There exists a spell in the original 1974 boxed set of D&D which forces a group of creatures to all make saves or fall asleep, rendering them unconscious and subject to being killed in their sleep or ignored and passed by. For the last 38 years, we've been fighting against this spell, and effects like it. The so-called "save or die" or "save or suck" effects put one saving throw between a PC or NPC and a long period of impotence, and there's been people unhappy with these effects since before I was born.
The sleep spell wasn't alone in the roster of D&D effects that put it all on the line in one die roll. In the original version of the game, charm person was nearly as bad, and spells like finger of death and hold person and polymorph had their genesis as well. All of these spells share one salient central point: when they affect a target, with one die roll, that target might be completely incapacitated.
This category of spells has some well-deserved infamy in D&D circles. There have been DMs telling stories about their awesome villains being obliterated with a single wave of a wizard's hand likely since these days in OD&D, DMs whose elaborate combat plans are foiled by a simple spell that bypasses HP. Recently, in a slightly more official capacity, head D&D honcho Mike Mearls has said “One of the big drivers of imbalance is the ability of casters to take down an opponent in one shot with a single save or die spell…”
So, that's that. One-shot takedowns are unbalanced, verboten, and to be banned from the game.
And here’s the point wherein I openly and publicly and politely disagree with the man in whose hands the future of this game rests. I don’t think Mike Mearls is right in that estimation. In fact, I think he’s wrong.
Put Down the Pitchforks
Well, let me be a little less cavalier. I think Mike's specifically wrong on two main points. I don’t think taking down an opponent in one shot is unbalancing per se, and I don’t believe that, in D&D, casters have had exclusive or unique provenance over taking down an opponent in one shot.
And let me be a little more narrow: I think he’s specifically wrong in generalizing about this fact. In implying that this “big driver of imbalance” drives imbalance in every D&D game, I think he’s overlooking a pretty big swath of game tables for which “one-shotting” is not any sort of problem and is, in fact, a desirable option.
Thirdly, I don't think that the people who have had problems with save-or-die effects are wrong or misrepresenting themselves. It's a legit problem in need of a legit solution. To show that, I’m going to start this disagreement in an unusual place: by pointing out where I think Mike Mearls and I agree.
Heroes and Villains; Dungeons and Dragons
So it's pretty clear that the issues with save-or-die effects are real issues. Certainly this isn't the first we've heard of them. Charm Person itself has been subject to so many nerf bats over the editions that, as of 4e, it has completely disappeared from the game as a distinct effect. Disintegrate might not actually disintegrate you as of late 3e. Even the venerable sleep now really only has about a 25% chance of putting someone to sleep...after they get a chance to fight back for a round. These effects have been being clawed back from their binary roots for decades at this point.
The endpoint of this is currently what we see in 4e, and we can see that 4e basically agrees with Mike. There are no real effects that can take down an opponent in one shot to be found in 4e at all, and only a few choice effects with the ability to take down any opponents without first obliterating their HP (like sleep can). 4e is pretty close to what a game looks like when you remove save-or-die effects from it and replace them with more "sanitized" versions.
And it's good.
A game that features one-shot save-or-die effects does actually raise those issues that people in the last 35 years have experienced. Combats made easy. Villains made into jokes. Casters who can dictate the terms of an encounter to the DM. If you're facing a powerful monster who is supposed to be the central villain of your tale, you don't generally want them to fall with a single die roll from a single action by a single PC. That's not a dramatic conflict or an intense climax to a hard-fought advneture, that's an "I Win" button. Okay, half the time you might not really press it because the target makes their save, but even THAT's a problem: there's not much fun about feeling ineffective. If what you're looking for is a dramatic build in tension over a complex combat, the presence of save-or-die effects makes it a lot harder to pull off, and 4e's rule of law will spare you that.
It's good from the other side of the DM's screen, too. A fight with a medusa or a basilisk isn't a tense dramatic moment if all it does is require a single die roll to resolve. Like we've pointed out before, rules are a lot of fun to play with in and of themselves, and forgoing all those interesting powers and abilities for a simple one-roll coin-toss? That is some weak sauce! Not to mention the effect it can have on player investment in their characters when death is hurled around randomly, and how boring it is sitting around twiddling your thumbs for 20 minutes when you're paralyzed and everyone else is fighting and you're just getting your turn skipped. Character death shouldn't be a random, arbitrary thing! These are heroes!
