How Do You Handle Extracting Incapacitated Combatants from Engagement?

Another situation I recall in our last session - it was the same combat where a PC charged and Knocked Down a powerful adversary, with the remaining PCs attempting to swarm him while he was down, in the subsequent 2 rounds.

During that fight, one of the 4 PCs went down while engaged with the enemy. The remaining PCs wanted one of their number to drag him out of melee and look him over. After doing so, the “dragger” returned to engagement and another PC went down. One of the two remaining PCs dragged the 2nd downed character out to look him over.

How would you handle this situation, as I can see it happening a lot in the future? Obviously, the players wanted to take advantage of tending to a fallen combatant within 1 round of falling to gain the +2 bonus.

I gave the players the benefit of my doubt in this case, but I’m not sure I ran it as intended to be run, and I’d rather have a clearer answer in the future.

The “official rule” would be that the PC-dragger would have to first use either a movement or an attack action to “pick up” the fallen character. The fallen character’s weight would be added to his encumbrance, reducing his movement probably to 60’ or 30’. On the character’s next round, he could then conduct a withdrawal.

There are two simpler ways you could handle it:

  1. Allow the “dragger” to grab his friend and withdraw up to his combat movement carrying his fallen comrade, but treat this as a full retreat;
  2. Allow the “dragger” to conduct an Overrun special maneuver to escape with the body of the fallen.

I personally use option #1.

So “by the book” then requires two rounds.

Putting it in ACKS terms, what I did was:

  1. Allow the dragger to grab his fallen ally (i.e. pick up an item off the ground… admittedly, “item” in this case is a stretch, but not too big a stretch)
  2. Withdraw from engagement up to half his combat movement (which admittedly breaks the RAW, since your non-movement action comes after your movement action).

I like all three of those methods actually. I can envision several instances where one makes more sense to use than the other two.

Thanks as always Alex!

Alex said: “The fallen character’s weight would be added to his encumbrance, reducing his movement probably to 60’ or 30’. On the character’s next round, he could then conduct a withdrawal.”

What if this causes encumbrance to exceed maximum capacity?

(I think in most cases it will. Consider an average human might be 17 stone. This leaves only 3 stone of armor and equipment for both characters combined before an average strength character can’t carry his comrade.)

[An on the fly ruling I did: Dragging: you can drag something if that would encumber you no more than double your max load. Movement while dragging is 5 feet per round, and counts as retreating.]