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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 4886682" data-attributes="member: 53980">1. Favors monsters much more than PCs as the game scales (monsters gain +1 Con every other level whereas a PC gains somewhere between +2 and +8 over 30 levels).  This also effectively eliminates the "average Constitution" defender.  Finally, this could easily make rogues godly (rogues hit pretty hard to begin with, so you're effectively adding daze (save ends) to most of their attacks, which could allow them to chain sneak attacks).I would base this off of something that scales with level (like bloodied value).  That said, I don't really like the idea much since getting hit for a large chunk of your hp seems penalty enough to me.2. This will make it really hard for the party to recover from having a party member go unconscious.  If you're the type of DM who focus fires a single PC at a time, I'd say this will lead to frequent TPKs.  If you spread the damage out a lot, it's probably feasible, but I expect the PCs to be encouraged to favor healing powers since hitting 0 hp could easily mean you're out of the fight til the end (you're a sitting duck with only a quarter of your hps, which could well mean you'll be unconscious again before you can make that save).3. PCs will be more delicate.  Not a big deal at low levels, but at higher levels it will shorten the workday (at level 28 it means 28 less hp, which means your healing surge value is 7 less, so a character with 10 surges would have 98 less hp per day than a normal PC).  In other words, relative to the base game, the PCs will get weaker the higher they get in level.4. Not sure how this would make the game grittier.  Plenty of skirmishers and lurkers have "sneak attack" damage so all this would do is make crits less valuable to strikers, skirmishers, and lurkers than to other roles.  That said, I don't see how it would break the game.5. This (along with 2) will encourage smart players to heavily favor healing (to minimize the chance of anyone ever falling unconscious).  Additionally, it has the potential to seriously cut short the workday (if the defender fails two death saves in the first encounter there's a strong chance he'll die today if the PCs press on).*. I'm also not crazy about penalizing arcane classes while buffing heavy armor wearing classes.  On the other hand, this might work in favor of your setting's theme, discouraging players from arcane classes while encouraging them to play the heavy armor wearing classes.  Depending on the DR bonus, it could easily make Paladins superior to Swordmages.  It might be more straightforward and balanced to simply ban arcane classes and forget about the DR for armor though.1 and 2 seem excessive and more likely than not to cause TPKs.  5 seems okay for a gritty game so long as you don't necessarily mind a 5 minute workday.  3 might be okay.  4 doesn't seem terribly unbalanced but also doesn't strike me as gritty at all.All in all, I expect that these houserules would encourage your players to focus on classes with healing and heavy armor (warlord, cleric, paladin, etc) and shorten the workday, which will likely encourage your players to nova (if you're only going to have 1 or 2 encounters a day because the defender will be down to his last death save by that point, might as well go all out and use up those dailies) which will likely run counter to the gritty feel you want to establish.Then again, every group is different, so some or all of this might not apply to you and yours.  YMMV.</blockquote>

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