Don't want Asmodeus killed in one round? Don't want your dragon disintegrated? Want to keep players engaged and rolling dice? Want to keep PC's around to tie up their plot threads? Binary results kill these elements pretty quick.
And yet...
Hypothetically, Asmodeus can still succumb to a 4e sleep spell (even if he's not exactly likely to). And then there are minions, whose entire existence is save-or-die: the moment they're hit, they're gone. And few would argue that minions are an unbalancing force in the game. And there are those that find their version of D&D ruined by the lack of these effects. A medusa that can't turn to stone with just a glance? A death spell that doesn't kill things? It's not what you expect, seeing the names and titles of these things. And there's an appeal to the occasional all-or-nothing bid, the brave gamble that surrenders control and puts it all on the line for a quick die roll...that's a fun thing to do, to wildly unbalance the scales and see what falls out.
It's important to realize that regarding epic dramatic combats and tense scenes as vital to a D&D game is actually a particular view of what a D&D game should be, not a universal view. There are plenty of groups out there who don't value these moments very highly in their D&D games, or who aren't willing to give up other elements they favor in service to these moments. Dramatic fights with sinister villains at key plot points with heroic characters is not necessarily what D&D is to a given group of players. Sometimes D&D is hitting Grazz't with Disintegrate. Sometimes D&D is wiping out a whole room of goblins with Sleep. Sometimes D&D is about running from a rust monster to avoid getting your magic armor eaten. Sometimes D&D is less about the countdown to the near-inevitable back-and-forth offered by 4e-style combat, and more about guerrilla warfare, using every edge you can manage, and overcoming the unfair challenges in front of you however you can. Remember that D&D was more game-like, with more of a Skinner Box design in the early days, with GP and XP measuring "winning," and character death as a "loss." Some days you roll well and nuke a demigod. Some days you roll low and get eaten by a grue.
I think that's where Mike's statement goes wrong originally. One-shotting a creature is only "unbalancing" in a certain values system that places a high importance on narrative and character. This is not the way D&D is played by everyone, so it's a qualified imbalance. All design is local, which means that balance doesn't have an abstract existence apart from a particular way of playing. All balance serves some other goal.
How save-or-die serves the goals of this other group of gamers might be hard to see, if you're in the camp that doesn't like them. What's with those people? Do they just not understand how to have fun? Do they just want to have overpowered wizards who solve every problem in the game all over again? Why would they want something so Do they unwittingly pursue really bad play experiences? Do they want anticlimactic battles and disposable characters and enemies who die during their menacing speeches? Why would they want that?
It turns out that, in practice, save-or-die has had a few reasons that it hasn't always been a problem for those that aren't very concerned about narrative and character.
It's Not Just For Spellcasters
Perhaps the most obvious problem with Mike’s rather categorical statement has to do with his contention that it is casters who are uniquely entitled to save-or-die mechanics. This hasn’t really been true ever in D&D. From vorpal swords and assassins with death attacks to 1e's deadly poisons and even fighters with big enough dice of damage and 4e's minions-anyone-could-obliterate, one-hit-kills have been within the reach of many characters, if not all of them equally, for most of D&D history.
Spellcasters do stand out for their variety and their reliability in acquiring these abilities, and so have historically been the worst offenders (clerics being able to turn undead being a prominent 1st-level example), but they were far from the only PC’s to kill things with one roll.
And on the DM's side, everything from traps to rot grubs to ear seekers to mimics to undead to liches were handing out death on a regular basis.
So save-or-die isn't necessarily a spellcaster problem. Any character who could take down NPC's with a single action deserves special mention, and would drive that problem.
Not For All Combats
4e’s use of minions helps us see that it’s not always a problem in a fight when a character can kill things in one hit. In fact, it can be a lot of fun! 4e's way of balancing this was to include 4 minions for every 1 normal monster, meaning that even if you could one-shot a few of them, there were plenty of them.
We can see a similar dynamic at work in earlier versions of the game, too. In versions of the game in which sleep could wipe out a pack of orcs, orcs came 30+ to a pack. Fights were not against small bands of creatures, but rather a small band of PC’s against a large wave of creatures, most of whom were about as simple to run as a standard 4e minion would be. A 4e sleep spell that only affected minions wouldn’t pose a balance problem. It might pose other problems (such as uselessness in standard fights, or the in-world existence of “minions," or the fact that hitting it with a fireball does the same thing), but balance would not be among them. A Charm Person spell or a death attack or a poison that only worked on minions would hardly be encounter-negating, and would hardly be anti-climactic, since your big angry villain probably wouldn’t be a minion.
