D&D 5E It's so hard to die!

[the Jester]

... because those two casters could just spam fireball or something and just kick the party of downed players into failing death saves but that's not a reasonable encounter

How do you figure? If the bad guys can do so, and if they're serious about killing the party, damn right they ought to do it.

If you're complaining about it being too hard to kill pcs on the one hand and then arguing that encounters or tactics that might actually do so aren't reasonable, I'm not sure what you're looking for here.

 

[Emerikol]

Our deaths have always come not just from going to zero and failing death saves, but from going to zero and foes continuing to hit your prone body repeatedly after that. Each hit causes one negative death save result. Do that enough before other players with healing can respond, and you die.

But only two types of creatures would do this...really smart enemies and animalistic enemies that would stop to eat. Everyone in between will move to the next enemy once someone goes down.

 

[Oofta]

Our deaths have always come not just from going to zero and failing death saves, but from going to zero and foes continuing to hit your prone body repeatedly after that. Each hit causes one negative death save result. Do that enough before other players with healing can respond, and you die.

Just to be nit-picky, many successful hits result in failing 2 death saves.

Under Unconscious

• Attack rolls against the creature have advantage.
• Any attack that hits the creature is a critical hit if the attacker is within 5 feet of the creature.

From the section on Death Saving Throws

If the damage is from a critical hit, you suffer two failures instead.​

​

If you focus fire and continue to hit PCs after their down, it's really not hard to kill them.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Repeat the experiment, only this time have the dm not pull punches. Monsters use good tactics- focus fire, attack you when you're unconscious, etc. ESPECIALLY attacking when you're down. I think you might find that it's easier to die when the kids gloves are off.

Nitpick: the idiom is "kid gloves", because they were made from baby goat leather, and were supposed to be less damaging than bare fists. Has nothing to do with human children.

(In practice the gloves might have been more damaging because they abraded or even ripped skin off.)

 

[Oofta]

But only two types of creatures would do this...really smart enemies and animalistic enemies that would stop to eat. Everyone in between will move to the next enemy once someone goes down.

Maybe, maybe not. I assume even reasonably intelligent monsters understand how magical healing works, especially after the first Healing Word or Cure Wounds.

As far as animals, yes they are motivated by food. But they are also motivated by not dying so dragging off the unconscious PC is par for the course in my games.

 

[Retreater]

How 5E is played by most tables is why the "gritty" rest variant needs to be standard. No one is doing 6-8 encounters between long rests - they simply don't have enough combat in their game. So the design should recognise that, and make resource recovery slower.

Nah. I'm all about upping the challenge of 5e, but I'll walk away from a game that uses the "gritty rest variant," because it demonstrates that the DM either has poor grasp of the rules or doesn't care about the fun of all the players. It unfairly penalizes casters while other characters such as rogues and fighters are untouched. Simply put, it's not fun to get 1-2 spells per week at 1st level. Even the hardest of hardcore editions of the game don't do that.

 

[CleverNickName]

If the gm needs to drop a player and counterspell a first level healing word and eattack the downed player and attack the downed player again before some other player can healing word unless a second counterspell is fired off by s second caster it pretty much screams how serious the problem is because those two casters could just spam fireball or something and just kick the party of downed players into failing death saves but that's not a reasonable encounter

Fireball? People always want that spell to be better than it actually is.

Nah, I'm thinking more along the lines of a bodak and his deathlock bodyguards. An abjuration lich and his harem of banshees. That sort of thing. You don't have to do gymnastics with the game mechanics, and you don't need a terribly contrived monster, to make an interesting and challenging encounter. (And you can always do better than fireball.)

 

[Retreater]

How do you figure? If the bad guys can do so, and if they're serious about killing the party, damn right they ought to do it.

If you're complaining about it being too hard to kill pcs on the one hand and then arguing that encounters or tactics that might actually do so aren't reasonable, I'm not sure what you're looking for here.

If you look at the current design paradigm of official content, like Rhyme of the Frostmaiden, most of the opponents don't want to harm the party. It's ridiculous that the only sense of balance in the adventure is "this witch just wants to talk" or "the yeti just growls but won't attack" or "the murderer can be persuaded to stop killing people if the party is nice to him." In the tactics, it's specifically called out that the enemies don't want to win, that they pull punches.
I just can't understand this new design philosophy. The kinder, cuddlier D&D, I guess?

 

[the Jester]

But only two types of creatures would do this...really smart enemies and animalistic enemies that would stop to eat. Everyone in between will move to the next enemy once someone goes down.

If you see a downed foe pop up due to healing once, you don't need to be smart at all to realize that finishing him off the next time he goes down might be a good idea.

 

[the Jester]

Nah. I'm all about upping the challenge of 5e, but I'll walk away from a game that uses the "gritty rest variant," because it demonstrates that the DM either has poor grasp of the rules or doesn't care about the fun of all the players. It unfairly penalizes casters while other characters such as rogues and fighters are untouched. Simply put, it's not fun to get 1-2 spells per week at 1st level. Even the hardest of hardcore editions of the game don't do that.

Oh man!

This reminds me of the 1e campaign I played in back in high school, where the DM ruled that spellcasters got their spells per level, not per day. And this was when leveling up was a long hard process that usually was more than a single adventure's worth of adventuring.

It was still a ton of fun, though. So, different strokes for different folks and all that.