D&D 5E Surprisingly Lethal Side Effect of Multiattack

[ScaleyBob]

I tend to try to work out what the monsters would do.

Most creatures will switch targets if someone goes down, because they feel threatened by them. There are two cases where I would have the monsters actually attack damaged enemies:

1) Anything motivated by hunger that doesn't know about or isn't threatened by the party. Because the players reacting to something trying to eat one of them is a nice motivation.

2) Intelligent, tactically trained or lead enemies who have seen the party using in-combat healing to bring someone back up. In that case, I'll happily have them make one extra attack to a downed PC. I telegraph this clearly the first few times a party sees it, though - one of them shouting something like "They've got a healer - if they go down, make sure they stay down". The party learns to expect it after a while.

The death save system is something I'm very glad was imported from 4e - unlike the 3e system of -10 and you're dead, it means I as the GM feel that it's perfectly reasonable for me to damage a downed PC if the situation calls for it.

I like both of these - the idea of a big, slavering monster taking someone down to zero HP, then licking it's lips and salivating because next turn it's going to eat them should give any player the willies. Should encourage much panicked healing.

Intelligent, nasty and possibly dishonourable NPCs should definitely do that. I also suspect that almost any opponent with Multi attack who can't get to another PC could well use their extra attack on the downed PC, just to be sure.

The 5E Death Saving throw system is great - it improves on the already good 4E system, with the stabilizing after 3 successes, and the standing up on a roll of a 20/two fails on a roll of a one. 4E didn't have either of those, and failed death saves didn't go away until you took a short rest. There were a few monsters in 4E that could force PCs to take Death Saves with their attacks - they always added a certain level of worry to any fight they showed up in. Not entirely sure how to replicate that effect in 5E.

 

[Flamestrike]

And yet, somehow I and my players are able to use this procedure successfully. Amazing!

So if you roll three dice at the same time how can you tell which attack (roll) is the first attack that hits?

And how can you tell which dice is the monsters primary attack which dice is it secondary attack?

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

So if you roll three dice at the same time how can you tell which attack (roll) is the first attack that hits?

Well, you could specify for yourself which die is which before rolling, count result from left to right according to location of the dice once come to rest, or even count the results of the dice in alphabetical order by color.

And how can you tell which dice is the monsters primary attack which dice is it secondary attack?

For that, you could specify which die is which before rolling, or have the order of the attacks be the same as the order they are printed in the book.

I happen to use the alphabetical by color order for dice, and printed order for attacks, as that is the easiest for me to keep straight during sessions I've elected to indulge in numerous alcoholic beverages.

And I won't be surprised if [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] has yet another method for keeping dice and what they mean straight even while rolling handfuls at a time.

 

[Ahrimon]

So if you roll three dice at the same time how can you tell which attack (roll) is the first attack that hits?

And how can you tell which dice is the monsters primary attack which dice is it secondary attack?

I usually do left to right when it's a bunch of rolls. So wherever the dice land on the table is who get's what attack roll. If it's several monsters with one attack a group of characters I'll sometimes call out what color is who or go left to right and around the table.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So if you roll three dice at the same time how can you tell which attack (roll) is the first attack that hits?

And how can you tell which dice is the monsters primary attack which dice is it secondary attack?

Are you asking me how I usually do it, how you could do it, or for an exhaustive list of all the possible ways you could do it?

At the risk of repeating things you already know: you can either do colors, or left to right, top to bottom (like reading English). If you don't want to worry about top-to-bottom ambiguity you could simply physically linearize your dice as part of the rolling process (e.g. roll them on a ramp one die wide so the dice come out in a line instead of a plane; or sweep them into a rough line with your hand before reading them).

Once you have a total ordering on the dice, mapping those dice to specific attacks is likewise easy. For instance, you could assign dice to attacks in the same order they are written in the monster manual. If the text says "Multiattack: the Balor makes one longsword attack and one whip attack," then the first die is for the longsword and the second is for the whip; and if the longsword hits and downs the PC and the whip misses, re-roll the whip because it's at advantage.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Intelligent, nasty and possibly dishonourable NPCs should definitely do that. I also suspect that almost any opponent with Multi attack who can't get to another PC could well use their extra attack on the downed PC, just to be sure.

It's probably not even dishonorable. In real life, soldiers learn to double-tap targets (shoot twice) to make sure they stay down. Even in a game world, you can't really be sure something is actually at zero HP just because it falls over; you might as well auto-crit it (I'm assuming here that attacks against a target feigning unconsciousness receive the same auto-crit bonus as attacks against a genuinely unconscious target) to make sure it doesn't pop up and hit you as soon as your back is turned.

 

[ScaleyBob]

It's probably not even dishonorable. In real life, soldiers learn to double-tap targets (shoot twice) to make sure they stay down. Even in a game world, you can't really be sure something is actually at zero HP just because it falls over; you might as well auto-crit it (I'm assuming here that attacks against a target feigning unconsciousness receive the same auto-crit bonus as attacks against a genuinely unconscious target) to make sure it doesn't pop up and hit you as soon as your back is turned.

Given RAW, you don't get an autocrit, but you would get Advantage. It could be a way to make sure someone isn't faking being dead. "He's unconscious, but, hold on I didn't get an autocrit. The $#@% is just faking. Why are you frowning at me MR GM? Is it my blatant Metagaming, or my attacking helpless targets who just want to get out the fight alive?"

Despite my new moderate, not rolling all attacks at once, I managed to kill a PC last session. It was a mixture of the Bearded Devils no healing attack, ongoing damage while unconscious, some bad Death Saves, and some unwillingness from the Druid to take a a possible 5 HP damage opportunity attack. To be fair to the Druid, he then fell unconscious as well, making it all the harder to heal someone.