Alternatives to nonlethal damage?


Homebrew and House Rules


So I'm not a terribly big fan of nonlethal damage. I just don't really like it. So I've been trying to develop or find an alternative to it that works a little better.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on things they've done/tried/thought up that could make nonlethal damage better? Or even just different, if you like how it is now?

Verdant Wheel

what don't you like about it exactly?


I probably should have stated that outright, yes, sorry about that.

I dislike that the healing is essentially doubled when nonlethal damage is present, because it makes knocking out a healer more difficult than other things. I also dislike that it's so...guaranteed.

In my mind, I'd like to see two things come about with a nonlethal damage system. The first is that there's no guarantee you don't accidentally kill the creature you're attempting to take prisoner, and the second is that it be harder to knock someone out than to simply kill them (though not as hard as the current system).

What we've done and what we're doing:
(I was hoping to not taint other people's advice with my stuff, so feel free to think about anything you have before reading. :) )

Spoiler:
We played for a session using 5e's ruling about simply choosing whether someone went unconscious when they got taken to negatives, but it didn't work well. There were a lot of issues with how much healing was required to bring them back to consciousness, and it lacked any possibility of lethality.

Currently we're using a system where lethal damage can't be cured until all nonlethal damage is cured (so essentially, nonlethal damage goes first, rather than being doubled), and the *bonus* damage from critical hits is always nonlethal damage, even if you took the -4, unless you have a merciful weapon.

Verdant Wheel

Nonlethal damage does not exist.
Nonlethal hits do.
If you get hit for X nonlethal 'damage', instead there is a X% chance to have to make a DC X Fortitude save or be knocked out.

Sovereign Court

Judge things when appropriate and just allow a knockout blow here and there if it seems reasonable.

If you're looking to capture people alive there are alternative methods to dealing damage as well. Various spells, combat maneuvers, demanding surrender, binding lethal wounds, etc.

I'm curious how this is coming up as an issue for you and your group at all really.


The knockout chance is interesting.

Morgen, that's not really a *fair* system. It's very...autocratic. Since the flavor and theme are absolutely decided by the DM, that means that the DM absolutely decides when knockouts will occur. I can already visualize the headaches that would occur with trying to float that rule.

Binding lethal wounds is what they ended up doing. They just happened to get lucky and knocked her to negative instead of outright killing her. Pure chance.

The specific encounter was against a brainwashed priestess that was fighting them to the death. They wanted to take her alive, but it was...difficult. Due to her spells, and, especially, her healing.

So obviously, demanding surrender was pointless. Combat maneuvers weren't terribly useful since she had freedom of movement up. What spells would you have recommended for taking her captive, instead?


I'm assuming the party is around 7th-8th level, since freedom of movement is a 4th level spell. That being said, my first solution would be dispel magic to remove freedom of movement (f o m), followed by silence.

Hilariously, spell immunity can be used to make her immune to f o m.

Remove curse or restoration could work, depending on the nature of the brainwashing. Granted, restoration has that tricky 3 round casting time.

Wall of ice is another option - placing the hemisphere around her would make a barrier nearly a foot thick. F o m doesn't help escape this. This only has minutes duration though, compared to f o m's 10 min/lvl.

Stone shape would be even better, transforming around 18 cubic feet of stone into anything, like for example a hemispherical prison. Duration is instantaneous, so the result can't simply be dispelled. I'm feeling too lazy to check the math on this; 18 cubic feet might not be enough unless they can corner her somehow. Or maybe it's more than enough.

EDIT: Calculator Soup says 18 cubic feet on a hemisphere would net a diameter of about 4 feet, if solid. Seeing as the shape you create would be hollow, I could easily see it being enough to safely cocoon a Medium creature.

If there's any chance she'd fail the save, an deep slumber might do it. Blindness/deafness would also be handy. Or bestow curse.

Alternatively, if she uses a holy symbol for casting/channeling, use a Steal or Sunder maneuver to remove that - the only maneuver f o m disallows is grapple. You could also use Dirty Trick to blind or deafen her.

More unconventional attempts? Zone of truth, and then the PCs explain what is going on to the priestess. Not guaranteed to work, as the zone only keeps you true to what you believe, not the objective truth. But it could be an icebreaker to get her to listen long enough for a bard to get his glibness on.

There may be an outsider that can help via lesser planar ally, but I'll leave that to someone else to check out. Too many options there.


This was a boss fight, so spending three rounds on restoration would have resulted in their deaths. Also, she would never have allowed them to get a spell out. The damage would have interrupted them...just before it finished, to make them waste turns. Plus, it was physical brainwashing, not magical, so that wouldn't have helped.

