As per the Core Rulebook, pg 445. Unconscious characters must begin making Constitution checks immediately upon being submerged (or upon becoming unconscious if the character was conscious when submerged). Once she fails one of these checks, she immediately drops to –1 (or loses 1 additional hit point, if her total is below –1). On the following round, she drowns.
That being said, I belief the keelhauling does 1d3 points of damage on a slow keelhaul. Minimum of 1 point even if the character makes their reflex save. And it's a pretty good DC to save (Reflex 20). So if an average pc fails a few saving throws and you roll a decent roll here or there on damage, you could knock a pc out within 7-8 rounds and then the drowning danger comes in. Which I believe is the biggest danger of keelhauling.
I had a characters rogue keelhauled for stealing something from the kitchen. (He planted it in Fipps locker and when Mr. Plugg and Scourge went searching the ship with their handpicked search party they found it in the characters locker instead, heh!) Anyway. He had toughness as a feet and a con of 16 so he had 14 hp to begin with. He made a few saves and hit negative hit points after 10 rounds and made his first constitution check and failed the second...so basically he would have drowned had he been under water another round. Lucky for him it was only 12 rounds.
Just take one of your characters and run him/her through a mock keelhaul and see what would happen. Interested to know if anyone else has had to do this and the results.
Maglok wrote:
Apologies for the double post, but I was looking into piratical punishments some more and I had a few questions:
First of all the keelhauling, slow is 12 rounds, fast is 6 rounds. A character can hold his breath for twice his CON score if he doesnt take standard/fullround actions. Basically if you are keelhauled slow and you have 6 CON you are fine. If you run out of CON rounds, you still get to make a CON check every round to see if you actually drown. The basic pirate has 11 CON, thus 22 rounds of holding your breath. What am I doing wrong? Or is it really only supposed to be the dmg that do characters in? If anyone can pretty much live through a keelhauling with breathing it is not that scary.
Next up: Whipping! 3 lashes with 1d3+1 nonlethal dmg means your average d8 HD player of level 1 goes down on the third strike, cause really when does anyone really miss those slashes (I do roll to hit, but you know). So when someone gets 6 lashes it is lights out for anyone. It then takes an hour for every point of non-lethal dmg to recover. Which would mean the character is down to less hitpoints for at max his hp in hours. That's 8 on average in my campaign. (Though there is some healing available dont you worry). Am I doing it right in that almost no one can walk away from 6 lashes and most also buckle on 3 lashes?
Next up: The Cat! Lethal damage, nasty. Nastier, obviously, same thing though. Two-three lashes with the cat can drop someone in the negatives. I guess with the cat that is ok, since you gotta do some bad stuff.
