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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7432834" data-attributes="member: 996">Not HW, specifically, but any readily available in-combat healing, particularly combined with the heal-from-0 rule.Because you do heal from 0, even if you were overkilled by anything less than your max hps, it makes a disturbing amount of sense for the party healer to wait until you drop before healing you.  Down to 1 hp and facing an enemy that's been averaging 30 hps a shot?  As long as you max hps are significantly higher than 30, no problem, take that next hit, so the enemy 'wastes' 29 points of damage!  If you want the reverse perverse incentive, track & heal from negatives, and allow overhealing to roll over into temporary hps.  Then it becomes in the healer's best interest to heal early to keep you from losing actions. Another option is to assume that such healing is comparatively rare, so enemies don't adopt that tactic until the whack-a-mole effect has been demonstrated, because they're just not used to coping with instant healing.  In 4e, for instance, which introduced heal-from-0 /and/ minor action healing, all that healing was powered by surges, which monsters and NPCs got very few of (1 at heroic levels), and most had no way of triggering in combat, so, they'd, even rules-as-laws-of-physics-style, spend all their hypothetical backstory lives fighting other creatures that stay down when you drop 'em, and take a good few days to fully recover from being dropped, then face a party of PCs - who disconcertingly pop back up over and over - and, generally, die before they can adapt their usual drop-and-forget tactics to that unexpected behavior...In 5e, it's just a matter of making casters with healing magic on their lists - Bards, Clerics, Druids, Ranger, & Paladins, at a minimum - comparatively rare, rare enough that their encounter with the PC party will likely be any give foe's first - and likely fatal - experience with one. That still leaves a strong incentive to take one last attack on a downed foe, since it's pretty likely to kill him outright.  Tracking to negative max hps, OTOH, makes being certain of a downed foe tedious - and healing back from deep negatives an unattractive waste of healing resource, so you'll get the desired result:  badly downed characters will stay most likely stay down. Ghouls, OTOH, totally.  Agreed.  I think there's an implicit assumption that PC abilities are commonplace in the setting, so most intelligent foes will routinely use tactics to counter them.</blockquote>

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