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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9339307" data-attributes="member: 71699">I've observed two unattractive tactics that are encouraged in the current design, and I believe the issue acute only because of the way the two work in tandem.First, it is far more efficient to drop to 0 and then be healed, then to be healed while standing. Say I am on 7 out of 28 hit points and fighting an Air Elemental (deals 2d8+5). If I am healed before dropping to 0 then that's likely d4+4 so call it worth +7 hit points. If I let it hit me, it is sure to drop me to 0 and I cannot take more than it's minimum. If it rolls the average of 14, I'll just ignore 7 damage (cannot go below 0). If I am then healed, on average that heal is now worth 14 hit points (the 7 healed and the 7 ignored.) Secondly, healing word and healing spirit are very efficient in the action economy. They're ranged, and they use a bonus action. There are other ranged heals, but those are two of the most efficient. Combining a tempo-efficient heal with the "efficiency-of-dying" explained above, makes it outright silly for players to heal first. The only time that would be justified is if a foe could do - in the scenario above - 35 or so damage in one hit so that I am at risk of instant death. Never am I more reminded of the adage - balance means ensuring multiple strategies are equally viable!I want to critique a couple of other solutions.One solution would be to track negative HP. The prospects for this look good, albeit it's just fiddly to track and if you use a VTT ruled out unless you can write an extension to do it. In the scenario above, a heal after falling to -7 would only bring me to 0. At that point, healing word is still a better spell than cure wounds but at least whack-a-mole is somewhat countered. A solution I see in many places is to suffer exhaustion. I think this is in many respects reasonable, however, its knock-on effect is to encourage players to more often want to rest after an encounter. To recover levels of exhaustion. Seeing as we like to see both attritional and lethal encounters matter, we have to be careful how much we make "rest" a forced choice. While imposing a cost for dropping to 0, it doesn't strongly solve the whack-a-mole problem that we find unattractive, and it can contribute to a 5MWD problem.So far a mix. Feats like sharpshooter were prioritised by two of the players, for example, while another just focused on spellcasting stat. There are two tweaks I am contemplating for feats. The first is that a feat that lets you increase a stat by 1, lets you increase any stat. That makes many feats more interesting to a wider range of classes. The second is to ignore stat and species prerequisites. Again, this opens up feats that are gated for theme rather than balance. I'm happy to let players develop the theme for their characters rather than adhering to designer conceptions.Per DMG261 answers to that will vary per table. We're using "Milestones" combined with "Session-Based Advancement" where players say what their milestones are, with up to 5 per session (milestones include personal motives that can be achieved in parallel with goals etc). Seeing as level progression stops, the costing is then 15 and 30 milestones apiece. That is probably not too low but might be too high: I don't expect to have it well-tuned until we've played half-a-dozen more sessions with it.</blockquote>

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