That still, at most, gives a 50% mark. Describing hit point loss in cinematic ways does not equate to knowing the target's hit points.
Once you know the half-way mark you know the total, or at least you know it approximately; since we can assume characters know what their own abilities are they then know roughly how much damage they need to do, and how much force they need to finish something off or knock it out.
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Assuming they have that much control, why are they not always hitting for max damage?
I didn't say anything about control? I said you know roughly how much damage you need to do, e.g- if you're fighting one-on-one and have hit a creature five times for around 10 damage per hit and that gets it to half health, then you know it had roughly 100 hit-points and has around 50 (or less) remaining, so you know another four or five good hits ought to do it.
If your goal is to incapacitate rather than kill the creature then those hits don't need to be killing blows aimed at the heart or throat. Just as someone hoping to knock out a common doesn't usually open with a two-handed decapitating strike with a greataxe.
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There is no such thing as a called decapitating strike in 5e, though. The closest one gets is the DM letting you describe a kill.... after the fact. There is no 'aiming at the heart or throat.'
There were homebrewed critical hit tables floating around in the first couple editions and there likely are for 5e too, but RAW, one is only just fighting the best one can against an actively defending opponent, i.e. one not simply standing there passively allowing attackers to hit where they want.
I'm not talking about mechanics, I'm talking about how a character is acting when trying to knock out a target with the information they have; the original post about this thread is a critical hit being ruled as killing a target the player wanted to knock-out, which is clearly not what they wanted.
A critical hit is supposed to represent an especially precise or skilful strike; while dealing more damage might normally be what you want, it's silly for an especially well delivered knock-out blow to result in the target's death, when a "worse" hit might not. The entire point of the knocking out a creature rule is that if you can deliver enough damage to kill a target, you can restrain that attack to not kill the target.
As has already been pointed out you don't need to know a creature's hit-points to knock it out, you decide once you've done enough damage to do-so.
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Players do not get to know target hps. Creatures are not wearing signs revealing their stats to any who wander by.
Players don't (usually) know exact stats, but that doesn't mean their characters can't judge the weakness of a creature; creatures below half their hit-points are supposed to start showing signs of wear, though it's up to your DM how exactly they describe that
To my knowledge, this is not a rule in 5e. It's a 4e rule that has become a common house rule for 5e tables.
I mention it only because I saw someone else bring it up earlier, also.
While there is no formal Bloodied condition like 4E had, 5E has this guideline for describing the effect of damage;
Describing the Effects of Damage: Dungeon Masters describe hit point loss in different ways. When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum. You typically show no signs of injury. When you drop below half your hit point maximum, you show signs of wear, such as cuts and bruises. An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious.
That still, at most, gives a 50% mark. Describing hit point loss in cinematic ways does not equate to knowing the target's hit points.
You're correct and you are not nor you need to know the target's hit points to knock a Creature Out.
You need to know the creature's lack of hit points because it's precisely the trigger to do so.
You literally cannot attempt to Knock a Creature Out with hit points 1+
Assuming they have that much control, why are they not always hitting for max damage?
I didn't say anything about control? I said you know roughly how much damage you need to do, e.g- if you're fighting one-on-one and have hit a creature five times for around 10 damage per hit and that gets it to half health, then you know it had roughly 100 hit-points and has around 50 (or less) remaining, so you know another four or five good hits ought to do it.
If your goal is to incapacitate rather than kill the creature then those hits don't need to be killing blows aimed at the heart or throat. Just as someone hoping to knock out a common doesn't usually open with a two-handed decapitating strike with a greataxe.
There is no such thing as a called decapitating strike in 5e, though. The closest one gets is the DM letting you describe a kill.... after the fact. There is no 'aiming at the heart or throat.'
There were homebrewed critical hit tables floating around in the first couple editions and there likely are for 5e too, but RAW, one is only just fighting the best one can against an actively defending opponent, i.e. one not simply standing there passively allowing attackers to hit where they want.
