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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 4038451" data-attributes="member: 2011">So, your players rolled this in front of the group?I can definitely see a pro and con here.Pro: the tension. People are watching that roll closely each round and it generates excitement.Con: everyone at the table knows that the unconscious guy is not only down, but when he is potentially one round away from death. Metagaming knowledge that only a Heal skill roll should supply and only a little tension occurs on the first round he is down, rather real significant tension does not occur until the round he is one roll away from death.Now that I think of it, this rule reminds me of a house rule from long ago for wands. Roll percental dice. On a result of 1 or 2, the wand is out of charges. This more or less emulates 50 charges, but the players really do not know. They could find a wand and only get one shot out of it just due to the luck of the dice, or they could get 60 charges out of it. They are not keeping track of charges (the reason for the shortcut), so they do not bother to count.Ditto for this unconsciousness rule. Whether the player is close to death or not is not dependent on the attack that occurred, it depends on the die rolls made after he is already unconscious. A character hit to -50 can get up on the next round and be conscious whereas a character hit to -1 can die in a few rounds.So, a great powerful NPC attack that damages for 100 points can mean almost nothing. The PC gets knocked to huge negatives and luckily, gets right back up.Like the house rule with the wand, it allows players to determine condition after the fact based on random dice rolls as opposed to based on "number of charges actually remaining" (or in 3E terms, number of hit points remaining before -10, in 4E terms, number of hit points remaining before -half). In other word, it's a rule to keep track of charges without really doing so.Hmmm.</blockquote>

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