Less death, more "dying"

[AuraSeer]

What are some options for expanding the "dying" zone, between -1 and -10 hp? That's an extremely narrow window, and most characters will go straight from "alive and fighting" straight to "dead" without a stop in between. I want to make random combat death a bit less likely in ordinary encounters, yet I'm afraid of going too far and making the characters immortal.

I'm running an Eberron campaign with a cinematic bent. In the tone I'm going for, it's fine if the PCs lose a fight, or even if some of them die. But if they do end up dead, it should be dramatic, befitting the major characters they are. Rick Blaine and Indiana Jones don't find themselves dead in an alley because of some random mugger, so my party shouldn't either.

Case in point: in our last session, the warforged fighter wound up 1 point away from death, after an unlucky first round in a throwaway encounter. That would have been a stupid and disappointing way to go, as well as irritating in RL if we had to take time out and create a new PC.

So, what sort of buffer strategies have you folks come up with? And what other considerations should I be worrying about here?

 

[Nifft]

IMC a PC may spend a "fate point" as an Immediate action to reduce the damage from a single attack such that the PC is at exactly 0 hp; you can negate an arbitrary amount of damage in this way.

Also, IMC you don't die at -10 hp, but rather at -(10 + HD); a 1st level PC dies at -11; a 20th level PC dies at -30.

Cheers, -- N

 

[XCorvis]

IMC, it's -10 or -Con score (not mod), whichever is better. It started as -Con, but we quickly changed that after an encounter with a fairly basic poison dart trap which would have killed a PC outright via HP loss. Actually, I like Nifft's -10+HD rule better, I might steal that.

You could always go the role-playing route. If they "die", tell them they won't actually die, but they'll wish they did. Then bring them back horribly scarred, or missing a limb, or as restless undead.

 

[MrNexx]

Another option: -10-Con modifier. Those with good con modifiers are harder to kill, but it doesn't go on quite as long as -9-HD might.

(For those confused, follow order of operations; it is not -[9-HD], but -[9]-[HD], which means that a higher HD will result in a greater absolute value. Sorry for those who understood, but I heard four years of high school students crying out in confusion)

 

[Av3rnus]

You could always go the role-playing route. If they "die", tell them they won't actually die, but they'll wish they did. Then bring them back horribly scarred, or missing a limb, or as restless undead.

Sounds a bit like what my DM did early on in our Savage Tide campaign. He was using a third-party d20 supplement (I want to say it was called "Skull & Bones", but I'm not certain) which had rules for this. Essentially, anytime your character "died" you would roll a d20 and compare the result to a chart of various afflictions, with high rolls being worse. Successive deaths resulted in an increasing modifier, making it more likely you'll get the really unpleasant stuff -a scar isn't so bad, but losing a limb kinda is. Fun stuff actually.

 

[Thurbane]

A common houserules is that you are dead at negative HP equal to your Con score (i.e. 18 con means you die at -18 HP instead of -10).

One idea of the top of my head is to expand dying to -1 to -19, dead at -20, but as a tradoff, characters do not gain HP for 1 level - say, 5th...

 

[Destil]

No negative HP heroic types have 1d4 rounds after going below 0 live, rolled in secret by the DM.

Huge fireballs no longer instant kill, but there's none of this "We have X rounds, he'll be fine" silliness.

I'd very strongly recommend against using Con in any way, myself. It's already the 2nd best ability score for almost every class, no reason to make it better. If anything I'd use 10-Level (i.e. -14 for a 4th level wizard) to help keep up with scaling damage.

 

[Edheldur]

I use the "Death and Dying" variant rule from Unearthed Arcana. You can find it HERE

 

[Phlebas]

i use the -con rules, though as the group are approaching higher levels i'm considering going to -con-HD before dying.

no-ones mentioned disabled yet - i always have disabled run from 0 to -con bonus to try and allow for heroic activities

 

[eamon]

I replace the normal rules with a fort save DC: 1/2 neg hitpoints, and you lose 2 hitpoints each round even on success. After five rounds, if you're still not dead, you stabilize. There's a link in my sig ;-)