Just to add to this discussion, knowing the hit points of a creature is a game mechanic and irrelevant to a creature figuring out "how hard" to hit a creature in order to knock them out.
Hit points are an abstract game mechanic: "Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile."
Only the last blow that takes a creature to zero hit points can be definitively stated to represent physical damage that is sufficient to knock a creature unconscious or kill it. Until that point, the "hit point" loss can represent some scratches and bruises, loss of nerve or determination to win, overcoming the survival instinct and just bad luck. The whole argument about "knowing the status of a creature in order to decide whether the last blow was lethal or non-lethal" based on the hit points of the target is pretty much meaningless since most of those hit points do not represent the physical damage that would knock out or kill a creature.
Finally, I kind of agree that intent should matter. It would be a fine home rule to require the players to decide whether they are trying to knock out or kill a creature before making the final blow. However, RAW, which is what we are discussing here, the decision to make the last attack lethal on non-lethal is determined when the target is reduced to zero hit points by the damage that reduced it to zero hit points. The rule for knocking a creature out is more specific than the general rule for what happens when a creature reaches zero hit points.
A creature's current hit points (usually just called hit points) can be any number from the creature's hit point maximum down to 0. This number changes frequently as a creature takes damage or receives healing.
Whenever a creature takes damage, that damage is subtracted from its hit points. The loss of hit points has no effect on a creature's capabilities until the creature drops to 0 hit points.
. . . the original post about this thread is a critical hit being ruled as killing a target the player wanted to knock-out, which is clearly not what they wanted.
A critical hit is supposed to represent an especially precise or skilful strike; while dealing more damage might normally be what you want, it's silly for an especially well delivered knock-out blow to result in the target's death, when a "worse" hit might not. The entire point of the knocking out a creature rule is that if you can deliver enough damage to kill a target, you can restrain that attack to not kill the target.
Well, we can also consider using my above suggestion about critical hits -- rolling for extra damage on a critical hit is optional. This would completely solve this particular problem. Now, whether or not a regular hit would cause death by massive damage is another story.
I agree that you do not need to know the creature's hps. However, my position is that you should announce in advance that you are taking a non-lethal approach. It cannot succeed (or at least makes no difference) until the creature reaches 0 hps, but still feel that announcing in advance makes much more sense and thus is much less immersion breaking.
So this is actually the most clear part about this rule and is specifically not what you are suggesting here. Sure, a player is free to embellish his description of what his character is saying and doing during battle and maybe that character is obviously trying to pull his punches along the way, etc., but mechanically that has no impact. Further, the DM absolutely should not require such announcements in advance since the rule states that "The attacker can make this choice the instant the damage is dealt".
The problem is, because of this specified timing, the target may already be dead from massive damage depending on how you interpret the rules in their entirety, which is the main debate in this thread.
As for the written procedure being immersion breaking -- I think that it doesn't have to be if the DM is careful. Practically speaking, I think that a lot of DMs in a lot of games are just too quick to describe the fatal consequences of an attack and then it feels like a retcon to go back and knock the creature out instead. But it probably shouldn't be that way. I think that the designers imagine the game flow to be something like this:
DM: Player's Character, there's a goblin standing in front of you that looks a bit worse for wear but nevertheless is growling menacingly at you.
Player: I attack it.
DM: Roll
Player: 16
DM: It hits!
Player: 6 damage
(The important part) DM: It's enough! And the goblin goes down! Player, how does this look when you are delivering this final blow?
(Option 1) Player: I do a cartwheel in front of the goblin to avoid his meager attempts at fighting back and while upside down I jam my longsword through his heart.
DM: The goblin cries out in pain as blood erupts from his chest and he crumples to the ground, completely and obviously dead.
(Or, Option 2) Player: While carefully avoiding the goblin's blade, I step in close and hit the goblin in the head with the pommel of my sword, attempting to knock him out with non-lethal damage.
