When a creature falls in combat, do you simply remove the miniature (or whatever marker you use) from the board and treat the space as empty? I've always marked it and treated the space as difficult terrain. With larger corpses, it might be able to provide cover. More recently, it's become a little tedious in fights with a large amount of creatures or fights in restricted spaces. Some creatures I have dissipate when they fall, all for flavor (like a cloud giant decomposing into a cloud), but most of the time stuff just falls and stays.
What do you guys do?
We tend to remove them, as it just makes things more complicated then it needs to be.
We remove them also. In the case of a larger critter, we'll leave the corpse on if it's a real source for cover, but otherwise, it goes as well. Combat is complicated enough as it is.
I tend to either leave the miniature "corpses" on the field or remove them depending on what kind of mood I'm trying for in the campaign I'm running (and how much time I think I have). For sessions when I know I have allot of time for a more elaborate battle with mobs of enemies I like to keep the enemy corpses as they lie as it makes for a more tactical combat.
However... if I'm trying to move the story along in a session with a limited time frame, I'll often hand-wave away that aspect of combat to make for quicker fights.
If they're substantial (in size or in importance), I usually tip the miniature over and leave them.
Sometimes they cause difficult terrain, but usually not for just one medium critter (which actually takes up very little space in a 5' by 5' square).
One time a pile of bodies built up in a doorway (due to bad planning on the bad guy's parts, and good planning on the part of the PCs), and it was used for cover and distraction. And it made good difficult terrain.
I think that the game itself focuses very heavily on what combatants can do with themselves, but not as much with the environment around them, so corpses can be a way to remind folks about that!
Plus, very occasionally, a good PC wants to NOT kill as many things as possible, so they can still heal them :)
normally I remove them,
sometimes when it seems important they will stay,
like two dead ogres on a 5ft wide staircase, the PC's had chosen that spot to fight because they figured that the first dead ogres would block the way for the following
Mr. Fishy makes sandwiches...wait corpses right?
Always removed them. If it helps make it easier to reconcile, think of the action as not unlike removing an opponent's chess pieces from the board after defeating them.
I draw it on the map.
My wife's necromancer animates them. Much cleaner and much more useful that way :)
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Wait... what have you heard?
I think I played D&D for about two years before it occurred to us that goblins (or any NPC) didn't' die until you got them to -10 HP. Needless to say ever since then we have left a lot of people mortally wounded laying around.
The minis always get taken off the board, usually to replace a mini that doesn't actually look like what we are fighting.
I lay the mini down. I like to keep track of where things happened in case, say, someone wants to go for the sword that guy was holding.
I don't usually treat it as difficult terrain unless the enemy was at least large. If you're watching where you're going, you can easily stop over a body on the floor (or stand on, if you want to, bodies are pretty solid).
I think I played D&D for about two years before it occurred to us that goblins (or any NPC) didn't' die until you got them to -10 HP. Needless to say ever since then we have left a lot of people mortally wounded laying around.
The minis always get taken off the board, usually to replace a mini that doesn't actually look like what we are fighting.
One of my more jerky DM's turned my alignment evil when I spent a few rounds coup de gracing some lizardfolk that I *really* didn't want getting back up. I'll admit, I was a bit morally ambiguous. But, really, I had just spent the last couple of rounds actively lighting these things on fire and shoving lightning in their...orifices. And suddenly making sure they stay down is evil?
Wait... what have you heard?
John Wilkes Booth would like a word with you.
I lay the mini down. I like to keep track of where things happened in case, say, someone wants to go for the sword that guy was holding.
I don't usually treat it as difficult terrain unless the enemy was at least large. If you're watching where you're going, you can easily stop over a body on the floor (or stand on, if you want to, bodies are pretty solid).
I think I'll start adopting that, then. I can picture how someone would easily be able to step over a medium sized corpse, but I'd like to keep the idea of difficult terrain for larger corpses, to add a little spice to movement and positioning in combat. So far it hasn't proved overly complicated, but with counting everything as difficult terrain, it was tedious.
