D&D 5E Considering a little rule tweak

[ccooke]

I tend to run campaigns with a cadence - there are periods when the players tend to fight a few big threats and can mostly control when they rest, and there are periods of many small and large fights where controlling their resting is often impossible.

I want my players to be challenged, but I mostly want that to be a matter of player agency and attrition. To help foster that, I've been considering offering my players a new option: Burn two hit dice to automatically get the effect of a natural 20 on a death saving throw.

Since that only gets you up to 1hp, I suspect this will (if the situation is bad enough) mean that my players are likely to use a decent number of hit dice if one of the big small-number-of-encounter-per-days set pieces goes wrong, which will have a knock-on effect on the next time they need to enter a more dangerous phase (the transitions to which are only about half the time under their control).

I'm going to try this out on my lower-level parties (levels 4 and 5) where the cost is quite high. I'm posting here to see what people think about that for a higher level party. I *could* go with 1/3 of your maximum hit dice, rounded down (which would mean 1hd up to level 6), or keep it at two...

My highest level party have just hit level 9, and I won't be running a game for them until the new year. Plenty of time for canvassing opinions.

(Note: Yes, this isn't going to be an option for groups that think survivability is too high already - although I suspect this won't actually decrease the death rate in my games, because there is already a lot of pressure on hit dice in the dangerous phases)

 

[iserith]

How often is the situation "bad enough" that you expect they'll make that trade-off? How much do you suppose this will be reliant upon party composition?

If you want players to choose to undertake more challenges before resting, you might try something like bonus XP: After the 6th combat challenge in an adventuring day, all subsequent XP awards are at +10%. Then just adjust that percentage to whatever number it will take to incentivize the players into pressing on..

 

[ad_hoc]

My initial impression is that monster's CR rating should be raised by 1 to compensate if using this.

 

[5ekyu]

Personally to me the strength and drama of the death save is the need for others to help vs the threat of others hurting. Others need to come help. That takes them out of just execute my offense mode.

So giving a default up on your own option might not be OP but it would be drama reducing. So, not for me.

Sent from my VS995 using EN World mobile app

 

[Phineas Q. Conundrum]

I think this is pretty interesting. On the one hand, when a player is making death saves their fate is totally and completely in the hands of the dice. They need to be helped by another player, usually in the form of healing and sometimes with a medicine check. I think taking control out of the downed player's hands is a great way to make some teamwork happen. On the other hand, there's nothing like a good risk-reward system where you can burn something you could use later to save yourself now. I get the appeal.
I wouldn't say that gaining one hit point is necessarily going to seriously add imbalance to a fight. If they don't get more healing soon, they'll just get thrown back into the revolving door. 1 hit point is not going to do much unless its the end of a fight.
Maybe... only another player within 5 feet can spend their hit dice to give the downed player 1 hit point back at the start of their next turn. The downed player themselves cannot.