The relatively high con bonuses everyone knows today didn't come about till 3.x. Getting crit with a high roll on 2-12 was still a huge bite from a tank and could easily crush the Squishies outright.
D&D 5E (2024) Effects that kill you at 0 hp
- Thread starter TheSword
- Start date
A combat encounter without meaningful risk is a waste of time. A risk free encounter should go something like this: "The party is traveling through the dark woods. A band of ogres takes the party by surprise. The party manages to kill the ogres with little trouble. The party divides the following loot: ...." No need to waste time playing out the encounter, the result is already known.
Risk doesn't have to be death. It could be the party are all downed by the above ogres and when they wake, they are stripped of all gear and the ogres are negotiating exchange ransom terms with a nearby settlement. This results in the party having no gear AND owing the settlement a bunch of money to settle the ransom debt. Debt probably worked off by doing several missions for the settlement. Maybe the settlement had an agreement with the ogres....
The classic 1st ed Rust Monster was a real risk to many parties with zero risk of death.
Another down side to the no risk scenario, no heroic tales to boast about in the tavern.
Risk doesn't have to be death. It could be the party are all downed by the above ogres and when they wake, they are stripped of all gear and the ogres are negotiating exchange ransom terms with a nearby settlement. This results in the party having no gear AND owing the settlement a bunch of money to settle the ransom debt. Debt probably worked off by doing several missions for the settlement. Maybe the settlement had an agreement with the ogres....
The classic 1st ed Rust Monster was a real risk to many parties with zero risk of death.
Another down side to the no risk scenario, no heroic tales to boast about in the tavern.
And I would argue stayed with 3e for the most part. Now what 4e/5e inherited was always have a "decent" con score, 14 being common. You don't want a low con, and so con is everyone's "second favorite stat". But the days of 20-30 con from 3e I rarely see nowadays....maybe the barbarian but its the barbarian its the one guy you do expect to be a tower of hp.
I was thinking about this a bit more and having automatic death at 0 leads to less tension rather than more would likely lead to less tension for a lot of people I play with. If someone is unconscious and a clock is ticking down, the DM is rolling death saves in secret, that to me is much more of a tense moment. Those moments when there are multiple characters down? That's when the rest of the group really has to scramble.
It's not that death is off the table, it's that it's not "I'm perfectly fi... oops ... redoing math ... nope I'm dead. You guys have fun while I write up a new character."
It's not that death is off the table, it's that it's not "I'm perfectly fi... oops ... redoing math ... nope I'm dead. You guys have fun while I write up a new character."
The part your missing is all of the tension before you hit 0. In the current system, there is basically zero tension until a player drops unconscious (assuming we are in the 6+ level range where massive damage has virtually no chance to kill a PC anymore). Now your right, once you hit 0 hp it can be a tense moment, but only at that moment.
But in a fight with a monster that can kill you at 0 hp....its a brand new ballgame. Now suddenly everyone is tracking their hp, going "ok I got 40 hp left. Damn do I push, do I need healing....maybe I pull back and stealth for a bit". All of those decisions become more critical because you don't have a safety net...creating an entirely new sense of tension.
Except with D&D's swingy amount of damage there often isn't much tension before you hit zero. As always this is just my personal observation, I drop characters to 0 often enough that there is significant tension. As others have pointed out healing, even with the boost from the 2024 rules, can't keep up with damage.
If it works for you, great. It makes for less tension for me.
What the heck are you talking about? 3.x is the edition that standardized ability score bonuses at +/-1 every 2 points up/down from ten. Prior to that con looked like this
/and healing worked like this
Every edition since 3.x has used the same unified attribute bonus breakpoints
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Just yesterday, I was running Tales of the Valiant (so pretty close to 5e). Unlike 2024e, they didn't improve healing. They gave the classes more bennies and things to do, but there wasn't a significant boost to sustainability, while the monsters, if anything, got fiercer.
They were fighting a CR 4 Weretiger. This is it's attack routine:
Multiattack: the weretiger makes four(!) Claw or Scimitar Attacks. It can replace one attack with Bite if in an appropriate form.
