new death save == leave your buddy on the floor for 3 rounds?

[baberg]

So, rounding things off, there is around 25% of chance for getting stabilized on your own. Whatever is the outcome, chances of getting past 10th round without an answer are very very slim.

That sounds about right. I just ran 100 Excel simulations - it's what I have here at the office, sue me - and got 31% chance of saving (which I'll accept as just a rounding error on your 25% solution) with an average turn of 6 for the death (which is where your data peaks over 50%).

So yes, your programming mojo is indeed strong, so with no help you have an average of 25% chance to stabilize before you kick the proverbial bucket.

 

[deathdonut]

By the numbers:

- You have a 27% chance of surviving without help.
- If you have "two strikes", you only have a 10% chance of living without help.
- During the first 3 rounds, you are 15% likely to recover fully.
- You are 9% likely to die on your third round on the ground.
- The average casualty is dead after 7 rounds without help.
- If someone is unconcious for 6 rounds, they are most likely dead.

 

[Revinor]

- You are 9% likely to die on your third round on the ground.

Very strange math. Chances of dying on the 3rd round is exactly 0.5^3, which is exactly 12.5%. We could probably discuss about the other numbers, as they are not that obvious, but not about chances of rolling 1-10 on d20 3 times in row...

Most of the other numbers you gave are also off by few percent here and there.

 

[Bishmon]

Very strange math. Chances of dying on the 3rd round is exactly 0.5^3, which is exactly 12.5%. We could probably discuss about the other numbers, as they are not that obvious, but not about chances of rolling 1-10 on d20 3 times in row...

Most of the other numbers you gave are also off by few percent here and there.

But you only fail on a 1-9.

 

[Xorn]

I just want to say, the moment I hear one of my players say, "We've got 3 turns to save him, don't worry!"...

A f***ing meteor will streak down from the sky, blast through whatever is covering the area they are in, and strike the speaking person for (whatever dice are within arm's reach, with my butt coming out of the seat) points of damage. When they look at me incredulously and say, "A meteor hit me?" I will reply:

"Yeah, weird, huh?"

More on topic--I found that getting to a person to stabilize them in the middle of a fight can be harder than it looks!

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Through my playtest, I didn't allow instant recovery if people dipped into negative HP. I simply had players roll each round; if they failed three times, they died - no self-stabliization outside of character Heal skill to revivify interaction. If the player died on a 0, I allowed them to recover if they rolled successfully once.

 

[Verys Arkon]

And I thought it was 10+ is success, so it's 1-9 (45%) fail, 10-19 (50%) success, 20 (5%) miracle.

This is how it was presented in the Design and Development article in the "Try it now" section.

In the Scalegloom rules appendix under "Hit Points, Healing, and Dying" (p24) though, their is no mention of anything special happening on a roll of 20 on 1d20. If the rules in Scalegloom are true, it appears there is no way for an unconscious and dying PC to stabilize without the help of his friends, as far as I can see?

I think we will have to wait until June to know which is true.

 

[stripes]

EDIT:
You probably misinterpreted the rule that 3 failures have to be in row for a person to die. In such case, chances to self stabilize are indeed around 41%.

Nope, 3 failures before the 20 is what I used...except now that I look at my script again I actually made the miracle a 19 or 20. D'oh!

So still my bad. That pushed the avg time to stabilize up to "nearly 4", and oddly the death time goes up a tiny bit too. Clearly I should have paid more attention to STAT400 back in the '90s

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict qw(vars);

my(@dead, @live);

while(@dead < 100 || @live < 100) {
    my($res, $round) = &zero_hp;
    if ($res) {
        push(@live, $round);
    } else {
        push(@dead, $round);
    }
}

my $tot = @dead + @live;
printf "$tot trials, %4.2f%% (%d) lived\n", 100 * @live / $tot, scalar(@live);
print "AVG ", &avg(@live), " to stabilise, or ", &avg(@dead), " to die\n";

sub avg {
    my(@n) = @_;
    my $tot = 0;

    foreach my $n (@n) {
        $tot += $n
    }

    return $tot / scalar(@n);
}

sub zero_hp {
    my $bleed = 0;
    my $rounds = 0;

    while($bleed < 3) {
        $rounds++;
        my $d20 = 1 + int(rand(20));
        if ($d20 <= 9) {
            $bleed++;
            print "$d20: BLEED ($bleed)\n";
### XXX Hey!   This should be $d20 <= 19 XXX ###
        } elsif ($d20 < 19) {
            print "$d20: no change\n";
        } else {
            print "$d20: STABLE!\n";
            return (1, $rounds);
        }
    }

    print "Sorry, you die (took $rounds rounds)\n";
    return (0, $rounds);
}

 

[Henry]

Under 3.5, the standing rule at our table as to leave the downed PC on the ground for (10+X) rounds, where X was the negative hit point number. If you were downed at -1 or -2, the common phrase is, "relax, we've still got 7 rounds to get to you! We'll have the combat sewn up by then."

In 4e, it looks like you've got two things: You're likely to die in three rounds without help, and combat takes a lot longer than two or three rounds to resolve. So, if it plays like it sounds, then unless someone takes time out of the combat, then things get dicey.

 

[stripes]

I just want to say, the moment I hear one of my players say, "We've got 3 turns to save him, don't worry!"...

Not really any worse then in 3.5 when someone says "he is only at -5, let's finish off the ogres and then come back for him". In fact most of the time in 3.5 you "know" how many rounds you have until death, in 4e you know it won't be in the first two rounds, but after that it is a crapshoot.

(and no, in 3.5 I haven't really seen anyone leave people on the floor knowing how long it takes them to bleed out, so I don't really expect them to do it in 4e either -- I'm the most analytical player in my wife's game, and I totally grabbed a fallen party member many rounds before I "had to" because it was the right thing for that character to do...I'm analytical, my character sure isn't; similar in the game I DM, everyone freaks out when someone gets dropped to -2...I mean -2, come on! That's more then a full minute from death, and only if he flips tails 7 times in a row! Oh, wait, never mind about that outburst, good roleplay folks! Yeah, that's the ticket....)