Someone else mentioned this and it reinforced my own observations. Defenders and and Leaders, the ones primarily in the front lines usually at least in my experience in tough fights tend to drop and then a turn later stand back up. Aka they wobble but they don’t fall down (or stay down anyway).
What would happen if instead of dropping the PC’s at 0 hit points, we instead impose a new condition – ‘Mostly Dead’ and have to make ‘dying’ saving throws. While Mostly Dead they suffer a combination of Dazed, Slowed and Weakened.
Mostly Dead
- You grant combat advantage.
- You may take one action, standard, move, minor per turn. You can’t take immediate actions or opportunity attacks.
- Your speed becomes the lower of 2 or your current movement rate.
- Your attacks deal half damage.
- You make a Dying saving throw every round.
Dying Saving Throws
When you are Mostly Dead you need to make a saving throw at the end of your turn each round. The result of your saving throw determines how close to dying you are.
Lower than 10: You slip one step closer to dying. If you get this result three times before receiving healing you suffer the Dying condition.
10-19: No Change
20 or higher: Spend a healing surge and recover hit points as if you were at 0 hit points. If you have no healing surges left your condition doesn’t change.
August 6th, 2009 at 11:54 am
That is a great idea. I’d toyed with aplying a blanet -2 penalty upon reaching Bloodied, but I think I like this better. Couple that with your one-shot-one-kill post from yesterday and you’re firing on all pistons. Thanks for the ideas.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Glad it’s of use to you at least for the ideas. This in particular, well it just kinda sucks as a player to be ‘down’. You can hear it in the Penny Arcade podcasts when Kurtz goes down and keeps trying to make saving throws. The problem seems to stem from players not playing attention to their health till they’re down. Is getting stuck making saving throws their fault if there was healing available? Yes. But is it fun? No. So I thought this way would a) drive home the fact that the player REALLY needs healing and b) let the player continue to participate (other than a single roll to see if they stabilized or not). Or that’s my thoughts on it.
August 16th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I tried this last night, and it went well. Mostly it resulted in the mostly dead characters getting to crawl away and get healed, and the ranger got to dish out a very appropriate Hunt’s End.
How do you deal with damage taken while mostly dead? I think it would be interesting to largely drop the idea of negative hit points and instead say that damage taken while mostly dead counts as an automatic failed save — possibly multiple automatic failed saves based on total HP value. So, (damage / (HP/4)), round up = number of failed saves. Avoids negative hit points, puts a cap on the number of times you can get hit, etc.
Anyway, I really do like letting the players stay more active during a long combat! Thanks.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
[...] not a fan of the Dying condition and the death saves to be honest which is why I came up with the Weebles Wobble rule where I came up with a Mostly Dead condition. This lets a player be dying and still be an active participant in the game. I’ve had a [...]