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
I keep a Gelatinous Cube in a Portable Hole for just such an emergency...
we remove minis as well as to make things simpler
I usually remove them but if they are unconscious or under any kind of effect that allows them not to act I tip the mini over on its side. You can buy some really cool wounded and dead markers to paint. I've wanted to do that for a while now.
If you're playing on a hard surface, a dead body can bleed all over the place creating an area that requires balance checks, thus the loss of dex mods. That makes "dead minis" new battlefield conditions. (paper minis work well for that.)
I usualy draw little humorous stick figures on the mat, so people know thats where somethng died, and typically with something to designate who it is. I suppose I have even had a stack of 3 or more medium sized baddies have become difficult terrain.
So, how many Medium corpses can fit into a square? When to they start spilling out and casuing difficult terrain in adjacent squares? How big is a pile of 20 corpses :)
Sometimes, when it's a real meatgrinder of a fight, I'll remove the minis and lay down tiles where they fell, to represent difficult terrain. But like someone else said, that's usually only if the opponents are large or larger.
I tend to dress them like various disney princesses
Or Santa Claus. Tis the Season....
I don't usually treat it as difficult terrain unless the enemy was at least large. If you're watching where you're going, you can easily stop over a body on the floorThe reason for calling it difficult terrain is that you have to "watch where you're going" (thus slowing you down) in order to "easily stop [sic] over a body" (i.e. avoid Balance checks).
When you're in combat and hustling, it's actually not at all easy to step over something the size of an armored body that is sprawled out on the floor. Actually, it's very easy to get tripped up by them.
Sure, speed bumps are "easy" for a car to traverse, but they still slow you down. Same with bodies laying all over a battlefield.
There is no reasonable argument for being able to realistically move about a battlefield strewn with bodies at your normal pace. The only argument for not making the terrain difficult is for the sake of simplicity ... beside the fact that D&D combat has never really been "realistic" in the first place :-)
I just find that the image of a gory battlefield strewn with dead bodies (denoted by the ever increasing piles of flipped tokens) that is slow and dangerous to move about better fits with the tone of my own grunge-fantasy world. I buy the simplicity argument from those who make it, but it's not for me.
FWIW,
Rez
Yes, but even a large armored body (unless it's Directly in the path, such as a doorway or trail) takes up less than half of a 5'x5' square, and can usually be walked around, which means that it takes longer to traverse...ohhh... Still, there's only a chance. that it needs to be walked around, so unless it's large or a particularly big critter, or even just an important fight, it may be easier just to get rid of it. Maybe balance check for speed, if you want to add the complication.
Still, it's also a matter of tone (certainly in your example). If you want to remind the player's that the characters are hacking upon and killing things, that's a good way to do it.
One of my more jerky DM's turned my alignment evil when I spent a few rounds coup de gracing some lizardfolk that I *really* didn't want getting back up. I'll admit, I was a bit morally ambiguous. But, really, I had just spent the last couple of rounds actively lighting these things on fire and shoving lightning in their...orifices. And suddenly making sure they stay down is evil?I think I played D&D for about two years before it occurred to us that goblins (or any NPC) didn't' die until you got them to -10 HP. Needless to say ever since then we have left a lot of people mortally wounded laying around.
The minis always get taken off the board, usually to replace a mini that doesn't actually look like what we are fighting.
Oooh I hate that.
"You did this bad thing, so now you're evil".
What, good people never do bad things? They're -monsters-. Whether your character is chastised for it in the afterlife or not, CdGing monsters is not an evil act. It's a brutal act, but not one that will magically turn you evil.
Ugh. I hate it when DMs pull crap like that. Alignment is something I feel strongly about. Being Lawful Good for example isn't being an avatar of Law and Good. Like in an old OotS comic put it, as long as you -try- to live up to the ideals of your alignment, it isn't going to change. Feeling bad about doing something bad is a part of being good. DMs who actively look for reasons to change a well played player character's alignment need to focus on other things, like running the game and making sure everyone is having fun.
Rant over and sorry about the threadjack.
Oooh I hate that."You did this bad thing, so now you're evil".
What, good people never do bad things? They're -monsters-. Whether your character is chastised for it in the afterlife or not, CdGing monsters is not an evil act. It's a brutal act, but not one that will magically turn you evil.
