D&D 5E What Single Thing Would You Eliminate

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the primary issue people have with this spell is they don’t like the Bonus Action to bring someone back into the fight so easily and quickly. I think most DMs from older editions of the game prefer that when someone in the combat is dropped to 0 (on either side), they are out of participation for the rest of the combat, and that quickly patching them back up to get back into the fight creates a dissonance in storytelling they don’t like. It is part and parcel to the “1+ hit point and your fine, 0 hit points or less and your (unconscious and) dying” binary state of D&D. Healing Word comes across like mage handing smelling salts under PC noses to get them back in the fight.

I confess to having some sympathy to this viewpoint.

You have to admit though, it leads to a somewhat rotten player experience, "hey, you took a chance, here's your reward, sit out for the next hour while we play out the climactic fight of the year." I think the problem is simply that you cannot really resolve this tension between what is dramatic and what is fun to play at the table using a set of rules that is built like classic D&D (more or less). 4e never really quite included a tool set for this either, though it can potentially. Of course the experience is a BIT different from what you would normally think of as D&D at that point.

 

[S'mon]

You have to admit though, it leads to a somewhat rotten player experience, "hey, you took a chance, here's your reward, sit out for the next hour while we play out the climactic fight of the year."

So then the alternative is either that the monsters quickly finish off your 0 hp PC to stop him/her popping back up, or the DM has monsters ignore fallen PCs so everyone keeps popping back up and the 'climactic fight' becomes an anticlimactic foregone conclusion. I do the former of course, but having 0 hp PCs incapacitated for a week as in 1e definitely leads to a lower PC death rate.

 

[Mind of tempest]

So then the alternative is either that the monsters quickly finish off your 0 hp PC to stop him/her popping back up, or the DM has monsters ignore fallen PCs so everyone keeps popping back up and the 'climactic fight' becomes an anticlimactic foregone conclusion. I do the former of course, but having 0 hp PCs incapacitated for a week as in 1e definitely leads to a lower PC death rate.

you could give it to both sides and let everything rapidly turn to chaos as if the other side can do it things get scary all of a sudden.

 

[S'mon]

you could give it to both sides and let everything rapidly turn to chaos as if the other side can do it things get scary all of a sudden.

I do do that occasionally, normally though it's only named NPCs who get death saves. I'm planning to give the enemy leaders (orcs) death saves in tonight's big battle, since they have a Black Sun Priestess who can heal them & get them back on their feet. Although she might just use Animate Dead instead.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I don't see how 'popping back up' makes things anti-climatic.

Or how dropping people so often that they have to pop back up enough that it's annoying the DM is never questioned as part of this perceived problem.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't see how 'popping back up' makes things anti-climatic.

Or how dropping people so often that they have to pop back up enough that it's annoying the DM is never questioned as part of this perceived problem.

Yeah, it seems to me that, ideally, this would be a kind of dramatic and potentially unusual kind of event. The problem in dramatic terms is that fighting is so common in D&D, it is practically the main activity. So why worry about drama in ordinary fights? My answer in my 4e games was just not to do those sorts of fights, but to do other things.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't see how 'popping back up' makes things anti-climatic.

Or how dropping people so often that they have to pop back up enough that it's annoying the DM is never questioned as part of this perceived problem.

There is tension involved in the resource attrition of hp & question of if the party should stop to patch themselves up through whatever means because it used to be a serious risk to keep going while stopping could result in all kinds of risk or consequence.

Popping back up with healing word after nullifying all of the damage after bringing the target to zero is an inversion of risk that makes it safer to not stop. As a bonus action first level spell with a 60 foot range healing word does not involve any meaningful cost to the caster, the caser's action economy usage, put the caster at risk of things like an AoO from needing to get close, or even cost the downed player something when their turn comes around.

Because of how effective short rests are for healing up the party no longer needs to rely on the healer's higher level slots for that so the caster keeps adding more & more times they can cast it without really taxing themselves in any meaningful way to the party's capabilities & efficiency in combat. That only leaves "will we be able to get a long rest" & that's rife with problems of it's own since even getting attacked & having everyone in the party go nova with their remaining resources when trying to take a long rest just results in getting everything back when the long rest finishes


You can think of it a different way by looking at basically every bomb disarming scene in movies & tv. If the expert just reaches in & casually clips a wire while strolling away without a care in the world there's obviously no tension. If the expert is carefully selecting the right wire & trying to settle on clipping this wire or that wire while the timer is beeping/ticking down you've got tension spread over a longer period of time. If the expert is taking their time unscrewing the housing for the bomb & their allies are shown desperately fighting off the bad guys for whatever reason between screws you've got tension even though the expert literally can not fail at removing a screw. If the expert is neutralizing a dozen bombs by squirting them with neutralizing foam like a pest control guy & the allies are basically playing cards you've got the anticlimatic 5e style

 

[Vaalingrade]

Well okay, but to take the bomb diffusion analogy, could the problem also be in the fact that every bomb is counting down super fast to the point that there's no time to build tension?

