Rya.Reisender
Explorer
For me this is not an issue at all, I actually really like that you can quickly heal someone like that. If the characters are unconscious for too long the players will get bored.
D&D 5E Whack-a-mole gaming or being healed from 0 hp
- Thread starter CapnZapp
- Start date
It's also worth noting that, at least in the first 5 or 6 levels when this sort of shenanigans will take place, staying at 1 hp is kind of dangerous because one decent crit will probably kill you outright, or make it easier to spread the damage around. Take a 3rd level fighter with 36 hp for example. He's dropped to 0, and the cleric brings him back up to 1 next. The Lets say they're fighting something like an Ettin (CR 4, hard encounter for a 4-person party); The Ettin could crit his first attack and do anywhere from 9 to 37 damage, possibly triggering instant death. It's not likely, but it's possible. Even if he doesn't, there's nothing stopping the Ettin from simply moving over to the Cleric and hitting with his second attack.
Suddenly, ignoring better healing options in favor of simply bringing them back up to 1 every time starts looking a little dangerous.
Suddenly, ignoring better healing options in favor of simply bringing them back up to 1 every time starts looking a little dangerous.
Kithas
First Post
my group/I have no problem with the RAW rules for death. Generally speaking my dm gives us pretty hard fights(at least beyond deadly every week) where taking a whole turn or bonus action to heal someone that will just get dropped again will actually make us get tpk'd(weve gotten tpk'd once and had at least 2 pcs die).
In my experience if pop-up healing is working, your dm needs to fight harder.
Realistically speaking if even demi-intelligent creatures are fighting you and they notice you get back up with relative ease they are going to try to keep you down ie. double tap. If you're teaching a noob how to deal with zombies, rule 1 is cardio, rule 2 is double tap. The same goes for minions, rule 1 is focus fire rule 2 is double tap. Imagine if every time you went down they made sure to hit you with a melee attack once asap, you'd have 2 death saves(auto crit in melee) and if you arent healed before your turn youve got a 50/50 shot to die outright. In a world where getting up from grievous wounds only takes a quick "GET OFF YOUR BUTT" from your local cleric, pretty much every combatant would be used to taking extra measures to keep people on the floor.
In my experience if pop-up healing is working, your dm needs to fight harder.
Realistically speaking if even demi-intelligent creatures are fighting you and they notice you get back up with relative ease they are going to try to keep you down ie. double tap. If you're teaching a noob how to deal with zombies, rule 1 is cardio, rule 2 is double tap. The same goes for minions, rule 1 is focus fire rule 2 is double tap. Imagine if every time you went down they made sure to hit you with a melee attack once asap, you'd have 2 death saves(auto crit in melee) and if you arent healed before your turn youve got a 50/50 shot to die outright. In a world where getting up from grievous wounds only takes a quick "GET OFF YOUR BUTT" from your local cleric, pretty much every combatant would be used to taking extra measures to keep people on the floor.
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Rhenny
Adventurer
I agree with you here. In many of my sessions and in sessions that I've played in or spoken with others about, clerics (especially Light and Tempest) are usually better off using offensive spells rather than healing so that the fight ends sooner. I suppose it is true for Paladins too. Haven't heard so much about Bard or Druid though.
CapnZapp
Legend
You've correctly described that there is no reward without risk.
But you haven't countered the argument that this is still worth the risk.
Take that Ettin critical for instance, it's a great example why this tactic is so good.
The Fighter is at 1 hp. Unless the Ettin does absolutely maximum damage (37) the only effect from the attack will be... that the fighter drops to zero.
That's probably 25 points of damage that simply... evaporates. 25 points of damage, negated. Automatically. For free!
That's four healing potions saved. Or two second level cure light wounds. And more importantly: instead of spending two full actions on healing that damage, all the cleric needs to do... is spend another Healing Word to bring that fighter back into the fight!
I am not saying you're wrong when you say "the Ettin can instakill the fighter" or "the Ettin can simply move over to attack the Cleric".
I am saying, however, a minmaxer evaluates the odds of those things happening... and then still pursues this tactic.
That is because what you're not taking into account. Chances are the Ettin misses the fighter with his first attack. Fighters often have high AC.
And what about the cleric. Those cure spells could (and should) be used for things like Hold Person, which means there's a chance of denying even more damage from the enemy side.
In contrast: what if the Ettin stays to bash the fallen fighter. He has advantage on his attacks. His troglodyte allies get advantage on their attacks. Hits mean automatic death save failures. If they manage to actually kill the fighter, the cleric must spend at least a third level spell (revivify).
Just as it's a much better tactic for the players to let the "zero hp" rule do most of the healing for them, it's a much better tactic for the monsters to have the auto-strike-on-fallen rule do its best to negate that advantage.
In the end, neither players nor monsters gain much.
But the players and the game have suffered. Now everyone is out to murder you, and not just defend themselves.
To me, that's a big shift in playing atmosphere. And I don't like it.
That's why I'm adding negative hit points to the game: to allow monsters to abstain from killing the fallen without that making whack-a-mole a superior tactic!
I'm sure there are more ways to accomplish this, but this thread often falls into the trap of criticizing the negative hp suggestion for the wrong reason. I'm not out to make things worse for the players - quite the opposite: the change is there to not make me kill off fallen player characters.
This is supposed to make life easier on the players!
Not sure if you're only looking for alternatives, or if you're also interested in knowing how many games find this an issue. In any case, this has not being an issue in our games. I've now DMed 5e for a little more than a year, almost every week (sometimes twice a week).
