Death & Dying - a better (and simple!) system.

[eamon]

I voted "Naa... why bother?"

Our group has always liked the dying/death mechanic from the core books. When your time is up, you just have to go, simple as death -err,that.

These suggestions are to complicated ( think new gamers ) and just adds more to the book-keeping wich we don´t need. It´s simply not smooth enough ( if you want to change the rules)
My personal opinion is that it feels to videogamey -almost like a savegame under the fight, or that everbody just likes the Frenzied Berserker - nobody really wants to die after all.

Asmo

Normal: When you take damage and end up at negative hit points, you lose 1 hit point each round unless you succeed on a 10% roll, in which case you become stable. Regardless, you die instantly at -10. A 10% roll is a roll with a d10 which turns up on a 1.

Proposed: When you take damage and end up at negative hit points, you die if you fail a fortitude save DC 1/2 negative hit points. Regardless, you lose 2 hitpoints. You must make four more successful saves, each one round later, after which you become stable.

I don't think the new rules are much more complex. And they don't use a weird percentile mechanic either. If you find this too lenient, you can replace the 1/2 neg hitpoints with simply the negative hit points. The advantages concerning metagaming, tension, and drama remain. The mechanic also scales much better to high levels that the old system which basically turned all combat into sudden death - and if that's what you enjoy, then this system isn't for you. However, if you enjoy sudden death (and some do like the gritty sense of danger) you might as well get rid of negative hitpoints entirely, and simply die once you drop below 0.

 

[ruemere]

Short commentary:

This particular rule makes deaths of important protagonists much less probable. Bigger creatures and beings of constructs/elemental type receive significant boost to their durability.

If you want to use this rule, please remember, that in my campaign characters are significantly stronger (meaning more points for statistics, using my version of point-buy), poorer (minor magic items are in shorter supply, costing 3 times as much, with items beyond 10.000 being virtually unavailable) and epic (the quests involve wellbeing of large community).

In short, sometimes a legion of skeletons may make a seasoned veterans pause.

regards,
Ruemere

 

[eamon]

Fortitude saves, Consitution, and Great Fortitude just became a whole lot more important...

But not out of flavor. If you're worried about survivability, then you wanted a high Con anyways. In practice, dropping is still very risky (in some ways more so, as even if you drop to -1, you have a 5% chance of dying immediately regardless of your save bonus), so most characters in my campain avoid it. Those that do drop do still regularly die in my playtesting, precisely because people underestimate how nasty iterative saves really are. You're still much much better off not dropping to negative hitpoints at all than having a few points higher save bonus, so scaling your fort save really doesn't improve your character that much just because of this house rule. In any case, it means that hardy characters are more likely to stabilize than fragile ones, which provides a slight boost to fighter types - generally not a bad thing in my book. Most of this boost only occurs if you're healed very quickly as this variant becomes deadly very rapidly once you need to make all five saves, so although it makes fighters somewhat stronger, it makes all dropped characters more dependant on quickly receiving aid. Your chance of surviving scales strongly depending on how quickly you are helped.

In practice, in actual play, players seem to disregard the increased importance of fortitude saves because of this variant - other factors are still far more important to their character. So I'm pretty sure that even after this change "Great Fortitude" is not a very powerful feat choice. My group has built at least 8 characters (8 have seen real play, more are on the sidelines) which are now at 7th level using this system and not once has anybody chosen Great Fortitude or any other specifically fort-save enhancing ability. They've not even purchased any a Con boosting magic item, despite the fact that others do have strength and charisma boosting items (the fighter and sorcerer, respectively). This house rule hardly impacts game balance therefore, but if you're really worried you could replace the fort save with a level check - which I don't recommend because of flavor, but it's possible, and would still be much better that the RAW solution in terms of in-game fun because it still avoids metagaming and still increases tension and drama.

 

[eamon]

Short commentary:

This particular rule makes deaths of important protagonists much less probable. Bigger creatures and beings of constructs/elemental type receive significant boost to their durability.

If you want to use this rule, please remember, that in my campaign characters are significantly stronger (meaning more points for statistics, using my version of point-buy), poorer (minor magic items are in shorter supply, costing 3 times as much, with items beyond 10.000 being virtually unavailable) and epic (the quests involve wellbeing of large community).

In short, sometimes a legion of skeletons may make a seasoned veterans pause.

regards,
Ruemere

Your rules look fine. I'm supposing you intentionally boost large creatures thusly? I wouldn't really want to do that, but if that's intentional, it's fine. I could imagine it makes battles with huge creatures more prolonged . Maybe you could further reduce the impact of low hitpoints (right now you include the full negative hit points as a modifier to the roll) depending on your size? something like, if you're large then hp/2 if you're huge hp/3 etc... That way they don't just become stronger (that's your intent right?) but also take nice and dramatically long to die .

Although I think your rules look like they could work fine, I think they're too complex for most people, such as all those players that aren't interested in the rules for the rules sake - to them there's just a bunch of modifiers and it'll be hard to remember exactly when what applies.

