D&D 5E Has anyone tried Negative HP = Con score = dead?

[Psikerlord#]

Hi all,

Just wondering is anyone has tried Negative HP = Con score = dead in their games? Eg PC has 14 Con. If he hits -14 HP he dies.

How did it go if so? Did it make the game more deadly? Too deadly? Some other problem arose?

Perhaps at higher levels, with monsters with lots of damage dice, this could be too deadly? Maybe dead at -ve "Con Score + Level" instead? So Con 14 at 5th level would be -19 death, but at 19th level would be -33 ?

I am considering using this instead of injuries in a new campaign.

Cheers!

 

[Sunseeker]

The problem is it doesn't scale. At low levels it's not a big deal because your enemies will do a few points to your body and AOEs are fairly infrequent. At higher levels you'll end up with very quick turnover.

Using Con score to assign wounds after hitting 0 wouldn't be unreasonable.

 

[CapnZapp]

In general, there's nothing wrong with such an approach. All you're doing is making player characters have less effective hit points. So, this won't wreck things any more than, say, reducing all Hit Dice one step, or, say, characters only get their CON bonuses to hp but no new HD after tenth level. As long as both DM and players are aware that monsters present more of a challenge and that the balance between different powers and class features tilt in the favor of doing damage away from inflicting conditions, there is nothing broken about this.

All this does is make a character at, say, 5 hit points much closer to Death's Door than before. If characters used to break off and flee from a combat when people started to drop, they now need to break off and flee from combat when, say, people become bloodied (reach half hp).

Sure plenty of people will tell you you've broken D&D, but as I said, all you've done is made the risk of dying come earlier in a PCs hp progression: you have made the cushion against the risk of death smaller and less fluffy!

That said, yes, negative CON alone won't cut it at mid and high levels, unless you want characters to be at a real risk of dying as soon as they take ANY damage. (That's not unreasonable; in fact, it turns D&D into much more of a "everybody can take one solid hit, but maybe not two" game such as WFRP)

Perhaps at higher levels, with monsters with lots of damage dice, this could be too deadly? Maybe dead at -ve "Con Score + Level" instead? So Con 14 at 5th level would be -19 death, but at 19th level would be -33 ?

Just to state the obvious, but there's already a good way to measure your increased survivability with level: your hit point total, only negative.

What I mean by that is: instead of making up new convoluted formulas, why not simply say "you die at HALF your negative max hp"?

 

[aramis erak]

Hi all,

Just wondering is anyone has tried Negative HP = Con score = dead in their games? Eg PC has 14 Con. If he hits -14 HP he dies.

How did it go if so? Did it make the game more deadly? Too deadly? Some other problem arose?

Perhaps at higher levels, with monsters with lots of damage dice, this could be too deadly? Maybe dead at -ve "Con Score + Level" instead? So Con 14 at 5th level would be -19 death, but at 19th level would be -33 ?

I am considering using this instead of injuries in a new campaign.

Cheers!

Not with 5E, but I have used it with Cyclopedia...

With 5E, it's too likely to kill PC's. I'd have killed 3 PC's last night had I been using –Con. One came 2 points shy of massive damage kill anyway. And higher CR monsters do way more damage, and so it becomes more likely as they level that they will be killed.

 

[Sigma 7]

Pathfinder already does this, and it's more of a replacement for death at -10 hp rather than an attempt to fix the scaling.

It's already known that this system doesn't scale between low and high levels, as it results in a -10hp to 6 hp range for the level 1 wizard, and a -20HP to 215HP for a level 20 fighter, in addition to higher level monsters having single attacks that do more than that HP range of damage.

4e/5e are scaled, and if you still need the lethality, simply use the automatic critical hit on unconscious/dying targets.

 

[jrowland]

It provides a buffer for low level characters (getting critically hit with an orcs great axe at 1st level can easily mean your dead dead) and provides a bit more tension for high level characters. However, high level characters can usually manage "the nerf" better (raise dead, temp hp, reactions).

FWIW, I often forget its not RAW as I do use -Con as my threshold in my games. It rarely comes up, and usually when it does, its at low levels.

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

I wouldn't have much trouble with rules that make D&D more deadly if D&D were a game that made retreat a viable option. It doesn't - opportunity attacks and matching-if-not-faster monsters almost always mean that pressing through and hoping for a lucky break will give a better chance of survival than disengaging - so I tend to be wary of them.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sure, in the olden days, as an alternative to -10 (/most/ characters'd've had more than a 10 CON, so mostly an improvement for them). Also max hps +d6 ("0-level hps") at first. We tried lots of things to get PCs through 1st level back then.

In 5e, it'd be a more mixed bag. It'd help any character with less than 10hps at 1st level, a little. Those with more, and higher level characters, obviously, would become more prone to being instantly killed by higher damage attacks (and attacks get pretty high-damage, pretty quickly). It would, assuming you apply healing to the negative hp damage, encourage more pro-active use of healing in combat, rather than waiting for allies to drop to get a little extra efficiency out of heal-from-0.

 

[Inchoroi]

If you want something like the OP is suggesting, go with the suggested half/max HP equal dead.

However...doesn't this already exist in the rules? If you are dealt enough damage to drop you to where you would be negative to your current hit points, you die?

 

[Sunseeker]

As a thought: If you keep the negative HP fixed, you could avoid high-CR damage issues with something like each hit dealing 1 point of damage. Basically treat HP as an abstract representation of how long you have to live. Pull in older editions bleeding out rules and you have something like:
You die at -Con HP.
Each turn you are dying, you lose 1 HP (this caps at 4 because the 5th roll will break the tie between saving throws)
Each time you are hit with an attack while dying, you lose 1 HP, a crit makes you lose 2 HP.

Also nicely keeps down number bloat.

Even on an average of 10 Con, that'd give you at least 5 rounds, short of the entire kobold army beating up your corpse, which seems unrealistic if the rest of the party lives.