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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 3869387" data-attributes="member: 40961">howandwhy99:Posts like yours boggle my mind.  You toss out a bunch of good things about D&D, things I like, things I agree the game should strive to contain, and then you claim that save-or-die represents these things and I choke on my drink.If you want to encourage strategic offense, a spell where a single die is rolled and your enemy either lives or dies right there is NOT the way to go about it.If you want to encourage strategic defense, there's a million ways to do it other than a clunky game mechanic.Nobody is saying that the game shouldn't include monsters that are hard to defeat, or which pose a threat to your character.  The question is how they should pose that threat, and save-or-die, all or nothing effects are one of the worst possible ways to create a threat in a game built around combat by attrition.Save-or-die effects are one of the biggest origins of simplistic, one dimensional combat.  They do bypass slugfests, true, but combat by save-or-die is worse than a slugfest.  It has all the aspects of a slugfest that are bad, such as the way players stand and toss deadly shots back and forth until someone falls down, and none of the good parts, such as the possibility that someone might do something even minimally tactical, like flank.What strategy does save-or-die add to the game?  The strategy of guessing this enemy has a weak will save, and that enemy has a weak fortitude?  The strategy of casting your spell before the other guy?  That's really it.Caveat to preempt the inevitable response:  I know, I know, the pro save-or-die people will now leap in to claim that the strategy is in avoiding having to make the save.  I call shenanigans.  You can create strategic challenges where the goal is avoiding having to fight on the enemy's terms without save-or-die.  howandwhy99's example combat with the orcs is actually a great example.  He didn't need save-or-die to make that work.  The orcs didnt' have it, neither did he (poison isn't SoD).  And if you DO use save-or-die to create that sort of strategic challenge, the challenge of avoiding having to face an enemy's deadly attack, save-or-die is a really bad way to go about it!  It turns what SHOULD be an exercise in creative lateral thinking into an exercise in waiting until the next morning and memorizing Death Ward, or whatever the applicable spell might be.</blockquote>

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