Morale when subdued

[dob85y]

There are a number of instances where it would be decidly OoC to kill a creature in your path, but conflict becomes unaviodable unless they fail morale. And in some cases there are creatures too stupid to realise they should have allready left.

I suggest, that if it is technically possible, if a creature/monster is subdued in a combat, that it automatically fail its morale and high tail it out of there.

I have noticed that creatures dont stay down very long when subdued, not much longer than 1 round i think, but combat is a confusing place, especially when three enemies look alike, can this be verified?

[AcadiusLost]

Currently, mobs recover from subdual/nonlethal damage at the same rate as PCs, which is currently 1 point per 5 rounds (30 RL seconds).

Since the lowest "effective health" one can be dropped to via subdual is -10, a "subdued" creature (or PC) will be "out" for between 30 seconds (last hit barely pushed it over) and 5 minutes (actual real-life time, if you'd pounded it down to -10 effective health with subdual damage).

On a practical level, one can always subdual-whack the subdued creature(s?) every minute or two to keep them in the negatives if necessary. With the massive penalty to dex that comes with the "subdued" state, it's usually not hard to land those hits.

We could easily change the rate at which subdual damage heals, but this would have consequences for PCs as well. Canon is supposed to be 1 point per 10 rounds, IIRC, which would be twice as long to wait if your PC is KO'd.

And in case anyone was wondering, these times are all rooted in seconds/rounds, so they are independent of the game-hour setting. Our 7 min hours vs. 14 min ones don't matter for the purposes of subdual recovery.

[edit: with regard to morale, it may be possible to force a morale fail OnRecovered, it's something we can look into when we review those scripts soon.]

[hollyfant]

I'd approve of the change, for whatever that's worth.

[AcadiusLost]

It's probably worth it's own thread to discuss the subdual healing rate, I believe the current setting was a fairly arbitrary decision at the time.

The downsides of going to a 10 round healing rate that I can think of offhand are:

1. A PC knocked out and left to recover on it's own would be looking at as much as 10 RL minutes of lying helpless with the player sitting at the keys waiting for the chance to "do" something beside emoting *lies motionless*. Right now it's 5 minutes maximum, which is still a significant test of patience.

2. As characters level up and get more HP, the amount of subdual damage they might accumulate increases quite significantly. If you take a theoretical 14-con Ftr5 (60 hp), they'd be able to rack up as much as 70 points of subdual damage if he sparred to unconsciousness with his pal, the greataxe-wielding Brb7. That damage, under the current system, would take 35 minutes to recover completely and be ready to battle a "real foe" again. He'd be able to move around and function after just 5 minutes, but would need the full 35 min (RL) to be back to 100%. With a 10-round recovery rate, that would be 10 min to gain consciousness, followed by another full RL hour thereafter to shake off the full effects of the sparring.

So the question is, would the hassle of occasional "recovering" NPCs outweigh the tedium factor of slow subdual healing on PCs themselves?

[hollyfant]

they'd be able to rack up as much as 70 points of subdual damage if he sparred to unconsciousness

Anyone who engages in mock fighting until he falls over, deserves whatever he gets...

Does healing a creature that has sustained subdual damage remove an equal amount of real and subdual damage, like in the rules for nonlethal damage in PnP?

[Keryn]

AL I have witnessed a situation where we tried to subdue 3 wolfs in an failed atempt to avoid killing the pack, thing is... the wolves kept rising every 5 seconds... so either there is a bug or things are not working as they should...

This raises some problems because we don't know what we can expect when making a decision.

[Rotku]

so either there is a bug or things are not working as they should...

Isn't a bug a situation where something is not working as they should? So what you're saying is that there is either a bug, or a bug?

[Kest]

Sounds like a nice suggestion.

[Keryn]

so either there is a bug or things are not working as they should...

Isn't a bug a situation where something is not working as they should? So what you're saying is that there is either a bug, or a bug?

Was trying to say that it was either scripted to work like AL said and it is not, so it is bugged, or the scripting is off so it aint working like it should

Smart ass