DM: The goblin is caught off guard by your movement and is hit squarely in the head -- he falls limply to the ground, unconscious but stable.
I agree that you do not need to know the creature's hps. However, my position is that you should announce in advance that you are taking a non-lethal approach. It cannot succeed (or at least makes no difference) until the creature reaches 0 hps, but still feel that announcing in advance makes much more sense and thus is much less immersion breaking.
I see your point why it would but unfortunately in 5E a lot of rules are designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind rather than for making more sense and it's just one of many.
Nothing stop a DM from requiring it do be announce in advance to make more sense.
I see your point why it would but unfortunately in 5E a lot of rules are designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind rather than for making more sense and it's just one of many.
Nothing stop a DM from requiring it do be announce in advance to make more sense.
Actually there is kind of a rule that requires the player to describe what they're trying to do in the How To Play section, essentially the first rules of the game. It's easily missed on D&D Beyond the "Introduction" section is given special treatment (not listed as regular contents) but the text here is as much a part of the rules as anything else, since it tells us the basics of using the dice, advantage, rounding down etc.
Sometimes one player speaks for the whole party, saying, “We’ll take the east door,” for example. Other times, different adventurers do different things: one adventurer might search a treasure chest while a second examines an esoteric symbol engraved on a wall and a third keeps watch for monsters. The players don’t need to take turns, but the DM listens to every player and decides how to resolve those actions.
Sometimes, resolving a task is easy. If an adventurer wants to walk across a room and open a door, the DM might just say that the door opens and describe what lies beyond. But the door might be locked, the floor might hide a deadly trap, or some other circumstance might make it challenging for an adventurer to complete a task. In those cases, the DM decides what happens, often relying on the roll of a die to determine the results of an action.
At the most basic level this is essentially the main thing a player does in any situation; they tell the DM what they want to do, the DM describes the result or asks the relevant dice roll(s) to resolve the situation. In that sense most of the actual game mechanics take place as part of the DM describing what happens step.
And this includes combat, because any combat initiated by a player involves steps before you actually roll Initiative, i.e- the reasons and events leading up to combat occurring. Even if the player(s) didn't initiate a combat, the player(s) were doing something before it happened, and had some goals.
And they should still be describing what they're trying to do as part of their turn as that's as much a core part of the roleplaying game as the actual mechanical turn structure and actions you can take. So if the player's goal in a combat is to knock out some guards, then the triggering the Knocking a Creature Out rule shouldn't be the first time you hear about it, it's just the point at which you confirm that that's what you're doing.
There's been a lot of focus on the combat case because that's what was originally raised, but I think it's also worth remembering that the combat and damage rules are not the only way to resolve knocking out a target; if that target isn't aware of you, you can just as easily use opposed Stealth and Perception checks followed by some kind of out-of-combat attack, or an Athletics check or whatever else makes sense for the character(s) at the time. In this case combat is only a consequence if you fail, as success may result in an unconscious guard without ever rolling Initiative.
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Describing what you want to do to me is more related to the action you want to do, such as attacking. Knocking a Creature Out is not an action, it's an outcome you can choose to when your attack's damage is dealt.
Describing what you want to do to me is more related to the action you want to do, such as attacking. Knocking a Creature Out is not an action, it's an outcome you can choose to when your attack's damage is dealt.
It's still part of the back and forth of the roleplaying of the game.
In a boring game of D&D you say "I will roll an attack using my longsword against the guard" and when the DM says "they are slain" you say "actually I want to knock them out, so they're not". That's a really stilted and boring exchange, and just listing mechanics at each other. You might as well declare at the start of the fight "Each turn I will move by the minimum amount required to reach the nearest bag of hit-points and hit it until that bag is empty, wake me when the fight's over".
More likely the player says something like "I aim for the guard's head with the hilt of my longsword to knock them out" and the DM responds either "the guard staggers backward before falling unconscious" or "though reeling from the blow, the guard is still in the fight" or whatever. Ideally with more narrative flair than that, I just wanted to keep it simple.
