D&D 5E Do You Think Spare the Dying is a Problem?

It seems self-evident to me and the Cleric player in my group that the spell spare the dying is horrendously overpowered. The reasons are obvious:

• It infinitely improves PC survivability. Every group wants someone who can cast spare the dying.
• If you're a Cleric, you pretty much have to take it, since you're doing your group a disservice by not taking it.
• A group that has it is so different than a group that doesn't have it, that it's almost a totally different game. A game where nobody ever dies except by stupidity or energy drain.

I tweeted this to Mike Mearls, and he said he doesn't think it's a problem. I mentioned it in another thread, and someone else said they don't think it's a problem. So, am I going crazy here?

Of course Mearls doesn't see it as a problem because he likes death as a rarity. I would just baj the spell if they won't remove it. Kind if forces "that" particular playstyle on your group.

I would agree that there's something wrong with Spare the Dying but my problem is broadly with the death and dying rules in general as well as with the concept of "swift casting." I think the current death rules in D&D5 are very forgiving in general (but they're pretty easy to houserule), and I think the idea of a spell that is so easy to cast it is an afterthought is utter nonsense. It's enough that cantrips are free in terms of memorization -- they don't also have to be free in terms of actions (unfortunately that's harder to houserule).

That said, in the context of the D&D5 rules as written, Spare the Dying in itself is potentially awkward, but I don't think it is actively broken. It's practically impossible to kill a PC with a few levels in D&D5, even without the spell being available. It is far easier to knock them out. Spare the Dying saves PCs from bleeding out, but so do healer's kits, which everyone can use. So the real issue here is not that Spare the Dying improves PC survivability, but rather that it returns them to combat as an afterthought, leaving the cleric still free to take a standard action in the turn (which could be used to heal the risen PC further).

I have never done the experiment, but it seems to me that even so this is not an advantage the PCs could use to turn a loss into a victory. At best, it's going to let the party tread water for a few more rounds before they are defeated. In a touch-and-go situation, it might tip the scales in the favor of the PCs, but the only reason why I have an objection to that is that there is no risk involved in the spell's casting. The cleric can do it and then take his turn as normal. But again, that's the D&D5 rules, not the spell itself.

In conclusion, I think the spell ought to either be swift and stabilize without healing, or heal to 1 HP and not be swift. But the concept of the spell itself is not necessarily broken.

I think this spell is clearly an effort to compartmentalize many of the problems D&D has with different playstyle attitudes toward death and dying. As such, I believe it does its job, though there is perhaps room for improvement.

Is it balanced as-is? Probably not: I mean, if I were playing a 5E campaign I'm pretty sure I would want someone to dip a cleric level at the very least in order to get this spell available to the party.

However, it never came up as a problem with any of the level 1-5 games I ran.

I've played plenty of Next, both as a DM and as a player of a Cleric, and I think the spell is... eh, balanced... but the kind of balance you get from being broken in two different places at once. Bear with me for a moment.

On the one hand, this spell can potentially remove every danger of dying except for dying outright in one blow. This becomes less likely as the levels go by.

On the other hand I've found that this is not very likely to ever occur in real play. As a touch spell, you must be near the target. Said target is almost invariably right in the middle of a very dangerous situation, because why else would he be dying? Simply reaching the target might earn you an unhealthy amount of opportunity attacks. Then there's also the opportunity cost. You can't cast a "real" spell on the same turn and your melee attacks are not so phenomenal that you really want to keep doing that. Sometimes there's other things you need (or just want) to do than to heal someone up to 1 hp. Maybe some other party member by now also needs healing, or maybe you yourself because you ate all those opportunity attacks getting here. Worse, since the healed creature has only a single hit point it's also trivially easy for them to collapse once more before your next turn comes up, potentially locking you into a loop of repeating the same turn over and over. It's a kind of guilt-tripping stun phenomenon that locks up both the Cleric and the victim. I've seen it happen only once in a fight where area damage was somewhat common and it was an absolutely miserable experience for everyone involved. The Cleric had another action thanks to the swift spell but he couldn't use it for anything because he already knew he'd have to stay next to his soon-to-be-dead-again friend. (The hell hounds' master had also noted this and had ordered them to simply walked away from the Cleric by this point.)


My main problem with Spare the Dying is that it has very little middle ground. At its very best, it might be too good. At its very worst, it sucks all the fun out of the fight. At its most reasonable it's fine... but I haven't seen this really happen very often. Everything might have a corner case every now and then, that's fine, but Spare the Dying has them more often than not.

XunValdorl_of_Kilsek said:

Of course Mearls doesn't see it as a problem because he likes death as a rarity.

Click to expand...

This.

DMZ2112 said:

I would agree that there's something wrong with Spare the Dying but my problem is broadly with the death and dying rules in general as well as with the concept of "swift casting." I think the current death rules in D&D5 are very forgiving in general (but they're pretty easy to houserule), and I think the idea of a spell that is so easy to cast it is an afterthought is utter nonsense.

Click to expand...

Indeed, 5e by default is pretty much tailored for players who never want to die. "Unless you do something incredibly stupid" is a trite formula that means nothing.

The game editors should have just acknowledged that players who never want to die just need a rule in the game that says they cannot die (and the DM comes up with other penalties or consequences).

Those tricky players who really never want to die but also want to be told they survived because they played well, should just be handled with DM's fudging all the time.

Everybody else (probably the small minority in 2014) can have a normal reasonable chance of death when playing D&D, and don't need stuff to reverse bad luck.

I chose that it's a problem, but I only feel that way in its current form. I like the idea of a spell that can instantly stabilize someone. I don't think, however, that it should be spammable at-will in combat. I think if it remains in the game for release, I'll houserule it as such:

Spare the Dying cannot be taken as a cantrip. Instead, Spare the Dying is a ritual that has no cost. The ritual takes one minute to perform, but the target no longer suffers the effects of bleeding out while the ritual is taking place. At the end of the ritual, the target has one hit point. Should the ritual be disrupted, the target resumes bleeding out, and the ritual must be restarted.

The cantrip's problem comes from the "I'm down. I'm up. I'm down. I'm up." effect that happens as a result. However, while playing Murder in Baldur's Gate (I think), our group ran into a ghoul, and the mage had gone down. I told the cleric to wait until he was about to die from the ghoul's chomping on him and then cast spare the dying on him. I thought it would have been funny to have him be basically a rawhide chew for ghouls.

I'm not sure I see the problem, it requires a touch, and it stops your from casting, AND it only targets downed allies.

It seams way better then cure minor wound, target heals 1hp...

...dark fire shall not avail you, Flame of Udun!

As I've suggested when we were discussing the so-called "death yo-yo", the problem is not with the cantrip, nor with the rules for stabilization, but with the rule for negative hit points.

Using the older version of the rule for negative hit points keeps death a real possibility at all levels. It's easily fixed (restored), and all the objections raised in the OP to Spare the Dying (all of which are overstated) are removed.