embee
Lawyer by day. Rules lawyer by night.
it’s a long post. If TLDR, whatevs. If interested read on.
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My problem comes in with occasional
dissatisfaction about the level of danger in the game. It seems like people are healed quickly and unless it’s a TPK, it’s not as dangerous and getting beat down lasts a round or two max.
But that is when reality hits me. When we were younger, the way we really got far was by DM fiat. Sure, you could get level drained and miss a death save but more broadly, the DM moderated some consequences so we could have a longer term meaningful story vs. a meatgrinder of anonymous jerks. In short, 5e has merely codified this fiat into the rules. It may not be that different, really.
In terms of moving forward I need to alter my expectations and be clear about what changes might give us a little more sense of danger. For one, it would not take much to make healing a little less automatic. Maybe long rests don’t take care of everything. Perhaps, long rests allow us to expend hit dice…or something. I have to think that through.
First of all, you're not alone. In many ways.
I cut my teeth on AD&D when I was in the Dungeons & Dragons club in junior high. I played a bunch of 2e in college, mainly Dark Sun, a setting so brutal it told you to make multiple characters so when your PCs died, a new one would be ready to go. That was before I moved over to WoD, Call of Cthulhu, and then CCGs. And then, life happened. I never played 3, 3.5, or 4. When I started getting back into the game, Pathfinder was putting out 2e and WOTC had 5e going strong. So I can understand the Rip van Winkle aspect of it.
5e characters are springy. They are Weebles. They will wobble but they won't fall down. To me, I see some broken game mechanics. The whole damage takes you down to 0 unless it would drop you to negative of your max HP (which is instant death) is a problem. It means that 1 hp and 41 hp are the same thing:
You have a character with 41 hp max.
1) You're at max 41 hp and take 41 damage. You're at 0 hp. You are unconscious and start rolling death saves.
2) You're at 1 hp and take 41 damage. You're at 0 hp. You are unconscious and start rolling death saves.
The other 40 hp doesn't count because the remaining damage doesn't equal your HP maximum.
That's a problem. Also, there is no negative hp. You just need 1 hp to stand back up. And if you roll a nat 20, you're at 1 hp. That's another problem.
Add to this the elimination of elimination of save-or-die. It's gone.
And on top of all of that, there's the change to resting. 5e players are cautious - in that they love to rest between encounters. You can spend a hit die to heal 1 hit die in a short rest or take a long rest for 8 hours and get back all of your hp.
There are other subtler problems. Ye Olde Majick Shoppe is gone. There's really no way to buy magic items in 5e. So now you have PCs running around with a ton of money because there is nothing to buy. Nothing to buy except for... healing potions. Which leads to another problem.
RAW, drinking a potion takes an action, not a bonus action. This sounds silly because that potion is a shot of liquid. It shouldn't take a full action using common sense. But if you house rule it to drink a potion as a bonus action, you break the game and make already springy characters nigh-invulnerable.
Of course, I'm probably wrong. But, that's the way I see it (through my Coke bottle nerdlinger glasses).