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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 6701006" data-attributes="member: 53980">Barring factors such as regeneration, each hit against a creature is one less hit it can take before going down.For example, let's assume that a PC, Hero, is fighting a pair of orcs. For purposes of this example these are both named villains, Blill and Blob, so the DM has decided that they will use the PC dying rules. It takes an average of two hits from Hero to reduce an orc to zero hp. Hero can make two attacks per round.On round one, Hero hits Blill once and misses him once. The orcs make two attacks against Hero.On round two, Hero hits Blill, knocking him to zero. He has one remaining attack which he can either make against Blob, or as coup de grace against Blill (which would leave Blill one death save away from death). Blob makes an attack against Hero.On round three, Hero's attacks hit Blob once and miss him once. If Hero attacked Blob last round, Blob is now at zero HP. However, if he wasted his second attack on Blill last round, then Blob can attack Hero again this round.As you can see from the above example, by choosing to coup de grace, the PC takes an additional attack during the fight. If Hero wanted to make sure that Blill was dead, he would have to attack him again in round three, guaranteeing Blob another attack.IME, players usually assume that dropped enemies can't be healed in combat (because they lack healing abilities) until they see otherwise. IMO, monsters should generally approach PCs with this assumption unless they have a reason to know better. There's no need to change rules or assumptions as long as you assume that PCs are not common. Even healing potions are not common. 50 gp is not a trivial amount to anyone other than the wealthy. By comparison, it costs 60 gp to maintain a middle class lifestyle for one month. In real world terms that means a healing potion would cost something like $1500. Which is hardly chump change for most of us.I would say that my assumptions are pretty close to classic D&D. Classed characters were traditionally a small minority. Of those, certainly not all would be adventurers. Some clerics oversee a temple, while a fighter may have retired from the adventuring life after taking an arrow to the knee. Of the remaining classed adventurers, only a portion would be healers. Depending on whether you count Paladins and Rangers as healers, and assuming an even distribution of the classes, between one quarter and less than half of classed adventurers have healing powers. Would you base your tactics in a fight on something only 25% to 42% of Navy SEALS can do, if you weren't even certain you were fighting a SEAL? Absolutely. I believe I said, earlier in this thread, that if an enemy had researched the PC's capabilities they might be more inclined to coup de grace. That said, I don't think random orc # 2 or the lich who has been trapped in a tomb for 1000 years is likely to have heard of the PCs, much less what they're capable of.My point is that coup de grace is not a go-to tactic for anything that isn't both suicidal and insane. In my campaigns, a monster's goal is not usually to take one PC to hell with him, but to survive. It takes two attacks to make sure that a target will never get up again (and thanks to Revivify, even that isn't a guarantee). That puts you two attacks further away from the goal of putting all of your opponents to zero and surviving the fight. For the average monster, killing a PC is pointless if that means that the rest of the party slaughters the monster. As DMs, we know that the likely outcome of facing the PCs will be the death of the monsters, but the monsters shouldn't know that.</blockquote>

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