Death Saves Idea

[MustaKrakish]

I am thinking about making my game a little bit rougher. And I had this idea:


Each character has 3 + Con mod death saves per day.
Death Saves that you failed during the day only reset after long rest.
You can use a Hit Die to reduce one death save failure per hit die instead of healing while on short rest.
You need 3 successes to stabilize as normal, but you will die if all of your death saves are crossed out.
If you are out of saves and fall to 0 you are dead.



What do you guys think? and how would you improve on it?

[cullynthedwarf]

I am thinking about making my game a little bit rougher. And I had this idea:


Each character has 3 + Con mod death saves per day.
Death Saves that you failed during the day only reset after long rest.
You can use a Hit Die to reduce one death save failure per hit die instead of healing while on short rest.
You need 3 successes to stabilize as normal, but you will die if all of your death saves are crossed out.
If you are out of saves and fall to 0 you are dead.



What do you guys think? and how would you improve on it?

So a barbarian could have a potential of 8 where a wizard could have as few as two? ( 3 + -1 con mod) I don't get why any one would do that but potentially they could.

Also I think there should be something ... Standardized for how you gain a death save back. As you are describing it a barbarians d12 is with the same as a rogues d8

Something I will be doing on my campaign is having any death save incur a exhaustion level.

[WrittenInBlood]

Death saves this way become just another layer of HP. It's widening the buffer zone between being simply out of combat and being perma-dead. It does not really look like "rougher" games, rather "beat 'em more, kill 'em less".

For those failed saves to matter more, they could count against Exhaustion levels, but some interactions between those variables will be weird, especially for very low and very high CON scores (e.g. check how it works as it is with ability score penalty).

If you want tie death saves with Constitution, consider simply making them regular CON saves (maybe never-proficient).

There's one thing to note: death saves are built-in coup de grace mechanic, because any hit at 0HP = fail, and hit vs unconscious, counting as crit, = 2 fails, so if you fail your first right away when dropped to 0HP and get hit afterwards, you're dead. Increasing the fali limit above 3 makes it irrelevant, but I understand that finishing off PCs is frowned upon anyway.

Define the goal you want to achieve with this, you will get more relevant ideas from people.

[MustaKrakish]

Death saves this way become just another layer of HP. It's widening the buffer zone between being simply out of combat and being perma-dead. It does not really look like "rougher" games, rather "beat 'em more, kill 'em less".

For those failed saves to matter more, they could count against Exhaustion levels, but some interactions between those variables will be weird, especially for very low and very high CON scores (e.g. check how it works as it is with ability score penalty).

If you want tie death saves with Constitution, consider simply making them regular CON saves (maybe never-proficient).

There's one thing to note: death saves are built-in coup de grace mechanic, because any hit at 0HP = fail, and hit vs unconscious, counting as crit, = 2 fails, so if you fail your first right away when dropped to 0HP and get hit afterwards, you're dead. Increasing the fali limit above 3 makes it irrelevant, but I understand that finishing off PCs is frowned upon anyway.

Define the goal you want to achieve with this, you will get more relevant ideas from people.

Well, my idea was to have more uses for Constitution score and use the short rest hit dice as a resource. By carrying failed death saves from combat to combat the players would feel wounded even with full hp, and thus there will be more consequences to fall to 0 hp. Because right now it kinda feels like a wack-a-mole, they fall and rise and fall and rise during combat, making it feel less then what it is.

[Anymage]

Well, my idea was to have more uses for Constitution score and use the short rest hit dice as a resource. By carrying failed death saves from combat to combat the players would feel wounded even with full hp, and thus there will be more consequences to fall to 0 hp. Because right now it kinda feels like a wack-a-mole, they fall and rise and fall and rise during combat, making it feel less then what it is.

First, pretty much nobody dumps Con. HP alone are nice enough that it's a priority stat, and on top of that Con saves tend to be something you don't want to fail. I don't think you'll change the stat priority meaningfully.

Second, yo-yo healing already means that someone generally gets up shortly after they get knocked down. Whether or not they need to make a death save in the interim depends entirely on the relative initiative counts of the attacking monster, the character, and the party healer. That's too much variability to make failed death saves a meaningfully standardized resource.

If you really want to remove yo-yo healing, insist that someone knocked below 1 HP goes into negatives and starts slowly bleeding out. A 1d4+5 Healing Word won't do too much after you took a solid hit from a big monster. (Low level characters will be in danger from the bleed damage. High level characters will be more at risk from the aoes that tend to happen around high level battlefields.)I don't really think it'll change combat dynamics all that much; the party can usually be expected to win, and 5e healing is just to help ensure that fewer people have to spend turns doing nothing. But if you really dislike the idea, negatives might be the fix for you.