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    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    PaladinGuy

    Join Date
    Feb 2019
    Location
    Iceland
    Gender
    Male

    Default I don't like watching my friends play while I'm dying.

    Hi, I'm a DM.

    Although this might be mostly a 4e issue, I always found rolling death saving throws an unengaging experience. Three times have I just have to watch a player sit there, for the majority of a combat encounter, watch his character slowly fade away into nothingness. Now, you could always just rip of the band-aid and have a character die instantly, but if you are all for the drama like me, you might want to make dying a bit more interesting.

    Solving this problem was one of the first houserules I made, and boy did I have some bad ones at first. Now I think I have finally landed on something that works just as well in practice as it does in theory!

    The first change we'll make is that you don't go unconscious when your down. You instead gets stunned. There's an important distinction, mainly that you can still talk and interact with your environment, although you still can't take actions. This prevents a lot of immersion breaking scenarios, the worst of which is the ranger-beast interaction at 0 HP.

    Stunned

    • A stunned creature is incapacitated (see the condition), can’t move, and can speak only falteringly.
    • The creature automatically fails Strengthand Dexterity Saving Throws.
    • Attack rolls against the creature have advantage.
    The second change we're going to make is make Death Daving Throws recharge slower. We're about to add a mechanic that gives them more milage later, so to maintain the drama we're gonna have to nerf Long Rests. The precedent for this is the slow recharge of Hit Dice.

    You recover one failed Death Saving Throw at the end of a Long rest.
    Now, here's the big change. You give them a way to turn their dying condition into something epic. A chance for heroism, epicness and drama! If they succeed on a Death Saving Throw, they can choose to DO SOMETHING, but at the risk of over-exerting themselves.

    Last Stand
    When a dying character rolls a successful death saving throw on his turn he can choose to make his Last Stand. Roll a DC 13 Constitution saving throw. On success, your character can take a single action, or use his movement, on that turn. On a fail, you gain one failed death saving throw.
    You can tweak the DC for the risk:reward ratio that you prefer, and even have it scale if you're playing in a long-running campaign. Another great idea is to have that DC increase each time your roll for it, and it never gets reset. That way each player has his own "comeback DC".
    Note: like usual, the DM can impose Disadvantage on the save if the narrative calls for it, for example if the character is taking ongoing damage, drowning, or in other situations that are less "I just need my anime flash-back"

    Now, this gives DSTs a lot more milage, especially since a lot of abilities can be used to boost that Con save. They are most likely to use that action to chug a potion, or run away from whatever's killing him, preferably towards someone with a Healer's Kit. This is why we made DST recharge slower.

    Now, why would you choose this instead of just handing out scrolls of revivify like candy on Halloween? DRAMA. With a spell scroll, there's no tension because the result is consistent. I have had much more success with creating tension by being stingy on my resurrection scrolls, and even have my players make a coin flip whether a diamond for the spell is even available at their current location.

    Hope someone finds this interesting, cheers, and happy homebrewing!

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