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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 3864991" data-attributes="member: 40961">I agree with Raven Crowking, in part.What matters is whether the monster can kill you in one (series of) roll(s) during which you can't act.  A monster who one roll kills you and a monster that uses ten rolls to do it are equally obnoxious if you're stuck sitting there waiting to die while it happens.  In fact, the monster who takes longer to do it is even more annoying in a way, because you have to sit there and wait.But I'd add some caveats.First, the monster's CR matters from a game design perspective.  If the reason my character is at risk of being killed in the first attack of an ambush is because the monster in question is CR 9 and I'm a 4th level character, then my character's death is at least not the fault of poor game design.  That's a DM/Player issue, and there's nothing that WOTC can do about it.Second, how often the monster can one-hit-kill me is important.  A monster who can save-or-die me every round is worse design than a monster who can one-hit-kill me, but only on the first round of combat if it gets a surprise round attack and then wins initiative.  Neither were particularly good things, mind you, they're both doing the same obnoxious thing, but one is doing it more often.  Which is bad.Third, a save-or-die affects only one statistic of my character.  I've either got a good enough save of the appropriate type, or not.  Against the "first round ambush killer" monster, I can "defend" in multiple fashions by focusing on several different stats.  I might have a high spot, and notice the ambush, allowing myself to act during the surprise round.  I might have a high initiative, allowing me to go before the monster goes a second time.  I might have a high flat footed armor class, or high hit points.  Each one of these is something in my control (albeit long term control) that I can use to prospectively defend against this sort of monster.  Which is nicer.  But this only really matters in context of my final point, which isThe chance that a monster will attack you from ambush and kill you before you have time to react is almost NEVER going to be as high as the chance that you will die to a save-or-die effect.  A save-or-die is going to affect you about 40 to 50% of the time, barring really great saves only available to certain classes (will save on a cleric, etc).  If a monster has to beat my Spot check in an opposed roll, hit my flat footed AC, roll sufficiently high damage, then beat my initiative, then beat my flat footed AC again, and then roll sufficiently high damage a second time, it is REALLY unlikely that the overall chance that the monster will win all of those rolls is going to be anywhere close to 50%.So this is all kind of academic anyways.  Its nice to compare theoretical 5% save-or-dies to theoretical 5% one-attack-sequence-kills, but save-or-dies are almost always much higher odds of "die" than 5%.</blockquote>

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