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Death & Dying - a better (and simple!) system.
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<blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 3644717" data-attributes="member: 51942"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="eamon, post: 3644717, member: 51942"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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