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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5440778" data-attributes="member: 22779">Why not?  Why is giving an orc +25 damage not a SOD creature?  He hits you, you die.  That's pretty close to any SOD creature that isn't required to hit you.  A saving throw is not all that far off the chances of a creature hitting you in combat.  I would argue that giving our orc +25 to damage is pretty much the exact same thing as having a 1 HD snake with a SOD poison attack.  Actually, to be entirely fair, you'd probably have to give the orc a few penaties on his attack, since the snake has to hit.  But, it's easily doable.See, the problem is, how do you determine what is level appropriate for that creature or any SOD creature.  In order to determine that the PC's were in over their heads, you have to know how tall they are.I look at the evolution of SOD as just a continuation of what 3e did.  1e and 2e had a boatload of small creatures that would be a speed bump encounter, except they had SoD poison attacks - snakes, spiders, vermin of many forms.  3e did away with almost all of them.  Instead, you have a debilitating poison attack that is nasty, just not immedietely fatal, usually.  In other words, they reduced the lethality while at the same time retaining the threatening nature of the creature.If there were no problems with SoD, if SoD was such good game design, why was it ejected from such a large swath of the game in 3e?Looking beyond D&D, I'm struggling to think of many games that include SoD mechanics (not counting retro clones of course).  I'm really having a hard time thinking of any game that has this.  Lots of games are lethal as all get out, but, very few have this arbitrary death mechanic built in.You'd think a well designed mechanic would feature more prominently in other games.</blockquote>

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