Nonlethal broken?

[Nickademus]

Is it just me, or is nonlethal damage just going to wounds now. I tried a fresh campaign with no extensions and it still is applying wounds for the 'nonlethal' damage type.

[Trenloe]

3.5E or PFRPG ruleset?

[Nickademus]

I would assume both. But I tested PFRPG.

[Moon Wizard]

I'm not seeing this in my version. Can you give me steps to reproduce?

Thanks,
JPG

[Nickademus]

Sure. Make a new PF campaign (no extensions of course).

In the combat tracker, make a couple creatures (or make a character and log in as a player to add it to the CT; can the GM add characters to the CT without a player having to make them active??). Either enter a weapon to the attack field of the creature: 'strike +3 melee (1d6 nonlethal)', or make a spell class with a spell that has a damage action that deals damage of the type 'nonlethal' or 'slashing, nonlethal' if you prefer. Or even create a weapon on a character with the damage type of 'nonlethal' or 'slashing, nonlethal'.

Either by dragging and dropping, manually targeting or using the CT to assign a target, apply damage to one of the entries in the CT. The damage doesn't go to the Sbd column like it should. It goes to the Wnd column. I even tried 'subdual' as a damage type.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I could have sworn that I've used 'nonlethal' as a damage type in the past to add damage to the Sbd column as nonlethal.

[Trenloe]

can the GM add characters to the CT without a player having to make them active??).
Yep, from the character selection window drag the PC portrait (or drag from the portrait square if there isn't a portrait - you won't see anything in the drag).

[Nickademus]

Thank you as always, Trenloe.

[Nickademus]

So, is anyone able to use subdual damage yet? I still see all nonlethal going to wounds.

Edit: Upon experimenting, I found the cause of this. Apparently a creature has to have a number of hit points set to receive nonlethal damage. New entries will not have hp initially and thus FG moves the nonlethal damage to wounds.

[Trenloe]

It appears the specific issue is nonlethal damage to PCs. It works fine for me applying NL damage to an NPC (from an NPC or a PC), but nonlethal damage from an NPC or PC to a PC goes to wounds.

As can be seen below, the exact same damage rolls work to an NPC but not to a PC:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39085830/Screenshots/Fantasy%20Grounds/3.5E%20Nonlethal%20to%20PC%20issue.jpg

[Nickademus]

Does your Wizard have hit points? New characters have no hit points set and thus NL damage bugs.

Also, I've found, if the hit point field has a value but the Hit Die field has no value, the creature will be parsed into the Combat Tracker with zero hit points. If you don't notice, they take damage normally but never die (and take NL damage as wounds as described above).

[Trenloe]

Does your Wizard have hit points? New characters have no hit points set and thus NL damage bugs.
Yeah, that was it. I put HP on the PC and NL damage worked OK.

[Moon Wizard]

This is correct behavior.

According to nonlethal damage rules in the d20 Pathfinder SRD, any nonlethal damage exceeding your hit points is converted to lethal damage. This is not true in the d20 base SRD.

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/combat#TOC-Nonlethal-Damage
Read the section under Staggered and Unconscious

Regards,
JPG

[Nickademus]

If this is appropriate behavior, then why isn't the creature given the dying condition when the nonlethal is converted to lethal and exceeds the creature's max hit points (zero)? I don't think the intention is for FG to utilize creatures with zero max hit points.

[Moon Wizard]

The status may not be updated, which would be a separate question. Also, probably not that important, since zero hp creatures are not really valid in the game system.

The logic for converting excess nonlethal damage in PF is correct though.

Regards,
JPG

[Nickademus]

I agree. The only real issue here that I've found that might warrant looking at is that an NPC with a blank Hit Dice value will ignore anything in the hit point field and be added to the combat tracker with zero hp (triggering this). For 1st-level NPCs that get max hp for 1st level, this is most likely the case. (If you put a HD value, it will ignore the hit point value and roll the Hit Die even though the creature is supposed to get max hp; the only work around I have found is to set the HD to a d1 with a bonus of one less than the total for max hit points, i.e. 12 max hit points would require a HD value of 1d1+11 to get FG to parse everything properly.)