Moral distiction between Lethal and Non lethal damage


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


For the sake of simplicity, i will describe a hypothetical situation similar to the one that played out in my campaign. I was playing as Chaotic Good Rogue with a group of other good characters that shared similar morals, very Robin Hood style. We come across a known merchant who was known to cheat on his trades, and we felt 100% justified in stealing from him- but not killing of course. I Started the fight pulling out my sap to deal non-lethal damage. I thought the plan was to just knock him out, steal his things and run. But then, the cleric of Milani pulls out her morning star and bashes the mans head in, dealing lethal damage to disable him. Myself and my character are originally shocked and immediately go to check to see if he is okay, Then the cleric casts stabilize on him. We loot the things, leave him on a relatively well traveled path and leave.

The player's logic (as well as his characters) is this: "In a world where there is magical healing, nearly killing someone is vastly different than killing someone and shouldn't be considered an immoral thing to do"

I had problems with this, but Metagame wise it made sense. I still disagree with this, but what are your opinions on the matter?


...and then a monster happened upon him and ate him.

Also, the cleric's lucky the man didn't actually die from the attack itself - especially since he's just a merchant, not a fighter, and so can't be expected to have high Con/Fort. It's hard to accidentally kill someone with a nonlethal sap; it's easy to accidentally kill someone with a lethal morningstar. And that's especially true when the victim is physically quite weak.

Silver Crusade

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In this case, I would call it borderline evil. While yes, most things can be cured via magic, it still inflicts damage and trauma. There's the lasting effect of pain. Plus the rules don't take into account concepts like brain damage, which may still have an effect in an RP fashion.

I'd definitely look at that character's alignment as a GM.

Also, by that logic, torture doesn't kill either....


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I get your point, but being hit with a sap bloody hurts.

At the end of the day, the Morningstar will do much more wounding than the sap, but lets not think that a beatdown with a sap is a gentle exercise in sending someone off to Snoozeland... its not a gentle footrub.

Assault is still assault, even if you are chosing a 'less likely to be lethal' method of doing it.

Sovereign Court

Lethal blow is lethal too that's kind of cheesy trying to argue otherwise. Sounds a bit meta gamey to me. Sure he knows all about magical healing but does the character know about hit points and death? Seems like he is playing fast and loose which is ok but eventually as a GM I would have him kill somebody.


Depends how much verisimilitude you want. In real life "just" knocking someone out (you know, giving them a concussion) has a high tendency to result in death. Or permanent brain damage. Though on the other hand it is very much easier (than in Pathfinder) for a group of people to grab and restrain someone. As GM, I'd tend to consider this sort of thing evil...and communicate this clearly beforehand to the players. But the purpose could otherwise be served by going through the grapple, pin, tie up route.


VDZ wrote:


I had problems with this, but Metagame wise it made sense. I still disagree with this, but what are your opinions on the matter?

It sounds as a great discussion to handle in-game. Your characters disagrees on the matter, and in that disagreement there are RP opportunities.

Who seems right or wrong outside the game, doesn't really matter. It could land either way: The cleric accepting your rogue's position and trying to use non-lethal damage; or, maybe he isn't convinced by you, and stick to his (slightly metagamey) smash-and-heal tactics. Neither will ruin the game in any way, so you might as well play it out at the table.
While discussing matters out of game can be a must for serious issues, sometimes it is better to leave it in the game to avoid it being a discussion on "you are playing this the wrong way".


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Pan wrote:
Lethal blow is lethal too that's kind of cheesy trying to argue otherwise. Sounds a bit meta gamey to me. Sure he knows all about magical healing but does the character know about hit points and death?

If he's a cleric, he probably has a pretty good understanding of how badly someone can be hurt and still be healed without any long-term injury. He doesn't think of it as "hit points", but the character's understanding is probably at a roughly similar level as the player's. I don't think it's really meta-gaming.

On the other hand, he should also understand that he's taking a significant risk of killing someone. One crit with a morning star and suddenly the guy's dead. Just that fact alone makes it a pretty iffy act, alignment wise.