Claw: +5 to hit, 7 (d8+3) damage.
Scimitar: +5 to hit, 6 (d6+3) damage.
Bite: +5 to hit, 8 (d10+3) damage plus DC 13 Con to avoid being cursed with weretigerism.
Bonus-Bleed Prey: choose one creature within 30'. Can pinpoint prey's location within 60'. If the weretiger hits that creature with two melee attacks, they rend- DC 13 Con save to avoid 7 (2d6) damage at the start of their next turn.
So a new player just joined the game with a 4th-level Ranger. 36 hit points, AC 16. Round 1, they ran up to the weretiger, making three attacks (ToV Rangers get a bonus action for two off-hand attacks with no stat to damage when two-weapon fighting).
The Weretiger in turn, uses Bleed Prey on the Ranger. They hit with three claws (on a natural 20) and their bite. I use average damage unless there's a crit, then I roll the damage di(c)e for the critical. So from the Ranger's point of view, this was the turn:
"Take 7 damage, take 7 damage, take 12 damage, take 8 damage. Ok, now make a DC 13 Con save. You failed? (+2 Con save, ToV Rangers are proficient with Str/Dex saves) Ok, that's 7 more damage."
"....I'm down." The Ranger's player makes a sad face.
That was it, that was his first combat round. From full to 0. If the monster could kill him at 0 hit points, he'd be dead. No warning, no nothing. No opportunity to do anything about it, make a new character. The party would get him up with minimal hit points (even a level 2 Cure Wounds from the Bard is only 2d8+4, the Ranger's own Cure Wounds is d8+3, and the Bard's performance allows you to spend a Hit Die to heal with a bonus equal to the Bard's Charisma, so that's 1d10+6 in this case. If all of those are used in the same turn, the Ranger isn't even back at their maximum hit points, and the Weretiger has demonstrated the ability to bring them from full to 0 already. So the melee Ranger was forced to disengage, drop their short swords on the ground, and switch to their longbow and deal d8+5/2 (because of course the weretiger is resistant to non-magical attacks) instead of using their +1 short sword for the rest of the combat. Because using the party's limited resources to keep healing him back to full only to have the monster decide to kill him again really wasn't worth it.
And that was kind of how it went for the rest of the session. A fight with some Death Dogs, a brawl with a Minotaur, the final battle with a CR 5 Sorcerer...every time he got into melee to do his Amazing Ginsu routine, the monster would see him as a threat, unload their damage on him, and he'd be on the ground bleeding out again.
And you can't even say he should have switched Con and Wis for example- all he'd have gotten was 4 more hit points.
Now some people reading the above might say "good! Low level characters should drop like flies! They need to be more cautious! He should have known better than to attack a weretiger head on!" and honestly, if that's someone's preferred style of gaming, that's great.
But this is what I keep seeing in 5e (and 5e-alikes). Almost no interaction between "player healthy" and "player critical" when it comes to combat. And no ability for a player to gauge "hm, can I afford to attack the monster and not die?" until after they've seen it tear large bloody chunks out of them!
So yeah, a good "death buffer" is fine by me. I don't want players to die due to actually thinking they can enter melee combat.
*Plus, in this particular circumstance, if I really wanted a character dead, with four friggin' attacks, downed PC's have zero chance to survive.
They were fighting a CR 4 Weretiger. This is it's attack routine:
Multiattack: the weretiger makes four(!) Claw or Scimitar Attacks. It can replace one attack with Bite if in an appropriate form.
Claw: +5 to hit, 7 (d8+3) damage.
Scimitar: +5 to hit, 6 (d6+3) damage.
Bite: +5 to hit, 8 (d10+3) damage plus DC 13 Con to avoid being cursed with weretigerism.
Bonus-Bleed Prey: choose one creature within 30'. Can pinpoint prey's location within 60'. If the weretiger hits that creature with two melee attacks, they rend- DC 13 Con save to avoid 7 (2d6) damage at the start of their next turn.
So a new player just joined the game with a 4th-level Ranger. 36 hit points, AC 16. Round 1, they ran up to the weretiger, making three attacks (ToV Rangers get a bonus action for two off-hand attacks with no stat to damage when two-weapon fighting).
