NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6995851" data-attributes="member: 6787650">FWIW, that seems as legitimate to me as relying on a Revivify spell. The tactic could still go wrong in a number of ways: (1) Hostage's HPs are low enough that the villain insta-kills the hostage with no death saves required; (2) villain knows the gameworld physics as well as you do and is planning on sawing the victim's head off (i.e. stabbing for auto-crits until 3 death saves are achieved); (3) there may be repercussions for getting your throat cut and surviving it, e.g. it may be very painful and cause psychic trauama or leave scars.The PCs are probably aware of all these factors, but the reality of the universe they live in is that for some reason, people don't die as easily as they do in our universe--so it would be wrong to transpose attitudes from our universe into that one.Amputation of limbs is very difficult under the 5E ruleset (I allow if only if you've already failed one death save and therefore your spirit is starting to dissociate from your body), so NPCs at my table look on amputees with a special horror that a medieval peasant from our world would have trouble relating to. Captain Hook isn't just odd to these people, he's disturbingly wrong--as wrong as mating a grizzly bear to a giant owl.I don't get the feeling that we are quite on the same page, because I don't get the feeling that you would extrapolate the world this way. Maybe it's partly because I come to (A)D&D from a Spelljammer background; binary gravity and phlogiston and alternate physics is part of what D&D is and always has been to me. People in my 5E game aren't even made out of atoms, they're made out of vaguely Aristotelian elements like "flesh" and "bone".(What I don't get about the death saves/hostage scenario is why any DM would set up those rules for his game and then get upset when the PCs want to play by them. Or rather, I understand it at an intellectual level--those DMs probably see the rules as loosely modelling the game world, but the master copy of the world is the fiction in the DM's head and not embedded in the rules--but I don't relate to it emotionally. How could you blame players for playing by the rules you gave them for the universe you invented? I can understand a DM feeling dissatisfied afterward and wanting to revise his rules because it didn't match his intended aesthetic, but I can't understand why he would be upset at the players and not at himself.)</blockquote>

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