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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8933488" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Surrender almost always means giving up your objective anyway--often worse than dying in most adventures. You're enslaved, or imprisoned, or killed, or worse. There's a good reason most players refuse to consider surrender. If you're going to do this, you'd better make sure to communicate to your players that "surrender" does not mean all the usual horrible awful baggage that comes with it, and that it's actually possible to request a "truce" and have that not be an absolutely horrible and unacceptable choice.I find these odds extremely unlikely given my experience of 5e combat (the odds are much more like 50% even for games with few combats), but even if we take this seriously, you are then saying that you want approximately a 1-in-24 (about 4.17%) chance of a character death every single session. Or, to put that in slightly different terms, you want approximately 2 character deaths every year assuming weekly sessions (52 weeks with a 1/24 chance of a character death gives 2.6 average deaths per year, SD 1.57) purely due to death by 0-hp exhaustion. This is excluding any other source of death, e.g. failing death saves.See my above math. You're getting on average 2-3 deaths a year from this. Possibly more, since there's something of a domino effect in D&D stuff--I'm just working off of your stated expectation that someone drops to 0 HP in only 25% of sessions. And, as I said, my experience with 5e combat indicates that that is wildly underestimating the actual rate.Your proposed rules do not give any incentive for fighting like a team. They in fact do very much the opposite. It is every man for himself, because a single bad round is enough to put you at risk of instant death. The rules you have proposed will punish players who make desperate last stands unless they have already accepted and embraced that their death is inevitable. That is the whole point of (as you term it) "making combat mean something." To go into combat is to court death. This creates the incentive: "Do everything you can to avoid combat, and if you engage in combat and it goes poorly, do everything you can to escape." If that is an incentive you wish your players to heed, go right ahead. It's not one I would want, but in all seriousness, my opinion of it is irrelevant; I just believe you should go into  this eyes-open.</blockquote>

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