jungle Japes is Best Jungle Japes
Greetings dice rollers,
l too have always disliked the knock out rules as unrealistic, so I have a home brew as follows:- Any weapon that is Bludgeoning can be used, but some weapons like a mace, might need a new damage catagory like ‘Crushing’ rather than just bludgeon. Any weapon that pierces the skin cannot be used, just like reaching for the baseball bat to stop an intruder rather than a carving knife! Bludgeoning damage that reaches the same amount of damage as a character’s CON stat or alternatively reaches half the character’s hit points is enough to knock them out. I use CON stat as even the toughest character can bludgeoned unconscious when hit from behind with a pool que or chair! This can keep the character’s hit points still in a reasonable state even though they were knocked out. The character then has to roll a CON saving throw to gain consciousness on their turn. This allows in game for some characters and NPC’s to recovery being flattened quickly, and sometimes not. Advantage can be given to this role if a character is tended to by a friend and a successful medicine Ability roll. The best of this is it opens up storylines, as it really helps when someone’s knocked out. Peace Siggy