Save or Die: Yea or Nay?

[FireLance]

I'm also a bit of a fan of "damage with special effect at 0 hp," though I haven't seen a lot of that. Meet the Medusa's gaze, and you take damage as your body turns slowly to stone, and if it reduces you to 0 hp, you become petrified, but if you're not at 0 hp, you don't need to worry about it. This makes HP more of an arbiter of "when things go wrong" then saves or anything does.

For the record, this is what I did in a mid-heroic 4E game with a medusa that I modified to be a solo monster. The medusa's gaze inflicted ongoing 10 damage and slowed (save ends); first failed save: ongoing 10 damage and immobilized (save ends); second failed save: ongoing 10 damage and restrained (save ends); third failed save: ongoing 10 damage and stunned (save ends), with the PC only turning to stone if he was reduced to 0 hit points while taking ongoing damage.

The fight went pretty well, and more importantly, I thought it modeled the effect of a medusa's gaze on the general population quite well (since most ordinary people would have less than 10 hp and would turn to stone almost immediately after being affected by the medusa's gaze) while allowing heroes like the PCs to overcome the effects and survive.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Two things:

A medusa is indistinguishable from a normal human at distances greater than 30 feet (or closer, if its face is concealed). The creature often wears garments that enhance its body while hiding its face behind a hood or veil.

You literally cannot identify a medusa until it's turned you to stone.

You can rant until your blue in the face about how DMs should spare SoDs for only super dramatic foretold enemies, but in those cases, the SoD is just a plot device, not a game mechanic.

As for the "difficulty" part of being heroic, BS.

Let's say you make a boss who just instant kills you 5/6 times he attacks. Wow, that'd be a really challenging level, and I'm sure it would be really exciting to beat it, but does that make it heroic? Or cool? Or fun? Or interesting? No.

You seem to be under this extremely bizarre idea that SoDs constitute as challenge. It doesn't. Playing rocket tag isn't challenging, it's just "which initiative won" or "how far in advance did you plan." Challenge isn't a wizard that can just one shot you half the time, challenging is an enemy that does enough damage to keep you on your toes, and takes enough damage to keep the combat going. In a combat where you can shift tactics due to how the fight is going. You can't do that with SoDs.

Stop this garbage about "wizard boo boo," or the hilariously passive aggressiveness. It doesn't help your point to make things stupid and needlessly polarized, it just makes you look...well, like someone who needs to be passive aggressive and spew out garbage to feel superior to others. If the only way you can imagine a challenge is by just killing off PCs without giving them much of a chance, you have the problem, not the game.

Oh, and stop spouting garbage about heroes when you've been disproven every time you open your gob about it. And change your sig, too, it's embarrassing.

~ See the above? it is a good example of the kind of language which isn't appropriate. If you think you need to insult people, then step away from the keyboard for a bit, else you face threadbanning at the least: Plane Sailing ~

 

[Lanefan]

You're assuming the death is certain, which tells me you have no idea how 4e save effects work.

Makes sense, as I don't play 4e, but that doesn't change anything: a quick unavoidable death is and remains far preferable to a slow unavoidable death.

You misunderstand.

Look at the sword and sorcery style gameplay where this is most evident or in the literature. The characters aren't "heroes," though they are protagonists. They aren't guided by morality or the desire to do good. The standard dungeon crawl came purely out of "There's treasure in there, go get it."

Now that's a whole bunch of assumptions bundled into 4 lines of type.

Who says S-and-S adventurers can't also be - or become - heroes? Or that dungeon crawlers live only for the treasure?

I mean, look at it this way: a hero needs only two things to become a hero. One, to do some good and-or useful things (most adventurers do such on a regular basis). Two, a good press agent (as said adventurers have probably got rich along the way, they can afford one).

It's interesting, because each edition leans more towards adventure over grim and grittiness. As alignment became more codified, it was more excepted that adventurers were such for reasons of morality rather then pure greed. Settings became more complex and filled in, which in turn gave rise to bigger and more complex backstories to characters. Character options grew, as did both the ability to and the desire to fully customize your character beyond just "fighting man" or "wizard."

Yes. Sad, isn't it?

That has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

It it the exact crux of what we're talking about. Those who die - by any means, including SoD - are dead. Those who survive are (potentially) heroes.

