|
Recently I was attempting to build a barbarian character using the "Deathless Initiate" line of feats along with others in order to stay fighting well into the negatives and I realized something rather shocking.
This entire concept can be shutdown by taking even a single point of non-lethal damage due to the following:
when your nonlethal damage equals your current hit points, you're staggered (see below), and when it exceeds your current hit points, you fall unconscious.
So diehard, deathless initiate, etc. are negated by taking even 1 point of nonlethal damage from anything. Additionally any creature with the Ferocity Monster Trait can be shut down the same way. Orcs become a lot less scary when they don't get to go to their negative CON.
I dunno, it just seems weird to me that a creature with the resolve to keep fighting well past the limits that would knock out or kill a normal being can be rendered unconscious by a light tap with a sap.
Anyways, I'd like to think this is not the case. So please, correct me if missing something here.
Unfortunately, thus is a problem that's been around for a very long time. And there has been no errata or anything on it.
It's a very reasonable house rule to say that Ferocity and Diehard help protect you from nonlethal damage too, and therefore make it so you don't fall unconscious until your nonlethal exceeds your current hp + your constitution score.
Yeah, ferocity is negated by any non-lethal damage.
There is currently no "fix" for it. I think probably because they don't know how they want to handle it mechanically.