Save and You're Dead! ... Soon

[GoodKingJayIII]

Yeah, I'd just say that, if Orcus' missed attack would bring the character into the negative, it would simply bring them to 0.

 

[MrMyth]

Keep in mind that if your max hit points are 60 (Bloodied 30), there's really not a lot of difference between being at 0 hp and being at -29 hp. Bleeding out is no longer handled through hit point loss, and healing effects reset you to zero and then add to that rather than having to pull you all the way back up through the negatives. So it doesn't much matter exactly how far negative you go, as long as you don't hit negative [Bloodied number] hit points. And conveniently, Orcus's Touch of Death will never quite take you to that number, since you must have at least 1 hit point or you'd be unconscious already.

The only case where it makes a difference is if you get hit again while you're unconscious, potentially taking you over the "auto-kill" threshold. I'm guessing they decided that was unusual enough not to worry about.

Though it should be noted that Orcus also has an aura that deals damage each round to everyone around him, and animates them as undead when they die.

That said, it is the easiest thing in the world to house rule that the miss can't drop them below 0.

I suspect it will not come up all that often, since he'll be wanting to use it early to try and take out a mostly healed threat.

 

[Imban]

Especially once you multiply the change of that corner case occuring with the chance that a character with 60 hit points is fighting Orcus.

Use a more reasonable hit point number for a wannnabee Orcus slayer, and the difference between Full, bloodied, and zero is enough to make "straight to zero from bloodied" a fairly nasty effect.

'eh, it's the same if you have 85/202 HP left. Getting hit knocks you to 0, him missing knocks you to -16.