NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Authweight" data-source="post: 6486653" data-attributes="member: 6693417">I see lethality as something that is rightfully part of campaign/genre tone. A high heroic game should feature few random deaths, a gritty game should make it more common, and a one-off death dungeon should kill people off constantly (think tomb of horrors).5e out of the box doesn't offer a whole lot in the rules to tweak death. It offers a lot of healing tweaks, but I don't think that affects lethality so much as pacing. 5e is easy to hack for different lethalities though. Off the top of my head, to increase lethality you could bring in the -10hp death rule, you could make death saving throws harder, you could make everyone do two death saves every round they're down, or you could include death by massive damage (lose half your max hp from one hit? Make a con save!). To decrease lethality, you could make it so you need more failed saves to die, you could do away with death by damage altogether, or you could make saves easier. Something I've done in games before is said you can't actually die directly, but if you're "killed" you are wounded so badly you cannot continue. Your allies then have a choice to bail on the adventure (suffering various negative consequences) and carry you back to town, where you will need a long time to recover, or they can leave you and let you die while continuing the adventure. It's well-suited to games where you want death to feel more dramatic and be a sacrifice rather than bad luck.</blockquote>

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