I've experienced that, when PCs get up from zero once, then they tend to retreat to fight another day. I only had the villain "double-tap" them once, and it was the Gorgon (from the Birthright setting), something like the evilest evil in the evil book...
werecorpse
Adventurer
My criticism of you negative hit points fix are as follows:
1. Unless you meta game what hit points you are on (and sometimes even if you do) it means there is a reasonable chance that a caster who uses an action to cast cure wounds on an unconscious ally might leave them still being unconscious meaning the caster probably has to spend another action curing - which is less fun than being able to use a bonus action and get to do something else. I think anything that drains healers ability to do things other than heal is less fun for the healer.
2. The person who is unconscious spends longer unconscious
(Both 1&2 stem from an issue with making players not participate in the combat)
3. You say that a natural result of staying on 1hp and damage taking you to 0 is that pcs will do it and therefore monsters will coup de grace. I say a natural result is that pcs won't do it because they will realise that they will then be liable to a coup de grace. It makes no sense to me that a monster will decline to coup de grace someone because they think they are able to be restored by a powerful cure in 1 round but will coup de grace them because they know they can be restored by a bonus action. If the monster is smart enough to think they can be healed back in a few seconds work - but not if I bash them a few times then it is as likely to take this opportunity (btw any hit on an unconscious character by a melee weapon is a crit - 2 failed death rolls)
4. There are other options available that do not cause issue 1&2 above.
Is this an actual issue in play for your characters? Do they enter combat (or stay in combat when there are other options) on 1 hp? My experience is that characters on low hit points retreat and heal up. They don't know what's coming and they don't want to spend rounds on the floor (the least fun part of D&D is playing an unconscious character).
Also if you think of hit points and combat as the same way you look at a whole event. There's no point blaming the guy who missed the last shot. ie 30hp means you can take a half dozen blows from a guy doing 1d6+2. It doesn't matter if the last one that put you down knocked you from 1 to 0 or from 8 to 0.
My solution to the problem is
1. People who fail death saves have a chance of lingering injuries (so no one wants to risk going unconscious)
2. After returning from unconscious all your rolls are at disadvantage until the end of your next action (so no one wants to go unconscious and so drinking a potion is a good option attacking or putting oneself at risk of a save isn't)
3. If - and only if - the bad guys see someone constantly coming back from unconscious they will double tap (as would the PC's)
I used negative hit points in 3e. I prefer this system.
1. Unless you meta game what hit points you are on (and sometimes even if you do) it means there is a reasonable chance that a caster who uses an action to cast cure wounds on an unconscious ally might leave them still being unconscious meaning the caster probably has to spend another action curing - which is less fun than being able to use a bonus action and get to do something else. I think anything that drains healers ability to do things other than heal is less fun for the healer.
2. The person who is unconscious spends longer unconscious
(Both 1&2 stem from an issue with making players not participate in the combat)
3. You say that a natural result of staying on 1hp and damage taking you to 0 is that pcs will do it and therefore monsters will coup de grace. I say a natural result is that pcs won't do it because they will realise that they will then be liable to a coup de grace. It makes no sense to me that a monster will decline to coup de grace someone because they think they are able to be restored by a powerful cure in 1 round but will coup de grace them because they know they can be restored by a bonus action. If the monster is smart enough to think they can be healed back in a few seconds work - but not if I bash them a few times then it is as likely to take this opportunity (btw any hit on an unconscious character by a melee weapon is a crit - 2 failed death rolls)
4. There are other options available that do not cause issue 1&2 above.
Is this an actual issue in play for your characters? Do they enter combat (or stay in combat when there are other options) on 1 hp? My experience is that characters on low hit points retreat and heal up. They don't know what's coming and they don't want to spend rounds on the floor (the least fun part of D&D is playing an unconscious character).
Also if you think of hit points and combat as the same way you look at a whole event. There's no point blaming the guy who missed the last shot. ie 30hp means you can take a half dozen blows from a guy doing 1d6+2. It doesn't matter if the last one that put you down knocked you from 1 to 0 or from 8 to 0.
My solution to the problem is
1. People who fail death saves have a chance of lingering injuries (so no one wants to risk going unconscious)
2. After returning from unconscious all your rolls are at disadvantage until the end of your next action (so no one wants to go unconscious and so drinking a potion is a good option attacking or putting oneself at risk of a save isn't)
3. If - and only if - the bad guys see someone constantly coming back from unconscious they will double tap (as would the PC's)
I used negative hit points in 3e. I prefer this system.
Even if you don't use the cleave rule, the Ettin still gets a second attack. So assuming the fighter has been revived *and* has taken a turn to stand up and pose as a threat, the Ettin will still just club him once back to 0, and then move over to the cleric or someone else nearby. Suddenly, it's not as simple as keeping one guy up retroactively after he falls each time, because now the 'love' is getting spread around a lot more.
And if you do use the cleave rule, this whole issue goes away entirely.
Is it a risk? Yes. Is it worth the risk? Could be, especially if the monster is pretty low on health. Are there other potentially better alternatives? Most likely. Such as outright healing the fighter, having him go full-defense to hopefully absorb both Ettin attacks rather than go down in the first of two attacks.
An Ettin has two attacks at +7 to hit for each attack, which is hardly something to assume will miss outright. Can a min/maxer who's built specifically to abuse a rule calculate the odds and decide to risk it? Sure! But the game is never going to be designed to prevent min/maxers from doing that. And in this fairly random example I brought up, I wouldn't even consider it a smart tactic for the group. In fact, if things do go wrong (such as the fighter getting hit with the first attack, and someone else getting hit with the second), you can easily have a TPK or close enough. It doesn't take much for a monster like that to change the dynamics from "lol the fighter keeps popping back up" to "my hell the fighter and cleric just went down and the ettin is still pissed!"
CapnZapp
Legend
You still merely describe basic facts rather than addressing the strategy gains involved.
Yes, that can happen. So what?
The fighter still soaked a 30 point attack in such a way only 1 point of healing is required to negate all that damage.
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