If players are dropping every fight and having to be brought back into the fight, then the main culprit is the routine dropping because it is the cause of them having to be brought back into the action. Maybe ease back on the encounter difficulty if you're mowing down PCs like wheat?

One of the worse plagues upon writing these days is not applying the correct stakes. Everything is life and death or relationship destroying. Pacing with varied stakes; some lesser, some more dramatic is the key to telling a satisfying long-term story. Not every fight must bring the party to the brink of annihilation.

 

[tetrasodium]

Well okay, but to take the bomb diffusion analogy, could the problem also be in the fact that every bomb is counting down super fast to the point that there's no time to build tension?

If players are dropping every fight and having to be brought back into the fight, then the main culprit is the routine dropping because it is the cause of them having to be brought back into the action. Maybe ease back on the encounter difficulty if you're mowing down PCs like wheat?

One of the worse plagues upon writing these days is not applying the correct stakes. Everything is life and death or relationship destroying. Pacing with varied stakes; some lesser, some more dramatic is the key to telling a satisfying long-term story. Not every fight must bring the party to the brink of annihilation.

You've got it backwards, hp attrition is when the gradual loss of hp adds up to the point of being threatening; it doesn't matter how fast or slow it happens as long as there is time for tension to build over a real risk. When it comes to the topic of hp attrition & the related tension 5e is built with a rotten core that a bunch of other things are rooted into maintaining phb197 which in turn ensures that hp attrition is an anticlimactic thing to be ignored until the damage beyond zero till negative max hp absorb shield is popped

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There is tension involved in the resource attrition of hp & question of if the party should stop to patch themselves up through whatever means because it used to be a serious risk to keep going while stopping could result in all kinds of risk or consequence.

Popping back up with healing word after nullifying all of the damage after bringing the target to zero is an inversion of risk that makes it safer to not stop. As a bonus action first level spell with a 60 foot range healing word does not involve any meaningful cost to the caster, the caser's action economy usage, put the caster at risk of things like an AoO from needing to get close, or even cost the downed player something when their turn comes around.

Because of how effective short rests are for healing up the party no longer needs to rely on the healer's higher level slots for that so the caster keeps adding more & more times they can cast it without really taxing themselves in any meaningful way to the party's capabilities & efficiency in combat. That only leaves "will we be able to get a long rest" & that's rife with problems of it's own since even getting attacked & having everyone in the party go nova with their remaining resources when trying to take a long rest just results in getting everything back when the long rest finishes


You can think of it a different way by looking at basically every bomb disarming scene in movies & tv. If the expert just reaches in & casually clips a wire while strolling away without a care in the world there's obviously no tension. If the expert is carefully selecting the right wire & trying to settle on clipping this wire or that wire while the timer is beeping/ticking down you've got tension spread over a longer period of time. If the expert is taking their time unscrewing the housing for the bomb & their allies are shown desperately fighting off the bad guys for whatever reason between screws you've got tension even though the expert literally can not fail at removing a screw. If the expert is neutralizing a dozen bombs by squirting them with neutralizing foam like a pest control guy & the allies are basically playing cards you've got the anticlimatic 5e style

ROFLMAO!

4e's solution was ELEGANT, key every single heal to HS. Then they let up a bit on that later on, which could get problematic, but it never got completely crazy except for a couple edge case party builds (and Vampires are pretty wonky, but it kinda depends on the details of the party and combats).

So, my answer was, have a lot of non-combat SC-type stuff that sucked up resources and could produce drama in multiple ways. Then you could still have some basic fights, mainly just to provide the right atmosphere and suck up a few more resources. These would usually have some goals besides 'kill everything' to enhance interest, but in terms of fighting/damage its fine if the PCs just 'get up again', since they're unlikely to really be fighting to the death. Finally you get the really dramatic super action-packed fights where everything is a roller-coaster and I can insert some sort of 'special rules' (IE powers or terrain, whatever) to create the "and he goes down" sort of drama (falls are a cheap way to get this BTW). This is where nasty save ends effects can play a part, if used sparingly (and its best if there is a costly 'cure' available, way to create some tension). Heck, you can even throw in a '5 minutes' duration if you do that right, or even a permanent one.

Anyway, forcing the game to rely on hit points as THE way of doing this gets old fast, and every edition of D&D since the mid 90's has had a way around it.