The party is level 14 and part of a coalition between celestials and devils to stop a demon lord.
Prior to the remaster, the Barbarian was LN and everyone else (Bard, Oracle, Fighter, Rogue) was NG or CG.
The infernal duke who is their main contact in the Hells offers them a job. An unknown party broke into a vault of his with infernal aid and stole a damned soul for unknown reasons. He's tracked the guilty party to a spot on the mortal plane and will pay the party to retrieve it (rather than needing to use his own forces) and the party agrees to his terms (gold for retrieving the soul, bonus gold for the head(s) of the thief or thieves).
The party winds up in a forest near a remote log cabin.
They decide to send the rogue to go investigate the area.
He rolls a critical failure on stealth when approaching, then tries to cover it with a deception check to imitate a bird...and also critically fails that.
This alerts the occupants of the cabin and a man wearing leather armor and holding a scimitar comes out along with a woman dressed in robes. They start searching the area.
The rogue uses his cloak to go level 4 invisible and makes a perception check to notice anything unusual. Critical success. He sees a black jewel on a metal chain around the man's neck.
He tries to sneak up and steal it before the invisibility wears off. Success on the approach. Fails by 1 on the Thievery check (which had a -5 penalty because the man was on guard and was only possible to attempt because of the skill feat the rogue had).
Man grabs gem with free hand to protect it and initiative is rolled. The rest of the party is still like 150 feet back hiding.
Man manages to spot rogue and attacks twice but misses.
Rogue books it back to party as invisibility wears off.
Bard starts singing with inspire courage and party members start running to attack with weapons drawn.
Woman opens up with long range AoE spells as the party charges and the man stands next to her to protect her.
Party gets to melee range and fights. The rogue tries to stab the woman a few times and when he does so he's almost overwhelmed by feelings of guilt as visions of angels and redemption play out in his head. I say he can resist the visions but it'll make him miss his attack or he can power through but become enfeebled. He decides to power through both times, but his strikes also do a lot less damage as a chunk of it gets resisted.
A round or two later the fighter strikes the man at low health and I say the man falls over dead as a result.
The next round the rogue uses Opportune Backstab to finish off the woman and I say she falls over dead.
Then the party goes "Hmm, wait a second, should we have taken one alive? Maybe that would have been a good idea," the bard goes "Yeah, especially since one of them was using Champion reactions," and the rogue goes "Can I retcon my last strike to be non-lethal?"
I say fine, but in the future you need to actually use non-lethal.
The Oracle following Sarenrae (in terms of ideals, not literal class powers) then wants to heal the man to keep him from dying and I said I already stated he died a round and a half ago when the fighter smacked him.
I said if he really wanted to try to preserve the man's life that I'd let him use his Shock to the System spell (https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1320) with a 50% chance of it working (since it normally only works on someone who died within the last round and it had been longer than that). The oracle said he didn't want to use significant magic like that and he was fine with the guy being dead in that case and I double checked that with him before moving on.
The party discusses whether to cut off the heads of the man and woman now to take back to the infernal duke. The Barbarian bounty hunter is all in favor, the Oracle is uncomfortable with killing the woman they deliberately didn't kill (with a retcon) in combat. And at a minimum the Oracle wants to look around first before doing anything.
The party leaves the dead man and the unconscious woman (for the moment) and went into the cabin where they saw it had been set up as a small shrine to Sarenrae.
Some additional information below in the spoilers for those curious, but my main question at the moment is this: should I have used the death and dying rules for the two soul thieves in this scenario? If so, why? If not, why not?
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Other Details:
The two thieves were a Redeemer and a Sorceress (Imperial bloodline with Arcane tradition), both following Sarenrae.
The soul in question was their father, an evil warlord who was justly damned.
The siblings had a pipe dream and almost certainly overly idealistic hope of figuring out a way to somehow redeem their father and made a deal with a rival infernal duke for help breaking into the first infernal duke's vault.
In retrospect, I didn't make it clear enough that the visions of redemption were linked to the man doing something like channeling holy energy to protect his sister or something. I overlooked that in the moment and that was a significant mistake in retrospect. Got caught up describing the visions themselves. At least one person in the party still realized Champion reactions were going on, though.
The main enemy here was lack of information and confusion, which the party escalated when the rogue tried to steal the soul and then the party kept escalating into a fight. No one tried to calm things down and the rogue ignored the visions of redemption (or thought they were a trick, perhaps). De-escalating the situation would have been on the party.
From the siblings' perspective, an invisible thief tried to steal the soul and then when that failed several other people jumped out from the bushes and launched themselves to attack, with a 99.99% chance that the attackers are working for a lord of the Hells.
Ironically, if they had just knocked on the cabin door and asked to talk it would have become very clear who was what very quickly. That said, I don't really fault the rogue for trying to steal the item initially.
I was actually hoping the party would gain the two as allies to help with several matters, such as protecting an secluded Sarenrite temple the party is using as a home base for the forces they've been gathering. So in that sense the NPCs are "significant," but saying "This NPC is dying instead of dead" also tells the party OOC "Oh this NPC is actually significant and you just didn't know it."
The initial infernal duke has no idea who the thief or thieves are or why they stole the soul (other than a rival duke aided them). He figured it was probably some evil mortal(s) trying to do something nefarious with it. Which wouldn't morally upset the duke, but the thief or thieves still stole the duke's property which isn't acceptable, obviously, and that needs to be punished.
Edit: the Redeemer never wound up using his Lay on Hands which didn't help. I wanted to but never got a reasonable chance. If the sister had gone down first I would have let him try to heal her, which is the main thing that has me wondering if I messed up here.
