Thoughts on Character Death

[hong]

I once instituted a house rule that said insta-kill spells like finger of death and wail of the banshee--and of course the equivalent monster abilities, like the beholder's death eye--knock you to -1 HP and dropping, rather than dead outright. In essence, they start your body shutting down, but someone who knows how to heal still has a chance of saving you.

It works for most spells, though I was never able to logically make it work with disintegrate. Might want to give it a try, see if it works for you.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention I also changed instakill effects IMC. Most death effects, instead of killing outright, now deal 4d6 points of Con drain. It's not quite as deadly as before, but still pretty scary.

I have a design issue with effects that don't scale with level, like dropping a target to -1 hit points. Basically it makes such effects disproportionately attractive as the level of the campaign increases.

This is already seen to some extent in the core rules. If you want to be a twinked combat mage in 3E, you _don't_ want to be an evoker, even though they get all the classic boom spells. You want stuff that bypasses hit points, and that means spells like poly other (into toad), phantasmal killer, feeblemind, disintegrate, finger of death, hold monster, etc. Two disintegrates or holds will be a lot more effective against your typical 300+ hit point brute, than just chucking delayed blast fireballs around. 3.5 fixes this problem somewhat, but it's still there.