It's easy to forget, especially in this sub-forum, that the mechanics are there to support the roleplaying, not the other way around; roleplaying and narrative is what turns fights from a contest where creatures just hack away at each other until one dies, into something more dramatic and emotive, and communicating intent is a natural part of that.
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In a boring game of D&D you say "I will roll an attack using my longsword against the guard" and when the DM says "they are slain" you say "actually I want to knock them out, so they're not". That's a really stilted and boring exchange, and just listing mechanics at each other. You might as well declare at the start of the fight "Each turn I will move by the minimum amount required to reach the nearest bag of hit-points and hit it until that bag is empty, wake me when the fight's over".
More likely the player says something like "I aim for the guard's head with the hilt of my longsword" and the DM responds either "the guard staggers backward before falling unconscious" or "though reeling from the blow, the guard is still in the fight" or whatever. Ideally with more narrative flair than that, I just wanted to keep it simple.
Knocking a Creature Out is not an action that you do with your sword's hilt to deal bludgeoning damage instead of slashing damage, it's the result of your melee attack dealing whatever damage type originally dealt that took the target to 0 hi points. It can even be a melee spell attack from any distance, such as force damage from Steel Wind Strike.
So while DM and player character can certainly announce in advance it wants to attempt Knocking a Creature Out, it doesn't have to as written, and doing so instead when the attack's damage is deal is the establishment.
Knocking a Creature Out is not an action that you do with your sword's hilt to deal bludgeoning damage instead of slashing damage, it's the result of your melee attack dealing whatever damage type originally dealt that took the target to 0 hi points. It can even be a melee spell attack from any distance, such as force damage from Steel Wind Strike.
So while DM and player character can certainly announce in advance it wants to attempt Knocking a Creature Out, it doesn't have to as written, and doing so instead when the attack's damage is deal is the establishment.
You're missing the entire point; describing what you want to do is a core part of D&D, just because mechanically the actual knocking out rule happens at the very end doesn't mean that's the only thing that's going on, or that it should be a surprise to your DM.
If the player is attacking a creature with a longsword (a slashing, bladed weapon) and says nothing about their goals, then it is reasonable for the DM (and everyone else at the table) to assume they intend to kill it (as repeatedly chopping a living creature with a sword tends to do). If the player then suddenly declares they're knocking the target out when that isn't what they've been describing up until that point, that is a fundamental breach of the "describe what you want to do" rule.
The rules aren't there so you can one-up and confound your DM, you're supposed to be telling them what's going on, it's literally part of the most basic rule of the entire game.
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While all of that is true about the general flow of D&D gameplay, in this case there is a specific rule about the timing of when the decision to knock out a creature can be made so if a DM requires their players to make this choice at a different time then that becomes a house rule, not RAW.
Steel Wind Strike is not 'from any distance.' It is from up to 30' but the caster is teleported to each target for the respective strikes.
"You flourish the weapon used in the casting and then vanish to strike like the wind. Choose up to five creatures you can see within range. Make a melee spell attack against each target."
The spell Steel Wind Strike only make you teleport after all the attacks are made as written. So not from any distance, but from up to 30 feet away.
But let's not regress, the point is that it can even be a melee spell attack from afar like Thorn Whip for exemple.
I somehow get the idea that in this whole game combat is the only instance that you make the roll and then declare your intent. In all other instances you make the declaration of what you want to do and then roll.
I get the idea that this is just an assumed instance in order to favor the player.
The excuse that it slows things down is a bit much since your only going to be declaring a non lethal strike when you think the victim is close to 0, not during the whole of combat. Unless of course your adding in an instant knockout rule and hoping to knock out a 20th level NPC with one blow to the head from behind. And then in that case your only doing it on the first attack, because if it fails your into full combat.
Imo combat flows better when the player just calls it at 0. Sure, it helps the DM narrate a little if they know the intent from the start, but players constantly saying “I attack nonlethally” is pointless and imo more disruptive to the flow.
