SoDs

[Draco_Argentum]

Is there any support for spells where a failed save actually kills you? Can they be redone like 3.5 disintergrate and still be worth casting?

SoDs are a nuisance when you want death to be rare. They also give an unlucky die roll too much consequence. Just like the autofail on a 1 rule.

[Username17]

Is there any support for spells where a failed save actually kills you?

It's called "greatcleave". At high levels, there are really high body counts, if your spells aren't generating high body counts you are running the very definite risk of sucking ass.

Can they be redone like 3.5 disintergrate and still be worth casting?

Maybe. Disintegrate really blows. You could do something entirely different wherein you spent spell slots to do really stellar amounts of damage to single targets - but then you've basically got a situation where there isn't any functional difference between a fighter and a wizard.

SoDs are a nuisance when you want death to be rare.

I'd go farther than that. SoD is completely incompatible with the idea of death being rare. The SoD concept is that you layer on conditions willy nilly, and you cure conditions willy nilly - and some of those conditions are "petrified" and "dead".

In order to make "death" a rare occurence without having the game unravel you would have to:

1> Adjust death so that people didn't die very much, even from large amounts of damage. Probably as soon as people hit zero they should just stop there and exist in some kind of quasi-state where they survive or not based on some other kinds of rules.

2> Remove all the spells that simply remove conditions.

3> Remove all the spells which simply inflict conditions.

---

At high levels you die all the time. This means that a character who uses their powers and doesn't outright kill opponents all the time is weak.

They also give an unlucky die roll too much consequence.

If the aggragate chance of your death is 30%, what the hell difference does it make if you roll dice once, twice, or fifty times to make it come out to that number? Rolling less dice to accomplish the same result is good, it saves time.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Conceptually, you might be able to make Save-or-Dies palatable by making their prevention more common and easy instead of making their cures fairly easy (cures for death are available as 4th level divine magic, 7th level arcane magic and a number of items) instead of just making them ineffective (3.5 Disintegrate).

This is more-or-less the approach taken with status ailments used against PCs in the Final Fantasy series of games. Either you are always susceptable to the given status ailment, or you have the fairly common item which makes you totally immune to that particular ailment, but equipping that item eats up a valueable slot which could be used for a damage or speed boosting item. Of course those games feature curing and resurrection that makes 3.x D&D look like a grim and gritty high lethality game by comparison, so there might be problems with this approach.

[Sir Neil]

1> Adjust death so that people didn't die very much, even from large amounts of damage. Probably as soon as people hit zero they should just stop there and exist in some kind of quasi-state where they survive or not based on some other kinds of rules.

That's always fun in video games. The character is "Faint" until the end of combat. If the PCs win or escape, the Faint characters recover 1 hp.

[Username17]

That's always fun in video games. The character is "Faint" until the end of combat. If the PCs win or escape, the Faint characters recover 1 hp.

Or you can do the Shadowrun style "deadly wound" - where once you hit zero hit points you are in danger of death and people with medical skills can save you, and failing that you make various rolls to eventually wake up on your own.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Saving someone couldn't be a combat action or you'd become a CDG magnet. Then it boils down to the heal skill raising you from the dead with imporved flavour text. Fine with me.

[Username17]

Exactly. The idea is that you can be removed from any particular combat fairly easily, and you don't get back in. Then you can be reshod and put back into the action relatively cheaply before the next combat.

That way getting taken out has a real consequence (you don't get any more actions this combat, and your side is that much closer to losing altogether), and you can still take enemies out by the cart-load, but the fact that you can be taken down with the same set of rules that you take down enemies with doesn't end up causing the game to spiral into crazy-town.

It's OK for NPCs to have PC effects and for PC effects to be dramatic and effective - so long as individual PCs getting taken out doesn't make the game come crashing down.

You can handle that with Paranoia Clones, or the heal skill bringing back the dead, or whatever, but fundamentally coming back from having been taken out of the previous combat must be cheap and easy.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

I don't really see the point in devaluing death, you might as well just extend the dying state if you want heal to be able to bring back dead people.

Because now when you want a serious higher level condition, you have to resort to spells which create condition "worse than death". ANd when you have spells to cure this you have to invent another condition "much worse than death" and so on. The problem is that fighters inevitably hosed, because the best condition they can inflict with pure hit point damage is death, and so anything that requires "worse than death" or "much worse than death" at high levels now requires a spellcaster.

It's a lot easier to make death incurable save special artifact/plot devices and just make it harder for PCs to actually die. You really don't need finger of death, you acn just have stuff like flesh to stone and baleful polymorph that doesn't really kill you.