Ugh. I hate it when DMs pull crap like that. Alignment is something I feel strongly about. Being Lawful Good for example isn't being an avatar of Law and Good. Like in an old OotS comic put it, as long as you -try- to live up to the ideals of your alignment, it isn't going to change. Feeling bad about doing something bad is a part of being good. DMs who actively look for reasons to change a well played player character's alignment need to focus on other things, like running the game and making sure everyone is having fun.
Rant over and sorry about the threadjack.
If nothing else, the GM should have warned him of the consequences BEFORE the first coup de grace.
Back on topic: We usually remove minis. Even so, we had one game where we were being pursued by a castle's guards. We ran down a hall, closed a door behind us, and turned it invisible. The guards (who turned a corner shortly afterwords) ran straight into the door. While they all fought to pick themselves up and un-entangle themselves from one another, I opened up the door so our fighter and barbarian (who were flanking the door) could tear into them. Just as they recovered I cast grease on the floor inside the open doorway. As more guards came rushing through the choke point, and slipping, our two bruisers (along with the sneak-attacking rogue) piled up the bodies. We got so many (leaving the mini corpses on the map) that it plugged up the doorway. Eventually, they sent a wizard after us, but by then we had made good our escape..
Heh, I thought this thread was going to be more along the lines of "101 uses for a dead NPC." Color me embarrassed.
On coup de grace . . . I've always thought that people were a bit too harsh on this particular action. I think there is a reason the rules never say its an evil act.
In combat, in a combat round, which lasts six seconds, taking six seconds to make sure someone you just dropped is really dead doesn't sound nearly as premeditated as it does as an action in a game, i.e. deciding to kill a helpless opponent.
In fact, you see all sorts of "heroes" in movies and other media that take a second to pull a sword across an opponents neck or to stab one more time into an opponent in the brain just in time to get back into the fight.
I think this is a little different than, say, sneaking up on a sleeping person and performing a coup de grace, but maybe its just me.
I have thought about using bodies as difficult terrain before, and while it makes perfect sense from a logic standpoint, a lot of maps tend to get very cluttered as it is, and adding so many extra squares of difficult terrain would slow things to a crawl in a lot of cramped battles.
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Although I'll probably be changing what I do in my next campaign due to my reading of this thread, unless they are important or very large, dead bodies simply disappear when I DM. I like to keep large dead bodies not only for cover, but for neat ideas, such as the one time I had a player in a Saga Edition use a disabled AT-ST as a stepping stone on his path to landing on top of a AT-AT (and yes he was a jedi)
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On coup de grace . . . I've always thought that people were a bit too harsh on this particular action. I think there is a reason the rules never say its an evil act.
In combat, in a combat round, which lasts six seconds, taking six seconds to make sure someone you just dropped is really dead doesn't sound nearly as premeditated as it does as an action in a game, i.e. deciding to kill a helpless opponent.
I once used a coup de grace to kill a high-level NPC fighter who was getting transformed against his will in a monster and was begging me to kill him. It was the absolute only way my mid-level patrician with zero combat skills could do it.
I challenge anyone to find it an evil act. In fact, it was true to the original meaning of coup de grace : mercy killing.
And concerning evil acts (according to real-world laws at least) committed by "heroic" PCs, what about leaving wounded enemies to bleed to death ? It casually happens in every fight and I have never seen a healer cast a Stabilize on an enemy, except maybe to keep him alive for questionning.
Now, about enemy NPCs' corpses, I will say only this :
NPCs of Golarion, RISE.
Mostly I bury them in the woods beside my house, it fertilizes the trees.
.....
What are you lookin' at?
Do you mulch them up first?
On advice from my lawyer I will not answer this question. That is all.
My rule is that if you move through a square that has a corpse in it its counted as difficult terrain.
If you fight in a square with a corpse you have to make a acrobatics check each round or fall prone. The DC is 10 + 1 per creatures body 1 size category smaller then the PC +2 per creatures body thats the same size category as the player +3 if the creature is 1 size category larger then the player.