And as for SoD, there's a different and forgotten perspective to look at here: that of the party as a unit. If one character has to (save or) die in order to warn the rest there's something around that corner best left alone - or that's going to need some real preparation in order to deal with - what's the problem?

That said, I do agree with Raven Crowking's point that if a game is to be high-death then character generation also has to be relatively simple.

Having a group go through dozens of characters falling like rats doesn't fit any literary tropes.

For traditional literature, you're right. For D+D story-hours or game logs, however, it *is* the trope!

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

... challenging is an enemy that does enough damage to keep you on your toes, and takes enough damage to keep the combat going. In a combat where you can shift tactics due to how the fight is going. You can't do that with SoDs.

Yes you can, by the rest of the party reacting to the death (or the made save).

What seems like a relatively simple battle against a frail-looking human gets turned on its head when Fred the Fearless suddenly petrifies in front of her. Yeah, the tactics are gonna change; as they should! I fail to see an overall problem; and while Fred's player might not be too happy for a few moments, stuff happens and it's part of the game.

Lanefan

 

[I'm A Banana]

Interestingly, FFZ has functionally immortal characters and save-or-die effects. It's heavily narrative, but it has no problem with putting characters through the wringer. Y'know that piece of writing advice, "kill your children," "break the cutie," "make conflict?" That's FFZ's narrative mantra. When you know your character isn't really going to die, it opens up such spectacular vistas of failure and temporary disability, that it might make death appealing.

I'm not sure where that fits on the continuum of narrative vs. game, but it certainly matches the videogames, which is something of the point.

The fight went pretty well, and more importantly, I thought it modeled the effect of a medusa's gaze on the general population quite well (since most ordinary people would have less than 10 hp and would turn to stone almost immediately after being affected by the medusa's gaze) while allowing heroes like the PCs to overcome the effects and survive.

That's why I like it. It lets you play a "grim n gritty" style where, like with Grim n Gritty HP, one sword wound might kill you, or to play it in a more heroic style, where, even if you're surrounded and have a knife to your back and are falling off a cliff, you might be able to survive.

In the heroic example, this would mean having a staring contest with the Medusa, using sheer force of will to stave off petrification.

In your 4e combat, I'm assuming that's basically what the Defender did.

 

[Hussar]

Yes you can, by the rest of the party reacting to the death (or the made save).

What seems like a relatively simple battle against a frail-looking human gets turned on its head when Fred the Fearless suddenly petrifies in front of her. Yeah, the tactics are gonna change; as they should! I fail to see an overall problem; and while Fred's player might not be too happy for a few moments, stuff happens and it's part of the game.

Lanefan

And that's the problem isn't it?

It's rarely "just a few moments". Even if chargen is very quick, unless you don't care at all about continuity in the game, the party still has to go somewhere to meet the new PC. "A few moments" in actuality might easily be a couple of hours.

I do not play games to be a spectator.

Honestly, if I was to go back to games with high kill rates, I'd use something like 3:16, which really does play into the idea of disposable heroes. In D&D, where your character is meant to last for a while, since most people do seem to like giving a modicum of backstory and personality to their character, high death rates is the death of role play.

It takes a pretty stellar role player to put the same effort into his sixth character in as many sessions as he put into the first one. And multiple characters, IME, means that you have either one character with a personality and a silent tag along, or two wooden mannequin characters with pretty much no personality between them.

It's been a very long time, I think, for most D&D gamers, to even consider multiple concurrent PC's as a base method of play. Certainly the game hasn't advocated anything like that in decades.

 

[Lanefan]

And that's the problem isn't it?

It's rarely "just a few moments". Even if chargen is very quick, unless you don't care at all about continuity in the game, the party still has to go somewhere to meet the new PC. "A few moments" in actuality might easily be a couple of hours.

I do not play games to be a spectator.

Where I accept that it happens sometimes. (my personal record, which *was* excessive: I once sat through 6 sessions (!) waiting for the party to find my character in a dungeon; they missed the room where he was shackled to a table on their way in, went through the entire adventure and found him on their way out! And I didn't have a pre-existing character in that party...)

It takes a pretty stellar role player to put the same effort into his sixth character in as many sessions as he put into the first one. And multiple characters, IME, means that you have either one character with a personality and a silent tag along, or two wooden mannequin characters with pretty much no personality between them.

You haven't met my crew, have you? Or my characters?

