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Message: <blockquote data-quote="touc" data-source="post: 7933097" data-attributes="member: 19270">Survivability is relative to what I throw at my party.But, I do use a few house rules to pump up a more realistic threat of death:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Variable initiative. You can't predict turns.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Vitality. Replaced death saves with a pool of vitality points to reflect actual damage body takes (if you actually got hit with a giant's club, ever, you'd be dead). This creates a real danger zone when 0 hit points are reached (1 hit from a giant will kill you, unlike death saves), and a real danger if a character repeatedly goes down (and up) in combat. In more detail:[spoiler] [/spoiler]</li> </ul>[spoiler]When you hit 0 hit points and don't die outright, you opt to gain the Staggered condition or go Unconscious.Until you have positive hit points, all further damage comes from your Vitality points, which are equal to your 1st level hit points. These never change over time, except if your CON modifier changes. Hit points reflect your ability to avoid fatal blows, not take them. Vitality reflects the body itself. A sword to the heart kills a 20th level man just as easy as 1st level. If you become Staggered, you are still on your feet, gain 1 death point, and all your rolls are made with disadvantage. All enemy rolls against your abilities are made with advantage. You have no movement (you can still move but must use the Dash action, and because you have 0 movement, you can't dodge or disengage). If you have 2 death points, you gain a lingering injury (DMG 272). If you have 3, you die (optional rule for a glorious death, to roleplay something that gives a bonus to another player). This condition goes away if you gain at least 1 hit point. If an enemy opts to knock you unconscious, you cannot choose this option. This allows players to act but in a very risky way. In a whack-a-mole battle, death points can very quickly accumulate, a lingering injury may be no laughing matter, especially if you get a missing limb or have to make a save to take a combat action, and that pool of vitality is relatively shallow.If you go Unconscious, you lose 1 vitality and make a DC10 death save to stabilize. Failure you are bleeding out, taking 1 vitality damage at the start of your turn. A natural 1 increases this to 1d4 damage. You avoid accumulating death points this way but if you've taken vitality damage already, this may still kill you.Death Points go away 1 per long rest. Vitality restores at your CON modifier (minimum 1) per long rest. In play, when a player goes down or even gets staggered, it's been an all out alarm to get that person out of danger and healed, when possible. With unpredictable turns, it's not a guarantee.Vitality cannot be magically healed unless hit points are max. Even then, they heal at 1 per 10 points of healing (calculated as if the healing effect did maximum, so a potion of healing (2d4+2, max 10) would heal 1 vitality to a character at full hit points, but a 1st level healing word  spell (1d4+4, max 8) would do nothing .[/spoiler]<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Resurrection survival chance. The AD&D table from the CON page works pretty well and gives another layer to the CON score, or the Matt Colville "ritual" where people can try to affect the roll is also interesting. However, it's all moot if no one is ever threatened.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Modified monsters. It's DM fiat, but I was not a fan of 75% of the monster manual making creatures nothing more than big bags of hit points. This means adding spells back to demons, restoring golems to magic immune, and so on, to provide a greater challenge.</li> </ul>With all that, I still don't have anywhere near the body count of prior editions, especially AD&D (had a player's character die so often and come back that her followers began to revere her as a deity.) I'm okay with that; I just want the threat there so players don't automatically assume that every situation is meant to be solved with hack n slash. In AD&D, with auto-kill or save-or-die situations abundant, often you were looking for clever ways to avoid direct combat, which led to innovation and creative ideas. I do worry D&D has morphed that a bit: by reducing threat to characters we're reducing the need to be innovative and avoid trouble.Anyways, don't want to get too far off topic on a design philosophy debate, but it does go a bit hand in hand.</blockquote>

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