D&D 5E Dying House Rule

[JValeur]

I've been preoccupied with the lack of tension in 5E for a while and tested various solutions. The one we've landed on in my game, is the following:

As per the standard rules, you still roll death saving throws at the end of each of your turns after falling to 0 hit points or less. And, as before, you die if you have three failed death saving throws, and you stabilize if you have three successful saving throws.

The difference is how healing, medicine checks and healer’s kits work on you, while you are dying. Healing and other effects that would automatically stabilize you, instead give you successful death saving throws.

Stabilizing effect – a stabilizing effect like a successful DC 10 Medicine Check, the use of a healer’s kit or the spare the dying cantrip gives you one successful death saving throw. A stabilizing effect that would normally also put you at 1 hit point gives you two succesful death saving throws.

Healing – each 5 points of healing, rounded down, give you one successful death saving throw. If you’ve just dropped to 0 hit points and have zero successful death saving throws, you need to receive at least 15 points of healing to stabilize. If you already have two successful death saving throws, you need only 5 points of healing to stabilize. If healing gives you three successful death saving throws, and there’s any left to spare, you regain that many hit points and become conscious.

Critical fails and successes – Like before, a roll of 1 on a death saving throw means two failed death saving throws and a roll of 20 puts you instantly at 1 hit point, regardless of how many successful death saving throws you have accumulated.

 

[Lanliss]

First, and this is just my opinion, but taking away a spell slot is nuts. If you're gonna screw someone over a rez, at least make it the dead schmuck and not the priest.

Second, though, your revival cost point system is an interesting idea. I think I would tend to make it more akin to becoming undead, so vulnerability to radiant damage and resistance to necrotic, susceptibility to turning and undead control spells, etc. If your campaign has a prohibition on characters of evil alignment, then it could be very effective to say that after coming back 12 times you can't have a good alignment, and after 18 you are evil (and an NPC.) Even if your actions are virtuous, the stain is upon your soul. I would suggest, however, that there has to be some way to undo the damage and reset your revival points. It should be epic, probably extra-planar, and could even be a big secret at first. You need to know what it is, though, and be ready for players to make the redemption of their rez-tainted souls a big freakin' deal.

It is based on my world's Plane of the Dead, a massive eternal blizzard. Time moves differently there, so your soul will wander that blizzard for centuries before even a second has passed in the Material Plane. The cold sticks to your soul if you are revived, hence the stacking cold effects. It is a thematic thing.

That said, your idea sounds good for a more generic fantasy world.

As for the spell slot, I agree that it is insane, I think I actually used that exact word at the end of my last post. You know what else is insane? People coming back to life, at will. No tense medicine check as you repeatedly hit them with the Defibrillator, no difficulty moving, they just rise up and start hacking away at the dragon again. Sounds like a pretty big thing, and should cost an equivalent amount IMO. On punishing the person spending the spell, that is one side of things.

To punish the dead guy, you could do something like remove one of their class levels and replace it with a level in Cleric or Warlock, depending on who they begged to revive them. Of course, none of these insane costs would just be sprung on the players, they would be told how it would all work in advance. If they die after that, they either were not careful enough or the DM screwed up.

All of this is assuming you want a more deadly game, Kiddie gloves off and all that. If default 5E works fine for you that is great. I just like throwing around ideas for getting my world how I want it, which is a state where death costs at least a little more than default 300 GP.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

First, and this is just my opinion, but taking away a spell slot is nuts. If you're gonna screw someone over a rez, at least make it the dead schmuck and not the priest.

It reminds me of the Atonement spell, from 3E, which included an XP cost in order to cast. It meant that the Cleric wasn't just going to automatically cast it on anyone who asked, because they had a real cost to pay, so they were the one you needed to convince.

By making the spellcaster sacrifice the spell slot, it becomes their decision about whether or not to bring back your character. It means the idiot fighter needs to stop taking stupid risks, because the cleric won't Revivify them if their death could have been easily avoided; but they don't need to fear honest mistakes or unavoidable sacrifices since the cleric will (probably) be willing to pay the cost if they think the fighter won't squander this precious gift. It's a middle ground between the default rules (where death is meaningless because you can return easily) and removing the resurrection spells outright (where death would be tragic because return is impossible).

 

[ad_hoc]

I've been preoccupied with the lack of tension in 5E for a while and tested various solutions. The one we've landed on in my game, is the following:

These rules just encourage players to not tend to fallen characters.

At the very least you should allow Spare the Dying to be worthwhile by completely stabilizing a character.

 

[Caliban]

I've been working on revamped death and Resurrection rules for my next campaign.

One thing I'm considering is that the act of pulling someone's soul back from the great beyond temporarily opens a rift that allow other things through as well - and if you are unlucky, one of those may take up residence in the body instead of the soul of the person you attempted to raise.

The more powerful the magic used, the greater the strength of the things that slip through.

Casting the spell on Consecrated ground (via the Hallow spell) reduces the number of things that come through, but doesn't stop it altogether.

Immediately after casting the spell, the cleric and any allies need to deal with the creatures that came though (usually various undead, but possibly fiends as well). The person being raised needs to make a Will save or be possessed. (Consecrated ground prevents this.)

Lorewise - this is where most of the various types of undead came from. Trying to pull people back from death is what unleashed undeath on the world.