Personally as for narrative vs mechanic, i always tend to first support mechanic and make the narrative fit rather than change mechanic to make it fit with the narrative, especially if it's disruptive to the game flow like The_Ace_of_Rogues said.
There's been a lot of focus on the combat case because that's what was originally raised, but I think it's also worth remembering that the combat and damage rules are not the only way to resolve knocking out a target; if that target isn't aware of you, you can just as easily use opposed Stealth and Perception checks followed by some kind of out-of-combat attack, or an Athletics check or whatever else makes sense for the character(s) at the time. In this case combat is only a consequence if you fail, as success may result in an unconscious guard without ever rolling Initiative.
I don't mean to get too far off of the original topic but it's my understanding that this is supposed to never be a thing in 5e. Any declaration of an aggressive action results in a roll for initiative before such action is resolved. People should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that. I do understand that out-of-combat attacks are common practice in a lot of games, but I'm pretty sure the rules do not support that.
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Where's this from? I'm having trouble searching for it.
Edit: found it. It's a sidebar in the PHB, chapter 9 "Combat."
Once you know the half-way mark you know the total, or at least you know it approximately; since we can assume characters know what their own abilities are they then know roughly how much damage they need to do, and how much force they need to finish something off or knock it out.
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I didn't say anything about control? I said you know roughly how much damage you need to do, e.g- if you're fighting one-on-one and have hit a creature five times for around 10 damage per hit and that gets it to half health, then you know it had roughly 100 hit-points and has around 50 (or less) remaining, so you know another four or five good hits ought to do it.
If your goal is to incapacitate rather than kill the creature then those hits don't need to be killing blows aimed at the heart or throat. Just as someone hoping to knock out a common doesn't usually open with a two-handed decapitating strike with a greataxe.
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I'm not talking about mechanics, I'm talking about how a character is acting when trying to knock out a target with the information they have; the original post about this thread is a critical hit being ruled as killing a target the player wanted to knock-out, which is clearly not what they wanted.
A critical hit is supposed to represent an especially precise or skilful strike; while dealing more damage might normally be what you want, it's silly for an especially well delivered knock-out blow to result in the target's death, when a "worse" hit might not. The entire point of the knocking out a creature rule is that if you can deliver enough damage to kill a target, you can restrain that attack to not kill the target.
As has already been pointed out you don't need to know a creature's hit-points to knock it out, you decide once you've done enough damage to do-so.
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You're correct and you are not nor you need to know the target's hit points to knock a Creature Out.
You need to know the creature's lack of hit points because it's precisely the trigger to do so.
You literally cannot attempt to Knock a Creature Out with hit points 1+
Just to add to this discussion, knowing the hit points of a creature is a game mechanic and irrelevant to a creature figuring out "how hard" to hit a creature in order to knock them out.
Hit points are an abstract game mechanic: "Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile."
Only the last blow that takes a creature to zero hit points can be definitively stated to represent physical damage that is sufficient to knock a creature unconscious or kill it. Until that point, the "hit point" loss can represent some scratches and bruises, loss of nerve or determination to win, overcoming the survival instinct and just bad luck. The whole argument about "knowing the status of a creature in order to decide whether the last blow was lethal or non-lethal" based on the hit points of the target is pretty much meaningless since most of those hit points do not represent the physical damage that would knock out or kill a creature.
Finally, I kind of agree that intent should matter. It would be a fine home rule to require the players to decide whether they are trying to knock out or kill a creature before making the final blow. However, RAW, which is what we are discussing here, the decision to make the last attack lethal on non-lethal is determined when the target is reduced to zero hit points by the damage that reduced it to zero hit points. The rule for knocking a creature out is more specific than the general rule for what happens when a creature reaches zero hit points.
A creature's current hit points (usually just called hit points) can be any number from the creature's hit point maximum down to 0. This number changes frequently as a creature takes damage or receives healing.