Dispel magic would have helped with the FOM, but the party only had one left for the day, and it went towards dispelling the blade barrier that was cutting the room into three sections. The priestess was merrily teleporting between the three sections and forcing the melee types to take damage or be useless.

The party is 10th level, and the priestess was 11th level, making the dispel check not a great chance, either.

How would encasing her in a wall of ice help? She'd be fully conscious and ready to kill them after the wall went down. It would also allow her some bonus time to buff and heal herself. This would actually help her quite a lot.

She's immune to deep slumber. She also had a very good will save, being a cleric.

Stone Shape is an interesting idea. As a DM, I certainly would have allowed a reflex save to allow her to avoid being trapped by something the caster created, similar to the transmute mud to rock spells and similar, but her reflex save was poor on account of being a cleric, so it might have caught her. The PCs could then have chiseled away the top part of her coffin and hit her in the head repeatedly. This would have been a clever and inventive way to trap her. An extremely powerful use of the spell. The players didn't think of it and didn't have a stone shape prepared (not sure why; it's one of those spells you should always have prepared, in my opinion).

The players did not attempt to steal or destroy her holy symbol, though perhaps they should have, as she had only the one holy symbol, plus the one in her armor. Destroying her armor would have allowed them to stop her channeling. Dirty trick would have been effective, yes, but, again, the players didn't think to use combat maneuvers for some reason. I'm not sure why.

All in all, a lot of these are effective ways to beat her, but with the exception of the stone shape, they don't really address how the players would have had an easier time taking her alive, other than the fact that destroying her armor and shield would have made her easier to hit and thus easier to bludgeon into unconsciousness. The group is scared of breaking their treasure, though, so they never do this. I don't think I've *ever* seen them sunder something.


Anyway, I think the post title may have been slightly misleading. While I'm happy to answer direct questions as to why this or that didn't work or why the players didn't try this or the other, I'm not looking for alternative ways for the players to take people alive, I'm actually looking for an alternative to the nonlethal damage system. The standard response for "taking someone alive" is to conk them in the head if your physical, and ensorcell them somehow if you're a mage. I know the magical options exist. I'd like a better system for the physical side, just because I'm unhappy with it as it is now.

Verdant Wheel

Nonlethal Coup De Gras.
You must catch your foe unawares (DX-denied? flanked?).
They don't actually take any damage, but if the 'damage' roll exceeds their remaining HP, or if they fail the Fortitude save, they go unconscious.

RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16

The book keeping is the only thing I don't like about the current system. How about a system like this: all nonlethal deducts from hitpoints as normal except you have the option to take an additional -2 penalty minimize the damage as if you rolled a natural 1 on all damage dice. If the hit reduces the target below zero hitpoints, they are knocked unconscious and have their hitpoints set to zero. However, if the hit reduces their hitpoints to Constitution or lower, they die as normal. This follows the criteria:
1) It's harder to knock someone unconscious than killing them because you take a penalty on your attack rolls.
2) There's still a risk of killing the person if your knock out deals too much damage.

It SHOULD be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to take a teleporting cleric prisoner when she has freedom of movement and fights to the death. Even in real life, suicidal combatants are dangerous and difficult to capture. Additionally, it strikes me that the GM specifically designed the encounter this way.


You could homebrew a Fatigue system addition. If the character takes damage in excess of their total number of Hit Dice (Or some multiple thereof, balance as appropriate) in a single blow, they become Fatigued for 1 minute. Then modify Exhausted so that if you get fatigued again while exhausted, you pass out for however long.
You could even have these statuses tracked as "As if you were affected by, but does not stack or interact with", so that Fatiguing Critical and a number of other abilities don't specifically interact with it.
End result? Powerful, repeated blows to the head can clock you out for a while.


Don't forget poisons - hitting a low Strength or Dexterity score can safely incapacitate someone, or a poison with an unconsciousness effect. An alchemist could possibly stack the effect enough that a high Fortitude save can be overcome. Hitting mental ability scores can also work, but may give the subject an insanity.

I think there's a feat that allows a grappler who had pinned his target to choke them out. Obviously not applicable with f o m up, though.

Verdant Wheel

building upon Shiroi's and Cyriad's ideas:

a Knockout combat maneuver which inflicts ordinary damage on a normal success (woops!), or scaling status effects (Fatigue>Exhaustion>Unconscious) on a critical success (per +5 exceeding CMD).

a situation which would ordinarily remove the -4 nonlethal penalty, likewise render's an ordinary success on a Knockout the scaling status effect (bypassing the 'accidental' damage bit).


Cool ideas, so far; I'll be sure to take them to my group and see what they like.

Any other ideas for a homebrew change to the nonlethal damage system?

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