snex wrote:
Govgrim wrote:
snex wrote:
Think about what "make its final attack" means in the scenario. "Final attack" of what? An arbitrarily designated 6 seconds in which it can make a full attack. But baddies don't know about these arbitrary divisions of 6 seconds.
The only thing a baddie knows is this: "I hit my enemy. He fell. Should I continue hitting him?" The answer to this question must be the same, whether the baddie is in the middle of a set of iterative attacks or whether he has just finished his last attack of the round and cannot attack again until the next round. Anything else is metagaming based on the concept of a "round" that the baddie knows nothing about.
The monster/NPC would have a visual or perceptual validation of the state of the PC. A PC with negative hitpoints still breaths and lives until he crosses that threshold. If you are suggesting that he shoudl make a heal sheck to indeed determine that the PC is dead, then shouldn't all PCs have to do the same? Like you said they don't see mechanics they see a person clinging to life or a person with their chest caved in, torn asunder, decapitated, etc...
How easily could it make that visual validation of the state of the PC in the heat of battle? Probably not so easily that it just gets to do so for free unless it is something blatantly obvious like the PC missing a head or still swinging his weapon around. Think about how difficult it is to tell if a person is dead or alive even in real life. You have to take a pulse at minimum, and even then, you can't be 100% certain. We require doctors for precisely this. You would at minimum need to make a Perception or Heal check, or something equivalent.
And yes, this should apply to the PCs as well. But which PCs actually metagame in this way? In our group, once a baddie goes down, we move on to the next one. Whether he is dead or not is irrelevant to us until the enemy cleric starts bringing them back. It only seems to be GMs who abuse iterative attacks in this way, just to get...
I think we just looped back to playstyle preference.I think alot of times when a pc or npc are dropped below 0 we don't get a detailed description but a your/their (axe/sword/arrow/magic missile)hits, doing X hit points of damage instead of a descriptive of the same attack disemboweling them. Their are injuries so terrible that common knowledge dictates death, no doctor needed.
I am not saying that you don't have a point, only that there are vast ways of playing it. There are no hard and fast rules considering how abstract hit points seem to be in the community.