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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5054923" data-attributes="member: 58197">Save-or-die could be argued as reducing the monsters to 0 hp, but it certainly isn't "slogging through their hit points." It circumvents the whole hit point mechanic - the monster may have had ten hit points or ten thousand before you nailed it with finger of death, but it's just as dead either way. 4E ensures that all monsters take several hits to kill, with the exception of minions which only ever take one hit.That's not to say I want to see save-or-die return in its original form. There were reasons why 4E got rid of it, and they're valid reasons; few players appreciate having a character unexpectedly zorched out of existence, and it can be a real letdown to have the BBEG die in the first round of combat after rolling a 1 on his Fort save.But I do think the game would benefit from some tricks that clever PCs could use to take down monsters without having to grind them down hit point by hit point. For instance, situational powers that require some setting up, but leave a monster crippled or dead when you do set them up right. At the moment, the only option I can think of along those lines is making the monster fall off something really high. (Yeah, I know, that's still hit point damage, but it's a huge amount of hit point damage compared to regular attack powers; find a high enough high thing and it can easily be an insta-kill.)</blockquote>