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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7566574" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Imagine a game where driving is important, and you have 30 pages of driving rules to determine how different factors affect your ability to drive. And imagine that you're playing the game, and you need to drive somewhere, under difficult circumstances that would normally call for a check with your driving skills. Now imagine that, before you make your roll, the GM flips a coin; on heads, you move forward with your driving check (taking into account all of the many rules for driving), but on tails you crash and no check is allowed.The coin flip is a bad game mechanic, in this example, because it invalidates every factor that should be relevant. If your skill at driving is not a factor in how well you drive, then something has gone horribly wrong; doubly so if this is an area of gameplay that you've invested effort into, because you actually want to be good at it. Why bother investing in something, if failure is going to occur regardless of your investment? Why bother having thirty pages of rules, if the outcome is going to be determined by a coin flip?Going back to HP and decapitation, you can have effects which make HP irrelevant, but it shouldn't be something that comes up with every swing of an axe. If every attack has a 5% chance of ignoring HP entirely, then that's a bad mechanic, because it relegates HP damage to pointless bookkeeping - the character will die when you roll decapitation, and HP don't matter. (You saw this a lot, when people tried to introduce Vitality points into D&D, and had critical damage go straight to Vitality.) If you want to take someone out without going through their HP, then it should be attached to an action that doesn't interact primarily through the HP mechanic, like petrification or something.The more obvious solution is to not allow such a wild power imbalance while still trying to challenge them both with the same obstacles. If the fighter has 35hp, and the wizard has 25hp, then you can hit them both for 8d6 damage (save for half) and they'll both care. It's enough that the fighter will probably stay up, and the wizard will probably fall, but the saving throw matters more than the HP totals in determining the outcome.Because throwing out a save-or-die effect, or just randomly killing one without regards to HP or save values, is a way to invalidate player participation. Nothing kills player enthusiasm like a GM fiat declaring that all of their choices are irrelevant.</blockquote>

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