D&D 5E Instant Death. Am I the only one who experienced this or what?

[TwoSix]

I guess I could see it happening at low levels, but we don’t tend to play low levels much.

Most higher damage creatures tend to be so due to multi attack, rather than one very hard hitting attack. Death by 3 death saves due to auto-crits on unconscious characters has been the norm, not massive damage.

 

[Asisreo]

My subjective experience has been that the instant death rule (has to be a single hit, basically, for [Max HP + Current HP] makes it very difficult to do unless a very big damage monster specifically targets a low HP character while they're at single digits or down.

This has been my experience as well and it reinforces why I think "yo-yo healing" or low-HP/low action economy healing is a flawed strategy during the game.

Lets take a look at a level 9 Wizard with +1 Con. This would average him to about 41HP. Let's say they're fighting a CR 9 Blue Dragon and it uses the breath attack. Assuming the worst, that is—they failed the dex save and doesn't have absorb elements, the Wizard at full HP has a .13% chance to instantly die from just the damage.

If the wizard was recently brought back with healing word and only has 5HP, the wizard now has a 85% instant death chance. This is from a creature that counts as a medium encounter and I believe it demonstrates that while technically being at low HP doesn't hinder your character, it is a very high risk situation that could still lead to your PC's early death.

 

[Asisreo]

I once had a sorceress who was grappled by a red dragon chewed to 0 hp and the. Flung into a mountain. It was instadeath. I was quite aggrieved. So I created a dirty Uber broken character. Campaign ended. Sad. Lose lose

Yeah, honestly being on the receiving end of damage you can't prevent from outright killing you sucks, which is why I believe WoTC wants to keep multiattack a high-level feature so that there's less instant death opportunities.

I guess I could see it happening at low levels, but we don’t tend to play low levels much.

Most higher damage creatures tend to be so due to multi attack, rather than one very hard hitting attack. Death by 3 death saves due to auto-crits on unconscious characters has been the norm, not massive damage.

This is true at higher levels but I feel you must be careful that you aren't taking advantage of that. Some monsters are tricky in that their multiattack could actually help them instakill you by whittling your health down before their large burst attack like the aforementioned dragon or they can down you on the first hit and the second is enough to instakill you while unconscious without any saves.

Balors do triple damage dice on a critical so if they end up knocking you out with their whip, they can yank you into their longsword and do 18d8+8 damage to your unconscious body. To level 18 characters, this is a medium encounter but if the wizard is caught up in this, they'll have a 36% chance to die assuming +1 con.

 

[jgsugden]

It is not uncommon at 1st level, but becomes rapidly less common as you advance in levels. This is one of the reasons why PCs advance to 3rd level so quickly under the suggested encounter building and experience rules. By the time you're third level, it will be rare, and I've only see it a couple times at higher levels (and both of those involved back to back rounds of dragon breath from a pretty nasty dragon damage roll). However, any Wild sorcerer that has rolled an 07 or 08 at first or second level knows it happens.

At higher levels, it is far more common for a PC to go down on the first attack of a monster multi-attack and then to be killed by the other attacks in the multi-attack, or for a flying PC to be taken to negative hps, crash into damaging ground (one failed save from crash damage, another from the dangerous terrain), and then die at the start of their turn on a failed death save.

 

[TwoSix]

Balors do triple damage dice on a critical so if they end up knocking you out with their whip, they can yank you into their longsword and do 18d8+8 damage to your unconscious body. To level 18 characters, this is a medium encounter but if the wizard is caught up in this, they'll have a 36% chance to die assuming +1 con.

Make sense. Although if they have a 14 Con, that chance drops to around 2%, so I'm not surprised I haven't seen it much.

Generally, once you get into the triple digit hit points, you're pretty safe from any one attack that doesn't have some kind of potent critical effect. Even an ancient red dragon breath weapon only does 100 damage a sixth of the time, and hardly ever crosses over 110.

 

[Stormonu]

I've only ever seen in once in 5E, at 1st level (and part of the reason I don't start PCs at 1st level).

Moreover, I think this crowd is bit more involved with D&D than your average person and is a bit more aggressive in "solving" D&D. Most of the problems I've seen raised on this forum I've never had come up in the casual games I run and the players haven't ever remarked that the game isn't deadly enough (as my four dead characters I've played myself will tell you if you were to use Speak With Dead. There's been enough blindsided deaths (or near-deaths) that I usually feel the players are behind the curve against the DM and are never really in control of how "safe" they are in the games I've run or played in so far.

I'm also probably an odd DM in that I'm not fond of killing characters*, and I don't buy into attempts by players to engage in an arms race - they'd lose anyways, and I don't need them always glancing over their shoulder and probing everything with 10' poles (god, am I glad those days are gone!). I do a mix of encounters - sometimes the PCs roll their opponents, sometimes its a hard-won fight, sometimes it's better for them to run or not go looking for fights.

* I enjoying seeing players getting the chance to grow their characters; they tend to be more engaged with NPCs and the world around them when they're not rolling up their 3rd, 4th or more character for a game just to watch it get stomped in the next miniboss fight.

 

[Krachek]

Is 5ed too much deadly?
Most of the time we see thread claiming 5ed is too forgiving!

 

[Eltab]

In Balders Gate: Avernus we got to the marsh gas area and somebody lit a torch so he could see what smelled bad. The DM rolled high and we were L1. All of us in the room needed new characters.

OTOH,
I Survived Being Disintegrate'ed In Undermountain !
because we just came out of a long rest and Ranger5 has more HP than the spell's threshold.

 

[el-remmen]

One time at 2nd level one character came within 1 point of this happening to her. But my guess is that it will happen eventually.

 

[Argyle King]

I've seen it happen once during low levels. One of the players took a critical hit from a charging minotaur skeleton after their character was already badly injured (and following a string of rather poor tactical decisions by the group as a whole).

Other than that one time? I've never seen it happen.