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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5279578" data-attributes="member: 22779">Because, mathematically speaking, save or die is very rarely just save or die, it's usually just die.  An unprepared party of five PC's meets a medusa has to make five saving throws, possibly ten saving throws if there is a surprise round, before their first action.  The chances that someone will fail that saving throw is too great IMO.If the chance of failing the save is even 25%, odds say that someone is going to die in the first round if they are caught unprepared.That is too powerful of an ability.  Never mind the skyrocketing odds of failure if you add a second or (shudder) a third SoD effect to the same encounter.To me, this is the whole problem in a nutshell.  RC - I mostly agree with your 1-8, although, I do think that massaging the situation during design with a view of increasing the odds of a particular outcome is a form of fudging, but, that's a semantic debate that's not going to go anywhere.  I can totally see your point, I just don't agree with it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />But, there's been multiple posts in this thread that anyone who suffers from a SoD effect is at fault.  That they should have been "more careful" or if the only time a saving throw is called for is when the players screwed up.  I'm not saying you're saying this, but, it is a pretty common opinion in this thread.Sure, I put my character in harms way.  Totally accept the fact that my character might die.  Got no real beefs with that.  Heck, just lost a PC last week to disease in a 4e game (with a second character, not mine, buying it in the same encounter).  Fair enough.  Poopie happens.My beef is the binary nature of SoD.  SoD monsters are almost always one trick ponies and if you negate the SoD, the encounter is a joke.  Medusa's not a bad one actually because at least a medusa has some back up abilities.  But a bodak?  Pshaw.  Basilisk?  Cockatrice?  That stupid faerie that kills you if you look at it (whose name I'm totally blanking on)?  All one trick ponies that become, IMO, anticlimactic as soon as the party negates the baddie's one big gun.See, this is the attitude that flies up my nose.  If I don't like SoD I'm suddenly a whiney git?  I don't get to decide on my own that I think SoD is piss poor game design?  If I play with a DM who likes SoD, I just have to suck it up, or leave the game?I dunno, I play with people I can actually have a conversation with.  That I can bring up concerns and discuss them rationally.  Maybe it's because I play with almost all DM's and mostly always have.  Very, very few of my groups have been made up of gamers with little or no DMing experience.  I've found that, by and large, as evidenced by this thread, a lot of DM's really don't like SoD effects, so that, even if they use them in the game, a few words at the waffle house after the game is usually all it takes.</blockquote>

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