D&D 5E (2024) Effects that kill you at 0 hp

[James Gasik]

Yes, thank you for explaining the specific over general rule. However, it all needs to be measured. The bigger the exception is, the more unpredictable the game becomes for the players and thus they make less informed choices, which is IMO the death of good roleplaying. Extreme example: If my exception is "Against this monster combat gets resolved in one single D20 roll, on a 5-20 the monster wins the fight and kills you all", that is obviously a pretty bad exception and just because the system allows that, doesn't make it good.

Less extreme obviously are 0HP death mechanics, but I still found them more on the bad side of "rules overwrite" ...


... and they need to be telegraphed clearly, as I was saying in my post before. If it was only realized after the fact its a bad telegraph. Instadeath is not something that should get only a subtle hint, especially not something like "this monster looks really bad", yeah ofc. every monster looks bad and DMs try to narrate most encounters as dangerous and exciting. Players easily misinterpret something like this as the usual "hype" of the DM. For such dangerous abilities I think you need them to demonstrate on NPC, let the players see the effect, see the numbers popping up or just plainly tell them OOC.

Honestly, if I told my players that "the BBEG in the next adventure has a weapon that kills you at 0 hit points)" I wonder if they'd even go on said adventure!

I actually had something similar in my last 5e game. They were fighting cultists (what can I say, it's been a theme with some adventures) with sacrificial daggers that had the following text:

"Sacrificial Dagger: +4 Melee Weapon, 5 (d4+2) slashing damage. If the target is paralyzed, prone, stunned, or unconscious, they take an additional 3 (d4) damage. If the target is dying, they are killed outright unless they make a DC 12 Con save."

Needless to say, after the battle, when I explained what the Con save was for (only one cultist ever got an opportunity to double tap a player), the players were pretty shocked, and said they would have approached the fight very differently!

 

[Maxperson]

Yes, thank you for explaining the specific over general rule. However, it all needs to be measured. The bigger the exception is, the more unpredictable the game becomes for the players and thus they make less informed choices, which is IMO the death of good roleplaying. Extreme example: If my exception is "Against this monster combat gets resolved in one single D20 roll, on a 5-20 the monster wins the fight and kills you all", that is obviously a pretty bad exception and just because the system allows that, doesn't make it good.

Less extreme obviously are 0HP death mechanics, but I still found them more on the bad side of "rules overwrite" ...


... and they need to be telegraphed clearly, as I was saying in my post before. If it was only realized after the fact its a bad telegraph. Instadeath is not something that should get only a subtle hint, especially not something like "this monster looks really bad", yeah ofc. every monster looks bad and DMs try to narrate most encounters as dangerous and exciting. Players easily misinterpret something like this as the usual "hype" of the DM. For such dangerous abilities I think you need them to demonstrate on NPC, let the players see the effect, see the numbers popping up or just plainly tell them OOC.

I agree with you on telegraphing death or other permanent effects like turning to stone clearly.

Not all groups or DMs want that, though. Some like having to suss out dangers and if they fail to do so, like the deadliness of surprise. It's the result of their failure of player skill. Other groups like a middle ground.

My personal feeling is that I like instant death/stoning/whatever effects in the game, but I don't want them just dropped on the group(as a player or DM) without some sort of telegraphing. As a player I don't mind the more subtle telegraphing, because I like looking for the little details to figure things out. As a DM, I want to err on the side of caution for those players who don't like that level of telegraphing, so I make it clearer.

 

[Maxperson]

Honestly, if I told my players that "the BBEG in the next adventure has a weapon that kills you at 0 hit points)" I wonder if they'd even go on said adventure!

I actually had something similar in my last 5e game. They were fighting cultists (what can I say, it's been a theme with some adventures) with sacrificial daggers that had the following text:

"Sacrificial Dagger: +4 Melee Weapon, 5 (d4+2) slashing damage. If the target is paralyzed, prone, stunned, or unconscious, they take an additional 3 (d4) damage. If the target is dying, they are killed outright unless they make a DC 12 Con save."

Needless to say, after the battle, when I explained what the Con save was for (only one cultist ever got an opportunity to double tap a player), the players were pretty shocked, and said they would have approached the fight very differently!

I would go, but if my PC knew about it, he'd start researching the weapon to find out how it kills, so he could perhaps find a way to stop or minimize the death effect. If it was a magic weapon, then I'd look for scrolls/items that cast anti-magic field, in case it isn't an artifact and can be negated that way.

Prep and research can be done!

 

[James Gasik]

I agree with you on telegraphing death or other permanent effects like turning to stone clearly.

Not all groups or DMs want that, though. Some like having to suss out dangers and if they fail to do so, like the deadliness of surprise. It's the result of their failure of player skill. Other groups like a middle ground.