In 4e, minions came in four times the quantity of other enemies. In earlier editions, NPC's vastly outnumbered the PC's. This is smart from a save-or-die perspective, since a large quantity of enemies helps to mitigate the “all-or-nothing” nature of these spells. A spell like sleep gains power from using it on a lot of creatures, since you’re likely to catch at least a few, even if most of them make their save. Cast it on a group of 9 NPCs and it only affects half? Well, that's enough to swing the action economy in the PC's favor! It’s not a waste of an action if it manages to eliminate a few of the dozens of creatures wailing away at your party, even if it doesn’t work 100% of the time. This makes these spells good “crowd-control,” in the MMORPG sense of the term of limiting what can attack the party at any one time.
So we can see that there are lots of combat situations in which save-or-die effects are useful, even weak! Far from being a driver of imbalance, they can serve as an essential component OF balance, ensuring that the overwhelmed PC’s have a fighting chance against large odds.
Not For Every Opponent
Mike also, in his statement, equates taking down opponents with balance, and this isn’t strictly true. In a game that was all about fighting and combat, this might be true, since killing or incapacitating a foe yields victory in combat pretty directly. However, this won’t necessarily lead to victory over the course of the adventuring day. Spending that save-or-die spell in one place might mean forgoing another spell elsewhere, and there are only so many problems simple murder can solve. In a game that is built for more than just combat, when your opponents take the shape of opinions and environments and traps as well as dangerous monsters, overcoming even 100% of every combat with one single effect doesn’t unbalance things, necessarily. There’s plenty of ways you can “lose” without necessarily getting killed by orcs.
It's also true that not every style wants to spend very much time on each encounter. For some groups, if combat only lasts 3-5 rounds, that's just enough, and a spell that helps reduce the number of turns spent in combat is a great convenience.
So in a broad sense of balance, over an entire play session, made up of multiple different types of challenges, save-or-die effects clearly have a role to play.
Resolutions
Ultimately, the point I'm making is similar to the point I made in the last article: everyone has different demands for their games, and what Mike sees as a driver of imbalance may actually be a useful tool with an appropriate place in some games. "Balance," like most game design ideas, doesn't exist in a vacuum and isn't something you pursue regardless of context. It doesn't lend itself to fundamentalist, unilateral thinking. Everyone's table is different.
I think that for me, the ideal place for save-or-die effects in the hands of players is twofold. First, I'd like to be able to use effects like sleep and hold person as crowd-control mechanisms, helping to keep a chunk of the enemy force occupied. This might mean that these spells affect large groups of relatively weak creatures, a la 4e's minions, but I'm fairly content with that -- against bigger threats, spells like this shouldn't do much, they should be easily thrown off. Next, I'd like to use effects like polymorph other and stone to flesh, vorpal swords, and an assassin's death attack to be useful against more on-par monsters -- these should be "all or nothing" kinds of bets that MIGHT remove the guy from play, if the dice are lucky. However, I don't think these have to work on EVERY monster, and I'm fine with creatures similar in design space to a 4e solo resisting them or having lesser effects. Because I like a mix of narrative action and gamelike win/loss potential, I want the ability to choose to make some NPC's/monsters especially resistant to save-or-die effects, but I don't want these resistances to be common.
One idea that might work is the concept of Destiny. The idea would be that instead of a massive pool of HP, a "solo" monster in 5e gets normal HP, and perhaps a pool of four "destiny tokens" that it can spend, when reduced to 0 hp, to instantly regain all their HP (and perhaps activate some other ability, like a dragon's breath). So if this powerful dragon fails a save against some necromancer's Finger of Death spell, or gets hit with a vorpal sword, they are lose Destiny instead of their lives. Hypothetically, you could extend this idea to PC's, and remove the dilemma of "HP as morale," as well, employing these tokens to regain all their lost HP to make it obvious when "fate intervenes to save you." This would make sure that people who had no interest in these more dramatic fights and durable PC's never had to worry about using them, while ensuring that those who enjoyed this kind of thing could get what they wanted out of the game, too. And folks who never wanted to deal with a one-save problem could add Destiny to everything.
But that's just one fairly off-the-cuff idea. I'm interested to hear yours, too! Surely, we all have our own ways to solve this problem at our own tables that don't necessarily mean excluding one-shot effects from the game entirely. What do you think of a hypothetical "concentration" mechanic to help ameliorate this problem? Do you like combats with massive quantities of enemies and overwhelming odds, or are you more a 5-on-5 kind of group? If there's one major takeaway from this, it should be the idea that we all have slightly different needs at our own tables. So if Mike stays away from things that are so categorical in the future, perhaps I'll have less occasion to disagree in about 2,000 words.
