So I've been browsing the core rulebook as I try to cram the ruleset for a weekend game and I'm a little unclear on how non-lethal damage works (and I could have missed it as I haven't fully read the book yet).
Is it just another damage type like bludgeoning and slashing? Is it healed as regular damage? Does it track like it did in Pathfinder 1?
1.) No, it's a trait a weapon has. The blowgun has the non-lethal trait but does piercing damage.
2.) Yes from what I can tell.
3.) Unsure, I'm not familiar enough with PF1 to say.
It looks like they just deal damage normally but if you reduce someone to 0 they are knocked out automatically instead of killed. To do the same thing with a weapon without non-lethal you take a -2 to hit (-2 to hit for the blowgun if you're trying to do lethal with it.)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Nonlethal damage is much more like Starfinder than PF1. To be sure someone is just unconscious, you have to put them down with nonlethal damage, not just get some nonlethal applied before impaling them. This means that using nonlethal damage effectively (as opposed to relying on stabilizing someone after putting them into a dying condition) does require more party coordination.
Thanks!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Works best to think of HP as an abstraction of endurance when it comes to most HP depletion. While the character is likely getting harmed they aren't taking any serious wounds until they hit that 0 threshold.
Doesn't line up 100% thanks to spells/special abilities and some monsters, but it does help with the cognitive dissonance :P
|
I came looking for answers to this as well. Still not sure I have completely wrapped my head around how it works. For example, I am in a party that is doing lethal damage (e.g., via swords and Magic Missile) and they get a creature down to 3 HP. I am a Monk and I make a successful Dragon Tail strike to that creature, which deals 1d10 non-lethal damage. I roll a (4), for example. Is the creature now knocked out?
Or, conversely, if I bring the creature down from (20) HP to just (3) HP using the Dragon Tail strike and someone else deals (4) lethal damage with a sword, is the creature now dead?
Is it just the trait of the weapon used for the final blow that counts with respect to unconscious vs dead? Or am I missing something?
Thanks!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Non-Lethal is a Weapon Trait that causes a weapon to do Non-Lethal Damage by default.
If a weapon has this trait you can perform Lethal Damage with it by taking a -2 Penalty to your attacks.
If a weapon does not have this trait then you can perform Non-Lethal damage with it by taking a -2 Penalty to your attacks.
When a creature is reduced to 0 Hit Points they go unconscious. If this happens as a result of taking Lethal Damage then they gain the Dying Condition. If this happens as a result of taking Non-Lethal Damage then they do not gain the Dying Condition.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
For the weapon trait it works via:
Attacks with this weapon are nonlethal, and are used to knock creatures unconscious instead of kill them. You can use a nonlethal weapon to make a lethal attack with a –2 circumstance penalty.
Correspondingly there is a -2 penalty if you want to do nonlethal damage with a weapon which lacks the nonlethal trait. Monks in particular are at an advantage here since they have the "Powerful Fist" feature which lets them do lethal damage with a nonlethal unarmed strike without a penalty, and thus can freely choose to do lethal or nonlethal damage.
Nonlethal damage works as described above- if the hit that reduces them to 0 is nonlethal damage, they're unconscious instead of dying.
|
|
Thank you all very much!! Sometimes it is harder to transition to a new way of doing things than to learn something from scratch. :)
So, if I am a Monk fighting that creature using a Dragon Tail (has the nonlethal trait) strike, I just choose to make every strike lethal via Powerful Fist. And now the Monk makes way more sense to me.
Grateful for all of the feedback and help.
|
|
casting Raise Thread here - please bear with me.....
Say I have a party together and we are sent to apprehend a known criminal and return him to justice. The criminal utters the ubiquitous "You'll never take me alive!!!"
We, the group, set to chastising the criminal but want to knock him out with non-lethal damage at the last. How can we know when he is on his last legs where the damage can be changed to non-lethal?
What are your collective ideas for making this happen?
Personally I like the idea that if any part of the damage a creature takes is non-lethal, and by assumption it is not immune to such, the final blow, regardless to weapon trait would knock them out and not kill them.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Nifty
How can we know when he is on his last legs where the damage can be changed to non-lethal?
There is no game mechanic for this, but you can always ask the GM "how bad does he look?" Totally up to the GM how well this works, if at all.
Personally I like the idea that if any part of the damage a creature takes is non-lethal, and by assumption it is not immune to such, the final blow, regardless to weapon trait would knock them out and not kill them.
Well, it worked that way in PF1, but in PF2 it would be a house rule, and a complex one at that. I don't recommend it.
If you want to be 100% sure of taking someone alive, just make every blow non-lethal. Sure you'll have a -2 to attack doing that with lethal weapons, but if it's the whole party vs one guy you ought to be able to handle that.
Yeah, you really need to do nonlethal as much as possible (or at least in proportion to how badly you want them to live) because crits happen.
Carry a nonlethal weapon if needed (especially if you have Doubling Rings!), and hopefully you don't need to bring in any boss-level villains.
Or be a Monk. :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My GM ask for a 1 action medicine check when we ask how hurt is the enemy.