[3.all] Do You Do Massive Damage Death?

[Trunamer]

Recently it was brought to my attention that PF carried death by massive damage (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/combat.html#_massive-damage) over from 3.5, which surprised me. It was like stepping out of a time machine into the future, and stumbling over a telephone cord. But maybe that's just me.

So regardless of which 3.x you play...do you? Do you have an opinion about this strange rule?

[Alaris]

Recently it was brought to my attention that PF carried death by massive damage (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/combat.html#_massive-damage) over from 3.5, which surprised me. It was like stepping out of a time machine into the future, and stumbling over a telephone cord. But maybe that's just me.

So regardless of which 3.x you play...do you? Do you have an opinion about this strange rule?

Off and on here. Massive damage is what, 50 damage?

My group often did "Half-Health" as well (as in, if half of your total hit points was dealt in one hit), though it's hard to imagine doing that at low levels...

Currently though, I believe we do enforce "50 HP in a single hit = Fort Save or Die."

[Fyermind]

I ignore it. I also discourage Save or Die spells and effects unless they have boosted the DC to the point they are most likely to kill.

Edit: I'd like to run a game where if you lose half of your remaining HP you have to save or be dazed for one round, but I feel like it would only cripple mundanes more since they tend to do damage in many small chunks instead of all at once.

[Asteron]

I've never played with it.

The 50 hp in one hit rule is dumb, especially at higher levels when even moderately optimized melee is doing twice that. High level monsters also have enough hit points that 50 is laughable. "Congratulations! You just dealt the Ancient dragon 50 points! What did it do? Chipped his toenail..."

At low levels, that's enough to kill anyway.

The half hit points rule is a little better, but at low levels it's hard to do because it happens so often.

[juicycaboose]

I'm not sure about the 3.5 version but the PF version there says that massive damage is half your hit points or more in a single hit with a minimum of 50 damage

so if you have 102hp, then 50 damage is not massive damage, and if you have 98hp, then 49 damage is not massive damage.

So it seems like the concerns for massive damage being a bad idea for low-levels it doesn't look like it applies at all unless you take 50 points of damage. At which point you are most likely dead outright anyway!

[kardar233]

I don't like massive damage not just because of the arbitrary threshold but primarily because at high levels, you're making a lot of these saves, and there are few save reroll abilities in the game, making it basically a flat 5% chance of death every attack.

[Phelix-Mu]

Mmmm, yeah, nothing quite like rolling a one on that Fort save v "wait, this happens all of the time!"

[ArcturusV]

Well, I don't use it as written too often. The DC is laughably low, after all. It can lead to some silliness. For example, in a game I ran where someone used a sap and accidentally killed the target he was trying to take alive due to Massive Damage on a sneak attack...

It's just hard to run by RAW.

[Alaris]

Yeah, in retrospect, an encounter during the last adventure of my campaign made me rethink massive damage.

A Bard/Sublime Chord dropped a Sudden Maximized Lucent Lance on a White Dragon and 1-Hit Killed it... ruined my entire plan to have that Dragon recur, or at least survive the encounter.

On the other hand, it's relatives are out for blood against said Sublime Chord...

Edit: The Dragon rolled a Nat1 on it's save, for the record.

[TuggyNE]

Well, I don't use it as written too often. The DC is laughably low, after all. It can lead to some silliness. For example, in a game I ran where someone used a sap and accidentally killed the target he was trying to take alive due to Massive Damage on a sneak attack...

It's just hard to run by RAW.

Both massive damage and coup de grace suffer from a bit of wonkiness in this regard; there should just be a clause that if you're doing non-lethal damage, any side-effects from massive damage, coup de grace, and so on are non-lethal. (And that failing a save vs. non-lethal death always results in taking your max HP +10 in non-lethal damage, a la Tarrasque; this has the advantage of generalizing an existing rule to all the situations it would actually apply to.)

[Kane0]

Nope.

Although sometimes on particularly dramatic points there we do saves that function in a similar way, such as taking so much damage in one round (I think it was all his Temp HP plus 3/4 his full HP in one round) you make a save or go into shock for a bit.

[Curmudgeon]

Yeah, but with a house rule: we only roll massive damage saves when the damage taken also exceeds half your existing hit points.

[Mcdt2]

I use the "1/2 hp=massive damage" rule as well, but I also change the fort save to be a tad bit more threatening. I change it from a flat DC to a fort save equal to 1/2 the damage you took. Thus 50 damage forces a DC 25 save, 100 a DC 50, etc. In addition, I grant bonuses to this save based on size, a +10 for each size above Medium/-10 for each below small. The DC's get pretty high, but I've found in my group anyone who survived the 50 damage probably had a good con score anyway.

[hymer]

I've only had the issue of it really in one of our rare high-level campaigns. At which point the save is pretty easy, and we doled out some rerolls every session for each character to use as they saw fit.
There was one unlucky giant NPC, though...

[RolandDeschain]

Yeah, but with a house rule: we only roll massive damage saves when the damage taken also exceeds half your existing hit points.

this, but we play it so that a failed fort save results in being "staggered" which is a damn sight better than being dead :)

[Slipperychicken]

Never used it. If we did, I would just have to take Steadfast Determinaton on all my high level melee characters.