I'm a fairly inexperianced GM doing a new campaign with a slightly revised group to what I had for the last one. Characters have been made and I was writing up a bit of an encounter where a poison-maddened priest attacks them and hoping that they subdue him rather than kill him at this point. The thing is none of them have taken real fatigue/subdual damage action cards and was wondering if anyone had house rules on over powering enemys?

Well, if the player characters say they want to subdue him instead of killing him, then there is no reason that he has to be dead after his wound threshold has been exceeded. He can just be incapacitated or unconscious. For a little flavor and tension you could also rule that if they do enough criticals to exceed his toughness (counting the additional critical received for wound threshold being exceeded) that they DO accidentally kill him - their loss and the Gods' will.

The major benefit to this approach is that it is not strictly a house rule. According to the RAW when NPCs have no wounds remaining they are defeated. This could mean down and too injured to fight or run, unconscious, in a coma, or dead at the GM's option. Dead is usually the case, unless you want to foster a group of PCs that routinely slit their enemies throats after combat. I like to mix the results up a little bit and keep my players guessing, but, then, morally (Earl) Grey is my cup of tea. My players prefer copious amounts of violence and villainy. Oh, and Mountain Dew.

Spice to taste.

-Thorvid

Thorvid presents good ideas. I'd recommend modifying the attack as follows: "Attacking with the flat of the blade and pommel of the sword: -1 damage; one black attack die; no criticals. This allows you to bring an opponent to unconsciousness without killing them."

jh