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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5829804" data-attributes="member: 2067">I've been pondering a bit about save-or-die mechanics as I look into what an Assassin might look like in my ideal world, or in a hypothetical 5e, and I'd like to start a bit of a conversation about them.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. I was thinking in the Assassin ruminations how I might want to challenge that because, to my mind, the Assassin should be save-or-die. That should be his major combat class power: the ability to kill something with one hit. So this forced me to think about what, specifically, is so awful about save-or-die, and what might be done to address it, without getting rid of that basic dynamic. First of all, I see the point that save-or-die can be anticlimactic. "RAARGH I AM ASMODEUS!" *pew pew* "BLARGH I AM DEAD", not fun, and I think we can all agree on that. But as I pondered this, I realized that this was probably a specific case, that should be addressed by specific rules. Okay, your "solo"-level monsters take megadamage instead of dying. Or a monster you specifically designate might get some effect other than death from save-or-die (damage, perhaps some save ends effect), but every little goblin and elf? Is it really important to save the lives of every monster in a big 5-on-5 combat?Thinking about solos lead me to thinking about minions, which, I figured...are save-or-die mechanics in a different box. Hit them, and they die. This is exactly what I want the Assassin to be able to do (in certain limited circumstances). It also lead me to think about 4e striker mechanics. If we were to translate an Assassin's instant-death attack into 4e terms and compare it with other striker mechanics, we find that it's worth about the equivalent of 4 rogue attacks (the amount of hits a rogue needs to perform to kill a monster of equal level, give or take)...which is, over the course of a usual 10-round-or-so 4e combat is actually kind of weak sauce, if they only get it once. I was also pondering this in terms of the Three Pillars. If combat is only one aspect of the game, might it be OK for the occasional monster to be blasted away with a single attack?So, this is a thread for thinking about the theoretically impossible. How is it possible to keep save-or-die/instant-death/one-hit-kill mechanics in the game without making it unbalanced?Haters who are all "It is impossible, and you are a dumb face!" will be responded to with hilarious smileys.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> <---(like that)</blockquote>

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