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4 people marked this as FAQ candidate.
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Okay paraphrasing the rules, if your lethal damage is above your hitpoints, you are unconscious. Also, if you lethal + nonlethal is above your hitpoints, you are unconscious.
Paraphrasing Diehard, if you lethal damage is above your hitpoints, you do not become unconscious but instead are staggered. Diehard does not say that if your lethal + nonlethal is above your hitpoints you do not become unconscious, but instead are staggered.
Is this just an oversight? Is Diehard meant to keep you conscious in both scenarios. If not, then it would be better to do 50 lethal and 50 nonlethal against a Diehard PC with 99 hitpoints than it would be to do 100 lethal against that same PC. Is this the intent or should the language of Diehard be tweaked a little to include the both scenario?
Yes, yes it would mean that nonlethal damage was better, or a mix. But it's also doubly easy to heal that damage away, and diehard does not prevent you from dying of, say, a coup de grace that does 1 damage (and you roll a 1 on the save).
Diehard makes it harder to die, not harder to go unconscious.
Most things do lethal damage anyway, except sap master rogues and we all know how OP rogues are.
No, it has no effect on unconscious, only dying.
Arksangiel wrote: Yes, yes it would mean that nonlethal damage was better, or a mix. But it's also doubly easy to heal that damage away, and diehard does not prevent you from dying of, say, a coup de grace that does 1 damage (and you roll a 1 on the save).
Diehard makes it harder to die, not harder to go unconscious.
Most things do lethal damage anyway, except sap master rogues and we all know how OP rogues are.
No, it has no effect on unconscious, only dying.
I agree with you about the consequences of the wording for a RAW standpoint. My question is did Paizo really intend to make nonlethal damage more potent lethal damage at knocking a PC unconscious or was this an oversight.
I just can't see why logically or even from a game balance standpoint that Paizo would intentionally do this. It has to be an oversight that they should address with a quick errata.
Paizo didn't write the rules. Wizards of the Coast did, back in 3.5 D&D. Paizo just copied them. Its worked the same way for over a decade.
Non-lethal damage should be more potent than lethal damage at knocking someone out. That is the entire point of non-lethal damage.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Jeraa wrote: Paizo didn't write the rules. Wizards of the Coast did, back in 3.5 D&D. Paizo just copied them. Its worked the same way for over a decade.
Non-lethal damage should be more potent than lethal damage at knocking someone out. That is the entire point of non-lethal damage.
I disagree. The point of non-lethal damage is putting some distance between "no longer a threat" and "dead". I don't switch to non-lethal because I want to make them not conscious, I do it because I don't want to make them dead which lethal damage has a pesky habit of doing.
Since this is the Rules forum, yes. One point of non-lethal damage on a creature that's using Diehard would knock them unconscious. The implicit difference between "none" and "number of points which happens to be 0" for inequalities in Pathfinder and such means this doesn't entirely invalidate Diehard (so even though you're at -1, your no nonlethal damage doesn't exceed your hit points).
Now, with that out of the way, I agree with you Driver. I view it as a pretty clear oversight (with standard disclaimers about how "obvious" is one of the most subjective words I know). I would say that if your hit points minus your non-lethal would put you at/below zero but above dead, you're staggered. If it puts you past dead, you're unconscious. If something would allow you to act and not die at negative con (see the non-PF frenzied berzerker PrC), you can continue to fight as effectively as if your hit points were actually at actual - nonlethal total. That needs some clean-up before it would be ready to go in a rulebook, but that's what I view as the intent of the feat.
Is that what you were imagining, Driver?
Jeraa wrote: Paizo didn't write the rules. Wizards of the Coast did, back in 3.5 D&D. Paizo just copied them. Its worked the same way for over a decade.
Non-lethal damage should be more potent than lethal damage at knocking someone out. That is the entire point of non-lethal damage.
I thought the point of nonlethal was to knock someone unconscious without killing them. I did not know that nonlethal was supposed to be more lethal than lethal at knocking you out? That is what you said isn't it.
As for 3.5, I have to plead ignorant. Whenever someone brings up 3.5 I just leave the argument alone. Was Diehard around in 3.5? Did it work the same way? Does Paizo ever change things that don't make sense from 3.5?
Berinor wrote: Jeraa wrote: Paizo didn't write the rules. Wizards of the Coast did, back in 3.5 D&D. Paizo just copied them. Its worked the same way for over a decade.
Non-lethal damage should be more potent than lethal damage at knocking someone out. That is the entire point of non-lethal damage.
I disagree. The point of non-lethal damage is putting some distance between "no longer a threat" and "dead". I don't switch to non-lethal because I want to make them not conscious, I do it because I don't want to make them dead which lethal damage has a pesky habit of doing.
Since this is the Rules forum, yes. One point of non-lethal damage on a creature that's using Diehard would knock them unconscious. The implicit difference between "none" and "number of points which happens to be 0" for inequalities in Pathfinder and such means this doesn't entirely invalidate Diehard (so even though you're at -1, your no nonlethal damage doesn't exceed your hit points).
Now, with that out of the way, I agree with you Driver. I view it as a pretty clear oversight (with standard disclaimers about how "obvious" is one of the most subjective words I know). I would say that if your hit points minus your non-lethal would put you at/below zero but above dead, you're staggered. If it puts you past dead, you're unconscious. If something would allow you to act and not die at negative con (see the non-PF frenzied berzerker PrC), you can continue to fight as effectively as if your hit points were actually at actual - nonlethal total. That needs some clean-up before it would be ready to go in a rulebook, but that's what I view as the intent of the feat.
Is that what you were imagining, Driver? I could not have said it better myself
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