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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack Simth" data-source="post: 5628263" data-attributes="member: 29252">The dice might be the same, but you're effectively changing the action type, which makes it vastly different.  Sure, you're making the check in that first standard action, but you're adding the requirement that the character remain there, doing nothing of particular use to the survival of the party as a whole, for the remainder of the combat.  Additionally, you're putting additional requirements on things: you need to specify materials used, and fetch them, at the cost of additional actions (shirt for bandages type thing that you mentioned).  Further, you're adding long-term consequences to the almost-deceased.With current rules, it's sometimes worth the standard action to prevent a comrade from fully dying.  With this proposed change, nobody will do so, unless they're doing it magically and bypassing the altered mechanics.  For a couple of reasons:1) You're requiring that the helper stay there.  Which means he's no longer actively hurting the opponent (who is still up and about).  If you attempt to save him, with the altered rules, the loss of one member effectively causes the loss of another for the duration of the combat as well.  Two for one deal on PC's losing. 2) You're potentially losing equipment - after a point, almost everything an adventurer carries is enchanted for some other purpose.  If binding him up requires ripping the shirt off his back, that may very well be a +3 Vest of Resistance down the drain.3) Even if you do go through the price of getting him to survive this battle... he's going to be at some severe penalties for the next several.  Meanwhile, if you let him die, the player can roll up a new character, get integrated into the game, and be a level (or two, or three, depending on the game setup) behind, rather than being faced with a fairly arbitrary penalty.  D&D 3.5 XP tables will catch him up fairly quickly.And yes, the penalty is arbitrary.  You're using a fluff description of an event, and extrapolating to a few game mechanical penalties... and the same person that's doing the fluff description is deciding the game mechanical penalties on the fly.  That becomes very, very arbitrary.Meanwhile, this has essentially no impact on the opposition - seriously, when was the last time you had a goblin, orc, or other baddie stop to tend to a wounded comrade?  They won't be invoking your altered rules, so it doesn't affect them.Depending on the nature of your players and the availability of other DM's, you'll have a hefty number of people vote with their feet, or you'll have a lot more PC's bleeding out rather than being rescued.  You keep emphasizing that you're not changing the mechanics... but you are, you really are.  Consider, say, sword swings.  They take an attack action.  If they took an attack action, then the warrior couldn't do anything else for the rest of the combat, sword swings would be much, much less attractive, to the point where basically nobody would swing a sword in combat.  This proposed change is similar - you're taking an existing mechanic that's usable, and turning it into something that is, for most intents and purposes, no longer viable.  You'll upset a lot of people, and others will shrug and stop using the mechanic completely.  Those are the only two likely outcomes.If you don't let him get back to the fight, you've changed the action type, which is a fairly major change indeed.In which case, saving him is mostly pointless if you permit rolling up a new character mid-game.  It'll be fairly rare for the penalties for a recovered character to be less than the penalties for a replacement character.The first time, sure.  The second time, maybe.  After that?  Not so much.  Because nobody's going to bother putting in the effort in the middle of battle after the first time dealing with it caused a TPK.  You'll have all this dramatic dialog saved up, and nothing to do with it.You've also mentioned that you're not allowing the healer to get back into the thick of things.  That changes the effective action type rather significantly, and makes saving the guy much more hazardous than it is now.Do you also make them describe how they swing their sword, how they block with their shield, and how they dodge blows?  What standard of realism do you use for that?I'm assuming that's a typo...With that description, you're going to get a lot more questions.  See, your description wasn't clear enough for me to distinguish little important things... like whether it's a line in the sidewalk, or an apparent tripwire.  Nor the height of the tripwire.  Nor the materials of the tripwire.  After all, if I do something other than your pre-conceived answer for disabling the thing, I don't even get a roll.If I want to have my character survive, I'm going to stop and ask you to describe every single thing.  If it happens repeatedly, I'm probably going to start asking you about every single detail of everything in the room, ever.  Why?  I'm not trying to be passive-aggressive... but you've made my character's survival dependent on my observational skills about what you've said, so I'm going to make him start observing everything... and the only way to do that is to ask you about every little nit-picking detail.  It's not malicious, it's a consequence of the way you're running the game.  I'm going to be asking you about the flooring in every room.  The ceiling height.  The ceiling material.  The wall material.  The wall texture.  I'm going to be asking you about how the goblins are dressed (as the clothing of a fallen goblin might be used as a bandage).  I'm going to be asking you what the lighting is like.  Whether there's any air currents here.  Because you've made it potentially relevant.So if you want it to take eight hours of real-time to walk across a room, go for it.</blockquote>

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