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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8287126" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, it's definitely not "unintended" because if you see any actual play with WotC people involved that is what is happening. Also 5E's healing design fits whack-a-mole but not murder-a-PC.I mean, but that's obviously not correct, because there's no easy way in combat for most beings to perceive if someone is unconscious or dead. You can't just take their pulse or something.There are beings (esp. undead) who could probably instantly perceive this, and that totally works for them, but for normal mortal beings like humans or bugbears, let alone animals? Absolutely not.So that's an rather weak way to justify it fictionally. As enemies don't have a legitimate way to tell if you're dead or not, they should be doing a lot of "overkill". I.e. chopping up people who already failed all their death saves. If you do that it once again becomes somewhat justifiable, but if you always have enemies stop precisely when a PC fails three death saves that's a nonsense, fictionally, an absolute nonsense. It's pure metagaming with any being who cannot magically perceive whether life or death is present (but is not with those few who can).The effects you suggest are correct, but you're wrong to ignore the fictional issues, I'd suggest. In addition to the effects you've listed there's the melee-punishment and live healers required issues:1) Melee characters take the vast brunt of damage in 5E. There's no way around this. This means melee characters are disproportionately likely to get downed. Which if you attack downed PCs, means they are disproportionately likely to get killed. So you may well simply end up forcing people who choose to play melee PCs to re-roll repeatedly until they end up picking a non-melee.2) You force "live" healing characters to be required. 5E is specifically designed so that they aren't. You don't need a Life Cleric or a Twilight Cleric in 5E as normally played. You can use short rests and HD, and/or weaker healers, or healers who do best out-of-combat (like Bards and Druids). That's fine if that's what you want, but it's a very significant change. Any party which doesn't have a serious in-combat healer is going to see a hell of a lot more deaths.3) Stopping dying becomes much more of a priority which means parties are likely to be more conservative re: not being on full HP at all times, which means more rests, short and long, and more stopping early in the adventuring day, particularly because the "live" healer has run out of juice.On top of that you massively increase the value of things which stop you getting to 0 HP. So THP, high ACs, high HP pools, self-healing, damage resistances, crowd control and so on.EDIT - Oh and multi-attacking monsters become waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay bigger threats than a single-attacking monster dealing the same sort of DPR, because a multi-attacker with 3 attacks doing say 1d4+2/1d4+2/1d3+2 can wipe out three Death Saves, potentially, but a single attack who hits for, say, 4d12+12  can only wipe out one.EDIT EDIT - Personally I think the thing to do is to say that creatures with appropriate supernatural perceptions, beasts/ghouls, and skilled warriors may continue to attack downed PCs, and to use a Instinct check like in Worlds Without Number (which you can get the free edition of from DriveThru) for the latter two groups. I.e. with beasts/ghouls, probably they feast on the downed UNLESS they make a successful instinct check not to. And will keep doing so after PCs are long dead, because they're there to eat, not fight (unless they get attacked whilst eating of course). And likewise experienced/well-trained warriors should make an Instinct check, if they pass, sure they can hit the downed PC, but if they fail, they move on, or they keep hitting an already-dead PC, or the like. Whereas spirit-seeing undead would never have to overkill (probably some angels/devils etc. too).</blockquote>

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