Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DiceGolem" data-source="post: 3667756" data-attributes="member: 53922">I really like your idea, eamon, but I think I'm going to mutilate it a little...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> A death check: Fortitude save vs. death, DC (half of your negative hit points). No success consequences.As a quick example:1) A character is dropped to negative hit points and is dying.2) The character makes an immediate death check.3) The character's initiative count changes to just after his/her attacker. 4) Not including the first round spent dying, the character makes a death check on his turn.5) If the character is still not dead after (a number, say 4) death checks, that character stabalizes naturally.If another character uses the standard action of Heal to stabalize the dying character, the dying character must use the healer's total skill check instead of the normal Fortitude bonus in the next round. Success means stabalization, but a failure forces a normal death check without the aid of the healer's skill. For every 5 the Healing check fails, the dying character also takes 2 damage.Edit: As an assumption on my part, and not in my post previously, the damage dealt from the horrifically failed Heal check applies before the second death check. Meaning a bad Heal check increases the DC of the death check required for failing the Heal check.I find it about as simple as death is going to get, and still be viable. I like the idea of the save not scaling up as you go unless your healer royally screws up. The fact that it doesn't normally scale lends to the idea that "dying" doesn't mean "losing hit points," but instead means "viable chance of death."Of course, you could have been killed by a Wounding attack; in which case you're bleeding and dying!I'd choose 4 saves in a row, personally. With the chance to die completely unaided and ignored, as Obergnom calculated, at a nice 19%, it means that players have to make some touch judgement calls as to whether to try and finish the enemy off or take pains to help falled allies. I like it.Like suggested, Diehard would require some reworking:The extra damage from a strenuous action may seem extreme, but remember that it doesn't really matter, because only a 1 will result in your character's death. It's really just an arbitrary number of how much damage you'll needed healed after the battle is over, meaning that an over-enthusiastic barbarian may have an angry PC cleric to deal with afterwards.At first I was worried about a powerful spellcaster taking this Diehard and throwing cataclysmic AoE's everywhere, but if a spellcaster is gonna take two feats to do it they might as well enjoy it. With all the Complete books full of useful spellcasting enhancing feats, a Diehard mage would be a good option for, say, a Rage Mage.Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything I missed?</blockquote>

Verification