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

[Retreater]

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 problem is that with instantaneous, bonus action healing you can do at a range, you don't get a second chance. The enemy drops the character to 0 hp. Even if it has multiattack, it causes two death save failures with a coup de grace. Then before your enemy can act again, your hero has been healed, is back up and attacking as if nothing had happened.
It's the death saves and Healing Word that keep characters from dying.

 

[toucanbuzz]

So both games are designed to keep you alive, it appears...

Anybody else had any observations like that? Or the opposite?

Yep. Rather than bring back a lot of "save or die" effects like Type E poisons from AD&D, we made a house-rule for what happens at 0 hp to make the threat of death greater. We did that because:

"D&D is yours." (Mike Mearls 2014 preface to PHB). That's been a maxim since Gygax and Arneson and all those folks started rolling dice.

Unless you're playing in fixed-rule Adventurer's League, if you and your players don't like how D&D makes it harder for a character to die, you have the freedom to tweak that. If you don't like what D&D is doing to orcs, or races, or monster abilities, do it your way.

I think this gets lost in the shuffle, that it's okay to make up or change rules when you see something that doesn't make sense or doesn't fit how you like to play.

 

[Oofta]

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.

I always assumed the default assumption was some sort of dungeon crawl. As far as number of encounters, I shoot for 5-10 myself.

Personally I'd like some sort of alternate spell recovery system where you get n number of spell slots per rest, but I find that the alternate rest rules works for me.

 

[FrozenNorth]

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.

Why? They live in a world where both healing magic and the undead exist. Treating people as if they won’t be healed in a world where it is perfectly clear they will be makes no sense.

 

[FrozenNorth]

The problem is that with instantaneous, bonus action healing you can do at a range, you don't get a second chance. The enemy drops the character to 0 hp. Even if it has multiattack, it causes two death save failures with a coup de grace. Then before your enemy can act again, your hero has been healed, is back up and attacking as if nothing had happened.
It's the death saves and Healing Word that keep characters from dying.

That assumes that the person who was downed wasn’t the healer, that the healer still has spell slots left and that there isn’t another monster that will finish off the character before the healer goes.

 

[Oofta]

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.

You do you, but that seems to be extremely short sighted. Have you ever tried it? Because I use it in my game and aim for 5-10 encounters between long rests which, yes, require a week of downtime. I find that it simply suits the pace of the story better. It does means spellcasters don't go nova every encounter, how is that a bad thing? My players seem to enjoy it and it really does help balance things out between casters and non-casters. But I guess you know better than I or my players do.

I do tweak durations a bit, any spell that lasts a half hour or more the duration gets multiplied by 5.

 

[Oofta]

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.)

Unless you're throwing a half dozen flame skulls at the party because after all flame skulls are only CR 4, right? Oh, and having them fly in from the darkness, casting fireball from far enough away that they're out of range of darkvision won't cause an issue will it? Not that I did it to my players in my first 5E campaign.

 

[Retreater]

You do you, but that seems to be extremely short sighted. Have you ever tried it? Because I use it in my game and aim for 5-10 encounters between long rests which, yes, require a week of downtime. I find that it simply suits the pace of the story better. It does means spellcasters don't go nova every encounter, how is that a bad thing? My players seem to enjoy it and it really does help balance things out between casters and non-casters. But I guess you know better than I or my players do.

I do tweak durations a bit, any spell that lasts a half hour or more the duration gets multiplied by 5.

Yes, I've tried it and thought it was terrible for my playstyle.
The "balance" was that casters would sit on the sidelines with literally nothing to do. Meanwhile, every monster or enemy could "go nova" every encounter because - well, they're not going to survive to get a week-long rest anyway.
And if I'm going to play a game like that, I'll play an OSR system where the one spell you get a day actually matters. Not like a "hold person" that lasts for one round.

 

[Oofta]

The problem is that with instantaneous, bonus action healing you can do at a range, you don't get a second chance. The enemy drops the character to 0 hp. Even if it has multiattack, it causes two death save failures with a coup de grace. Then before your enemy can act again, your hero has been healed, is back up and attacking as if nothing had happened.
It's the death saves and Healing Word that keep characters from dying.

Healing Word does pretty minimal healing and the target PC will likely drop again next round. Also assumes the monster is limited to two attacks and never having multiple attackers or rolling a 1 on a death save.

 

[Retreater]

That assumes that the person who was downed wasn’t the healer, that the healer still has spell slots left and that there isn’t another monster that will finish off the character before the healer goes.

That's a lot of "ifs." Like you can finish off a character if that character was the party's only healer, if no one else has spell slots, if you have another monster nearby to coup de grace, and if you managed to chip away at a monolith of hp to begin with.