A Land Far Away

Sourcebook: Book of Exalted Deeds, Page 46

Subduing Strike (General)

You are adept at striking to deal nonlethal damage even with normal weapons.

Benefit: You can use any melee weapon to deal nonlethal damage with no penalty on your attack roll. If you are a rogue you can deal nonlethal damage with your sneak attack even if you are using a normal melee weapon. This feat does not allow you to deal nonlethal damage with ranged weapons.
Normal: If you use a melee weapon designed to deal lethal damage to deal nonlethal damage instead, you take a -4 penalty to your attack roll. Rogues normally can only use saps or unarmed strikes to deal nonlethal damage with their sneak attacks.
Special: A fighter may select Subduing Strike as one of his fighter bonus feats.


On ALFA currently, if I am correct, players suffer a -5 to damage rolls when entering subdual mode with a lethal damage-dealing weapon. What this feat would do is negate that -5 to damage penalty so that a player could enter subdual mode and be adept at taking down an opponent quickly and efficiently without killing them. There are plenty of instances, at least from what I have seen, that taking a prisoner benefits the storyline more than just hack and slashing one's way to victory, so this feat would definitely see use. Just a thought.

~SSM

I likey

The following properties are temporarily and reversibly added to the equipped weapon upon entering subdual mode:

• No Combat Damage
• physical damage -5

Both are mechanistically necessary to block physical damage inflicted when striking an enemy with the weapon. The nonlethal damage scripts should still calculate full subdual damage (no penalties), even taking into account weapon specializations, power attack modes, etc. The -5 does not affect subdual damage.

Very rarely, one or both of these properties gets "stuck" on a weapon used for subdual; when this occurs, it is a bug and a DM should be informed to get a replacement for the bugged weapon.

Would it be possible (and/or desirable) to grant this ability for free to an Unarmed Strike?

Forgive me. I didn't know it did full subdual damage, I just looked at the -5 and thought it applied as well (as a substitute for the lack of -4 to hit).

hollyfant wrote:Would it be possible (and/or desirable) to grant this ability for free to an Unarmed Strike?

Subdual mode works when making barehanded attacks as well, when it's activated; I expect making it a "default behavior" for unarmed attacks would be problematic, though. Technically, it's implemented using a "creature weapon" similar to the claw or bite attacks monsters get (the invisible "NLD Fist" that occasionally appears in inventory), so it doesn't always work right with things like Improved Unarmed Strike and other such feats.

For now, folks wanting to do non-lethal damage with any non-ranged attack just need to activate subdual mode, then de-activate it when they're done dealing out nonlethal blows... and most everything will work properly.