A word about Non-Lethal Damage.

[thaX]

Seems that I started a discussion about Non-Lethal damage in the blog comments.

From all accounts thus far, it looks identical to the Starfinder rules, where Non-Lethal is just another type of damage and only matters on "last hit."

I was hoping for something a bit more than the Starfinder "between" ruleset placeholder for this. The Dying rules in the playtest is better than the Resolve or Die Starfinder paradigm, but having no way to track how Non-Lethal is effecting a character except on "last hit" is disappointing.

Thoughts?

[Captain Morgan]

thaX wrote:

Seems that I started a discussion about Non-Lethal damage in the blog comments.

From all accounts thus far, it looks identical to the Starfinder rules, where Non-Lethal is just another type of damage and only matters on "last hit."

I was hoping for something a bit more than the Starfinder "between" ruleset placeholder for this. The Dying rules in the playtest is better than the Resolve or Die Starfinder paradigm, but having no way to track how Non-Lethal is effecting a character except on "last hit" is disappointing.

Thoughts?

It doesn't frankly seem worth the hassle, is my thought. Nonlethal damage rarely made any sense anyway.

[Gratz]

I don't know what to expect from non-lethal damage in PF2, as it never came up during my Playtest experience, but I would be glad if they got rid of having to track non-lethal damage, as it created two health pools, which was unnecessarily confusing and complicated. Non-lethal damage as a player was generally only relevant if you wanted a monster or NPC to survive after an encounter, which can be easily handled by a GM in the situation without having the need of tracking two different health bars.

[QuidEst]

The dying rules make it hard to kill something off from “conscious” to “dead” accidentally without time to stabilize them.

[graystone]

thaX wrote:

Non-Lethal damage

How exactly do you WANT the damage tracked? Do you want something knocked out if ANY of the damage was Non-Lethal? As/is, I'm just not sure what's you're looking for.

For myself, I'm fine with the current rule: The whole party has to agree to do it or it's a crapshot to see if it'll work. As to casters, if they want to do this type of thing, they'd need to pick spells that do non-lethal [they had some in the playtest] and/or take some kind of metamagic that allows it.

[Elfteiroh]

Gratz wrote:

I don't know what to expect from non-lethal damage in PF2, as it never came up during my Playtest experience, but I would be glad if they got rid of having to track non-lethal damage, as it created two health pools, which was unnecessarily confusing and complicated. Non-lethal damage as a player was generally only relevant if you wanted a monster or NPC to survive after an encounter, which can be easily handled by a GM in the situation without having the need of tracking two different health bars.

In the playtest, yeah, that's pretty much what was done.

Doing non-lethal damage is really only important on the last hit, because they are not tracked. It just mean that if the final blow is nonlethal, the creature doesn't become "Dying", they just fall unconscious.

[Mark Seifter]

My War for the Crown group has two (scarily effective, egads!) blaster casters and they have had no trouble taking people alive when they want them alive. And then sometimes they didn't want to do that and instead disintegrated the big bad monk on round 1! :D

[PossibleCabbage]

"Last hit being nonlethal knocks you out instead of killing you" makes vastly more sense to me than "I took nonlethal damage 12 hours ago and never healed it, so being *impaled by this spear* is not life threatening" does.

Certainly it makes it much more difficult to knock someone out, but it make more sense to me so I am for it. Additionally "take them alive" being trickier makes it possible for the GM to make "captive adversaries" much more useful without becoming the first order optimal strategy

[Mechalibur]

Seems like less of a headache as a GM. I'm all for it.