Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grog" data-source="post: 3858759" data-attributes="member: 6183">Okay, I've seen two votes from pro-SoD people for "The PCs should never have to save or die unless they want to." Basically, they think that save-or-die should only be for big challenges that the PCs can face if they want to, but don't have to face.I see a few problems with this.1. As a DM, if I want to put an optional challenge in the game that has a good chance of killing some PCs, I don't need an extremely flawed mechanic to do it. There are many different ways I can build a challenging and fun encounter without using abilities that make a PCs life or death come down to a single roll of the d20. Save-or-die is not a necessary component of a "great risk for great reward" scenario, and I don't think that the potential for its use in such a scenario is worth all the problems it causes in other areas of the game.2. The idea that SoD should be for optional challenges only means that I can never use high-level wizards or clerics (along with several monsters, such as the iconic beholder) as villains who the PCs must face. Or, alternatively, I have to metagame and have the wizards and clerics choose less than optimal spells to use against the PCs. Neither of those options is particularly appealing to me. If I want a high-level wizard as the BBEG in my campaign, I should be able to have a high-level wizard as the BBEG in my campaign.3. This does nothing to address the issue of the players using save-or-die spells against enemies, which in my experience can also be a problem. It can turn an important encounter into an anticlimax (and while encounters are a dime a dozen in D&D, important encounters aren't), and it contributes to the problem of casters dominating the game at high levels ("Gee, the wizard one-shotted the enemy in the first round. Again.")</blockquote>

Verification