The sleep spell wasn't alone in the roster of D&D effects that put it all on the line in one die roll. In the original version of the game, charm person was nearly as bad, and spells like finger of death and hold person and polymorph had their genesis as well. All of these spells share one salient central point: when they affect a target, with one die roll, that target might be completely incapacitated.
This category of spells has some well-deserved infamy in D&D circles. There have been DMs telling stories about their awesome villains being obliterated with a single wave of a wizard's hand likely since these days in OD&D, DMs whose elaborate combat plans are foiled by a simple spell that bypasses HP. Recently, in a slightly more official capacity, head D&D honcho Mike Mearls has said “One of the big drivers of imbalance is the ability of casters to take down an opponent in one shot with a single save or die spell…”
So, that's that. One-shot takedowns are unbalanced, verboten, and to be banned from the game.
And here’s the point wherein I openly and publicly and politely disagree with the man in whose hands the future of this game rests. I don’t think Mike Mearls is right in that estimation. In fact, I think he’s wrong.
Put Down the Pitchforks
Well, let me be a little less cavalier. I think Mike's specifically wrong on two main points. I don’t think taking down an opponent in one shot is unbalancing per se, and I don’t believe that, in D&D, casters have had exclusive or unique provenance over taking down an opponent in one shot.
And let me be a little more narrow: I think he’s specifically wrong in generalizing about this fact. In implying that this “big driver of imbalance” drives imbalance in every D&D game, I think he’s overlooking a pretty big swath of game tables for which “one-shotting” is not any sort of problem and is, in fact, a desirable option.
Thirdly, I don't think that the people who have had problems with save-or-die effects are wrong or misrepresenting themselves. It's a legit problem in need of a legit solution. To show that, I’m going to start this disagreement in an unusual place: by pointing out where I think Mike Mearls and I agree.
Heroes and Villains; Dungeons and Dragons
So it's pretty clear that the issues with save-or-die effects are real issues. Certainly this isn't the first we've heard of them. Charm Person itself has been subject to so many nerf bats over the editions that, as of 4e, it has completely disappeared from the game as a distinct effect. Disintegrate might not actually disintegrate you as of late 3e. Even the venerable sleep now really only has about a 25% chance of putting someone to sleep...after they get a chance to fight back for a round. These effects have been being clawed back from their binary roots for decades at this point.
The endpoint of this is currently what we see in 4e, and we can see that 4e basically agrees with Mike. There are no real effects that can take down an opponent in one shot to be found in 4e at all, and only a few choice effects with the ability to take down any opponents without first obliterating their HP (like sleep can). 4e is pretty close to what a game looks like when you remove save-or-die effects from it and replace them with more "sanitized" versions.
And it's good.
A game that features one-shot save-or-die effects does actually raise those issues that people in the last 35 years have experienced. Combats made easy. Villains made into jokes. Casters who can dictate the terms of an encounter to the DM. If you're facing a powerful monster who is supposed to be the central villain of your tale, you don't generally want them to fall with a single die roll from a single action by a single PC. That's not a dramatic conflict or an intense climax to a hard-fought advneture, that's an "I Win" button. Okay, half the time you might not really press it because the target makes their save, but even THAT's a problem: there's not much fun about feeling ineffective. If what you're looking for is a dramatic build in tension over a complex combat, the presence of save-or-die effects makes it a lot harder to pull off, and 4e's rule of law will spare you that.
It's good from the other side of the DM's screen, too. A fight with a medusa or a basilisk isn't a tense dramatic moment if all it does is require a single die roll to resolve. Like we've pointed out before, rules are a lot of fun to play with in and of themselves, and forgoing all those interesting powers and abilities for a simple one-roll coin-toss? That is some weak sauce! Not to mention the effect it can have on player investment in their characters when death is hurled around randomly, and how boring it is sitting around twiddling your thumbs for 20 minutes when you're paralyzed and everyone else is fighting and you're just getting your turn skipped. Character death shouldn't be a random, arbitrary thing! These are heroes!
Don't want Asmodeus killed in one round? Don't want your dragon disintegrated? Want to keep players engaged and rolling dice? Want to keep PC's around to tie up their plot threads? Binary results kill these elements pretty quick.
And yet...
