Hello

Just wondering if I've missed the rules for non-lethal combat somewhere- an encounter in the last session called for someone to be subdued and I couldnt find any specifics on how to achieve it. We ended up battering the NPC down to zero wounds.

I have some sort of huse rule forming that fighting to subdue should perhaps do fatigue damage as well as actual damage- this should result in most PCs/NPCs loosing consciousness before they run out of wounds.

What do people think of this, or has anyone handled it differently?

Cheers

you can knoch people prone, but i don't actually know at which point it happens. i would say it is a perform a stunt call

Well, first trying to down someone without killing should be using weapons like fists, cudgels etc. This can be modeled using the CR rating, 3 or lower not being good at non lethal damage and 4 or higher being better. If you use only CR4 plus, I would rule that when you drop target they are alive unless, roll challenge die, a chaos star comes up, as an unlucky knock on head can always kill someone.

Another, more narrative/shared authority approach is to let a player always say a felled target is alive if they spend a fortune point to make it so, perhaps more than one if they fought all out though.

you could model an action on the NPC Soldier action 'Subdue'

I was thinking about this a while back, and the fatigue rules actually do a decent job of this. Few characters will be equiped to fatigue someone enough to K'O' them without doing some wounds, though, which strikes me as appropriate. The fun thing about this is you could use action cards to design a brawler whose specialty is fatiguing opponenets. I don't think it would be easy, but it should be doable.

As for subduing, I would just treat that as a stunt, possibly requiring the 3 success line or something. (As noted above, compare to the Subdue card, but in my book Perform a Stunt should always be less efficient than an action card.)

I don't understand. Too many wounds knock you out, why do you need a separate counter - or even use Fatigue, which has a whole different way of working and is either easier or harder depending how you houserule it. So here's my completely off-the-cuff non-lethal houserule.

1. Attack as normal, actions as normal, soak as normal. However, any weapon not optmisied for non-lethal damage has DR reduced by 1. Or 2. Maybe even 3 (non-lethal strike with a rapier?)

2. The first Critical hit doesn't take effect, instead inflicts number of additional wounds equal to severity. However, these wounds heal back much faster than normal wounds, so that they will knock you out, but it's the normal Wounds that keep you unconcious.

3. Any subsequent critical hits are criticals as usual.

4. On 2 Banes, the subdual critical hit is turned into a normal critical hit. If there is a 2nd crit, however, that can be a subdual one, so this Bane effect is only really relevant if a single Crit is generated.

4. On a Chaos Star, all critical hits take effect as criticals. Whoops. Your non-lethal strike just subdued his head off.

Job done

Seriously, the key risk is that this makes non-lethal combat more potent than lethal combat, but the combination of slightly reducing damage potential and only converting 1 critical hit to non-lethal damage should mean that it's usually slightly less effective, which is as it should be.

And no, you can't intentionally increase your weapon's critical rating to avoid multiple critical hits. If you roll that many dice and get a lot of Boons, that means you've clocked him real good. This isn't Hollywood, any powerful blow to the head that knocks you out causes some level of brain damage, and there isn't anyone out there skilled enough to hit someone hard enough to knock them out but do no lasting damage*.

*Oh, ok. If you want to more cinematic, a-team types, one Crit per level of Training goescan add subdual damage. But the chaos star still screws them over.

We handle it like this:

When you have more wounds than your Wound Threshold you are KO'd as a PC. So why not let the PC's KO the same way enemies if they to do it? The only thing I demand from my players is that they say beforehand that they want to KO the enemy they are fighting rather than kill him/her. If they do not say anything on beforehand I assume that they fight to kill.

When fighting to KO an enemy it's up to the players not to opt for critical damage when having Sigmar's comets, enough boons or success lines that indicate criticals. Too many criticals when they're above their Wound Threshold and their opponent dies regardless of what the players "want". This might make the players use "lesser" success lines to avoid inflicting criticals and might make them use "lesser" actions that do not cause criticals to begin with.

Also they'd probably have to use first aid or wait for the enemy to wake up, just as with KO'd PC's.

It's easy and almost not even a house rule. And you don't forget the rules as they're basically the same as for killing/KO-ing the PC's.

I'd say that normal wounds are non-lethal combat damage. By themselves they can't kill you (if you're a PC, or using the above 'houserule'). You also heal relatively quickly as you discard 3-4 wounds from toughness and another 1-2 for the resilience check might make a normal character heal about 5 wounds a day. In two, or three, days you're fully healed from beeing knocked out and that's even without any sort of medical attention. Now throw in some first aid after the fight and/or some long term care and they all might be gone in a day. That's what I call Non-lethal damage, Warhammer style.

A real world example might be that if you're punched around a bit in a fist fight (non-lethal?) and subsequently knocked out from the blows you'd feel that for at least a couple of days.

The subdue action is this: How do we think it compares with things like Reckless Cleave and whatnot in terms of game balance? I think monsters would actually be tougher to take out as they are not inclined to have a fatigue score (you would have to create one for them). Another thing to consider, as a GM, is that your players will eventually start subduing (and then torturing-interrogating) everyone that they meet. The implications of this are that you'd better be ready for your game to go that way.

**Cross-posted from another thread to save me the trouble of typing something similar here**

I wouldn't go the route of converting wounds into fatigue. Four reasons:

1. PCs are KO'd by fatigue faster than they are by damage. With toughness 3, it takes 13 wounds to KO you, but only 7 fatigue to do so. Converting normal damage into fatigue doesn't make it "softer", it actually makes it more immediately debilitating.
2. Most NPCs don't actually take Fatigue anyway. Their fatigue is converted into damage, so converting damage into fatigue to make it non-lethal ends up in a weird paradox that ultimately only complicates things.
3. Normal wounds heal super-fast in Warhammer 3rd. An average human will recover from 3 to 6 wounds per day without any medical attention (just a good night's rest), which is roughly 25% to 50% of the number or wounds it takes to KO them. First Aid and Medicine checks can greatly improve this healing rate. If you're KO'd but not actually killed, you'll be fully healed in 3 or 4 days, even without medicine or magic.
4. Only Critical wounds count for determining if you die or not, and it takes several of them to do it. 4 total to kill an average human who's been KO'd. Most crits are caused by things the players can self-limit to one extent or another. (If you want to reduce the crits you're inflicting, simply use your comets for redundant successes and always spend boons on non-crit effects first.)

For my group, I made a Condition card called " Pulling Your Punches ". It's voluntary, and only uses a Condition card so that we'd have a visual reminder of how it works. The card effect reads: " Add a Misfortune die to your attacks. Unless you roll a Chaos Star, your attacks do not cause criticals (including the one normally inflicted when a target is KO'd) ."

I considered all sorts of ways to complicate that card further and make it more "realistic", but found this to be elegant and functional enough. Taking care not to kill your target should logically be harder than attacking normally, but not so hard that the PCs are always better off just killing everyone. Note that as written, the condition works equally as well for punches, pommel strikes, or even shooting someone in a non-vital area. Apply common sense as needed.