D&D (2024) Rules that annoy you

[Maxperson]

It seems that you are arguing that because Healing Word restores consciousness to a PC that has been reduced to 0 hp, and Healing Word is healing magic, than the PC must have taken meat damage.

No. I'm arguing that in order to be down and dying due to physical attacks you have to have taken meat damage. That doesn't equate to all hit points are meat damage, though.

However, by this same reasoning, if I cast Healing Word on a character that has taken 2 hp of damage, healing word is still healing magic so any hit point damage is meat damage.

No. That's very faulty logic. That healing word can heal meat damage does not at all mean that all damage healed by it is meat. It can reinvigorate or whatever to heal the non-meat damage.

My point is that you don’t know if the damage is fatal until it kills you.

Sure, but you do know that you have taken a very serious physical injury or you could not be making death saving throws as you move closer to dying. The wound MUST be serious enough to be potentially fatal or you would not be making death saves.

You’re assuming that each death save represents getting closer to death or closer to recovery. But you don’t have to make that assumption.

There is no assumption. No potentially fatal physical injury = no death saves.

The game makes more sense if you assume that you don’t know whether a blow is fatal until you actually die from it. If you roll a 20 on the death save, guess the injury was less serious than it appeared. Same thing if you get healing halfway through. If you fail your death saves though, I guess the injury was more severe than it looked.

I agree. It will be less serious than you thought, but has to at least be potentially fatal and/or a serious physical injury. That sort of injury isn't going to be fine the next day.

This second way of looking at things is more consistent with what the characters see as well. If I am fighting hobgoblins and the wizard goes down, my character has no way of knowing whether he just got his femoral artery severed or just got the wind knocked out of him.

But he is going to notice the blood spurting out of the open wound. It may not be a deadly wound, depending on how the death saves worked out, but it is going to be noticeable as serious.

If it was just getting the wind knocked out of you, the wizard didn't have to make any death saves. You can't die from the wind getting knocked out of you.

 

[Maxperson]

Now correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will in 6 seconds, but I think in 1E or 2E it said potions had to be swallowed. Actually, the word was imbibed.

That sounds right, but a lot has changed since 1e and 2e. WotC made big changes with 3e, and with 4e, and with 5e. In 5e the rule is drinking or administering to another which has to be swallowed.

For my part, the magic of potions, especially healing potions, triggering the swallowing reflex is something that I can see happening. You can administer it to an unconscious person without killing them, so they are able to swallow it somehow.

What I can't get past is Baldur's Gate 3 allowing it to be administered by throwing it at an unconscious ally.

 

[billd91]

“Swinginess” means that extreme events are more likely. The way you measure departure from the mean in probability is through the standard deviation.

The standard deviation of 1d20 + 5 is larger than 1d20 + 1d10.

Math doesn’t lie.

But even the AnyDice page you link to shows the deviation for the d20+5 method as 5.77, but the deviation of d20+d10 as 6.44.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, if you look at first aid classes, they say not to give liquid to an unconscious person as it may result in the person choking.

But does it say not to give magical liquid to an unconscious person? I could very easily see the magic of a healing potion including a trigger of the swallowing reflex.

 

[Maxperson]

They will be more clustered around the average of a larger spread!
With d20+5 you will never roll 2, or 30, with d20+d10 you will.

Yep. In the zeal to achieve some sort of more stable average, you end up boosting the top DC attainable from 25 to 30, improving the skill of the PC.

 

[cbwjm]

No.

Riposte: Will it actually lead to better gaming experiences for most people if we are sticklers about having to consciously swallow a healing potion?

Not sure who you're quoting due to my extensive block list, but the answer to your riposte IMO is that, no, it will not lead to a better gaming experience. A DM who would require someone being conscious to swallow a potion as opposed to someone else feeding it to them when they've been knocked down to 0 is a DM I don't think I'd want to game with.

 

[Maxperson]

“Swinginess” means that extreme events are more likely. The way you measure departure from the mean in probability is through the standard deviation.

The standard deviation of 1d20 + 5 is larger than 1d20 + 1d10.

Math doesn’t lie.

That's not how I've seen it used. Swinginess refers to going from one extreme to the other, much like happens when you get on a swing and swing. It's the range, not how often you are in the middle.

 

[billd91]

That's not how I've seen it used. Swinginess refers to going from one extreme to the other, much like happens when you get on a swing and swing. It's the range, not how often you are in the middle.

No, FrozenNorth may have misread a result, but I agree that swinginess HAS to incorporate the likelihood that the extreme values will come into play. If you were to compare a 10d10 probability curve with a d100 curve - you'd normally consider the d100 curve swingier not because it includes the 1-9 range, but because it's a flat distribution with the extreme values just as likely to come up as the center. 10d10, however, has a much stronger tendency to stay closer to the mean and is much less swingy.
It's also why a 2d10 distribution is substantially less swingy than a d20 distribution, even though it truncates only 1 result. Or why 3d6 is less swingy than d20 even if you reroll any result outside 3-18.

 

[pukunui]

Not from WotC.

I figured. But does it exist elsewhere?

 

[Micah Sweet]

No. I'm arguing that in order to be down and dying due to physical attacks you have to have taken meat damage. That doesn't equate to all hit points are meat damage, though.

No. That's very faulty logic. That healing word can heal meat damage does not at all mean that all damage healed by it is meat. It can reinvigorate or whatever to heal the non-meat damage.

Sure, but you do know that you have taken a very serious physical injury or you could not be making death saving throws as you move closer to dying. The wound MUST be serious enough to be potentially fatal or you would not be making death saves.

There is no assumption. No potentially fatal physical injury = no death saves.

I agree. It will be less serious than you thought, but has to at least be potentially fatal and/or a serious physical injury. That sort of injury isn't going to be fine the next day.

But he is going to notice the blood spurting out of the open wound. It may not be a deadly wound, depending on how the death saves worked out, but it is going to be noticeable as serious.

If it was just getting the wind knocked out of you, the wizard didn't have to make any death saves. You can't die from the wind getting knocked out of you.

Hence my "Schrodinger's Character" preference. No death saves there, as you know nothing until someone checks on you.