Hypothetically, Asmodeus can still succumb to a 4e sleep spell (even if he's not exactly likely to). And then there are minions, whose entire existence is save-or-die: the moment they're hit, they're gone. And few would argue that minions are an unbalancing force in the game. And there are those that find their version of D&D ruined by the lack of these effects. A medusa that can't turn to stone with just a glance? A death spell that doesn't kill things? It's not what you expect, seeing the names and titles of these things. And there's an appeal to the occasional all-or-nothing bid, the brave gamble that surrenders control and puts it all on the line for a quick die roll...that's a fun thing to do, to wildly unbalance the scales and see what falls out.
It's important to realize that regarding epic dramatic combats and tense scenes as vital to a D&D game is actually a particular view of what a D&D game should be, not a universal view. There are plenty of groups out there who don't value these moments very highly in their D&D games, or who aren't willing to give up other elements they favor in service to these moments. Dramatic fights with sinister villains at key plot points with heroic characters is not necessarily what D&D is to a given group of players. Sometimes D&D is hitting Grazz't with Disintegrate. Sometimes D&D is wiping out a whole room of goblins with Sleep. Sometimes D&D is about running from a rust monster to avoid getting your magic armor eaten. Sometimes D&D is less about the countdown to the near-inevitable back-and-forth offered by 4e-style combat, and more about guerrilla warfare, using every edge you can manage, and overcoming the unfair challenges in front of you however you can. Remember that D&D was more game-like, with more of a Skinner Box design in the early days, with GP and XP measuring "winning," and character death as a "loss." Some days you roll well and nuke a demigod. Some days you roll low and get eaten by a grue.
I think that's where Mike's statement goes wrong originally. One-shotting a creature is only "unbalancing" in a certain values system that places a high importance on narrative and character. This is not the way D&D is played by everyone, so it's a qualified imbalance. All design is local, which means that balance doesn't have an abstract existence apart from a particular way of playing. All balance serves some other goal.
How save-or-die serves the goals of this other group of gamers might be hard to see, if you're in the camp that doesn't like them. What's with those people? Do they just not understand how to have fun? Do they just want to have overpowered wizards who solve every problem in the game all over again? Why would they want something so Do they unwittingly pursue really bad play experiences? Do they want anticlimactic battles and disposable characters and enemies who die during their menacing speeches? Why would they want that?
It turns out that, in practice, save-or-die has had a few reasons that it hasn't always been a problem for those that aren't very concerned about narrative and character.
It's Not Just For Spellcasters
Perhaps the most obvious problem with Mike’s rather categorical statement has to do with his contention that it is casters who are uniquely entitled to save-or-die mechanics. This hasn’t really been true ever in D&D. From vorpal swords and assassins with death attacks to 1e's deadly poisons and even fighters with big enough dice of damage and 4e's minions-anyone-could-obliterate, one-hit-kills have been within the reach of many characters, if not all of them equally, for most of D&D history.
Spellcasters do stand out for their variety and their reliability in acquiring these abilities, and so have historically been the worst offenders (clerics being able to turn undead being a prominent 1st-level example), but they were far from the only PC’s to kill things with one roll.
And on the DM's side, everything from traps to rot grubs to ear seekers to mimics to undead to liches were handing out death on a regular basis.
So save-or-die isn't necessarily a spellcaster problem. Any character who could take down NPC's with a single action deserves special mention, and would drive that problem.
Not For All Combats
4e’s use of minions helps us see that it’s not always a problem in a fight when a character can kill things in one hit. In fact, it can be a lot of fun! 4e's way of balancing this was to include 4 minions for every 1 normal monster, meaning that even if you could one-shot a few of them, there were plenty of them.
We can see a similar dynamic at work in earlier versions of the game, too. In versions of the game in which sleep could wipe out a pack of orcs, orcs came 30+ to a pack. Fights were not against small bands of creatures, but rather a small band of PC’s against a large wave of creatures, most of whom were about as simple to run as a standard 4e minion would be. A 4e sleep spell that only affected minions wouldn’t pose a balance problem. It might pose other problems (such as uselessness in standard fights, or the in-world existence of “minions," or the fact that hitting it with a fireball does the same thing), but balance would not be among them. A Charm Person spell or a death attack or a poison that only worked on minions would hardly be encounter-negating, and would hardly be anti-climactic, since your big angry villain probably wouldn’t be a minion.
