D&D 5E The -10 Myth: How a Poorly-Worded Gygaxian Rule Became the Modern Death Save

[jgsugden]

A thing to remember - widespread wasn't a thing back then.

There was no internet to distribute information. Information had a downhill flow, as opposed to the horizontal flow we now see on the internet. The Books and Magazines were the source of information and provided the entire framework for the game. There was very little community on which to draw upon for interpretation and clarification.

Yes, there was some horizontal spread between players in a community, or at conventions. However, gameshop play, conventions, etc... were not the forces they are now. There are a small number of people that had wide access to other players as information sources, but until the mid 90s you were looking at the printed page for understanding for almost everything.

With regards to the -10 rule, this was a common misunderstanding of a poorly worded rule where people widely interpreted it the same way because they found the game too harsh without the leeway.

 

[Stormonu]

Someone got time to scour Dragon Magazine? I’m sure a lot of ink was spilled over this subject in the “Letters from the Readers” section, but I don’t have ready access to my PDF versions (or print, for that matter) for a quick search.

 

[RangerWickett]

Better, I think, than death saves, but I digress.

I work at a medical library and look at a lot of medical textbooks in my job, and just kind of generally like studying health and dying. There are very few role-playing games where injury functions like in reality. I think the recent legend of the five rings game had a pretty good model where you had stamina to avoid being hurt, but then if you were hit you were going to suffer injury.

Even if you are delimmed and begin quickly bleeding out, you simply pass out after a round or two, but don't die for several more minutes because, well, magic exists. And magic can restore things even better than modern medicine can. And we can already bring go back after they are sort of technically dead for a few minutes.

To me, having people die at negative 10 hit points is too simplistic. Having someone die from a couple death saves is also too simplistic. I prefer having zero hit points represent an inability to fight, but remaining conscious vaguely. Then as you fail saves or drop lower, you pass out, but it's still possible to bring someone back to the break of death for quite a while.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There are very few role-playing games where injury functions like in reality.

Even some very early RPGs, like Runequest, experimented with more realistic injury systems.

The verdict was it just wasn't fun.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

With regards to the -10 rule, this was a common misunderstanding of a poorly worded rule where people widely interpreted it the same way because they found the game too harsh without the leeway.

I feel like maybe misunderstanding is maybe the wrong phrasing here.

Like, as you point out, people didn't really have the internet (I mean some real nerds had stuff like it, I worked with someone who had been using emails since the 1970s, but it wasn't as we know it), only 'cons and word-of-mouth to really spread it, and yet somehow, across the entire globe, the international D&D community all seemed to come to believe this same rule. I knew 1E players in the UK when I started in 1989, and I started with 2E, but they already subscribed to the -10 HP = dead theory (I know this because of an argument at one point, actually over whether an NPC was dead).

It's more like people saw this rule, and decided to ignore a bit of it - if it just a misunderstanding, I think it would be much more irregular, people would have talked about -3 a lot and stuff - but it was consistently -10.

I do think Snarf's listed reasons are generally valid as to why rules got ignored/re-interpreted/mis-interpreted/changed etc. but I just feel like it's really unlikely this was simply an error rather than people going "let's take the loosest possible bit of this" (which, in my experience, was a common attitude into the 1990s).

 

[Mannahnin]

I only remember using the -10 hit point rule in 2E, don’t remember using it in 1E, but that was some 30 or more years ago.

It's my recollection that 2nd ed codified the Death's Door optional rule of death being at -10, with the 1hp/rd bleed, rather than at zero.

This was a simplification and expansion of Gygax's optional rule from the 1E DMG, still presented as optional, but used at every table at which I remember playing 2E.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

We never had any confusion about it. My 11-year-old self read it a couple times, thought about it, and figured it out. I used it in my game for about two or three years, iirc, before I modified it to be "-10, with an adjustment based on your Con HP bonus". So a Fighter with +3 HP for having a Con of 17, would have his cut-off at -13...and the frail Illusionist with a -1 HP adjustment would be at -9.

The rule, with the 'optional -3' bit, imnsho, is pretty straight forward: You get hit and go to 0 to -3, you are unconscious and dying, loosing 1hp per round until you reach -10. If you get hit and go to -4 or lower, you are dead.

I honestly did have some DM's misinterpret this to simply think you weren't dead until -10, period. But I only had to point it out to them once and then they got it. It's like THAC0; it's not complicated at all...yet soooo many people, apparently, "don't get it" or find it "confusing". Really? Taking 8 points of damage and going from 5hp to -3...no problem. Rolling 18, subtracting it from THAC0 15, is -3... "Nope! Too confusing".

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[RangerWickett]

Even some very early RPGs, like Runequest, experimented with more realistic injury systems.

The verdict was it just wasn't fun.

Oh, I loved the L5R system for samurai combat. You've got to slice limbs off with that. And the game gives PCs resources to turn horrible wounds into nasty scars, with the exception of duels to the death.

 

[Shiroiken]

I just ignored the rule in the DMG. No one ever took Deaths Door, so it never became an issue. Everyone knew that 0 HP was death, which came early and often.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I just ignored the rule in the DMG. No one ever took Deaths Door, so it never became an issue. Everyone knew that 0 HP was death, which came early and often.

Yeah, well my table was so hard-core that we ruled that you died if you were reduced to POSITIVE 10 hit points.

(It REALLY sucked to be a first level MU)