D&D 5E It's so hard to die!

[DEFCON 1]

How 5E is played by most tables is why the "gritty" rest variant needs to be standard. No one is doing 6-8 encounters between long rests - they simply don't have enough combat in their game. So the design should recognise that, and make resource recovery slower.

I will say though that to do this the game would have to decouple health recovery time from class feature recovery time. You really can't put spell slot recovery on a 7-day Long Rest time table, the game breaks down. I've tried it, and spellcasters just end up not casting anything because they know they're going to have to wait 7 days to get their slots back and they feel like they have to save their slots for something really important that might happen down the line.

Now if you want to add in a third rest type... so that you have a Short Rest be an hour, a Long Rest be 8 hours, and a "Recovery Rest" (or whatever you want to call it) be 7 days, and then move spending hit dice up to a Long Rest and a full recovery of hit points and hit dice to a Recovery Rest (while leaving all class features on their standard Short and Long Rest timetables)... you might be able to work it out okay.

 

[dave2008]

I've often thought the easiest and most simple way to make D&D combat deadlier is to just change the cast time on all healing spells to 1 minute. As soon as you can't heal anyone in combat, the risk of death rises exponentially.

Or increase the damage of monsters. Add the monsters CR in damage to its attacks and it gets nice and deadly.

 

[Oofta]

Or increase the damage of monsters. Add the monsters CR in damage to its attacks and it gets nice and deadly.

I like to change things up now and then so sometimes I'll give monsters max or double damage and either a +2 to hit or pack tactics so they always get advantage. Throw in a monster or two that grants extra attacks on their turn. Makes for glass cannon hard hitting enemies

 

[TwoSix]

Now if you want to add in a third rest type... so that you have a Short Rest be an hour, a Long Rest be 8 hours, and a "Recovery Rest" (or whatever you want to call it) be 7 days, and then move spending hit dice up to a Long Rest and a full recovery of hit points and hit dice to a Recovery Rest (while leaving all class features on their standard Short and Long Rest timetables)... you might be able to work it out okay.

That doesn't work as well as one would hope, as it's pretty easy to restore everyone to full hit points with only a moderate investment of spell slots. What really drives a feeling of attrition is the actual lack of spell slots, which means that characters with spells do tend to hoard them, which I'm totally OK with!

What I did differently to help mitigate the feeling of lack of options, but still retain the attrition feel, is give out a fair amount of special abilities that recharge at in game time periods (dawn, dusk, noon or midnight, depending on the type of ability), as well as a number of minor consumables that can be crafted during the "long rest". (A long rest is 72 hours and requires civilization.) Hit Dice can be sent in combat, one Hit Die can be spent whenever the character takes the Dodge action.

Granted, this is in a heavily houseruled 5e hack, so it isn't apples-to-apples with normal 5e, but I don't think it's impossible to do so. I do agree that "just make the long rest 7 days" is too simplistic, there's a battery of changes needed to really support the desired goal of not requiring 6-8 encounters per 24 hours to achieve rough balance.

 

[Delazar]

Maybe it's hard to die, but how hard is it to kill you? Especially at high-level, there's several monsters with attacks that go "if you reach 0 hit points you're dead" or something similar.

The real issue is "it's impossible to STAY dead!"

 

[Oofta]

Maybe it's hard to die, but how hard is it to kill you? Especially at high-level, there's several monsters with attacks that go "if you reach 0 hit points you're dead" or something similar.

The real issue is "it's impossible to STAY dead!"

Hasn't that always been a problem? Raise Dead and Resurrection have always been options.

 

[Delazar]

Hasn't that always been a problem? Raise Dead and Resurrection have always been options.

Yes, absolutely! I don't mean to derail the topic, I was just mentioning that even if we do manage to die/kill, its meaning is still moot. So we might as well have a system where dying is hard. Which we do.

 

[the Jester]

Repeat the experiment, only this time have the dm not pull punches. Monsters use good tactics- focus fire, attack you when you're unconscious, etc. ESPECIALLY attacking when you're down. I think you might find that it's easier to die when the kids gloves are off.

 

[Retreater]

Here's the thing. It's impossible to permanently kill a single character in PF2 if you're playing by the rules. It's very difficult to kill a single character in 5e as well. What's not hard is a TPK. In fact, that's the only way I have ever had character deaths in these systems. They are all up (or will be in a round), or they're all down.

The Hero Point meta currency in PF2 ensures that a character cannot die. Spending your Hero Points means your character is stabilized and no longer dying. As long as there are other party members there to recover your body and to keep you from taking additional damage, you're going to be fine.

Healing is so easy to come by in 5e that dropping to 0 hp is at worst a temporary speed bump to winning.

This facilitates the story-based campaign playstyle of modern gaming. A lot of modern boardgames are the same way - no one has to sit out. The game ends when one character dies/loses or the character can't die.

 

[Mistwell]

Our deaths have always come not just from going to zero and failing death saves, but from going to zero and foes continuing to hit your prone body repeatedly after that. Each hit causes one negative death save result. Do that enough before other players with healing can respond, and you die.