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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hautamaki" data-source="post: 3947058" data-attributes="member: 42219">There's another solution to this problem, that also nicely solves a great many other problems I have with the game.  It's always seemed to me incredibly arbitrary to assign the 'death' point at -10.  That seems to me to be some kind of artifact from second edition or something and never really came with any kind of reasoning or explanation that I'm aware of, so I can it entirely for my games.  In my games, characters are not seriously hurt until they drop to 0 hp.  They are superficially wounded of course (bruises, small cuts, etc) but they are not in any way incapacitated in their fighting ability.  This is of course common sense; no character's abilities are affected in any way by hit point loss until they get to 0.  A fighter with 1 hp does as much damage as a fighter with 112, at the same attack bonus, and so on.  We all know this.  But then he goes from perfectly hale and healthy to stone dead with a mere additional 10 points of damage?  Which amounts to less than 10% of his total hp at high levels?  That never sat right with me, I dunno if I'm alone.  The simple solution is to make his 'death' point at -(his max hp).  A fighter with 112 HP dies at -112.  Once he hits 0 hp, that's when he starts to be seriously wounded.  Damage taken from blows after 0 hp I typically force the player to roll saves against unconciousness (and if you want, you can add other serious wounds to the mix; losing limbs, ability score damage, etc).  Anyone can work out their own tables for this and make it as simple as they want.  I've never had it be a problem where a high hp guy was reduced to 0 hit points and then the enemies had to beat on his prone and unconscious form for 5 minutes to finally kill him or anything wierd like that.  It's incredibly easy to wrack up damage very quickly against a prone and unconscious character, especially when you apply the common sense solution to the AOO problem mentioned in this thread, which is that as soon as someone stops defending themself (for whatever reason, including unconsciousness or paralysis) they are subject to AOO as normal.  This can give your heroes the extra cushion they need to heal themselves after being taken down or paralyzed despite incurring all those AOO's.  But as I said, I've never had it get ridiculous the other way either.I once had an encounter in which I intended my villain to make a last second escape with his ring of teleportation with contingency to teleport him to safety if he went below 0 hp on it; he had a buttload of HP so I thought for sure he'd survive at least one round even after being dropped below 0, but wouldn't you know it, the PC's had dogpiled him, and dealt over 80 points of damage before the ring could whisk him to safety, and my nicely designed villain was fishfood even despite adding that mechanic.</blockquote>

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