[Josh_Kablack]

That's what Wizardy did. You were Dead at zero HP. Di the resurrection spell had a chance of failure, and when it failed you were turned to Ashes and needed Kadorto, which also had a chance of failure. When Kadorto failed you were DELETED and you needed a cheat program or backup disk of your character.

Currently D&D also sports a system where you can be a lot worse than dead, although it is handled a lot less elegantly. To wit,

Dead for 30 days
Dead & decapitated (with head seperate from body)
Dead by old age
Dead via death effect
Dead and brought back as Undead
Dead and victim of Soul Bind

all of the above are worse then just death, in that Raise Dead cannot cure them.

I really don't see any conceptual problems with sidestepping annoying real-world semantics by changing the -10 HP "Dead" status into a "Comatose" status, allowing the existing ressurection effects to heal it, replacing that most of that laundry list with a "Little Bit Dead" status which can be healed by Ressurection, but not by Raise and then adding a "True Death" status for death by old age, and similar conditions which aren't meant to be healed at all.

[Essence]

There are already conditions that are worse than death without being any variant of dead. Being petrified, imprisioned, temporally stasisted, Gate Trapped into the Far Realm, or Microcosmed can each be significantly worse than being dead, in that Raise Dead or it's elder brothers can't help you. Petrification is relatively easy to undo, but the others can be entire story arcs to resolve.

[RandomCasualty]

Is there any reason that the spell has to "kill" you outright? Can't it just take you out of the fight, like a forcecage or polymorph and just as the levels for the spell get higher, you require more to get the guy out. Like a forcecage requires a disintigrate or teleportation, a polymorph requires a dispel and so forth.

If the consequence of instant death is devaluing death and then inventing stuff worse than death, why don't we just skip that crap and not devalue death in the first place.

[Username17]

And there are many gradations of death beyond simply being dead.

There's being dead where you can't be raised (like being undead or something). There's being dead where you can't be resurrected (like when you were an outsider before, or according to Skippikins, after you died). There's being dead where you can't be brought back with true resurrection (like being eaten by a barghest). There's being dead where you can't get brought back even with a Wish (like when the 50% chance failed on the last wish or you've fallen into one of a number of Gygaxian smack downs littered across the legacy landscape).

That's four levels of being really really really dead, over and beyond what happens when you just sort of die.

And there's no need for it, really. The system is caught up in an escalatory cycle wherein people still need to be threatened and people still need continuity. So really any time you hand out a new threat that can happen in combat there needs to be a counter to it - and the natural result of this is five flavors of being a corpse. If you count Epic stuff, there are of course even more (actually an unlimited number, since you can get an epic spell that makes people really really really really really really dead, and a spell that will bring people back even if they are more dead even than that and so on forever).

You could short it all out by simply not having people have the opportunity to become "dead" during combat. That's the root of all of this. Since player characters are in it battle after battle, week after week, year after year, anything that can happen during combat is going to happen to them. So there really can't be anything that happens in combat that ends continuity - because if there is the continuity is going to end.

So with a simple semantic shift, you can make people "deadly wounded" or "casualties" or whatever instead of "dead" when they get hit for way honkin large amounts of damage or a death ray. And then have people be "dead" only if their character gets killed in some non-combat and entirely real fashion (say: dies of old age or is chopped into pieces and devoured by ogres). Then death can actually mean something because it won't be something that gets handed out in the middle of combat.

Weird, but true. Death just has no business being a consequence of combat.

-Username17

[MrWaeseL]

So it all boils down to a semantics issue?

[Draco_Argentum]

Pretty much. The rules changes aren't that big.

[Username17]

It's mostly a semantics issue. If people are "dead" in combat you end up needing ways to cure that, and then you need bigger deaths that won't heal, and then bigger cures and so on.

If you don't make people "dead" in the first place you can side-step that whole escalation cycle and then you actually don't need multiple layers of death and rebirth.

It ends up making a rather big difference.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

The main difference is that only wizards and monsters can produce the "worse than death" effects, so by having hit point related death be so easy to cure, then you're hosing fighters. Because at higher levels, hacking something up with a sword is irrelevant, you need to either soul trap it or banish it or whatever, which all requires a caster.

Fighters need to be able to kill stuff permanently too. It doesn't have to be in combat, but it can be out of combat too.

[Username17]

The only reason wizards and monsters can produce "worse than death effects" is because they need to because the curing of "death effects" is necessarily such a small potatoes thing.

