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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5846025" data-attributes="member: 54877">As I understand the original conception of saving throws, they were misused almost from the very beginning. Namely, they get used as the only (frequently poor) way out, instead of a nice, last-ditch chance to get out of what has developed into a nasty situation.&nbsp;That is, you should have plenty of decision points and chances to deal with whatever the main problem is. If in the course of that, your luck goes totally sour or you make a string of bad decisions, then the game will give you one chance to &quot;save&quot; the situation.&nbsp; It's supposed to be a benefit, not a punishment!&nbsp;It didn't help any that the &quot;half damage&quot; part got applied early, which watered down this idea. That is, there wasn't a whole lot you could do to stop a dragon breathing on you. How to provide more decision points over the whole set of such situations is the problem, of course.&nbsp;I do know that the idea that shorter combats and quicker character generation is some kind of answer is totally missing the key elements. That's like saying that the only thing stopping frequent and random house burning from being a problem is lack of fire departments and insurance coverage. Or you can shoot people as long as you take them to the hospital or morgue when done. Sure, we'd like to have better ways to cope when the game has thrown that kind of monkey wrench into the works, but that doesn't make having a barrel of monkeys going ape in a hardware store suddenly a wonderful thing. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue&nbsp; &nbsp; :p"&nbsp; data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5846025, member: 54877"] As I understand the original conception of saving throws, they were misused almost from the very beginning. Namely, they get used as the only (frequently poor) way out, instead of a nice, last-ditch chance to get out of what has [B]developed[/B] into a nasty situation. That is, you should have plenty of decision points and chances to deal with whatever the main problem is. If in the course of that, your luck goes totally sour or you make a string of bad decisions, then the game will give you one chance to "save" the situation. It's supposed to be a benefit, not a punishment! It didn't help any that the "half damage" part got applied early, which watered down this idea. That is, there wasn't a whole lot you could do to stop a dragon breathing on you. How to provide more decision points over the whole set of such situations is the problem, of course. I do know that the idea that shorter combats and quicker character generation is some kind of answer is totally missing the key elements. That's like saying that the only thing stopping frequent and random house burning from being a problem is lack of fire departments and insurance coverage. Or you can shoot people as long as you take them to the hospital or morgue when done. Sure, we'd like to have better ways to cope when the game has thrown that kind of monkey wrench into the works, but that doesn't make having a barrel of monkeys going ape in a hardware store suddenly a wonderful thing. :p [/QUOTE]

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