At some point nonlethal damage would have to transform into lethal damage, otherwise what happens when someone keeps on beating your head in with a sap after you have been knocked out. I could go on, but talking about nonlethal damage probably belongs on another thread.
That's just not the way it works in the rules, though. By the rules, I can deliver enough nonlethal damage to you so that you'll stay unconscious for a month and it won't kill you (though not eating or drinking might ;) ).
At some point nonlethal damage would have to transform into lethal damage, otherwise what happens when someone keeps on beating your head in with a sap after you have been knocked out. I could go on, but talking about nonlethal damage probably belongs on another thread.That's just not the way it works in the rules, though. By the rules, I can deliver enough nonlethal damage to you so that you'll stay unconscious for a month and it won't kill you (though not eating or drinking might ;) ).
Perhaps you missed the part in the DMG where it says that the rules are a basic guideline and that the DM is encouraged to change things he does not think work well. Being bound by rules was not the intent of the DMG, some of the rules work perfectly fine, and make sense, some do not and can be done better.
Words of wisdom, Lex. Words of wisdom.
Cool that you are returning to the game and taking you S.O and family with you. We all have our memories of our first encounter with mold, jellies, worms and other dungeon nasties. If someone perishes or not, at least they'll never look at a moldy piece of bread the same way.
Negative experiences make for better players. After encountering a room full of animated furniture and rugs, now I use a marker to detail out room specifics on our graph pad - that way no one gets suspicious about that rug in the center of the room I'm drawing...hee hee.
Perhaps you missed the part in the DMG where it says that the rules are a basic guideline and that the DM is encouraged to change things he does not think work well. Being bound by rules was not the intent of the DMG, some of the rules work perfectly fine, and make sense, some do not and can be done better.
Yay - instead of debating the rules as written, we can instead debate who has the better house rules. :-\
The infamous "rule 0" has no place in a discussion about the rules. Of course you're free to change the rules any way you want. But the rules provide a basis from which to debate on boards such as this one; the only thing Rule 0 accomplishes in a debate is to muddy things and make it impossible for two people to discuss the rules.
Cool that you are returning to the game and taking you S.O and family with you. We all have our memories of our first encounter with mold, jellies, worms and other dungeon nasties.
Thanks :P Yeah, tomorrow is the big day of our first session. I'm hurriedly finishing up their characters and writing up their character profiles. I'll post the profiles later today, and possibly tomorrow some sort of adventure journal describing my first day DM'ing in 25 years :P
In my game, the mold encounter provided some much needed comic relief! The way the party decided to get past the mold was to make a mad dash around it. the barbarian went first, suffered the subdual damage but was fine.... the next three players head first in fungus as the damage knocked them out! Luckly they had a rope tied to each member (the funny part was imagining the players taking a face first dive down the slip and slide that was the mold!)
Hope no one addressed this already; the thread was getting so long and unwieldy that I stopped reading about 15 posts into it. But I wanted to share this brief Brown Mold experience that my own group had during the previous Adventure Path, in fact, the patch in the basement of the Lucky Monkey... remember that one?
I too was concerned that my party would try to whip out the fire and toast the stuff. With a wounded half-drow NPC hiding just beyond it who had vital info for the party, I was afraid that the mold doubling in size would overwhelm here and she might very well perish before the PCs would even know she was there! Knowing my groups tendency to just whip out their wand of Burning Hands, or throw alchemist's fire at stationary threats (like molds, slimes, trapped wooden doors that they didn't want to risk disarming), this seemed like too much of possibility to risk the storyline on their automatic knee-jerk reactions.
So I found a solution: my skill as a DM, as a storyteller. I simply described the effect it was having on them in such a way that they'd never give it more fuel. "As you approach, you begin to shiver and quake with cold... the patch of mold before you seems to quiver and rustle with nearly eager anticipation, as you feel the very warmth being leached from your bones. You feel chilled to the marrow as the heat is literally being sucked from your body, flowing into the hideous mass of fungus laid out before you." After a description like that, no player would dare suggest giving it more heat, let alone fire! From there, it was simply a matter of neutralizing it. I too thought that a measly Ray of Frost cantrip was a bit paltry to kill something that occupied several squares, so a compromise was reached. The Ray of Frost was ruled insufficient to kill the entire mold patch, but the shock of the magical beam of cold sent the mold into a hibernative dormant state. Provided no mild heat sources lingered too long in its vicinity, the threat would remain neutralized for some time while it slowly gathered ambient heat from its environment before it could function again. Anyway, it worked for my players, and I think that a tactic like this could work for you as well. Good luck!