Nonlethal Lethality?

[Seraphimpunk]

For some reason I thought nonlethal damage in excess of your total hp included your constitution score. Like , if a player had 15 hp and a 10 Con, and they took 20 nonlethal damage, they'd just have 20 nonlethal on them. But re-reading, it looks like they'd have 15 nonlethal, and 5hp of lethal damage?

I thought it would be much harder to kill someone with nonlethal damage 2x max hp + 2x Con score. But is it just 2x max hp + Con score? eek.

Oh well, My players lucked out and avoided a TPK

[Twisteminds]

That is what the rules on it say so yeah just twice their hp plus their con would kill them.

[Merkatz]

Doubling Con really shouldn't make that much of a difference. It should still be extremely hard for your NPCs to accidentally kill your PCs.

Taking your example at 15 nonlethal damage (the max he could have and still be conscious), it would still take another 25 points of nonlethal damage to kill him. That is the same amount of lethal damage it would take to outright kill this character, even at full health. So unless you are throwing up grossly overpowered opposition at your PCs, this really shouldn't happen.

Not to mention that as you level up, Con is going to becomes even less of an important factor. A PC with 100 HP, and 20 Con can take 220 nonlethal damage instead of 240 if Con was also doubled, and would require at least 120 points of nonlethal damage from a single hit to take a character from conscious to dead.

So what were you throwing at your party that should have TPK'd them with nonlethal damage? I mean the only thing that really does that kind of nonlethal damage are those grossly spec'd sap masters.

[Umbranus]

Perhaps a full attacking great wyrm gold dragon with the bludgeoner feat. ;)

[Seraphimpunk]

ahh the source of it was nothing so great as a wyrm with bludgeoner =)

Spoiler:

Crypt of the Everflame has a nasty trap. everyone in the room gets hit indiscriminately with 1d4 blunt arrows for 1d8 nonlethal damage per round. if you go unconscious in it, and don't have cover, nasty things happen: you lose your dex bonus to AC, gain a +4 bonus ( it takes a -4 penalty to hit prone ) , but you still end up taking 1-4 x 1-8 nonlethal damage per round, as a first level or 2nd level character. It was fairly lethal, and had I run it properly, would have TPK'ed the whole party. They survived because of the extra +CON hp that I'd accidentally allowed them.

[Seriphim84]

I take it they didn't barrow the large shields to hide behind then?

[Seraphimpunk]

they did.

Spoiler:

the two people hiding behind them, taking a standard action each round were fine. if they'd just stayed there and waited out the trap, they would have been fine. but the Rogue was knocked unconscious running around the room to explore the other door first. And then more people had to go into the room to get her body. And then instead of using the shield for cover each round, one of them wanted to break down the door to the next room ( OH the fun that ensued when the human without light ran into THAT room ). ... It was both amusing and sad at the same time. lol.

[Serum]

Seraphimpunk wrote:

they did.

** spoiler omitted **

Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Spoiler:

Hell, when we ran it, we didn't have shields yet, and we sent the fighter to the door on the other side. He immediately got decimated by arrows and fell unconscous. We ended up tying the monk up with rope, and he ran out to tie the fighter up so we could pull them both back out through the door once the monk went unconscious from the arrows.

[Seriphim84]

lol ouch. Seems like they got what was coming to them. That's Hilarius