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Message: <blockquote data-quote="keterys" data-source="post: 6344147" data-attributes="member: 43019">Without going into specifics of playtesting, I can anecdotally confirm that it's really quite possible to just outright kill people up through 3rd level without great difficulty. It is much more likely if you roll damage instead of taking the average. At 1st it's downright trivial, to the extent that in a normal game I'd feel like I had to avoid attacking low hp PCs with certain creatures, for no apparent reason.At 3rd it's much more rare, but I can confirm several anecdotal deaths, including one from full via a high damage crit, and a few from low hp. I'm not as convinced these are problems, though, so 3rd does feel like a reasonable place to start the game and avoid the problem.I don't remember any deaths due to failed death saves that weren't also TPKs, and I'm personally quite happy that spare the dying was fixed so that it's no longer quite so ridiculously game shifting.At least in my case, it's not wholly a case of armchair game design. That said, the math really is brutally simple:As long as a PC can be outright killed in 12-16 damage and monsters at 1st level can do 12-16 damage, there statistically (remember, hundreds of thousands of newbies) will be groups where new players were killed outright before they got a chance to do anything meaningful. There are a variety of ways around this, but none of them were taken.</blockquote>