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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 4645007" data-attributes="member: 114">I was thinking about ways of simplifying combat and reducing or removing additional saving throws where I could, and I realised that from a statistical point of view it would be pretty simple and relatively accurate <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="(:" />)) to remove saving throws for ongoing damage and say that all ongoing damage lasts for two rounds.After all, ongoing 5 does 5, then 50% chance of another 5, then 50% chance of another 5 after that. The expected damage is 5 + 2.5 + 1.25 +0.62 etc which approaches 10 pretty closely.The same way ongoing 10 approaches a final result of 20, ongoing 20 approaches a final result of 40 and so forth.So from a statistical point of view, the expected average damage of ongoing damage can be maintained by doing away with the 'save at end of turn to remove ongoing damage' and just saying that it works for 2 rounds then stops.Sure, it removes the bugbear of failing a save 5 times in a row and dieing - but I don't think of that as a particularly bad thing (and I'm the DM). Three times we have had characters who are at -ve hp die as a result of ongoing damage that they didn't seem to be able to save against.I'll probably discuss this with my players and see if they would like to try it out. The numbers should work out the same on average over the adventure and it is one less set of rolls we have to worry about during a fight.Cheers</blockquote>

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