D&D 5E Death, dying and class balance

[Ancalagon]

So this is achieved by the bard "stealing" the paladin spell then - why Lore bard is needed...

 

[pemerton]

So this is achieved by the bard "stealing" the paladin spell then - why Lore bard is needed...

I could be wrong, but I think it would be to get Magical Secrets at 6th level rather than 10th level.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I'm a bit confused why you're asking this question. I just finished telling you that my own players don't do this and don't need to do this. The OP asked for feedback on his house rules, though, and one possible outcome of changing the rules for death saves/etc. is "players need to/begin investing more energy in healing optimization." I.e. the behavior of my current players right now in vanilla is not necessarily a good guide to the behavior of OP's players after OP implements his planned house rule. Change the incentives and you may change the behavior.

I'm asking because I was discussing the OP's views about the default assumptions of the 5e system, and your suggested build strikes me as rather an edge case, not something that the game was balanced around.

 

[Libramarian]

I find this a rather false assumption.

5e healing is a lot less "liquid" than any previous edition other than 4th. Editions 1 through 3.5 relied on healing through magic from specific sources, whereas 5e has a significant amount of healing on a per-character basis from HD. Compare to the editions where rest healing was a few points per day, where healing resources were actually pooled together.

Furthermore, in 5e compared to 4th ed (and 3rd ed in some cases), defensive-capable classes are much less "sticky". This leads to damage being spread around the party a lot more, rather than the Defender-type classes being able to focus much of the incoming damage upon themselves. In those editions, temp HP given to those classes would almost definitely be used, and thus count as "party temp HP", whereas in 5e there is no guarantee that the character you had just given temp HP to would be the one who would be taking damage. The Moon Druid's temp HP for example can't be considered the party's temp HP because the Mood Druid can't guarantee that she is absorbing damage that would otherwise be applied to the Sorceror for example.

The only scenarios where your base assumptions are valid, are those where each character in the entire party is taking constant low-level damage for long enough to seriously deplete all of them during a single encounter. This is a rather rare occurrence: it is more likely that someone will go down due to a bad position or bad luck/crits while some of the rest of the group are relatively healthy.

In short, 5e is probably the edition where those assumptions are the least valid.

All fair points. When I mentioned liquidity I was thinking of not just how easily healing resources can be converted into HP but the overall "accounting liquidity" of how that squares with incoming damage, or basically how easy it to manage party health and keep everybody alive. This is very easy in 5e. What really makes it easy are the rules for death and dying: high threshold for instakill, low likelihood of dying from death saves and heal-from-zero, which perversely incentivizes waiting for someone to drop before healing them. There's almost always a chance to save a downed character, often without them missing a single turn as long as the party has healing slots left. This is why characters almost never die outside of a TPK, and the party dies when they can't pop up KOed characters with spells (or forcefeed them healing potions) anymore. If the rules were death at negative Con+level, or simply dead-at-zero, then it would be much more difficult manage health across the party and characters would have to rely on their own defensive capacity without relying on a pop-up heal. Which brings us to the point of the thread: I'm concerned about character imbalances resulting from modifying the death and dying rules, because classes seem to have very different defensive capacities, even comparing classes of the same traditional role, like Barbarian vs Fighter and Druid vs Cleric.

Killing PC is not the goal of DnD. And even then they come back with an new pc.
DM should focus on mission failure/success.

I agree that problems would result if the DM made it their goal to kill PCs. That's why I want the system to do it instead.

Can you create a good challenge with a complex scenario and the sporadic, somewhat arbitrary use of simulationist game mechanics? Yes, but that's like saying you don't need a washing machine to clean your clothes.

As I said earlier I associate this kind of prep-heavy light gamism with Call of Cthulhu. It's nice to use a simple, "invisible" system for that style of play, rather than a 300 pound washing machine like D&D. You can focus on the atmosphere of the game and worry less about plot-busting abilities like Speak with Dead and Zone of Truth, and gamist constructs like XP and levels. I wonder how Curse of Strahd would run with Cthulhu Dark Ages.

My opinion does not matter in your games. The only opinions that matter are those of you and your players.

However, you will always have an undue influence in the outcome of a game when you are the DM. You make the rules, stack the deck, deal the cards and tell the players when they can play their cards. An interesting question: If this is a concern, why is it a concern? What does the answer to that question say about your group?

I don't think a DM must have an undue influence in the outcome of a game. I think many of the tools and techniques that help to minimize conflicts of interest in DM prep and refereeing (to maintain system "hygiene" as Eero Tuovinen would say) have fallen out of the game through the years, some of which are back in 5e but unfortunately presented more as oddities than serious tools, e.g. random encounters.

As for the scenario I described assuming success: To an extent, yes, and to an extent, no. We started with the premise that the foes in the adventure were not deadly threats to the PCs. Unless the Dice Gods are cranky or the PCs do something cringe-worthy, they'll survive. However, what happens if the NPC friend dies? If they have to kill townsfolk to get to the vampire? If the We're rat gets away the first time the PCs approach? This goes back to the concept of what is failure.