In 4e, minions came in four times the quantity of other enemies. In earlier editions, NPC's vastly outnumbered the PC's. This is smart from a save-or-die perspective, since a large quantity of enemies helps to mitigate the “all-or-nothing” nature of these spells. A spell like sleep gains power from using it on a lot of creatures, since you’re likely to catch at least a few, even if most of them make their save. Cast it on a group of 9 NPCs and it only affects half? Well, that's enough to swing the action economy in the PC's favor! It’s not a waste of an action if it manages to eliminate a few of the dozens of creatures wailing away at your party, even if it doesn’t work 100% of the time. This makes these spells good “crowd-control,” in the MMORPG sense of the term of limiting what can attack the party at any one time.
So we can see that there are lots of combat situations in which save-or-die effects are useful, even weak! Far from being a driver of imbalance, they can serve as an essential component OF balance, ensuring that the overwhelmed PC’s have a fighting chance against large odds.
Not For Every Opponent
Mike also, in his statement, equates taking down opponents with balance, and this isn’t strictly true. In a game that was all about fighting and combat, this might be true, since killing or incapacitating a foe yields victory in combat pretty directly. However, this won’t necessarily lead to victory over the course of the adventuring day. Spending that save-or-die spell in one place might mean forgoing another spell elsewhere, and there are only so many problems simple murder can solve. In a game that is built for more than just combat, when your opponents take the shape of opinions and environments and traps as well as dangerous monsters, overcoming even 100% of every combat with one single effect doesn’t unbalance things, necessarily. There’s plenty of ways you can “lose” without necessarily getting killed by orcs.
It's also true that not every style wants to spend very much time on each encounter. For some groups, if combat only lasts 3-5 rounds, that's just enough, and a spell that helps reduce the number of turns spent in combat is a great convenience.
So in a broad sense of balance, over an entire play session, made up of multiple different types of challenges, save-or-die effects clearly have a role to play.
Resolutions
Ultimately, the point I'm making is similar to the point I made in the last article: everyone has different demands for their games, and what Mike sees as a driver of imbalance may actually be a useful tool with an appropriate place in some games. "Balance," like most game design ideas, doesn't exist in a vacuum and isn't something you pursue regardless of context. It doesn't lend itself to fundamentalist, unilateral thinking. Everyone's table is different.
I think that for me, the ideal place for save-or-die effects in the hands of players is twofold. First, I'd like to be able to use effects like sleep and hold person as crowd-control mechanisms, helping to keep a chunk of the enemy force occupied. This might mean that these spells affect large groups of relatively weak creatures, a la 4e's minions, but I'm fairly content with that -- against bigger threats, spells like this shouldn't do much, they should be easily thrown off. Next, I'd like to use effects like polymorph other and stone to flesh, vorpal swords, and an assassin's death attack to be useful against more on-par monsters -- these should be "all or nothing" kinds of bets that MIGHT remove the guy from play, if the dice are lucky. However, I don't think these have to work on EVERY monster, and I'm fine with creatures similar in design space to a 4e solo resisting them or having lesser effects. Because I like a mix of narrative action and gamelike win/loss potential, I want the ability to choose to make some NPC's/monsters especially resistant to save-or-die effects, but I don't want these resistances to be common.
One idea that might work is the concept of Destiny. The idea would be that instead of a massive pool of HP, a "solo" monster in 5e gets normal HP, and perhaps a pool of four "destiny tokens" that it can spend, when reduced to 0 hp, to instantly regain all their HP (and perhaps activate some other ability, like a dragon's breath). So if this powerful dragon fails a save against some necromancer's Finger of Death spell, or gets hit with a vorpal sword, they are lose Destiny instead of their lives. Hypothetically, you could extend this idea to PC's, and remove the dilemma of "HP as morale," as well, employing these tokens to regain all their lost HP to make it obvious when "fate intervenes to save you." This would make sure that people who had no interest in these more dramatic fights and durable PC's never had to worry about using them, while ensuring that those who enjoyed this kind of thing could get what they wanted out of the game, too. And folks who never wanted to deal with a one-save problem could add Destiny to everything.
But that's just one fairly off-the-cuff idea. I'm interested to hear yours, too! Surely, we all have our own ways to solve this problem at our own tables that don't necessarily mean excluding one-shot effects from the game entirely. What do you think of a hypothetical "concentration" mechanic to help ameliorate this problem? Do you like combats with massive quantities of enemies and overwhelming odds, or are you more a 5-on-5 kind of group? If there's one major takeaway from this, it should be the idea that we all have slightly different needs at our own tables. So if Mike stays away from things that are so categorical in the future, perhaps I'll have less occasion to disagree in about 2,000 words.