My personal feeling is that I like instant death/stoning/whatever effects in the game, but I don't want them just dropped on the group(as a player or DM) without some sort of telegraphing. As a player I don't mind the more subtle telegraphing, because I like looking for the little details to figure things out. As a DM, I want to err on the side of caution for those players who don't like that level of telegraphing, so I make it clearer.

It comes down to "gotcha moments". Nobody really likes these. There's no fundamental difference between "oh the woman is a medusa/succcubus/vampire/doppleganger/polymorphed hag" and "oh didn't I mention? The BBEG has a Vorpal Sword" or "Yeah, of course that statue is a construct/that treasure chest is a mimic/that innocent bunny rabbit is a violent killing machine".

I remember I was fighting some Stone Giants in an AL mod. I'd found this consumable that functioned like Greater Restoration during Storm King's Thunder, and I'd been saving it for a rainy day on my Fighter/Rogue.

In the fight, one of the Giants, a spellcaster, petrified our Cleric. Thinking I would save the day, I Dashed to the cleric's side and Action Surged to use the consumable.

DM: "Oh, sorry, it doesn't work. The ability on the monster says the petrification cannot be reversed as long as it's alive."

One expensive consumable lost, one annoyed player (me!).

Should the game have unknown information? Of course! But the downside is that you cannot expect someone to make informed choices without information. You win initiative on a Beholder and try to kill it before it could use it's goofy eye rays..."haha, you fool, it's a gas spore!". What should the player have done? Wait to see if the beholder has a disintegration eye? Run from a gas spore, leaving your friends behind?

If the consequences of forcing a player to make an uninformed choice are deadly, it stops feeling less like a game of strategy and more like a game of luck, like Candyland or Fluxx.

 

[tetrasodium]

The Fighter: Weapon Master (the ToV Battle Master). Sword + Board. High AC, good hit points. Has an ability similar to protection fighting style (bonus action, select an enemy within 5', the first attack that enemy makes each turn against you or an ally within 5' of you has disadvantage so long as the enemy stays within 5' of you). Was out of "stunts" (maneuvers).

The Bard: total support, carries a rapier, doesn't use it often. Had one use remaining of a bardic performance that can be maintained for 1 minute, at the start of the turn, allies who can hear the performance may spend a Hit Die and recover hit points equal to the die result + the Bard's +4 charisma mod. Normally quite useful, but the consequence of this ability is that the players often run out of Hit Dice (I think everyone had a single Hit Die left at this point). The only spells they ended up casting were Cure Wounds. They have an ability to Help as a bonus action.

The Sorcerer: all about cold damage. Has built around being able to turn other spells into cold damage. Favorite spells are Shatter and Magic Missile (and Ray of Frost).

The Mechanist (ToV's answer to the Artificer): can cast utility spells in a roundabout way. Uses a firearm that they can generate infinite ammo for that counts as magical.

-

The initiative went thusly: Minotaur, Ranger, Weretiger, Sorcerer, Mechanist, Bard, Sorcerer, Fighter.

The Minotaur came in with his charge attack first, hitting the fighter with it's gore and greataxe (as he was first in the room). The Ranger saw that the weretiger had a bow, and decided to pin down the archer (he couldn't reach the enemy sorcerer). He could have focused on the Minotaur, but I can't totally fault his logic, especially since the weretiger could make four longbow attacks per turn (not that anyone knew that besides me).

The questions were far more important than the class selections and even those make some very dubious claims while justifiably pointing fingers at the players. That list does reveal some stuff though.

The bard being a "full support build" and really only having a healing type ability as it's noteworthy contribution to the party suggests that it's a "healer" rather than anything approaching a "support build" there is a gigantic difference between supporting the party in the form of force multiplication and simply healing them. I've seen a lot of players start with 5e and think literally anything other than for us "support" and that all forms of "support" are interchangeable.
[Insert gus fring meme]
Going beyond that nothing about rapier user screams "full support build" either. A support build should be focused on things like force multiplication and things they can safely contribute after doing so. The questions in my previous post would have added a lot of clarity.
The inclusion of a fighter absolutely percent points one of a few different fingers at the players. Either the fighter is more of a crunchy tank type than the ranger and nobody proactively discussed/stuck to a plan that would put the fighter out front and center with support that somehow makes them a better target (ie position terrain changes etc) than the squishier members or the fighter was yet another dpr in a dpr heavy party that lacks a solid tank and has a healer with a rapier dressed up as a "full support build". The questions in my previous post would have added a lot of clarity.
I'm not familiar enough with the dc20 and the mechanist to know what kind of "support build" spell/ability options it has, but the d&d version has always had top tier support options like slow & web but none of them were mentioned. Going beyond that though... "Utility" usually means exploration and sometimes social pillar rather than support in combat. Once again the questions in my previous post would have added a lot of clarity.

