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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3749508" data-attributes="member: 5143">The reason they are so harmful is the FEELING they tend to give players and DMs alike.  For example:"Alright, we've set out into the wilderness on a 3 week trip to the legendary Dungeon of Infinite DOOM.  We've heard in town that there are cultists there who are doing a ritual to summon their horribly evil god to destroy all of reality.  We are the only ones strong enough to stop them.  We are 8th level, so we have a number of hit points and the skills to win.We reach the temple and we find some cultists in the first room.  One them casts Slay Living on the fighter.  He rolls a natural 1 and dies despite being at full hit points, having a large fort save, and being able to kill that cultist in about 2-3 hits.  The rest beat the cultist.The party considers going onwards, after all if they don't stop the cultists the world will be destroyed.  However, that was their only front line fighter character.  Plus, they receive a bunch of out of character whining from the player of the character who (strangely enough) doesn't want to spend the next 3 hours of the session (and possibly all of the next one) watching everyone else play the game.  So they pick up the body of their fallen comrade and trudge the 3 weeks back to town to get the fighter brought back to life....a level lower than everyone else."Yes, the same thing can happen with hit point damage, but it happens more gradually and tends to be a lot more predictable.  VERY few enemies hit in one round for enough damage to kill any one character.  So, because of that you have the ability to go "Wow...that monster hits for 50 damage a round?  The fighter has 80, two rounds of being hit in a row will kill him.  But if we can cast a cure critical wounds every round for an average of 25 healing, it'll take the enemy 4 rounds to kill him instead of 2.  That should give us the couple of extra rounds the rest of the party needs to win."This allows the party to predict how far their resources will go, realize when they are almost dead and retreat in order to rest and regain resources.  Maybe they'll spend a day overnight outside in the wilderness rather than 6 weeks going to town and back.  Also, the fighter won't lose a level.  The players get a challenge ("Wow..this is hard, we had to retreat and rest in order to beat them...and that one battle they knocked me down to -5 before you healed me.  It was close") without dealing with the level loss and trouble of death and raise dead.</blockquote>

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