Whenever a creature takes damage, that damage is subtracted from its hit points. The loss of hit points has no effect on a creature's capabilities until the creature drops to 0 hit points.
Well, we can also consider using my above suggestion about critical hits -- rolling for extra damage on a critical hit is optional. This would completely solve this particular problem. Now, whether or not a regular hit would cause death by massive damage is another story.
So this is actually the most clear part about this rule and is specifically not what you are suggesting here. Sure, a player is free to embellish his description of what his character is saying and doing during battle and maybe that character is obviously trying to pull his punches along the way, etc., but mechanically that has no impact. Further, the DM absolutely should not require such announcements in advance since the rule states that "The attacker can make this choice the instant the damage is dealt".
The problem is, because of this specified timing, the target may already be dead from massive damage depending on how you interpret the rules in their entirety, which is the main debate in this thread.
As for the written procedure being immersion breaking -- I think that it doesn't have to be if the DM is careful. Practically speaking, I think that a lot of DMs in a lot of games are just too quick to describe the fatal consequences of an attack and then it feels like a retcon to go back and knock the creature out instead. But it probably shouldn't be that way. I think that the designers imagine the game flow to be something like this:
DM: Player's Character, there's a goblin standing in front of you that looks a bit worse for wear but nevertheless is growling menacingly at you.
Player: I attack it.
DM: Roll
Player: 16
DM: It hits!
Player: 6 damage
(The important part) DM: It's enough! And the goblin goes down! Player, how does this look when you are delivering this final blow?
(Option 1) Player: I do a cartwheel in front of the goblin to avoid his meager attempts at fighting back and while upside down I jam my longsword through his heart.
DM: The goblin cries out in pain as blood erupts from his chest and he crumples to the ground, completely and obviously dead.
(Or, Option 2) Player: While carefully avoiding the goblin's blade, I step in close and hit the goblin in the head with the pommel of my sword, attempting to knock him out with non-lethal damage.
DM: The goblin is caught off guard by your movement and is hit squarely in the head -- he falls limply to the ground, unconscious but stable.
I see your point why it would but unfortunately in 5E a lot of rules are designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind rather than for making more sense and it's just one of many.
Nothing stop a DM from requiring it do be announce in advance to make more sense.
Actually there is kind of a rule that requires the player to describe what they're trying to do in the How To Play section, essentially the first rules of the game. It's easily missed on D&D Beyond the "Introduction" section is given special treatment (not listed as regular contents) but the text here is as much a part of the rules as anything else, since it tells us the basics of using the dice, advantage, rounding down etc.
The players describe what they want to do:
At the most basic level this is essentially the main thing a player does in any situation; they tell the DM what they want to do, the DM describes the result or asks the relevant dice roll(s) to resolve the situation. In that sense most of the actual game mechanics take place as part of the DM describing what happens step.
And this includes combat, because any combat initiated by a player involves steps before you actually roll Initiative, i.e- the reasons and events leading up to combat occurring. Even if the player(s) didn't initiate a combat, the player(s) were doing something before it happened, and had some goals.
And they should still be describing what they're trying to do as part of their turn as that's as much a core part of the roleplaying game as the actual mechanical turn structure and actions you can take. So if the player's goal in a combat is to knock out some guards, then the triggering the Knocking a Creature Out rule shouldn't be the first time you hear about it, it's just the point at which you confirm that that's what you're doing.
There's been a lot of focus on the combat case because that's what was originally raised, but I think it's also worth remembering that the combat and damage rules are not the only way to resolve knocking out a target; if that target isn't aware of you, you can just as easily use opposed Stealth and Perception checks followed by some kind of out-of-combat attack, or an Athletics check or whatever else makes sense for the character(s) at the time. In this case combat is only a consequence if you fail, as success may result in an unconscious guard without ever rolling Initiative.
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Describing what you want to do to me is more related to the action you want to do, such as attacking. Knocking a Creature Out is not an action, it's an outcome you can choose to when your attack's damage is dealt.
