Balancing Save-or-Die

[Szatany]

Well, if it's all about being reduced to 0 hps, why would you ever use sleep or charm or whatever? It's just as easy to kill your target with actual damage.

Because only in battle for life and death you want to kill your enemy. If you want to subdue or control them you will cast sleep or charm.
If you play a game where all confrontation ends in deaths, it is a shallow game.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Well, if it's all about being reduced to 0 hps, why would you ever use sleep or charm or whatever? It's just as easy to kill your target with actual damage.

If you can sleep a creature under 40 hp but your best damage spell does 20 hp damage it totally makes sense to use sleep. Or if the sleep spell is lower level than a damage spell that does an equal amount of "damage." Or if you need to take a prisoner.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Because only in battle for life and death you want to kill your enemy. If you want to subdue or control them you will cast sleep or charm.
If you play a game where all confrontation ends in deaths, it is a shallow game.

I don't think this is necessarily true. And some people just want to play a kill kill kill game. This is not an uncommon style and the game should be designed with this in mind.

 

[Frostmarrow]

I don't think this is necessarily true. And some people just want to play a kill kill kill game. This is not an uncommon style and the game should be designed with this in mind.

Consider not picking Sleep.

 

[Gargoyle]

Save or die failed its save and died.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Consider not picking Sleep.

The thing is with everything that bypasses the HP system, you either allow it and they are often better...or you don't allow it. There isn't a good in between.

If a Fireball does 10d6 points of damage but the enemy gets a save for half and a Sleep spell just puts someone to sleep if they fail a save...the sleep spell could be doing 200 points of damage(effectively). If you limit the Sleep spell so that it only affects enemies who are at 40 HP or less...well, it's more powerful than a Fireball against any enemy who has 40 HP or less. If you also add a saving throw to it even against targets with 40 HP or less...it becomes worse than just fireballing them every time and is only useful for those rare circumstances where you want someone to go to sleep instead of die(and assuming you aren't playing with mechanics like 4e where you can knock them unconscious with a fireball). Plus, you have to lower them to 40 hitpoints to begin with, so you have to nearly kill them just to put them to sleep.

This is the same problem with all things that bypass hitpoints. Including all Save or Dies. If something has lots of hitpoints, it is better to use these abilities by far. In the vast majority of cases the idea is to take out the enemy(whether they are dead, unconscious, unable to move, or whatever, as long as they can't fight back and at your mercy to kill them off). That means if you allow Save or Dies to just take multiple rolls to pull off, you are not helping the rest of your party.

As an example, say it takes 3 failed saves to die from Save or Die. You hit someone with a "You are going to die attack". The next round, the enemy fails its save, but the rest of your party does 40 damage total. Then the round after that, he fails his save but the party does another 40 damage total. The third round the party does another 40 damage and kills it right before it makes it's last save.

Your save or die has done effectively nothing since it doesn't contribute to helping what the party is doing...reducing hitpoints.

 

[Quickleaf]

The way I see it, the problem with save or dies is that they bypass HP mechanic. So one possible solution would be to make SoD dependant on HP, but of course they shouldn't just deal damage. If a damage dealing spell looks like this:
spell X
level 5
Deals 30 damage (reflex halves)

then a save or die spell should look like this:
spell Y
level 5
Kills target with currently 40 or less HP (will negates)

This solves two most glaring problems of SoDs. 1: Fights can no longer end on the first turn of combat because you need to reduce target's HP to some level before the target becomes susceptible to sods.
2: Solos are naturally resistant to sods because of their huge HP pools.

Plus it is still useful for dropping weak enemies.

Hmm where have I seen that mechanic before? Power Word Kill maybe?

You utter a single word of power that instantly kills one creature of your choice, whether the creature can hear the word or not. Any creature that currently has 101 or more hit points is unaffected by power word kill. Spell resistance YES. Saving Throw NO.

[MENTION=128]Mishihari Lord[/MENTION] suggested a damage threshold earlier. It could work. If you gave an assassin some kind of scaling power word kill which required surprise, a successful attack roll, and granted a save to avoid death and instead take normal damage I think it could work well.

Anyhow I was just reading through all the posts and there are some very simple elegant ideas about using coup de grace...

Assassin class feature: During a surprise round, you can make a coup-de-grace attack against a surprised creature.

Ben]Coup de gras: if a target is unaware or unable to defend itself, an attacker can make a coup de gras. The target of the coup de gras must make a d20 + Level + Con mod save or die. The DC of the save is equal to 10 (or maybe roll) + attacker level + cdg bonus.

The more I think on it the less I think a save or die effect models the assassin well, and the more i think only 3 things are needed:
1. The assassin can make a coup de grace when undetected and/or target is surprised.
2. The assassin receives bonus damage on coup de grace attacks slightly better than a thief's sneak attack, but must do legwork/prep to earn bonus damage.
3. The assassin maintains the 4e Essentials Executioner's "Death Attack" (when you drop an enemy to 10 HP or less you may kill it outright."

Using a 4th edition example, say our 3rd level assassin sneaks up on a Hobgoblin Spear Soldier (level 3 skirmisher with 48 HP) after staking it the fortress with the party's ranger. He hits and since it's a coup de grace it becomes a critical hit, for 26 damage (weapon 1d8+1 maximized, magic item crit +d8, ability modifier +4, focus feat +1, attack finesse class feature +d8 maximized). He gains 13 extra damage for preparing (+3d8). So he deals roughly 39 damage. But combined with his Death Attack feature the attack kills the clueless hobgoblin where it stands.

 

[Kingreaper]

Well, if it's all about being reduced to 0 hps, why would you ever use sleep or charm or whatever? It's just as easy to kill your target with actual damage.

Maybe, outside of combat it's much more effective.

It's quite plausible that in combat a sleep spell would force someone to push through it, essentially damage themself.

However, a guard sitting down at his post who has sleep cast on him, before any violence starts at all, may simply give in to it and fall asleep. He doesn't have the adrenalin pumping.

(Also, the fact it could have a slow effect etc. but honestly, Sleep should be more of an out-of-combat than in-combat spell)

 

[Szatany]

Consider not picking Sleep.

Precisely. If a gaming group doesn't care at all about languages, will they complain the tongues spell shouldn't be in the book?

 

[Endur]

It's generally accepted wisdom that save-or-die is bad bad bad naughty evil bad unpleasant bad verboten no no wrong fun, and that late 3e and early 4e doing away with this mechanic was basically the second coming of Gygax. Okay, hyperbole, but you get my drift: save-or-die baaaaad.

On the one hand there is the one hit, one kill, big bad boss is dead, conflict over if a single saving throw is failed. On the other hand, there is the long-drawn out combat if save or die is not available.

A 10,000 hp creature who has to take multiple saving throws might fail a saving throw long before that creature runs out of hp.

There is also the special case of AD&D spells such as Power Word Kill, Death Spell, etc. that didn't even offer a saving throw. These spells were limited by hp or HD, so they wouldn't affect the 10k hp creature (although Harm would affect the 10k hp creature).

I like the big tough spells, the assassin's chance to slay, etc. That said, I think the GM has to be careful to make sure the combats are still "fun" for the players.