The beautiful abstraction of inflationary hit points is an efficient, streamlined, and (most importantly) fun way of handling combat damage.
Once you get outside of combat, however, they do take a toll.
Falling damage is oft-cited, but doesn’t really bug me any more: If your character is capable of punching out a dragon (and they are), the fact that they can jump off a skyscraper doesn’t really seem that implausible. My philosophy is let the demigods be demigods.
But the one tack-on effect that does bug me is the loss of stealth-based play. You can’t just sneak past the guards, because in practice that usually just means that you end up with enemies in front and behind you. And since the system is designed to make it difficult to take out your typical opponent in one hit (because that doesn’t make for a fun combat), it’s impossible to execute a “quiet sweep” (by taking out opponents without raising the alarm). So, in general, your only viable option within the mechanics is to go for a full breach every time. And this is a problem that is typically exacerbated as the PCs gain levels.
(You’d think that having a wider range of weaker opponents would counteract this trend, but in practice it doesn’t because the players don’t have a reliable way of knowing which opponents are weak enough for the “guaranteed take-out”. Since a failed stealth attempt will generally put you in a bad position and the group can usually just overwhelm targets they could successfully take-out during a stealth op, my gameplay experience suggests that they’re rarely willing to take the gamble with the odds stacked so heavily against them. This could be addressed by adding a mechanic that would allow PCs to figure out “how tough is this guy?”.)
Another solution, of course, would be to increase the lethality of the system. The D20 version of Call of Cthulhu, for example, lowered the Massive Damage Threshold to 10. This encourages stealth-focused play from both sides — it makes the PCs vulnerable in open melees and makes it possible for them to take out opponents in a single, stealthy blow.
Of course, in D&D, setting the MDT to 10 would simply turn the game into a big crap shoot of save-or-die. Not much fun. I’ve long been tempted to play around with setting the MDT to a character’s Constitution score + HD in a D20 game just to see what would happen. That might work for an E6 game; although beyond that point the lethality would start creeping back up into save-or-die territory.
But I digress. My point is, using MDT to solve the problem will also impact how combat itself plays out. Which may not actually be desirable. So let me tweak it a little bit and propose something different.
SURPRISE DAMAGE THRESHOLD
Create a “surprise damage threshold”. If a flat-footed character suffers more damage than their surprise damage threshold during the surprise round, they are knocked unconscious.
This rule allows the PCs to dogpile a single sentry or small group to help guarantee that their stealthy behavior pays off. And by requiring the damage to be dealt during the surprise round, you’re eliminating random knock-outs at the start of every fight. (The flat-footed requirement is there to make this strictly about achieving surprise.)
What value should the SDT be set at? That’ll probably require some tweaking and playtesting, but Constitution score + HD might not be a bad place to start. You could also add a Fortitude save like the regular MDT rules require.
I like it. However, does this result in rogues with a surprise round being too effective at mid to high levels? Sneak attack damage is scaling at an average of a little under 2 per level, so scaling the threshold at 1 per level means sneak attack is likely to gradually overwhelm it. You’ll eventually get to the point that rogues can regularly one-shot boss monsters in a surprise round… which might honestly be pretty awesome.
If the point is to take out guards in an effort to sneak past them (not kill them, just knock them out) then rogues should be the ones best capable of doing that. And it really only works if they’re able to get them one by one – anyone notices what you’re doing and you’ve lost the element of surprise, so having a group of guards still means having to bring the whole group in to fight.
I love this idea. Being able to sneak ahead and actually take care of guards on my own instead of just having to sneak back and say “yup, we’re gonna have to go kill some things, and you all are so freaking loud that as soon as we all start moving down this hall everyone will know we’re here” would be amazing. The few times in game when I’ve felt confident that my sneak attack damage would be enough to take out solitary guards was awesome and I think really added an interesting variation in how we proceeded into an area.
Stephen, for a lot of monsters, like Giants, I think HD is scaling by 1.5 per CR. They’re getting some free Con too, it should work out.
ps Can we put the security question above the Submit Comment button so I quit forgetting to answer it?
This is something that’s bugged me since forever too. You might be onto something with this suggested rule, and it’s good that rogues profit from it quite heavily (thanks to sneak attack).
However, I don’t think it’s right if (storywise important) boss monsters get taken out by the rogue before the rest of the party even sees them.
Also, how would this work with someone stealthily (invisibly?) arriving during an ongoing combat? Have they lost the opportunity?
I like this – but it requires you to add a new bit of info to the character sheet / monster stat block, which is bad.
My method of dealing with it was to modify the coup de grace rules:
“If a defender is unaware of you, you may attempt a surprise knockout as a standard action with a non-lethal weapon or unarmed attack. You roll to hit as normal (though your target is usually flatfooted when unaware of you), and deal your non-lethal damage as though you had scored a critical hit.
If the defender is not unconscious from the damage, he must make a Fortitude save (DC 10 + damage dealt) or be knocked out. Sneak attack damage is also applied against an unaware opponent when delivering a surprise knockout.
You can’t deliver a surprise knockout against a creature that is immune to critical hits. You can’t deliver a surprise knockout attack against a creature with total concealment.”
Also, how long does knockout last? How easy is it to reawaken a knockout-out ally?
I’d use the rules for sleep: A standard action can be used to awake them.
Duration I’d probably ad lib. Or maybe number of minutes = damage to dealt. Or damage dealt in excess of SDT.
The Black Company D20 campaign setting has a novel (if deadly) approach for dealing with this very issue. In the suprise round damage is done directly to CON -this quite well reflects the books, where a number of super powerful characters are taken out in ambushes, however for most games this will probably be too deadly.
I really like this idea, but I’d specify damage in a “surprise round to a flat-footed target.” Otherwise, you’re creating yet more incentive for characters to pump initiative so they can act before their opponents and drop them into unconsciousness, regardless of how sneaky and surprising the scenario is. Limiting it to surprise rounds makes the damage pretty uniquely the territory of sneaky rogues and ambushes, which is really where I think it should be.
@Pedantic: Actually, it was already limited to the surprise round. “If a flat-footed character suffers more damage than their surprise damage threshold during the surprise round…”
But, yes, that’s exactly why I did limit it to the surprise round: You want to reward the PCs for being sneaky, not just randomly hand out extra bonuses for high initiative scores.
Is this balanced when used against the PCs? Groups of monsters with Hide checks now have the skill “deal enough damage, one PC loses next turn to wake him back up” — that’s not that bad, but what about lurkers that catch a PC split from the party and can render him unconscious one turn and CDG the next?