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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
A realization about Monster Crits and Death Saves
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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8754013" data-attributes="member: 7006"><p>I certainly understand what you are saying and implicating with your statement and on the face of it I do not disagree. But I will say that I have always found that the difficulty on a DMs part to cause real stakes for players was never that that I couldn't kill any one singular character... but rather it was the difficulty in making things challenging for the party on the whole.</p><p></p><p>To me, killing <strong><em>A</em></strong> character is easy... the monsters just bum-rush one PC, whale away on them, and then when they hit 0 just thwack them a few times and they're dead. But doing that does nothing to challenge the rest of the party and they will most certainly have an incredibly easy time of things based on potential healing and the number of HP spread out across their group, and with all the monsters now in a circle and exposing their backs around that one downed PC.</p><p></p><p>So to me it's the possibility of getting say <em>3 or more</em> PCs down and making death saves that is the hard part. That's where I'd say players have it easier. I don't care if any of them die or not... I just want the tensions high as the remaining half of the group need to make hard decisions and split their time stabilizing their comrades while also taking the monsters out.</p><p></p><p>To me, generating that kind of mass damage across the board to all of the party that's the hard part of combat from the DM side of things. And is also why it doesn't bother me personally if thwacking an Unconscious PC only would now cause a single automatic death save rather than auto-critting and doing two. I don't need the help in killing someone, I need help in cutting large swathes through the party on the whole. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /></p><p></p><p>But everyone has their own checks and balances on what they find is needed and I would not argue their needs.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 8754013, member: 7006"] I certainly understand what you are saying and implicating with your statement and on the face of it I do not disagree. But I will say that I have always found that the difficulty on a DMs part to cause real stakes for players was never that that I couldn't kill any one singular character... but rather it was the difficulty in making things challenging for the party on the whole. To me, killing [B][I]A[/I][/B] character is easy... the monsters just bum-rush one PC, whale away on them, and then when they hit 0 just thwack them a few times and they're dead. But doing that does nothing to challenge the rest of the party and they will most certainly have an incredibly easy time of things based on potential healing and the number of HP spread out across their group, and with all the monsters now in a circle and exposing their backs around that one downed PC. So to me it's the possibility of getting say [I]3 or more[/I] PCs down and making death saves that is the hard part. That's where I'd say players have it easier. I don't care if any of them die or not... I just want the tensions high as the remaining half of the group need to make hard decisions and split their time stabilizing their comrades while also taking the monsters out. To me, generating that kind of mass damage across the board to all of the party that's the hard part of combat from the DM side of things. And is also why it doesn't bother me personally if thwacking an Unconscious PC only would now cause a single automatic death save rather than auto-critting and doing two. I don't need the help in killing someone, I need help in cutting large swathes through the party on the whole. ;) But everyone has their own checks and balances on what they find is needed and I would not argue their needs. [/QUOTE]
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