Request for Comment: Subdual damage comparison

[Doublebond]

As a slight aside - what are people seeing at their actual tables?

After a couple of sessions all my players started dealing subdual exclusively, regardless of whether they had to convert the damage type and take the associated penalties. The only time lethal started being used was in the hopes of getting a critical success. If not for this I really wouldn't have an issue with subdual damage.

Perhaps the problem is that vitality is appearing as something that by necessity has to be circumvented rather than dealt with directly. Regardless of whether subdual is objectively better than letha, it nonetheless certainly appears to be.

[Morgenstern]

Hey Blankbeard, I was looking at your initial set up and noticed one path is using a 2-h weapon, and the other is using a 1-handed weapon. To even things up they should match. Since I've been looking at the concern "there is no strategy for seeking critical hits" lets go ahead and shift the lethal weapon selection to Broad axe and see how it shakes out?

Looking for crits is, as a strategy, an exercise in beating your opponent with the random number generator as often as possible until they abruptly die. More attempts per round is better (true of all three tracks). The nice thing is most of the time if you crit, you hit - you almost ignore those missed hit delays you had to factor into both the lethal and subdual tracks. It also lets you fully exercise the multiple attack feats, or at least the first step. If you sample guy has Darting Weapon, he can take the -2 penalty each round to increase the number of attempts by 50%(!!) without penalizing his chance of crit per attempt at all(!!). Apply Darting weapon to the other tracks and the gain is not nearly as substantial. His real ideal circumstance would be to have a 18-20 threat range weapon, so that when using Darting Weapon any hit is a crit... Razor swords are confined to the age of reason, but they'll end a special character in seconds when they are available in the hands of a character building for lethal crit hits.

I mention Darting weapon (and it's kin) because it is probably one of the most game altering first tier feats there is. In a toe to toe slugging match it ups your attempt rate 50% over the other guy if they don't have it, but where it really shines is if you can dictate the course of the enegagement at all, forcing both parties to take a movement action each round, it doubles your number of attempts compared to the non-feated. In other words, if you put two copies of your sample character up against 2 targets that are moving away, the lethal damage attacker's crit strategy is unimpaired (the feat fully offsets the movement cost compared to toe-to-toe without the feat), while the suubdual strategy charater either has to accept a -2 attack penalty to make 2 attacks each round or only make 1 attack per round at full bonus. Ouch.

[Mister Andersen]

Since you guys are crunching comparative numbers, how does the reworked subdual damage posited in my post here pan out?

[Blankbeard]

Hey Blankbeard, I was looking at your initial set up and noticed one path is using a 2-h weapon, and the other is using a 1-handed weapon. To even things up they should match. Since I've been looking at the concern "there is no strategy for seeking critical hits" lets go ahead and shift the lethal weapon selection to Broad axe and see how it shakes out?

The weapons used had no bearing on the outcome except setting the damage.  The two I used are both threat 20 1d12 weapons.  A Broad axe is threat 19-20 which would bias the results towards lethal.   if you're concerned about weapon choice the fairest thing to do is to take a weapon that inflicts lethal and then apply the Rootwalker upgrade to it for the subdual weapon. 

But if you just take the broad axe and plug it into the original situation, the broad axe kills before knockout 85% of the time compared with the long sword at 60%. 

Looking for crits is, as a strategy, an exercise in beating your opponent with the random number generator as often as possible until they abruptly die.

I get what you're going for here but I think that adding in a strategy or a situation just clouds the comparison of damage types. 

Since you guys are crunching comparative numbers, how does the reworked subdual damage posited in my post here pan out?

If you think subdual is currently too strong, that might work.

[Morgenstern]

The weapons used had no bearing on the outcome except setting the damage.

I don't know how you can say that when two-handers are designed to be more potent than one-handed weapons. Its factored in 2h are better (mostly on offense) since you are giving up the ability to have a shield or alternate weapon in the other hand. Also in the two handed category with the broad axe would be the Falchion, Zweihander, and Claymore. All of which have 1d12 damage code (or better) and all of them have a 19-20 threat range. With lethal weapons you almost have to go out of your way to not get a 19-20 threat range . Being one handed but still offering a 1d12 is why the longsword's crit range is so low.

The two I used are both threat 20 1d12 weapons. A Broad axe is threat 19-20 which would bias the results towards lethal. If you're concerned about weapon choice the fairest thing to do is to take a weapon that inflicts lethal and then apply the Rootwalker upgrade to it for the subdual weapon.

