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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 3869532" data-attributes="member: 40961">I remember a fight where, instead of taking on the enemy shaman in melee, we met him out in a city dock that we had prepped to collapse.  The dock crumbled, the shaman fell into the water, and we clubbed him like a seal.  It rocked.My character at the time was an elf.  I conclude from this that unless elves are in the game, this sort of cool encounter won't be possible.Do you see the logical gap?What made your encounter with the orcs cool was that you came up with a way to fight the orcs that didn't involve going toe to toe.  You used creative thinking, and it worked.  That's great.Now lets say there was no save-or-die in the game.  Your poisoned wood still works, it just does... lets say it does Con damage every round you breath it.  So you do the poison wood trick, and the orcs... die just as they did in the game you actually played.  Save-or-die added nothing to this fight.Or look at a fight against a medusa.  What makes that sort of fight cool is that the players have to do it with their eyes shut.  Lets go the opposite way, and remove the save.  Its not save-or-die now, its just-plain-die.  What changes?  Nothing, really.  The point was that the medusa has a gaze attack that doesn't work on people who's eyes are closed.  There's a million ways you could do that other than save-or-die.If you want to set up a fight for your players that they have to think around instead of taking head on, why use save or die?  Why not just add a big number to the party's average level, and use a monster of the resulting CR?The good things people attribute to save-or-die rarely stem from save-or-die itself.  They stem from the type of encounter in which save-or-die is typically found, and that type of encounter is almost always possible using non save-or-die mechanics.  Meanwhile, the negative effects of save-or-die are definitely related directly to it.  It breaks the CR system by balancing ONLY against preventative spells, not against anything about the characters (DC does balance against saving throws, but considering that they scale together, it doesn't matter).  It leads to a trite sort of gameplay where save-or-die spells are matched against don't-save-or-die spells.  It ruins climactic fights by reducing them to "ultimate battles of the clerics' a la The Order of the Stick.  And it makes encounter creation involving spellcasters an awkward, perilous process.We can do better.</blockquote>

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