No rules for dying or bleeding

[eriktheguy]

Death saves are boring and take time in combat, and usually nothing comes of them. Several house rules have been suggested, but I don't think its worth wasting time on.
I think it's a legacy mechanic. To us, it seems strange not to have it, but to a newcomer it would probably look frivolous.
I am going to just ignore bleeding and dying. Players below 0 HP are down. They don't do anything until they are healed or the fight ends. Monsters can still attack them, but you don't have to keep stopping at their turn.
Has anyone tried anything like this and how did it go?

 

[DracoSuave]

Well, the threat of death does make combat a little more tense when someone goes down.

Take away death saves and you take away that tension, and instead forcing you to 'be a dick and coup-de-grace.' It makes you more of a villain, whereas death saves are 'the dice did it.'

Regardless, you must have some form of death threat in the game in order for the combat to work, otherwise, the players truly -are- unstoppable killing machines.

 

[eriktheguy]

Oops, can anyone move this to the houserules forum?

 

[Starfox]

In the end, I suppose it boils down to what you think about PC death. I always preferred my PCs to be more or less immortal. Being imprisoned (and having to escape) is a much more interesting consequence of defeat that death and rerolling the character. But I am a storyteller. For a more tactically minded DM, the reverse might be true.

 

[Mengu]

When someone is down, there is often an urgency to try and help them, and I like that urgency. I've seen a few deaths occur from either a downed person failing three saves, or taking enough damage to die. Eliminating the threat of death might eliminate that rush to save someone.

I also understand not wanting PC's to die due to story reasons. But there already is a mechanic for not killing. The enemy can decide to do subdual damage when they knock a PC unconscious. In particularly difficult encounters where you might get a TPK, you can decide the enemy is knocking PC's unconscious instead of killing them. This might lead to a situation where if the PC's are defeated, they might just wake up in a prison (instead of game over).

 

[ValhallaGH]

Oops, can anyone move this to the houserules forum?

Nope. The boards aren't supporting thread-moving at this time (I found that out reading a thread on the General RPG forum).
Though that may change.

 

[Piratecat]

Yup, it's a bug that'll disappear when we upgrade the software. I'll close this as a result; please feel free to start a new thread in House Rules.