Well, that sounds more functional but less exciting. The fact that it's not obvious what will happen lessens the impact of the failure. With character death and start over at level 1, the impact is very clear.

 

[Libramarian]

I've been convinced that it's worthwhile to houserule death and dying. I think I'm going to go with one death saving throw, rolled after the battle is over. Not sure what I want to do with Revivify yet.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I could be wrong, but I think it would be to get Magical Secrets at 6th level rather than 10th level.

Yep. Plus, you don't need the Valor Bard's Extra Attack (you're a sorcerer so you have SCAG cantrips) and you don't need his medium armor (you already have heavy armor prof from Life Cleric) and Cutting Words has a better action economy than regular bardic inspiration and the extra skills could be kind of useful and fun. But yes, you could use Valor Bard as your chassis if you wanted to; you could also use Paladin.

In fact, the variant of this that is most likely to see actual play at my table in the near future is Paladin of Devotion 9/Wild Sorc 4. There's already a P7/WS 4 with Quicken Spell + Extended Spell, clearly aiming for the superhealer capability eventually because that's almost the only thing Extended Spell is any good for.

As an aside: if you're playing at a table where the party dies only when they run out of pop-up healing resources, Aura of Vitality is going to be even more powerful at your table. That's twenty rounds(!) of free popup healing that stacks. If you're a DM who likes to "challenge" players, this combo could distort your gameplay quite badly. You may want to houserule it away somehow, as Libramarian is doing or by eliminating Aura of Vitality from the game.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

All fair points. When I mentioned liquidity I was thinking of not just how easily healing resources can be converted into HP but the overall "accounting liquidity" of how that squares with incoming damage, or basically how easy it to manage party health and keep everybody alive. This is very easy in 5e. What really makes it easy are the rules for death and dying: high threshold for instakill, low likelihood of dying from death saves and heal-from-zero, which perversely incentivizes waiting for someone to drop before healing them. There's almost always a chance to save a downed character, often without them missing a single turn as long as the party has healing slots left. This is why characters almost never die outside of a TPK, and the party dies when they can't pop up KOed characters with spells (or forcefeed them healing potions) anymore.

This might be an artifact of the initiative system you're using. Perhaps one reason my players don't rely on popup healing is because of the AD&D-style (WEGO: everyone declares/everyone acts) initiative system in use. When five of six giant rats are attacking you this round and you're already at 2 health, or when you're at full health but you just hurled yourself into the middle of a clump of four Umber Hulks, popup healing is pretty irrelevant. The players become very, very aware of exactly how many enemy hits they can take before becoming hamburger. In the case of the giant rats, what happened was that the giant rats hit him just enough times to bring him down to two failed death saves (i.e. once to put him at 0 HP, and then once more auto-crit due to 5' melee attack against an unconscious target, resulting in two failed death saves), and at the start of the new round before anyone could declare an action he rolled his death saves and got a natural 1. Sayonara, Gale!

The point I'm trying to make in a roundabout way is that cyclic initiative tends to result in predictable combat where players are very comfortable that they'll be able to coordinate effectively. This tends to make combat safer, not just for healing but for e.g. exploiting the Mobile feat or gaming spell durations like Wrathful Smite. Could it be that trying a new initiative system would resolve your discomfort over "safeness" in a satisfying way?

 

[Ancalagon]

I think a very easy way to avoid the "pop up" healing being abused. In 2nd ed, if you were using the optional "death at -10" rule, if you were healed back in the positive you were all messed up and groggy and generally useless until you had rested. This could be mimicked with the use of the exhaustion rules. Even adding a single level of exhaustion per near death should be enough of a penalty to discourage the "pop up"

If you want something more drastic, then use more levels of exhaustion, or even the lingering injury rule.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Another option to avoid pop up healing would be to require a check to return to consciousness after being healed from zero. I've never understood why being healed to 1+ hp automatically wakes you up, apart from tradition. Although that increases the risk of TPK more than death for any individual PC.

 

[ninjayeti]

TL;DR: If I make it easier to kill characters, do hard-to-kill builds become OP?

It’s a great theorycrafting question, and since I don’t have a good theorycrafting answer, I’ll just say that theory can only take you so far before game play takes over. On paper a raging barbarian has much more survivability than a rogue or wizard. In practice, the barbarian is likely on the frontlines taking a beating while the rogue or wizard hangs back avoiding direct combat, so those are arguably the safer choices.

I’d also point out that 1st and 2nd editions were much deadlier than 5E. In those editions clerics were probably the most survivable class (plate armor, good HP, defensive and healing spells), yet surveys from back then showed clerics were the least played of the four main classes. So I wouldn’t be overly concerned that tweaking the lethality of the game will necessarily be a big factor in driving character creation decisions.