Sometimes ice spells have limited support like damage spells that carry a minor movement debuff or area denial wall spells, but at such low levels it's probably yet another damage build simply by not having a deep enough chest of spells and all of the spells you mentioned as the sorcerer's "favorites" tend to rank highly on the damage build scale.

Absent answers to any of the questions from my last post I'm going to guess that there is some level of a thing I've seen many 5e groups do. The GM potentially knows that the party is hyper focused on damage, can't fill their own capability gaps, and is not even working together in ways that might mitigate those gaps. They might have even tried to bring up things they noticed that the party is not but could or should be doing but such suggestions were ignored in favor of players doubling down on dpr and leveraging the social contract against combats they themselves made impossible as a self fulfilling prophecy that must see no deviation

 

[James Gasik]

I would go, but if my PC knew about it, he'd start researching the weapon to find out how it kills, so he could perhaps find a way to stop or minimize the death effect. If it was a magic weapon, then I'd look for scrolls/items that cast anti-magic field, in case it isn't an artifact and can be negated that way.

Prep and research can be done!

But it all starts with, as you say "if my PC knew about it". Often, you don't have that information to begin with. And even if you do have a hint, like, the guy leaves a trail of decapitated foes in his wake, do you have the time? And what would your character assume? Vorpal sword or guy who lops off heads from people he kills so they can't be easily brought back to life or to make a point?

In an ideal situation, of course you'd know, and you'd have the ability to prepare. But how many classic D&D scenarios require the element of surprise? Take the Werewolf. It's got this powerful defense that only works if you don't know you're about to fight a Werewolf, otherwise, you load up on silver weapons and your casters prepare Magic Weapon or just use spells, and the fight becomes a whole lot less dangerous!

Or all those DM's out there who hate it when players assume they know fire and acid are to be employed against trolls when "you've never fought a troll before, how could you know that?".

 

[tetrasodium]

Honestly, if I told my players that "the BBEG in the next adventure has a weapon that kills you at 0 hit points)" I wonder if they'd even go on said adventure!

That's pretty much my experience as well and I have an example showing that the rejection might even be more blatant. I once was fed up with a group who made it their mission in life to avoid adventures hit the eject button on adventures they themselves found instead of they ever found themselves unable to stealth up to combat for a free surprise round of combat take a short rest after every fight.

At some point I was fed up and told the. That cultists were gathered in a black hawk down style mob in the process of casting disjunction to save their temple that would make escape from the temple the players themselves were trying to save∆ minutes ago. After being told ~"no that way obviously leads to disjunction you can't find any way other than saving the temple you came to save". The player literally said "I don't consent to that" and did it anyways just before I told them to start making saves.

∆it was like a fusion Aztec dinotopia type city and the problem was something like a lunar alignment triggering an ancient [Halloween themed] problem with undead that I've forgotten

 

[James Gasik]

That's pretty much my experience as well and I have an example showing that the rejection might even be more blatant. I once was fed up with a group who made it their mission in life to avoid adventures hit the eject button on adventures they themselves found instead of they ever found themselves unable to stealth up to combat for a free surprise round of combat take a short rest after every fight.

At some point I was fed up and told the. That cultists were gathered in a black hawk down style mob in the process of casting disjunction to save their temple that would make escape from the temple the players themselves were trying to save∆ minutes ago. After being told ~"no that way obviously leads to disjunction you can't find any way other than saving the temple you came to save". The player literally said "I don't consent to that" and did it anyways just before I told them to start making saves.

∆it was like a fusion Aztec dinotopia type city and the problem was something like a lunar alignment triggering an ancient [Halloween themed] problem with undead that I've forgotten

I can't recall the name of it, but when AL finally decided to have a higher level adventure for the first time, it apparently involved things that could destroy hard-earned magic items. The few players who went on it were decidedly annoyed.

And of course, let's not forget the Tomb of Annihilation season, where characters who went on it were at risk of permanent death, no being raised from the dead! Boy did I hear a lot of complaints about that!

Wanting a game to have more lethality and surprise deaths isn't a bad thing in isolation. It comes down to the expectations of your group. I know a lot of people who like death being on the table in D&D who won't touch something like DCC with a 11' pole- we went to Games Plus in Mount Prospect Illinois last Saturday, and there was a group running a DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics) character funnel. My gaming friends were curious and observed the goings on.

*in case you don't know, you're given a bunch of random Joes who go on a super lethal starting adventure- you get to play one of the survivors. The odds of keeping the character you want instead of some worthless slob is pretty slim, lol.