Liberty's Edge

Yeah, it's metagaming.

Some of the players I play with do the same thing, "He already has some nonlethal on him. You don't have to hold back anymore."

When I'm running a character committed to not killing someone they do nonlethal damage the whole way through.


It's not a fault of metagaming, it's a fault of the rules.


Unless you're allowing clerics to have a massive effect on the game world (i.e. there's pretty much no disease anywhere outside of dungeons because a quick Remove Disease cures it all), there's no reason to assume that any random person you happen across has unlimited access to cures in the same way that an adventuring party with a Cleric does - especially when that person is left unconscious alone outside of a city.

Remember that high-level characters are rare, most high-level clerics don't sit around all day waiting for random people to come to them for healing, novice clerics in city temples have extremely limited cures per day, and the guy is unconscious in the wilderness, no matter how well-traveled he is what makes you think bandits or a bear won't get him?


The PCs live in a world that runs on the d20 rules. Presumably, the PCs know these rules by observation. It is very hard to outright kill someone with a morning-star. A commoner 1, with 10 con must suffer 12 points of damage to die. A morning star, wielded by a strength 14 cleric does, at most, 11 damage.

Given that the cleric of Milani is a cleric she knows that she can stabilize the merchant no matter what happens.

You could call this meta-gaming, but if a character has hit many people with her morning-star, and they have never outright died, it would take a very stupid character to not notice that.


Knight Magenta wrote:

The PCs live in a world that runs on the d20 rules. Presumably, the PCs know these rules by observation. It is very hard to outright kill someone with a morning-star. A commoner 1, with 10 con must suffer 12 points of damage to die. A morning star, wielded by a strength 14 cleric does, at most, 11 damage.

Given that the cleric of Milani is a cleric she knows that she can stabilize the merchant no matter what happens.

You could call this meta-gaming, but if a character has hit many people with her morning-star, and they have never outright died, it would take a very stupid character to not notice that.

You're overlooking two things:

1) Critical hits exist.

2) The victim doesn't have the same sort of easy access to cures that a cleric does.


I think you can choose to fail to confirm a critical. You can always choose to miss an attack, and a critical confirmation roll is just an attack roll. Though if your DM does not allow this, then you would need to wait until your target was level 2 or 3 :p

It does not matter what the victim has access to. He has access to a cleric who will stabilize him right there during the attack :) I think the cleric of Milani's point is that the likely-hood of the person dying to the morning-star hit is very very low.

Think of it this way: where is the best place to be grievously wounded by a murderer? Answer: In a hospital.

Edit: Though I agree with you that leaving the merchant at -10 and stable in the wilderness is an evil act. A level 1 npc is quite likely to be there for 20ish hours until he wakes up. When he does wake up, he will not be able to defend himself (or take standard actions) for 10 days. That's a death sentence in most places where PF takes place.


What might be more important than if beating someone with a morning star till they are unconscious is evil, might be that a party of good characters even took part in beating someone to steal from him because he was a cheater of trades. Think about this a second. Does a good person rationalize beating a person based on some crime he may have committed?

At the very least that is very vigilante. At the worst its evil actions rationalized by other bad actions. Did your mother ever tell you that two wrongs don't make a right? You might want to reconsider your own alignment. Right now you are doing evil things, maybe with the best intentions, but that doesn't change your actions.

Stealing from someone like this merchant could have gone down wholley differently, using skill checks to convince him to hand it over (after all, it sounds like you had him at a disadvantage. You all are big scarey adventurers, and he is a lowly merchant). I think this is what intimidate is all about, and why it is based on Charisma. Surely one of your band of merry men is dashing and can make a "this is a robbery" speech while you unload his goods.


There's a big difference in recovery time between being stabilized at -5 and being knocked out at nonlethal damage 5 higher than hit points. As in, if it's a Com1 with average scores, it'll take more than a week to recover if it's lethal (at least without professional aid), if it's nonlethal it'll take like half a day.