The cycle is caused by the fact that the story pulls on combat and non-combat character removal are entirely opposite. Which is that the removal of a character from combat has to be reversable (at the slowest between combats, if not actually within a single combat); meanwhile the removal of a character from the non-combat landscape really does have to be irrevocable if the story line is going to make any sense.

So it's a big problem, and it gets turned into a series of over writes. A story needs a way to permanently remove people so some way to really kill people gets pulled right out of the author's ass. Meanwhile, continuity demands that players be restorable from being removed from combat, so the author has to pull a way to remove that kind of death out of their ass and so on.

Once you accept the basic irregularity that death of all things is not a direct consequence of combat - the problem goes away. There are no more "worse than death" effects. Death becomes real and absolute, and yet distinct from combat such that it doesn't get in the way of story continuity.

So no, we don't need to allow Fighters to hand out "worse than death effects" because we don't need to allow wizards to have any "worse than death effects".

---

Now, there's an entirely separate question of whether there needs to be "remove enemy for the next two combats" attacks. That's a stylistic decision, but the answer is probably yes.

And if Wizards have the ability to turn enemies into turtles for the next three combats, that actually doesn't mean that Fighters need to have the ability to cut people up so bad that they miss the next three combats. After all, the only people who actually give a damn whether they miss the next combat or not are Players, so there is actually no difference in game play between PCs taking an enemy out of action for the next fight or for the next dozen fights.

This is one part of game balance where it doesn't need to be balanced at all, because there's no real difference between removing NPCs from the combat and removing NPCs from the universe entirely. It actually makes no difference whatsoever whether NPCs are becoming "dead" or not.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Except for recurring villains and all.

Then again, I have no problem with a DM house-ruling on the spot if it doesn't make the universe fold on itself.

[Username17]

Recurring villains can just as easily be "The Son of..." as "The Return of...".

Really, it doesn't make any difference whether NPCs are getting hit with "and you can't come back effects" or not. There is an arbitrary and unknown number of villains arrayed against you, so if you hit some of them with no come backies there can just arbitrarily be more of them.

Player Characters, on the other hand, are of specific limited quantity. So the difference between an NPC using an effect that keeps you from coming back and an NPC using a normal removal from combat effect is drastic.

But while a PC Fighter and a PC Wizard have to balanced against each other, an NPC Fighter and an NPC Wizard do not. So since the only time it actually matters how long you get removed after the combat by an attack form it doesn't require that balance be maintained between Fighters and Wizards - the extended removal abilities (if any) don't actually have to be fairly distributed between character classes.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

It's not that raising the dead shouldn't ever happen, it's just that when it does it should be dramatic, and should happen very rarely.

Recurring villains can always just be brought back with a plot device artifact. This sort of thing can happen once or twice in a campaign, and when it happens it should be really dramatic, and a total surprise to the PCs.

Alternately you can always just ensure your villains escape loing before the PCs ever reach them and just sort of work in the shadows, or like comic books you can have the PCs take them alive and then have them bust out of jail sometime later.

[Crissa]

The point is that making effects that are like death - but less bad - means you don't have to make up arbitrary excuses to escape death.

There's no particular reason why a Barbarian who has just taken ten or twenty ten point jabs should die forever from one more ten point jab.

The space between laying on the ground bleeding to death and being dead is arbitrarily shorter than the battle - which is shorter than the time it takes in real life to die from having your throat cut out.

I'm all for more ways to make someone not-in-combat but don't-need-res to bring back.

-Crissa

[Essence]

Slice the Soul
Your bladesmanship has reached such a level of supernatural skill that you can attack the soul of a creature as it dies.
Prerequisites: BAB 16+, must be wielding a weapon with a +4 or greater enhancement bonus.
Effects: Whenever you attack a creature that is dying, or a corpse that has died within the last round, or whenever your attack renders a creature dead, you may make a Wisdom check DC 20. If you succeed, your blow has rendered the soul (or other animating aspect) of the creature, and it cannot be brought back to life until a Wish, Miracle, or Reality Alteration spell is used specifically to repair the soul (at which point, any standard method of restoring the dead will work normally.)

[Username17]

Essence, what would the point of such a feat be? The only thing that would do is be one more way Clerics own you, because Miracle doesn't cost XP and now people would need to cast Wish or Miracle more often.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

The point of the feat is to create save-or-dies that people other than primary casters can use. If you can think of a better resussitation mechanic, I'm sure Essence would be glad to hear it.

-Desdan

[Essence]

Desdan Mervolam is right. Again.