D&D General 0 HP Magic Missile = Death?

[Reynard]

What if the body rolls down a slope onto three different caltrops?

Maybe next time don't hit on the DM's partner?

 

[Quickleaf]

RAW yeah. However I’d probably overrule it.

Thing is by the point you get into asking this question at the table, you’ve probably already passed a big yellow flag…

If Magic Missile is being used by a GM against a downed player, that’s not going to feel great to the player as this wasn’t foreshadowed (eg. how life draining threat of wraith might be foreshadowed) & ranks up there with “tools that should almost never be employed by GM” like Counterspelling a player’s Feather Fall.

OTOH if a player uses Magic Missile in this way against a monster who has such narrative importance that the GM bothers rolling death saves for it… there were plenty of upstream changes the GM should have focused on (changing stats, changing encounter parameters, questioning whether to even have the enemy appear physically at that time) in lieu of leaning on death saves.

Just my two coppers. YMMV.

Btw, here are the death save rules in case it's helpful while discussing:

 

[Reynard]

Obviously, everyone has preferences and tables should definitely agree on stuff like killing downed PCs. But I prefer a game in which the bad guys know to kill the unconscious characters before they can get brought back. Or one in which the hungry predator runs or flies off with a downed PC rather than fight to the death. I like my D&D dangerous.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Nope, because two weapon fighters have to make two attack rolls. Magic Missile is one spell.

But it is a spell that makes several attacks, they just happen to autohit.

 

[aco175]

I might see this used against an important NPC with some cool dialog by the big bad. I don't like it against the PCs- it feels cheap.

 

[Oofta]

Whether or not you should do this is really up to the DM and group and is something that should be discussed in a session 0. Whether you target dying PCs is a different issue on whether or not it works.

 

[Stalker0]

But it is a spell that makes several attacks, they just happen to autohit.

Not really, attack is a specific thing in game and it’s an important distinction because there are reactions and things that respond to “attack rolls”, and magic missile does not generate those.

 

[ezo]

But it is a spell that makes several attacks, they just happen to autohit.

No, it is a spell that makes no attacks. It just deals damage.

And if you target one creature, they all hit at the same time.

Allowing MM to count as separate sources of damage would be like ruling a creature that falls takes more than one source of damage. Afterall, first its arm hits, then its head, then back, then legs. Obviously it is very likely that creature will suffer multiple sources of injury. But for the game, it is treated as one source of damage.

 

[Umbran]

On the other hand, the spell's scaling isn't great, such that it seems pretty pointless in medium to higher levels.

Now, the thing becomes quite a menace, and a counter to the whack-a-mole of magical healing. When a teammate goes down, you darned well ought to put pressure on the enemy wizard, or...

 

[Reynard]

No, it is a spell that makes no attacks. It just deals damage.

And if you target one creature, they all hit at the same time.

Allowing MM to count as separate sources of damage would be like ruling a creature that falls takes more than one source of damage. Afterall, first its arm hits, then its head, then back, then legs. Obviously it is very likely that creature will suffer multiple sources of injury. But for the game, it is treated as one source of damage.

it isn't a certainty, it is an ongoing debate.

However, it is probably unbalanced for MM to do discrete damages because that means a single casting can not only kill a downed creature easily, but it also plays havoc with concentration, forcing multiple checks (trivial checks, but the die has many sides...). It probably makes more sense in that light to treat multiple missiles at one target as a single damage event, but RAW does not make that clear. Hence the ongoing debate part.