Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8687996" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Really the point of this thread wasn't to engage in the house rule itself, but more to demonstrate how my playgroup feels about the way I analyze the rules.  They'll say "wouldn't X be cool" and I'll be like "mmm, not a good idea."But rather than leave it at that, they press me for my reasons, I go on this long-winded explanation (I blame reading the 1e DMG cover to cover a couple hundred times), and when I'm done, they're like "ugh.  couldn't you just say you didn't like it?".Even thought that's exactly what I did!Anyways, back to my opinions.One of the things I always disliked about older D&D was it's need to make death and dying extra punitive.  It was present in AD&D, but I never gave it much thought.  It wasn't until the 3.x/PF1e era that it really struck me.In combat, you hide behind a number called "Armor Class".  You have a limited amount of ways to increase it.  Maybe you can wear armor.  Maybe you can wear a shield.  Maybe there's a spell you can cast, or you can take a huge penalty to hit for more AC, or maybe there's a Feat.  Magic items exist, but each table has a different approach to how players can acquire them, if at all (it's been my experience that most DM's seem to have less idea what magic items the characters need than the players themselves, but quite a few chafe at the idea of letting players select items for themselves).So ok, you do what you can to increase AC.  You ignore half the armor types in the game, because there's always a "best" armor for you (seriously, whoever really wore padded, hide, ring mail, and chain mail?).  Now you enter combat, where unless you're super cautious (and sometimes even that can't help you), you pray that enemies don't roll high enough to hit this number.But they will, fairly often, and you'll take damage.  It's all random amounts, and you have no control over how many hit points you have, beyond what Constitution score you were able to give your character, and maybe a Feat like Toughness, which competes with every other possible Feat you could take.And inevitably, these random amounts of damage you most likely can't do anything about it, will knock you down and now you can no longer play the game.That's bad enough, but then you get rules about slowly bleeding out and inching closer to death unless some other person can manage to get to you with a healing spell, and then you can play again.Some DM's feel this is to "unrealistic" (you know, despite the fact that healing spells in of themselves are unrealistic...or hit points in general) and want to tag you with some kind of negative effect on top of this.But if you actually die, the game continues to want to punish you.  Spells that revive you are expensive and drain party or personal resources.  They require high level casters who may need to be persuaded to use them in the first place.Then they often come with penalties for being revived- depending on the edition, maybe you lose permanent Constitution.  Or lose levels permanently.  Or can get those levels back, but it costs more gold after the fact!And the whole time this is going on, the player can't even play their character.  So I lost count of how many times someone would die and say "you know, the heck with it, I'll just make a new character, it's less of a hassle, and I can get back to playing faster."Which is the exact opposite of what I wanted to have happen.  Not to mention the party then divvying up the loot of the dead character to add to their own resources, which I now had to adjust for, even as a new character with new resources was coming into the game...So I just find the idea that punishing the player for having the nerve to die is the wrong approach.  What did they do wrong, exactly?  You could say they were too reckless, perhaps, but ultimately, nobody really wants to go to 0 hit points and then hope the Cleric can get them back up.  Nobody wants to be stuck not playing the game.That's already punishment, if you ask me.  Tacking on more penalties will just result in players becoming less willing to take risks.  Who will chafe at long adventures without being able to rest frequently.  Who won't ever want to press on and enter combats with less than maximum hit points.  If you want "pop up healing" to stop being a thing, you need to give players the ability to do something to prevent it.  In 4e, everyone could take an action to Second Wind, for example, once a combat, letting them increase their AC and recover 25% of their hit points.Now, only a Fighter can do that, and the amount of hit points recovered starts off pretty good, but eventually turns into a band-aid against the increasing damage potential of their enemies.TLDR: being dropped to 0 hit points is bad.  Being healed for a pittance so you just fall over again is bad.  Players have no real ability to get healed for enough to matter, nor do they have many tools to prevent being dropped to 0 hit points in the first place.  Adding insult to injury doesn't solve these problems.</blockquote>

Verification