One of my friends even compared it to the ludicrous scenario presented in The Gamers II where one player pre-generated a stack of Bard characters so he could instantly replace any that died in the game with an new character, without the downtime of having to make a new character. This led to the party taking cover behind a pile of dead Bards in a fight.

I'm using this as an example of how people have different things they like in games, not an indictment against DCC players- if that's your jam and it's fun for you, game on!

My personal style is that I would vastly prefer players die as a result of their own actions- but not in the "oh you decided to fight a creature of appropriate CR" sort of thing. A 1st level character deciding to throw down with a Pit Fiend? Yeah, you earned that death.

I prefer D&D being a strategic game where you can make informed choices, but this runs into two issues- one, a lot of game revolves around hidden information. And the second, information overload can lead to analysis paralysis or worse.

Let me explain that a bit better. 3e, 4e, and Pathfinder 1e all had provisions for using various skills to acquire monster knowledge. I thought this was a great idea, and for a long time, in games I ran, I would let players make these checks.

In 4e, this was fine, as stat blocks were generally not that complex, but a 3e or Pathfinder 1e stat block can get fairly bloated. When I would let players make checks, suddenly the game action stopped cold while I explained what they were dealing with (based on the successes gained).

Then we'd get back into the action, and to my horror, players would, after a round or two, forget some of the information they just gained!

So I've taken to a more relaxed approach to this. If I know a player is about to do something they'll regret, I offer them a last minute ability check (or sometimes I just say "please don't do that").

This doesn't always work out- in one game, I had a Bard player try to use Command on some Gnolls. I asked him to make a check. He failed it. I asked him what language he was speaking. He said Common. I told him it didn't work, he got very upset.

So I explained. "Command requires that the targets understand you. Gnolls only speak Gnoll. The player was incredulous- apparently he though everyone spoke Common, and I had to show him the Monster Manual entry before he would accept that I wasn't just being a jackass. Even then, he was pissy about it for the rest of the session, refusing to cast any spells (apparently believing I would make "rulings" to ruin his fun or something, I don't know).

Or something that actually happened recently. They were up against an enemy Cleric using Spirit Guardians. I should note that my entire previous game featured many battles that were trivialized by the PC's using that spell, lol, so I thought it would be great fun to use it against them for once.

I was wrong. Very wrong. I won't make that mistake again.

Anyways, the Sorcerer, desperate to disrupt the NPC's concentration, said "I'll cast Magic Missile and..."

I stopped, looked at the NPC, then said. "Please don't."

"What?" Player blinking. "But if I don't, we'll die!"

"No, it's not that. I really suggest you don't do that."

He frowned, looking super annoyed. "Fine, I guess I fire at the other monsters then."

After the battle, they loot the NPC and find...a Brooch of Shielding.

"But that just makes you resistant to force! My magic missiles do cold damage!"

"It also makes you immune to the Magic Missile spell."

"...oh."

Some DM's would probably have let the players suffer the consequences of their actions, but there's enough uncertainty in the game as it is, IMO.

 

[Retros_x]

It's the result of their failure of player skill.

how is could that be the failure of player skill - a 0HP death mechanic is nothing that happens in the narrative, its a pure mechanical effect. If you try to telegraph it in the narrative "this monster seems really deadly to you" or something like that, most players will think "oh they probably make tons of damage". I cannot fathom how someone would think it is a players failure to not correctly deduct from the narrative that this monster deactives a full component of game system.

The worst part of the mechanic that we haven't even talked about (correct me if I'm wrong): There is also nothing the players can do about it afterwards, they just have to accept it. I would rather implement something like "because of this masterful necrotic evil spell, you fail your death saving throws at 14 or lower" (like in Tomb of Annihilation) or something like "because of the incredible deadly wound this attack inflicted on you, you only need 2 failed death saving throws to die" because than you have the surprise, but still can react to it.

A mechanic that can't be anticipated, so the players can't make informed decisions to prepare, and that can't be reacted afterwards to diminish the damage, so the players informed decisions afterward are also limited - thats a bad mechanic to me for an TTRPG. Because roleplay is about making informed decisions, even in combat. Sure surprises are exciting, but they must leave the player with a new obstacle, a new problem to overcome, not just with an "oops youre dead". As @James Gasik said correctly IMO, mechanics like these reduce the game to a game of luck.

And OSR games or older D&D editions had a lot more of insta-death traps and abilites - so players knew they existed and anticipated them. 5e normally don't have them, so players have a much harder time to anticipate them.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

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.

The first time I played cyberpunk, I spent an hour making a character that could one-shot enemies with his fists.

The first encounter he ran down an alleyway using acrobatics or something so he couldn’t be easily hit by some gun wielding psycho at the far end.

DM: “oh lucky roll. He hits you….” rolls hit location “ in the head…you’re dead.”