It's still part of the back and forth of the roleplaying of the game.
In a boring game of D&D you say "I will roll an attack using my longsword against the guard" and when the DM says "they are slain" you say "actually I want to knock them out, so they're not". That's a really stilted and boring exchange, and just listing mechanics at each other. You might as well declare at the start of the fight "Each turn I will move by the minimum amount required to reach the nearest bag of hit-points and hit it until that bag is empty, wake me when the fight's over".
More likely the player says something like "I aim for the guard's head with the hilt of my longsword to knock them out" and the DM responds either "the guard staggers backward before falling unconscious" or "though reeling from the blow, the guard is still in the fight" or whatever. Ideally with more narrative flair than that, I just wanted to keep it simple.
It's easy to forget, especially in this sub-forum, that the mechanics are there to support the roleplaying, not the other way around; roleplaying and narrative is what turns fights from a contest where creatures just hack away at each other until one dies, into something more dramatic and emotive, and communicating intent is a natural part of that.
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Knocking a Creature Out is not an action that you do with your sword's hilt to deal bludgeoning damage instead of slashing damage, it's the result of your melee attack dealing whatever damage type originally dealt that took the target to 0 hi points. It can even be a melee spell attack from any distance, such as force damage from Steel Wind Strike.
So while DM and player character can certainly announce in advance it wants to attempt Knocking a Creature Out, it doesn't have to as written, and doing so instead when the attack's damage is deal is the establishment.
You're missing the entire point; describing what you want to do is a core part of D&D, just because mechanically the actual knocking out rule happens at the very end doesn't mean that's the only thing that's going on, or that it should be a surprise to your DM.
If the player is attacking a creature with a longsword (a slashing, bladed weapon) and says nothing about their goals, then it is reasonable for the DM (and everyone else at the table) to assume they intend to kill it (as repeatedly chopping a living creature with a sword tends to do). If the player then suddenly declares they're knocking the target out when that isn't what they've been describing up until that point, that is a fundamental breach of the "describe what you want to do" rule.
The rules aren't there so you can one-up and confound your DM, you're supposed to be telling them what's going on, it's literally part of the most basic rule of the entire game.
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While all of that is true about the general flow of D&D gameplay, in this case there is a specific rule about the timing of when the decision to knock out a creature can be made so if a DM requires their players to make this choice at a different time then that becomes a house rule, not RAW.
The spell Steel Wind Strike only make you teleport after all the attacks are made as written. So not from any distance, but from up to 30 feet away.
But let's not regress, the point is that it can even be a melee spell attack from afar like Thorn Whip for exemple.
I somehow get the idea that in this whole game combat is the only instance that you make the roll and then declare your intent.
In all other instances you make the declaration of what you want to do and then roll.
I get the idea that this is just an assumed instance in order to favor the player.
The excuse that it slows things down is a bit much since your only going to be declaring a non lethal strike when you think the victim is close to 0, not during the whole of combat. Unless of course your adding in an instant knockout rule and hoping to knock out a 20th level NPC with one blow to the head from behind. And then in that case your only doing it on the first attack, because if it fails your into full combat.
Imo combat flows better when the player just calls it at 0. Sure, it helps the DM narrate a little if they know the intent from the start, but players constantly saying “I attack nonlethally” is pointless and imo more disruptive to the flow.
You can even Knock a Creature Out while Grappling or Shoving if you're able to somehow deal damage during such special melee attack.
Personally as for narrative vs mechanic, i always tend to first support mechanic and make the narrative fit rather than change mechanic to make it fit with the narrative, especially if it's disruptive to the game flow like The_Ace_of_Rogues said.
I don't mean to get too far off of the original topic but it's my understanding that this is supposed to never be a thing in 5e. Any declaration of an aggressive action results in a roll for initiative before such action is resolved. People should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that. I do understand that out-of-combat attacks are common practice in a lot of games, but I'm pretty sure the rules do not support that.