It's been a very long time, I think, for most D&D gamers, to even consider multiple concurrent PC's as a base method of play. Certainly the game hasn't advocated anything like that in decades.

And my point has always been that this is a mistake, given that characters can easily find themselves out of action for a while by any number of different means - including roleplaying; I've roleplayed myself right out of parties on several occasions, just by having my character(s) do what they would logically do.

Lan-"the character shackled to the table was, in fact, Lanefan"-efan

 

[Hussar]

Good grief Lanefan. You actually kept playing with that DM? You, sir, have an amazing level of intestinal fortitude. I freely admit that I would not stand for that. And, really, I think that most players are in the same boat. Forcing someone to not play for several hours to maintain a sense of verisimilitude is not the sense of priorities I want in a DM. Ever.

As far as the multiple PC's idea being a solution, I'll admit I like the idea to some degree. It does have legs, although, IMO, it simply spackles over the problem, rather than solving it. It's great for some games - Paranoia springs to mind - but, I'm not sure if it would be something many gamers would like in long term campaigns.

The problem that is being spackled over, is frequent character removal from play. Whether that removal is from character death or role play, frequent character removal is the problem.

So, while multiple PC's does speak to the symptoms of the problem, it doesn't actually solve them. After all, you need a method to restock your stable of characters or you wind up right back at the same problem - a player with no character to play.

The other direction to take is to simply mitigate (not remove) the number of characters removed from play. The example of a character being role played out of the group is solved by group templates, where a given character must have connections to existing characters before it is incorporated into the group. Instead of random stranger with a glowing "P" over his head in a tavern, the new PC must have at least one, and hopefully more, reasons for joining the group and staying with it.

Instead of multiple creatures with SoD, reduce the total number, mitigate the effects of poison to make it debilitating rather than lethal, and possibly reduce the odds that a SoD will actually result in death (snakes that give +4 save bonuses, SSSoD, that sort of thing). Less characters die, and the problem is greatly reduced.

That's more or less why I don't think multiple characters is the way to go. It's only dealing with the symptoms, not the underlying problem.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Makes sense, as I don't play 4e, but that doesn't change anything: a quick unavoidable death is and remains far preferable to a slow unavoidable death.

Ignoring your love for old school D&D in general and how arguing about that will get us nowhere, for christ's sake, read how 4e mechanics work before you criticize them. You're just coming off as ignorant here.

 

[FireLance]

Makes sense, as I don't play 4e, but that doesn't change anything: a quick unavoidable death is and remains far preferable to a slow unavoidable death.

Um, I think the whole point to having multiple saving throws is to ensure that death isn't unavoidable.

And I think that's the other aspect of the SoD issue that has been raised, but not really explored yet (at least, not in this thread): the number of opportunities for action between the time the player realizes that his character might die and the time the character actually dies.

Of course, this is not really an issue if you take the perspective that the whole point of a saving throw (and IIRC, the original idea behind a "saving" throw in the first place) is that the character should be dead: he's been hit by a death spell, he's looked at a medusa, he's gotten a faceful of deadly poison gas, etc. However, because he's a hero (or he has the potential to be one), he's got one chance to not die. Go ahead. Roll your saving throw.

If you take this perspective, by the time a player is rolling a saving throw for his character, he would have already made enough mistakes and/or been unlucky enough that his character should be dead. You might have to deal with issues such as whether the players and DMs have different ideas about what is a "mistake", and how much bad luck and/or how many mistakes are "enough", but here, saving throws are always to the player's benefit because the alternative is simply "die, no save". Smart play consists of avoiding the need to make a saving throw in the first place, whether through research, planning, magical divination and/or protection, avoiding combat through negotiation or evasion, etc.

However, sometimes the DM simply wants to increase the threat of death in an encounter without making the fight arbitrarily lethal. IMO, straight SoD doesn't work as well in such scenarios because the player usually can't do much after his character has been targeted by a SoD effect except make a saving throw. The multiple saves before death model works better in such cases because the player will usually have a number of options he could potentially take: try to run away (if being away from the monster stops the effect), try to kill the monster as quickly as possible (if the monster's death stops the effect) or try to remove the effect (if he can).

Incidentally, I think that this chance to take action between realizing the increased likelihood of death and the actual death of the character (should it occur) is one key reason why some gamers who don't mind it (much ) when their characters die in normal combat still don't like SoD.