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

[Oofta]

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.

Why would spellcasters be sitting on the sidelines? Yes, they're going to be casting cantrips on a regular basis, but that's what cantrips are for. Casters don't need to be spamming leveled spells every round in order to contribute.

In any case, you do you. I and my group have a lot of fun and several of them are DMs who have commented that for the games that they run they've switched to the gritty rest rules because it works. Resource management should be part of running a caster.

 

[Retreater]

Healing Word does pretty minimal healing and the target PC will likely drop again next round

My experience is that 1 hp is as valuable for action economy and effectiveness as 100 hp: character can stand up, disengage, move to safety, can heal himself for more hp, etc.

Also assumes the monster is limited to two attacks

Yeah. Probably most of the time. Or will miss with at least one attack if they have three attacks.

and never having multiple attackers

Likely not that will just stand there chopping at a single dying target while the rest of the party is peppering them with ranged attacks and spells.

or rolling a 1 on a death save.

5% chance of death.

 

[Waller]

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.

It fits how we like to play just fine.

 

[Oofta]

My experience is that 1 hp is as valuable for action economy and effectiveness as 100 hp: character can stand up, disengage, move to safety, can heal himself for more hp, etc.

Yeah. Probably most of the time. Or will miss with at least one attack if they have three attacks.

Likely not that will just stand there chopping at a single dying target while the rest of the party is peppering them with ranged attacks and spells.

5% chance of death.

I have multiple enemies focus fire on a fairly regular basis, it's an effective tactic. If the enemy is intelligent and they know that if they don't take out a target they'll just pop back up, why wouldn't they double tap? I don't double tap as often as I could because my players want a less lethal game, that doesn't mean I couldn't.

 

[Weiley31]

Or increase the damage of monsters. Add the monsters CR in damage to its attacks and it gets nice and deadly.

That is a VERY intriguing and tempting idea.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Try this thread if you're interesting in killing PCs

 

[Dausuul]

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.

Because it is not "perfectly clear they will be." There is no guarantee the enemy has healing magic; in fact, healing magic is fairly rare. And if the enemy lacks healing magic, double-tapping means you are wasting your attack. That attack could be the one that makes the difference between victory and defeat.

In my experience, PCs rarely double-tap unless they see the enemy healing fallen foes. Then they start double-tapping like crazy. I adopt a similar approach with monsters: They ignore fallen enemies until they see a fallen enemy get up and resume the fight. After that, throat-slitting becomes the order of the day.

 

[Oofta]

One thing that bears mentioning: when people talk about "my level 12 party took out a CR 20-something monster", I don't think solo monsters in any edition have never worked particularly well. It's simple action economy, especially if you have more than 4 PCs. The only way I've gotten them to be a challenge is to set up environment and options to heavily favor the monster. Even then, it's kind of a crapshoot.

Besides, CR just means that if PCs are lower than the CR that there's a decent chance of 1 or more PC dying. It also depends a lot on setup and tactics. Have that ancient dragon land and duke it out with the PCs like an unintelligent brute and they aren't likely to live long. Have them strafe, fly out of sight, split the party, have traps set up to harass the party? Now they have a chance.

 

[CleverNickName]

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.

Heh. I'd call that a special case for sure. I'm sure I could contrive a way to make the Fireball spell into an actual threat, but usually it translates to about 12-15 points of damage for a 3rd level spell slot. Not bad, but there are better options.

If combat is too easy and death is too uncommon for your game table, maybe the enemy spellcasters should think outside the box. Counter the cleric's healing, silence the bard, banish the fighter. Force the players to do more than just "spam the A-button" every round. Things will get more interesting and exciting in a hurry.

And slightly off-topic: a lot of times when my game felt too easy, it was because the rules weren't being interpreted correctly. For example, I recently discovered that Darkvision doesn't work exactly the way my players want it to work...it's considered dim light, so even though their characters could "see," it still imposes Disadvantage. The tone of the game changed dramatically when I started enforcing that.

 

[Oofta]

Heh. I'd call that a special case for sure. I'm sure I could contrive a way to make the Fireball spell into an actual threat, but usually it translates to about 12-15 points of damage for a 3rd level spell slot. Not bad, but there are better options.

If combat is too easy and death is too uncommon for your game table, maybe the enemy spellcasters should think outside the box. Counter the cleric's healing, silence the bard, banish the fighter. Force the players to do more than just "spam the A-button" every round. Things will get more interesting and exciting in a hurry.

And slightly off-topic: a lot of times when my game felt too easy, it was because the rules weren't being interpreted correctly. For example, I recently discovered that Darkvision doesn't work exactly the way my players want it to work...it's considered dim light, so even though their characters could "see," it still imposes Disadvantage. The tone of the game changed dramatically when I started enforcing that.

Yeah, I know about darkvision being dim light and I still forget on a regular basis.