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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7533198" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I can speak from experience, as I have actually run with this house-rule before. One version where staying up was voluntary and required concentration, and one version where staying up was automatic, and you fell unconscious after your first failed death save.With the former, one player tried concentrating to stay in the fight, once. Then, because he was still an active combatant, the monsters kept attacking him, he took two failed death saves from a successful hit, stopped concentrating and wend down later in the same round. No one ever concentrated to stay conscious again, and it played out exactly like it would have if the house rule didn’t exist.With the latter, it was pretty interesting. Most of the time, players who dropped to zero would drink a healing potion, or one of the other party members would heal them. But, crucially, the party always retreated after someone went down to 0, even if they got healed up after, unless it was very clear that the party had almost won, in which case they’d finish the fight. But the player who had gone to 0 would always play much more cautiously for the rest of the encounter, even after regaining hit points. There was no “ok, Oliver can take two failures before we have to worry, and then Glory can get him back up with a healing word.” Once anyone dropped to zero, everyone went full emergency mode. “Oliver, do you have any potions on you? No? Glory, can you spare a spell slot to heal him? There are only a few bandits left, we can probably finish them off, but Oliver should probably hang back and use his Shortbow, and everyone should be ready to book it if he goes down to 0 again.” It was actually great, the only reason I didn’t keep using it was because it was kind of difficult for some of my players to wrap their heads around the idea of being at 0 HP but conscious. Well, one of my players in particular. He also got confused when I would narrate missed attacks as making contact but doing no damage, or hits as not making contact but still wearing the target down to avoid.</blockquote>

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