That leads me to the conclusion that there's QUITE a bit more hurt in being dealt lethal damage than nonlethal damage.

Now, if they didn't HAVE to deal lethal damage (they had nonlethal means accessible, or the encounter wasn't forced upon them, or they weren't in real danger), then I would see it as an evil action as it is "arbitrarily violent" (as mentioned in the chaotic evil description).

But as a single occurance, I don't think it should ever get close to an alignment change. If it's a cleric of a good god, and he keeps this up though, I do think he should get a warning from his god in some way.


The cleric's argument looks to me to be "It doesn't matter how much lethal damage he takes because as long as he's still alive he just needs to be zapped with a few Cure Light Wounds and he'll be fine."

Which, you know, would almost make sense if the merchant were himself a positive-channeling Cleric, as opposed to an ordinary civilian with no obvious means of access to cures.


Yeah, if the cleric had actually healed him fully afterwards (when tied up) it'd have a stronger case (though still a bit evil) but just stabilizing and leaving? No frakkin' way that's not at least a little bit evil.

Silver Crusade

Having NPCs react realistically to what PCs do can do wonders with curbing crazy behavior born out of metagaming.

Well..."can". Not necessarily "will"...

Strongly advocate having NPCs view PCs behaving callously* as callous, and sociopathic PCs** ans sociopaths. Hearts and minds these PCs may have won over*** are going to be turned away when stories of their merry maulings circulate.

Preventing the NPCs from feeling like props to the players helps too, especially when they start imagining their victims as people rather than just obstacles and targets, and hopefully really think about what their characters are doing to them and why.

*Which seems to be the general range you're finding your players in at the moment.

**Too often a result of not nipping the former in the bud soon enough.

***Something a follower of Milani should be bearing in mind, honestly.


I agree that leaving the merchant at -10 and stable is not nice. I was arguing that dealing lethal damage is not, in principle, evil.


Non-Evil != Good.

The PCs were doing a "Robin Hood" style adventure, and I think it is commonly accepted that Robin Hood is Chaotic Good. They were not living up to Robin's standards, but they were still trying to do good. In my mind, that's Neutral.

If they were robbing for their own benefit, it would be Evil.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Knight Magenta wrote:

Non-Evil != Good.

The PCs were doing a "Robin Hood" style adventure, and I think it is commonly accepted that Robin Hood is Chaotic Good. They were not living up to Robin's standards, but they were still trying to do good. In my mind, that's Neutral.

If they were robbing for their own benefit, it would be Evil.

Robin Hood did not generally slug his victims to unconsciousness. In fact that's not generally what Highwaymen do.


Ah, but Robin Hood did not live in a world with magical healing :)


Well, what if I were to use a combination of blunt implements, electricity, and irritants to torture you without leaving a mark or lasting effect. You wouldn't even need to pass out. Is that okay? Technically I didn't hurt you at all, but boy was it painful.

Or a more practical, what if you were an a*!#*+~ so I walked up and beat you savagely. Maybe you deserved it, maybe not... but I couldn't see Gandhi or Mother Teresa doing it. Good people do not solve mundane problems with violence or by causing pain to others.

Evil people beat up people they don't like and take their stuff with or without rationalization. The fact that you had a good reason is like putting a gorilla in a dress, its still a gorilla.


Removed a post and reply. Please refrain from being excessively graphic.

Shadow Lodge

There is no moral distinction between lethal and non-lethal damage. Only the purpose of the damage can differentiate that.

Both of the OP's example characters were acting immorally by assaulting and robbing another person.


<@><@>

Does it sound like meta-gaming. Yes.

As your playing a Fantasy RPG Game, i do not see anything wrong with meta-gameing.


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Lethal vs. Lethal combatant - ok
Non-Lethal vs. Lethal combatant - ok
Lethal vs. Non-Lethal combatant - GM discretion (typically evil)
Non-Lethal vs. Non-Lethal combatant - ok
Lethal vs. Non-Combatant - Evil
Non-Lethal vs. Non-Combatant - GM discretion (typically evil)

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