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PunTheHun
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Non-lethal attacks?

Wed 01 Feb 2023, 12:33

We are still busy finding our way through Chetwood – and through the rules. We "encountered" an ambush situation and the question came: How do you make a melee attack to stun/temporarily disable opponents without risking to kill them (in our case, some bystanders goaded into opposing us by evil forces)? Any attack with a weapon has a chance to cause a piercing result and can therefore kill (even cudgels/clubs have an injury rating); the rules do not describe applying piercing results as optional. The only exception I see is the unarmed/stone throw attack, but that causes so little damage that we risk a long fight and damage to self.
Is discussing/convincing them the only other option? How do you handle such situations?
--
Lutz
 
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Harlath
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Re: Non-lethal attacks?

Wed 01 Feb 2023, 15:48

This is an intersting question!

- Go Unarmed to be very safe, and rely on Heavy Blow to do damage via Stength. Will be at -1d for Brawling.
- Just let PCs "pull" their blows, use sword hilts to subdue etc (perhaps ignoring Piercing Blows).
- Just let PCs "pull" their blows, use sword hilts to subdue etc, but apply a -1d penalty as quasi brawling.
- Just roll normally, perhaps letting PCs use Healing to try to patch foes up if some attacks are too vigorous and cause Wounds.
- Use Intimidate Foes to Awe the opponents, perhaps even extending this to being a quasi Council/Skill Endeavour within the combat. Making it a skill endeavour would let other combat actions help too: perhaps Battle to get a superior position and help argue for the opposition to surrender.
 
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PunTheHun
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Re: Non-lethal attacks?

Thu 02 Feb 2023, 09:05

Thanks for the reply! Yes, those are the options I also see.
In our present case it would not have been relevant, as a character went suddenly into hack-and-slash mode with a bow (no way to avoid piercing with that, in particular because he made the bow "keen" shortly before, thus intentionally making it a deadly weapon). But I did want to get a second opinion on our options.
In general we want to avoid house-ruling, but maybe we could either use -1d and halve the strength damage. Or we allow to use a "T" success to modify a "piercing" result to "stun" - this looks nice to me because it gives a nice balance between skill and luck (good skills with a (melee) weapon improve the chances to handle it delicately enough for non-lethal use).
I do not think that we want to water down the danger of using a weapon too much – it should still be a serious risk to use it. "If you are not prepared to kill, don't use a weapon!" should still apply.
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Lutz
 
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Leuwart
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Re: Non-lethal attacks?

Thu 02 Feb 2023, 22:56

I think realistically medieval weapons have no "stun setting". So, when you hit someone with a club or any sharp weapon there is a good amount of chance wounding them. Theatrically I have no problem with that (we all know scenes when someone is knocked out by a hit with a sword hilt and later awakes just fine). So if you really want to do this I would go with the -1d6 like Harlath suggested. In addition when a piercing blow occurs you can prevent it using a bonus success (so there is still a risk of hurting the people).
 
Sebastian
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Re: Non-lethal attacks?

Sat 04 Feb 2023, 11:26

Of course, realistically anything can happen in a fight. So even if you hit your opponent with the hilt, he might fall on his head and die. But, this is a game, and I don’t like to torture players with such things.

I‘d just go with, no piercing blows and if an opponent is at 0 Endurance, he won’t die, but is unconscious.
 
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HunterGreen
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Re: Non-lethal attacks?

Mon 06 Feb 2023, 15:21

There was a 1e adventure that explicitly referred to a non-lethal attack option which was basically "just ignore piercing blows" as people have suggested above, so I coded that, even though it's not an official rule, into Narvi (my dice-rolling/VTT Discord bot for TOR), and it seems to work well.
TOR/AiME Discord: https://discord.me/theonering
Narvi, the TOR bot for Discord: https://bitbucket.org/HawthornThistleberry/narvi/

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