The Weretiger in turn, uses Bleed Prey on the Ranger. They hit with three claws (on a natural 20) and their bite. I use average damage unless there's a crit, then I roll the damage di(c)e for the critical. So from the Ranger's point of view, this was the turn:
"Take 7 damage, take 7 damage, take 12 damage, take 8 damage. Ok, now make a DC 13 Con save. You failed? (+2 Con save, ToV Rangers are proficient with Str/Dex saves) Ok, that's 7 more damage."
"....I'm down." The Ranger's player makes a sad face.
That was it, that was his first combat round. From full to 0. If the monster could kill him at 0 hit points, he'd be dead. No warning, no nothing. No opportunity to do anything about it, make a new character. The party would get him up with minimal hit points (even a level 2 Cure Wounds from the Bard is only 2d8+4, the Ranger's own Cure Wounds is d8+3, and the Bard's performance allows you to spend a Hit Die to heal with a bonus equal to the Bard's Charisma, so that's 1d10+6 in this case. If all of those are used in the same turn, the Ranger isn't even back at their maximum hit points, and the Weretiger has demonstrated the ability to bring them from full to 0 already. So the melee Ranger was forced to disengage, drop their short swords on the ground, and switch to their longbow and deal d8+5/2 (because of course the weretiger is resistant to non-magical attacks) instead of using their +1 short sword for the rest of the combat. Because using the party's limited resources to keep healing him back to full only to have the monster decide to kill him again really wasn't worth it.
And that was kind of how it went for the rest of the session. A fight with some Death Dogs, a brawl with a Minotaur, the final battle with a CR 5 Sorcerer...every time he got into melee to do his Amazing Ginsu routine, the monster would see him as a threat, unload their damage on him, and he'd be on the ground bleeding out again.
And you can't even say he should have switched Con and Wis for example- all he'd have gotten was 4 more hit points.
Now some people reading the above might say "good! Low level characters should drop like flies! They need to be more cautious! He should have known better than to attack a weretiger head on!" and honestly, if that's someone's preferred style of gaming, that's great.
But this is what I keep seeing in 5e (and 5e-alikes). Almost no interaction between "player healthy" and "player critical" when it comes to combat. And no ability for a player to gauge "hm, can I afford to attack the monster and not die?" until after they've seen it tear large bloody chunks out of them!
So yeah, a good "death buffer" is fine by me. I don't want players to die due to actually thinking they can enter melee combat.
*Plus, in this particular circumstance, if I really wanted a character dead, with four friggin' attacks, downed PC's have zero chance to survive.
Willie the Duck
Hero
Hmm. I don't feel like they bring back the feel of early editions (so much as we can generalize about them) so much as just plain tamps down on the so much discussed 'low risk mode' quality of 5e. The two are not the same.
In particular, any time you raise a safety measure but then raise the offense to counteract, you have to understand the downstream consequences and incentivization structures it creates. A good example might be 3e increasing both hp and damage making save-or-die/suck spells so powerful, or AC raising alongside to-hit and then touch attacks dominating, or eventually ability damage (dragons falling to shivering touch).
For 5e, one thing I have noticed about tamping down on/negating the usefulness of pop-up healing is that the consequences fall disproportionately on the party frontliners (and especially those that mitigate attacks via lots of soak instead of an AC of 23 or the like). Those are the ones who already are agreeing to get in harms way so the casters and archers and flee-away rogues/monks can set up their devastating offenses. That's a choice, and one one should recognize when thinking about adding effects like this (or altered rest frequency, consequences to pop-up healing, etc.).
Anyways, my overall opinion is that it is fine. Death is relatively easy to recover from (much like early D&D) -- except when it isn't -- so even this isn't the last word.
Willie the Duck
Hero
I think the point was that characters don't end up with the same Con scores as they did in 3e*, not what the table looked like.
*everyone not having an item of +6 con and +5 from manuals by level 20, as part of an expected treasure loadout filtered through wealth-by-level, etc.
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