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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kmart Kommando" data-source="post: 4428880" data-attributes="member: 39915">Save or dies don't work very often, except against mooks.Negative levels skew your chances of survival a lot. Your poor saves quickly go to negatives, your good saves become poor, you suddenly can't hit anything reliably. Your spell slots go away, along with your ability to overcome SR.I squared my group off against something with energy drain, even spread its attacks around so no one got focus-fired, and the party retreated with several people at 1 or 2 hits from death and they ended up with about 10% chance to hit the creature, at best.  It should have been a difficult encounter, but once the negative levels started stacking, it became impossible. It was the end encounter of a whole module, and the party went in and got mauled, ran away. I had even toned down the energy drain by half, and 'forgot' to use several of the suprise abilities and gizmos I had planned.  The party went into the encounter knowing full well what the creature could do, as they had fought it briefly twice before.In another game, a creature was throwing energy draining spells and hammering the party at range soaking up high level spell slots and SR penetration, and the single time I reflected it stole the creature's ability to even use that spell.  The rest of the encounter was very short.</blockquote>