Personally I feel that canonically in the game narrative, the Death and Dying rules are used for all creatures except those that specifically list that they are destroyed at 0 HP. For ease of game mechanics, we handwave that away for most NPCs in order to avoid unnecessary bookkeeping and certain moral quandaries.
But if the bookkeeping is ever useful or needed, or if the moral quandaries are an integral part of the encounter, then the Death and Dying rules are available and should be assumed.
I think you did fine, and I'm interested to see how it plays out. It should make for some interesting RP with the brother dead once the sister wakes. I assume finding someone to resurrect him isn't impossible either, especially at that level. It should also impart a solid lesson that retconning the death or allowing NPC death saves could diminish, that you shouldn't murder hobo too often. I also think you described the Redeemer reaction well. If one PC was able to determine what was going on then I feel you did just the right amount of describing, without revealing so much that you almost meta the mechanics to them.
Point being, roll with what happened and it will still make a great story, mistakes and accidents are sometime the highlights of a campaign.
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In general, if the party has indicated a desire to keep people alive/save them, while combat is still ongoing, I will use death/dying rules. I won't spend too much time figuring out exactly how many rounds its been, and would just guesstimate a dying value for people. Ie, everything uses Death and Dying rules by default, but we can hand wave it most of the time and do so.
However, if they've indicated they want to take people alive (even if somewhat retroactively), I also expect them to at least start considering non-lethal options, or at least show they they acknowledge their actions are at odds with their intentions. I'd expect to see stabilize used, or other approaches once someone reaches dying rather than just hoping they stabilize on their own, or the combat ends in time to save them.
If they get in the habit of beating people to near-death (ie using lethal force), but then saving them while dying/taking them prisoner, that's the type of reputation that will get around. Brutal thugs, merciless bounty hunters, etc this might be what they want, this might not.
I don't think you should have used death and dying rules for these NPCs. That's what nothlethal damage is for. I also don't think you should have let the rogue retcon the last attack. Unlike 5e, nothlethal attacks (that lack the nonlethal trait) inflict a -2 penalty on the roll. That's a huge shift in PF2 math. You're gambling that you'll hit anyway despite the penalty. Letting the player apply it after they know the result doesn't make sense. I'm very tolerant of retconning actions, but not if the tactical situation changed or dice have been rolled.
Now, if the NPCs were important to moving your plot forward? You could have used death and dying rules. They really are just plot armor. For randos, it is usually more interesting to let players have to live with killing someone.
That would seem to make non-lethal mostly irrelevant, yeah?
I'm not saying that's automatically a bad thing, just that it means taking someone alive isn't at least slightly harder.
Yeah I agree with that. But there's still a decent chance of them bleeding out before the end of combat if you use lethal.
Personally I use them anytime NPCs have healing (since they should get to use the rules) and ABSOLUTELY when NPCs have regeneration (since they just don't work otherwise).
The way I usually do it is have NPCs die at dying 2 instead of 4. If the party doesn't care whether the enemies are alive or dead then they are presumed dead. But if the party does potentially want to take someone alive for questioning or out of mercy then they have a chance.
Not using nonlethal damage still carries a risk though. If the knockout blow was a crit that immediately puts them to dying two. And even if not, they have a very limited time to try and stabilize the enemy.
I think you did fine, and I'm interested to see how it plays out. It should make for some interesting RP with the brother dead once the sister wakes. I assume finding someone to resurrect him isn't impossible either, especially at that level.
The sister was none too happy and assumed the party was trying to pry information out of her before killing her on behalf of the infernal duke. So she didn't want to say much initially. The oracle claimed he followed Sarenrae. She said to prove it. He couldn't think of a way to do that. Another party member tried to use diplomacy to make an impression and rolled like a 2.
Eventually the party had a long conversation in front of her whether to take her to the duke or leave her behind with her dead brother or what. She eventually relented and extended some trust and explained what she and her brother were trying to do.
The party decided to take the soul back to the duke (as otherwise the party was on the hook for failing to fulfill their contract) but leave behind the sister and her dead brother. But as the party was leaving they were intercepted by agents of the rival infernal duke and combat broke out again, which is where the session ended (with the sister back in the cabin and out of the fight).
How that turns out and what the long term ramifications are of all of this are yet to be determined/revealed.
Captain Morgan wrote:
Unlike 5e, nothlethal attacks (that lack the nonlethal trait) inflict a -2 penalty on the roll. That's a huge shift in PF2 math. You're gambling that you'll hit anyway despite the penalty. Letting the player apply it after they know the result doesn't make sense. I'm very tolerant of retconning actions, but not if the tactical situation changed or dice have been rolled.
That's nearly word for word what I told them. I said I'd allow it this one time but not in the future for those exact reasons.
NielsenE wrote:
I'd expect to see stabilize used, or other approaches once someone reaches dying rather than just hoping they stabilize on their own, or the combat ends in time to save them.
That too. If I had said the man fell over dead and the party was like "Wait, we want to use death and dying rules" I'd have been a lot more sympathetic...but that was only brought up after they had killed the woman.
I also wonder about non-lethal damage in these circumstances. I dunno.
The way I usually do it is have NPCs die at dying 2 instead of 4. If the party doesn't care whether the enemies are alive or dead then they are presumed dead. But if the party does potentially want to take someone alive for questioning or out of mercy then they have a chance.
Not using nonlethal damage still carries a risk though. If the knockout blow was a crit that immediately puts them to dying two. And even if not, they have a very limited time to try and stabilize the enemy.
Yeah, I use more or less the same guidelines in Strength of Thousands. Hit and you get 1 round to heal or cast stabilise, crit and they're dead, sorry. Declare nonlethal in advance