 

[ruemere]

Your rules look fine. I'm supposing you intentionally boost large creatures thusly? I wouldn't really want to do that, but if that's intentional, it's fine. I could imagine it makes battles with huge creatures more prolonged . Maybe you could further reduce the impact of low hitpoints (right now you include the full negative hit points as a modifier to the roll) depending on your size? something like, if you're large then hp/2 if you're huge hp/3 etc... That way they don't just become stronger (that's your intent right?) but also take nice and dramatically long to die .

Although I think your rules look like they could work fine, I think they're too complex for most people, such as all those players that aren't interested in the rules for the rules sake - to them there's just a bunch of modifiers and it'll be hard to remember exactly when what applies.

Ooops. Forgot to add that base difficulty level is 10.

Anyway, apart from making Toughness a desireable feat for tank-type characters this rule adds only a little work for GM. You still use D20 rules, still record negatives, just need to remember that you resolve character actions a little differently once they go into negatives.

With regard to changing game balance - game flow:
- heroic characters are much less likely to to die because of one lucky critical (for an average roll of 10 and Fortitude save of +4, you would have to go into -34 to die),
- in the best tradition of HK movies, tough guys can bleed yet continue fighting.

As for the big guys, constructs and undead:
The boost is intentional. Combats against such creatures become more resource consuming. It's fine by me, since I often add xp bonuses for clever tactics and overcoming major obstacles.

regards,
Ruemere

 

[Bladesong]

All of these ideas seem good and I would like to use something like this, but why does there have to be so much math connected to all new ideas? I have adults in my group that have touble "doing the math" quickly. So how about this: who really cares if they are at -1 or -100; dying is dying right? Just off the top of my head, starting the round after they get hit, a DC 5 Fort Save to stay alive, DC 10 the next, then DC 15 and finally DC 20 then stabilize; or how about a flat DC 15 for 4 - 10 rounds. You could also make an equivalent Concentration check each round to "stay alert" enough for free actions/talking only (for those "death-bed" speeches someone mentioned).

Or maybe the other way, a DC 10 Fort save every round for 10 rounds to "stay alert" and if you succeed by 10 or 15 you stabilize on your own and if you fail by 5 or more you die immediately but if you have not stabiliized in 10 rounds or a number equal to your CON, you die. Anyway the "half of this then add this negative number every round and then subtract this and then add this up again" gets a bit cumbersome.

 

[Obergnom]

The rule as written by eamon (first post) is really simple and light on math:

Roll Fort against half neg HP or die, if successfull, loose 2 hp. Repeat that 5 times, after which you remain stable.

Works great, but you could go for a deadlier but easier variant and role against full negative HPs. Make them only loose one HP if the save is successfull.

 

[Bladesong]

The rule as written by eamon (first post) is really simple and light on math:

Roll Fort against half neg HP or die, if successfull, loose 2 hp. Repeat that 5 times, after which you remain stable.

Works great, but you could go for a deadlier but easier variant and role against full negative HPs. Make them only loose one HP if the save is successfull.

It should be easy, and it is to you and I, but I am telling you that there ARE people who really get bogged down by this...you'll just have to trust me on this one.

I guess for those people who just feel the need to see numbers "counting down" I suppose you could start at DC 10 or 15 and just add one to it for 4 or 5 rounds.

 

[eamon]

I chose to do 2 damage each round so that the DC would increase by one each round. For extreme light-on-math-ness you could simply do as Obergnom suggests and not even divide by 2. Further if you then simply don't do extra damage each round you get:

Each round at negative hitpoints, do fort save DC negative hitpoints. If you survive 5 consecutive rounds without additional damage, you stabilize.

However, I like counting down numbers, hence the extra damage. Increasing the DC each round without dealing damage leads to weird corner cases (what happens when someone gets extra damage - does the clock reset?)

In practice however, it's really simple, you just divide the (negative) hitpoints by two - that's your DC, and each round the DC goes up by one. To play D&D you need to be used to constantly adding a bit of damage, and that part is in the normal rules too, so I'm guessing that's not the problem? BTW, raising the DC by 5 each round is extremely lethal unless helped very quickly. If you want the math to be easy, I'd use Obergnom's suggestion, just make the DC equal to the (negative) hitpoints. Nice and simple. You could even get rid of natural stabilization, and rule that you only ever stabilize with help (so you don't have to bother counting rounds). Now that I think of it, that probably wouldn't disturb game balance much even though it sounds pretty nasty.

 

[Obergnom]

Hmm,

I thought about it a bit more, here is what I would do:

Have all your players record their "Death Save". Make this save equal to Fort+5
This will allow them to successfully save in the later game, when they can easily be hit toward -20hp.

Have them role against neg HP.

If successfull, role again next round. If not, you're dead.

Repeat for a number of rounds you (as a DM) are comfortable with. (This determines the Death Chance when a character would only fail when roling a 1. 5 saves =23%, 4 saves =19%, 3 saves = 14%, 2 saves = 10%, 1 save = 5%) I would suggest (to minimize book keeping, because the saves are still quite though and not to make them stabilize to fast) to use 3 saves in a row. The initial one and the 2 rounds after that.

If a characters is wounded while dying, reset the counter.

I think this rule is as light on math as possible, it is even lighter than the original one.