There is some weird grey area in being helpless - theoretically, you could willingly be helpless. But nothing in the rules says you actually can be. I had a similar corner case where a high level monk was asking someone to kill him, except there's no way RAW to lower insight bonus to AC other than being helpless.
Ultimately, when it boils down to it, if a player wants to coup de gras themselves, let them. It's a weird thing to do, but players do weird things.
Rednal, as far as the dominate/kill yourself problem goes, I'd be willing to allow it. Those spells already allow extra saves for doing things against your nature, and things that are self destructive. If someone failed three consecutive saves against a dominate effect, one with a substantial bonus... well, that's no big difference from failing three saves against another spell of equivalent level - like finger of death. The means is just different.
Here's a rules precedent from a Paizo adventure path:
Each round, a random creature in the haunt’s area must succeed at a DC 22 Will save or draw its weapon and attempt a coup de grace action on itself. This action deals the creature’s normal weapon damage for an attack. An affected creature must make a Fortitude save with a DC equal to 10 + the damage dealt to avoid being immediately slain by the suicide attempt.
Yes, you can absolutely coup de grace yourself. It's just slitting your own throat or shooting yourself in the chest or w/e else.
Yes, DR still applies and that helps with both the damage and the DC. Theoretically you could make a character unable to kill themselves if their DR was high enough.
If somebody is the subject of shield other, then half of the coup de grace damage is transferred to the other person. The other person is not required to make a save, but the person who the coup de grace was performed upon still does (at a lower DC since they're taking less damage).
...Forms of harm that do not involve hit points, such as charm effects, temporary ability damage, level draining, and death effects, are not affected...
The damage from the coup de grac would be split, and the victim would still need to make a fort save against the half damage they received. But the shielding party would not need to make a save because the save or die is not a hit point harm.
Here's a rules precedent from a Paizo adventure path:
Each round, a random creature in the haunt’s area must succeed at a DC 22 Will save or draw its weapon and attempt a coup de grace action on itself. This action deals the creature’s normal weapon damage for an attack. An affected creature must make a Fortitude save with a DC equal to 10 + the damage dealt to avoid being immediately slain by the suicide attempt.
An interesting aside, that says nothing about the attack being an auto-critical. How would you run that haunt?
An interesting aside, that says nothing about the attack being an auto-critical. How would you run that haunt?
Probably as not-doubled damage. It's still an very hard DC for most characters at that point.
Hello all, I have a couple questions regarding Coup De Grace and I apologize if these have been addressed in another thread, I couldn't find anything definitive. First and for most, can a player preform a Coup de grace on themselves? And second, does DR, or similar damage mitigation apply to the damage and/or the DC of a coup de grace?
If a player tried that, I would call nine-one-one. A character, however, is another matter. :-)
Per the PRD:
As a full-round action, you can use a melee weapon to deliver a coup de grace (pronounced "coo day grahs") to a helpless opponent.
Therefore, a character cannot Coup de grace themselves.
Per the haunt mentioned later, the haunt is performing the action by causing the character to act against themselves.
Per the PRD:
A helpless character is paralyzed, held, bound, sleeping, unconscious, or otherwise completely at an opponent's mercy. A helpless target is treated as having a Dexterity of 0 (–5 modifier). Melee attacks against a helpless target get a +4 bonus (equivalent to attacking a prone target). Ranged attacks get no special bonus against helpless targets. Rogues can sneak attack helpless targets.
So you get an effective -1 to hit yourself, but get precision damage.
Delivering a coup de grace provokes attacks of opportunity.
:-)
Creatures that are immune to critical hits do not take critical damage, nor do they need to make Fortitude saves to avoid being killed by a coup de grace.
/cevah
I'd allow a player to CdG themself. It's a good system to represent seppuku, or other forms of ritual self-termination.