You took what is the second best of all knock out strategy weapons (second only to the blunted claymore)and compared it to one of the bottom 40% worst boss-killing lethal melee weapons and ask, "which of these stuns/kills a boss faster?" Longswords are genius for mowing down unarmored mooks, but terrible for fighting special characters. I agree, lets be fair: pit sharp and blunt no-dachi against the target. You might also get interesting numbers with a sharp and dull dagger, arguably one of the most common 1-h weapons in history. The dagger being interesting because the sharp one will likely have to score 2 crits to finish the job .

But if you just take the broad axe and plug it into the original situation, the broad axe kills before knockout 85% of the time compared with the long sword at 60%.

Death by critical is a core feature of lethal damage. It what it offers instead of death spiral by fatigue. The table of lethal damage melee weapons is well over half 19-20 with occasional spikes of 18-20. Trying to divoce that fact from all the weapons that do lethal damage is going to give the skewed results we're seeing: people so concerned that subdual will end the fight before you grind down a foe's vitality that they are ignoring the exact result you just described - that a lethal damage weapon chosen for the task at hand will outperform a similarly well chosen subdual weapon being used for that same task

I get what you're going for here but I think that adding in a strategy or a situation just clouds the comparison of damage types. 

*shrug* Damage type doesn't exist in a vacuum. But I follow the desire to reduce variables.

[Morgenstern]

Philospohical sidebar:
So, I actually think of offensive combatant characters as falling into two camps - those that specialize in handling the standard characters, and those that specialize in handling the special charater. The character optons out there really support this division of labor.

Multi-target killing feats like cleave have bonuses that only affect standard characters. Instant kill tricks are for obliterating tought standard characters one at a time, but most standard character killing tactics involve multiple-attack or AoE tools, ussually trading attack bonus for scattering damage as standards just seem to have low defense scores. These combatants can kill named foes adequately because combatants ussually have good fundamentals with specialization layered over that, but the look forward to descriptions of 25'x25' rooms with 15 or more enemies packed in wating to be cut down in 2 rounds or less...

Boss killers or 'duelists' as I think of them rarely acquire AoE effects. They don't need them as there is typically only one or two enemies worthy of their attention (don't get me wrong, they can kill minons just fine, just not with the unholy speed a lawnmower build can). Assassins are pointed towards this line of thinking by their core ability. They favore multiple single target attacks (Darting weapon is excellent) and generally don't give up attack bonus for anything less than more attacks, since their chosen prey often has pretty sound defense thresholds. Low-level ones might favor all-out attack when the prospect of doing 16-24 damage per hit can still chew through villian vitality in moments.

Coming back around to the current concern, I normally think of subdual damage as a tool of the lawnmower. Its every bit as good as lethal for ending the fight and it leaves you with enemies you can question or ransom at your leisure. I normally think of duelists as favoring lethal damage because its so good at dropping special enemies before they can dish enough damage to kill your comrades (erratic or not, I don't want to wait 7 rounds/14 attacks to get the dragon to stop pounding us. I want it to die NOW. Last round would be even better...). I'm left to wonder if the folks using subdual against bosses are using lethal against minions in a total reversal of my mindset, or if they just use sudual for all jobs (the jokes about having a hammer and everything looking like a nail slot in here pretty seemlessly ).

[Sletchman]

Since you guys are crunching comparative numbers, how does the reworked subdual damage posited in my post here pan out?

Without doing all the math on it - I'm sure your suggestion will make Lethal pull out by a long distance.  They both become a vitality-removal race, with Critical Hits being vastly superior for Lethal - they end the fight in as few as one crit, vs a minimum of 5 crits for subdual (before vitality removal).  After that it's just a case of damage dealt and they're going to be totally equal for that (rootwalker weapon etc.).

[Mister Andersen]

I don't mind that actually: the whole point of subdual after all is beating the tar out of someone without killing them.

At the same time, it also allows them to fight effectively as part of a team with someone using lethal by being able to wear down vitality at the same rate

[Coyote0273]

It amused me tonight that for this entire post nobody brought up passive subdual damage potential, such as the Orc's Grueling Combatant. Only occured to me because tonight I lost a fresh NPC to missing my group's orc soldier and failing his save right then and there.