 

[Saeviomagy]

No, I don't fear anything in 5E. There is never a point where I am at any risk of discomfort. Either I take some damage and maybe fall unconscious, but I'm fine an hour later, or the entire party is dead and we're talking about the next campaign. I guess if we had powerful magical items, then we could be at risk of losing those, but we can always prevent that from happening by escalating; if I had a +3 sword, then you'd have to kill me in order to take it away from me.

So your DM never has:
- NPCs who have some goal that you are trying to interfere with other than "kill the PCs"?
- Time pressures
- Fights that need to be retreated from
- NPCs who take advantage of your unconscious/dead state
- NPCs who imprison you

I mean really - it kind of seems like the problem is you: if you're not even worried about a TPK and the end of the campaign, why would you be afraid of individual permanent character death?

What I want is for there to be some consequence to getting hurt. I want to have some incentive to play cautiously, because being reckless and charging into combat might have a reasonable chance of inconveniencing me for a while. I want the outcome of one combat to influence everything that happens after that combat, such that letting one character get seriously injured early on might throw the whole quest in jeopardy, because that's at least a reason to care about what happens.

Facetiously: You could just try hitting yourself in the face whenever your character is knocked unconscious. You seem to want an individual, metagame punishment for failure. Perhaps if you're not keen on actual pain, you could do something like buy everyone a pizza, or donate money to a charity. Or say 10 hail marys.

More seriously: Your campaign doesn't seem to have any consequences at all, and you seem to have no investment in the game at all. You said yourself: a TPK isn't worrying to you. Why not? Do you just not care about the story at all? If your quest is delayed by an hour, that should matter. If the party are TPKed, you should care that the bad guys won, and that their evil plans will come to fruition.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So your DM never has:
- NPCs who have some goal that you are trying to interfere with other than "kill the PCs"?
- Time pressures
- Fights that need to be retreated from
- NPCs who take advantage of your unconscious/dead state
- NPCs who imprison you

The last campaign I played in was Princes of the Apocalypse, so no, there was nothing like that. And if the published adventures are any guideline as to how they expect you to play, then your suggestions are pretty far out of line.

I mean really - it kind of seems like the problem is you: if you're not even worried about a TPK and the end of the campaign, why would you be afraid of individual permanent character death?

Hey, you can't help how you feel. You can't logically argue yourself into a specific emotional state, especially if you know what you're trying to do.

If they wanted players to care about their characters, or about the world as a whole, then they should have included some semblance of a reason to take the game seriously. If they want me to care about what goes on in the game world, then they shouldn't have treated it like a video game where a night at the inn fixes everything and you can only really die during a cutscene. Seriously, tabletop RPGs are supposed to be better than that.

 

[JValeur]

These rules just encourage players to not tend to fallen characters.

At the very least you should allow Spare the Dying to be worthwhile by completely stabilizing a character.

Maybe - although this hasn't been the case in actual play. My players know that it is often better to get someone up quickly, so they can help in the fight, or so they don't risk them suddenly bleeding out on a nat 1. But, I'm not really to preoccupied with how long it takes them to get up, as long as it costs significant resources and not just a single healing word on a bonus action. I'm far more happy to experience that my players actually care about going down, and try to heal each other BEFORE they go down, because they know getting back up isn't trivial.

 

[CapnZapp]

As I understand it, the root of the issue is that some folks think that dying and death in 5e lack sufficient gravity. I am assuming the real crux of the problem is that players don't feel threatened, and DMs don't feel as though their BBEG is being taken seriously. It doesn't seem to me that bolting on an AD&D or 2e death mechanic is a particularly elegant solution, though. If you're trying to recapture the feel of old-school D&D, you might be better served by playing a retro clone like Swords & Wizardry.

If what you really want is to make players more interested in avoiding dying and/or death in 5e, then you're better off (I think) to use 5e systems and optional rules. For example, page 272 of the DMG has optional rules for lingering injuries. If every character who is reduced to 0 without becoming immediately stable (eg because the attacker chose to knock unconscious rather than kill) is required to roll on that table, those players will definitely be trying to avoid letting their characters drop. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

No, I think people just want the default Dying rule to be less generous and more like earlier editions. They don't want retro clones or optional rules, they just want the default Dying rule to be less generous and more like earlier editions

 

[epithet]

No, I think people just want the default Dying rule to be less generous and more like earlier editions. They don't want retro clones or optional rules, they just want the default Dying rule to be less generous and more like earlier editions

So, you're saying that people just want the default Dying rule to be less generous and more like earlier editions? Thanks for clarifying, although I actually had already read the earlier posts wherein some people did, in fact, clearly articulate that they wanted the default Dying rule to be less generous and more like earlier editions.

I surmised that this desire (for the the default Dying rule to be less generous and more like earlier editions) was motivated by something other than a deep seated mistrust of anything new, or a desperate longing for things to be like they were back when Gygax laid waste to high level parties and your knee didn't have arthritis. The thread's original post is, in fact, a proposed house rule (which is an optional rule by its very nature) which attempts to bring 5e, in this one area, more in line with an earlier edition of the game (which necessarily involves moving, at least a little bit, in the direction of a retroclone.)

Given that the the "default Dying rule" for this edition will never become "less generous," it seemed worthwhile to look at the underlying reasons for people to want that, and to examine other ways to satisfy their desire. But hey, if you want to just keep on aimlessly lamenting the relentless march of years and editions, I'll get the sackcloth, ashes, and Geritol and join you in remembering the past as we tell these damn kids to stay off the lawn.