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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5631155" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, I'm not sure it is all THAT bad. Consider this, Athletics, Endurance, and Perception are generally the very skills that kick in when you have a physically life-threatening situation. Beyond that you're likely to have a decent check for a few other skills, like Heal, maybe Insight, perhaps Acrobatics depending on your fighter build. You might not WANT to rely on those for hard checks, but really if the DM is putting you in a situation where you MUST make a hard check on an off skill to stay alive, then that's a pretty darn lethal situation! Much more lethal than any normal combat would be. At the very least it shouldn't come up without a number of other failures coming up first, and the DM should certainly be looking for you to suggest a plan that provides some advantage (IE he might well allow you to say something like "OK, I make the ultimate effort to lift the rock, even if it rips half the muscles off my body") and let you succeed or erase a failure or something for the cost of a surge. You may also consider putting some kind of resource into that side of the character, a feat, a skill power, or some kind of minor item that can grant a reroll or a bonus on at least one of your skills. Maybe not even one you have a really big bonus on. After all a reroll when you need a 10+ is worth around +4, and if you need a 15+ it is worth more like +6. And yeah, there can be that 'falling off a cliff' skill check kind of thing where failing a check can be instantly lethal. The very situation came up once a while back in my game. A character had to make a leap onto a ledge because of various circumstances and failed the check with a 1. In that case I gave the character a 'make a save to fall down' and had her hanging by her fingernails off the edge, which was a LOT more fun than "you fall 500 feet to your death." I might not always be that nice either, but in this situation the player didn't screw up and had no other choice and it would have been a bad spot to have lost a character as no replacement was logically going to show up for a while. Nor would the body have been recoverable. So I guess the moral of that story is there's no one-size-fits-all answer to those things. It also depends on the tone of the game. If it is a nasty dark gritty high death rate game, well then by all means play grim reaper. In my case it was more fun to have the PCs all rushing to try to keep the enemy from finishing off the character and it made a really nice scene. Plus it is a bit more of a "PCs are big heroes that do super stuff" kind of a theme to the game.</blockquote>

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