The thing is with a "Death Charm" spell (if you assume that it is something cast beforehand by the spellcaster) that it ceases to be a method of rescuing someone after things have gone wrong, and becomes a method of preventing things from going wrong in the first place. Functionally it's very different to healing - it's no longer a final safeguard rescue mechanism of last resort, but instead it's a form of damage limitation. Prevention is better than cure, they say, and a "Death Charm" is prevention rather than cure. If you have a "Death Charm" spell up, my guess is, psychologically, you're going to take more risks than someone who is going to depend on post hoc healing. So therefore the "Death Charm" fails to do what healing is really there for in metagame terms, which is to haul the PC's ass out of the fire when the player has misjudged the risks or been unlucky or outmanoeuvred.

Perhaps I've misunderstood JHKim's concept here.

Here's an alternative:- Heroic Determination. After being struck with that final blow which takes you to 0 hitpoints, as a PC (or important NPC of great calibre) you suffer a condition, Losing Consciousness, which means that you will fall unconscious... but perhaps not immediately... and you lose your bonus actions and reactions, and can only move at half rate, while affected by this condition. You can make a saving throw of some sort each round to remain conscious and acting:- probably just like a Death Save. Only when you fail the saving throw do you fall unconscious (dying). If you fall unconscious (dying), but you are revived, it will take you one full round to come round. But if you are healed even 1 h.p. when you are merely Losing Consciousness, i.e. before you fail your saving throw and fall unconscious, then you are immediately back to tip-top condition.

For a long time it's seemed unsatisfactory to me to have instant healing of any sort in lower-powered games; that sort of power seems fitting for demi-gods in my book, not vaguely heroic mortals. And I really don't like how in D&D games you can be down 20 h.p. one minute, then back on full h.p. the next, when you only had say 21 h.p. to start with. But this notion of being dazed and snapping out of it, on reflection, seems possibly OK.

Quote from: jhkim;823945If you're going to nitpick... An adult red dragon bite has 10 foot reach, so 5 foot melee is not the only way to get bit. So a character could take a 26 damage red dragon bite from 10 feet and get 1 failed Death Save, and another character could take a 2 damage cat scratch from 5 feet away and get 2 failed Death Saves. Both of these characters would pop back up to the same hit point total with a single Healing Word spell.

Yeah, and to further nitpick, both have a very real chance of Instant Death. That's why I did the math for both of them for you. An average of 22~26 damage is plenty to wipe out most first tier characters (lvls 1-4).

Each wound while Unconscious is a Death Save, yes. But HP Max does matter, so being at 0 HP and attacked is a real risk when around heavy attack opponents. I've seen Instant Death matter, so you're disregard of it is bizarre to me. We can keep dancing this game, but the numbers are very much not with you here.

Quote from: jhkim;823945OK, I don't see how this accomplishes anything of what I want. It sounds like this is intended to increase the length of combat, when I'm happy with the length of combat. My issue is with the believability and feel of having characters pop up and down.

OK, mostly what I get is you trying to fight a feeling. And to avoid spinning into an REO Speedwagon song, I am trying to clarify your complaint. So you're:

Fine with combat length... check.
Fine with HP amount and successful attack rate... check.
Not fine with Death Save speed... check.
Not fine with Lay on Hands, Healer feat, and Heal spells bouncing people back into combat... check.
Prefers downed PCs to remain down and Stabilize to mean something... check.

Sorely miss negative HP because... heal spell tax feels closer to genre?
Cannot/Will not stop whack-a-mole effect by restricting classes, feats, or altering core rules... because?
Wants to solve this by pre-emptive healing... to lengthen combat (contradictory) and circumvent Death Saves?

Now, healing before came in various forms before. Sounds like you prefer negative HP, but it also existed where 0 HP equalled death and healing had to be beforehand. 5e currently works with bouncing one back into combat.

Which aesthetic are you looking for? Do you really want this more involved (and contradictory) solution? Is adjusting the core really harder than adding mechanics?

Quote from: Opaopajr;824153...I am trying to clarify your complaint. So you're:

One of the key things jhkim wants is to minimize the time that during which the player of an incapacitated/0 HP/unconscious character has have nothing to do during play. I'm not seeing that you adequately captured that bit.

Quote from: Bren;824173One of the key things jhkim wants is to minimize the time that during which the player of an incapacitated/0 HP/unconscious character has have nothing to do during play. I'm not seeing that you adequately captured that bit.

That is the whole, you know, point of being dead or unconscious?

Which kinda contradicts the OPs spiel against the PCs getting back up and into action so fast in 5e.

Quote from: Omega;824237

Quote from: Bren;824173One of the key things jhkim wants is to minimize the time that during which the player of an incapacitated/0 HP/unconscious character has have nothing to do during play. I'm not seeing that you adequately captured that bit.

That is the whole, you know, point of being dead or unconscious?

Which kinda contradicts the OPs spiel against the PCs getting back up and into action so fast in 5e.

Omega got it said already for me, as that facet leaves me only further confused. That facet being:

"Minimize the time a player has nothing to do during play while their PC is unconscious."

That's an expected consequence of risk-involved play, a PCs may go unconscious. What is expected during this consequence, a pleasing mini-game? A chance to quickly get back into the action? A chance to avoid falling out of the action?

5e has included the ”return to action" failsafe to re-introducing downed PCs back into the action without having the party healer/s guesstimate, or allies meta-game, their party's health knowledge. If you go down, you can get up again with the right healing. This is one of the ways to do exactly what is asked.

The other option is to avoid falling out of the action. And that is explicitly not wanted because the combat length is considered adequate. Thus increasing missed attacks, bloating HP, or even more healing spells is not wanted. And yet health charms, as proposed, does the same thing and goes against the request of 'not lengthening combat time'.

Thus what am I left to conclude, Bren? What is the non-contradictory request here? To shorten Stabilization time from 1d4 hours to something else? Provide a mini-game to the players of downed PCs?

How can this complaint, which other GMs might encounter, be adequately articulated into something productive and solvable by other GMs' creative houserules? To even attempt this you need to articulate the problem, and the desired result, to then analyze. Obviously I am missing the core complaint and desired solution, so I ask for clarity.

We're all deeply passionate GMs here so this is more than academic hobby musing.

That's why I said at first that the issues seem somewhat irreconcilable. On the one hand, anything you do to combat still runs the same risk of having someone sitting out twiddling their thumbs. So you can either mess with the combat length, or with the characters' mortality. Beyond that, you're going to be doing some stuff outside of character to keep players busy, and some of that could be funky territory.

Regarding the tangent on "cat scratches", a crazy thought occurred to me:

What if the final blow needed to take down a PC required a minimum threshold of damage? This would make the PCs pretty badass, and weaker enemies would need to gang up on a PC to finally put her/him down like a rabid dog.

Quote from: Opaopajr;824244Thus what am I left to conclude, Bren? What is the non-contradictory request here?

It's not clear to me that jhkim's request is non-contradictory. But he clearly said he wants to minimize down time. I suspect (but don't care enough about the issue to prove) that his request is contradictory.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;824262What if the final blow needed to take down a PC required a minimum threshold of damage? This would make the PCs pretty badass, and weaker enemies would need to gang up on a PC to finally put her/him down like a rabid dog.

That reminds me of the Taken in Glen Cooks Black Company books.

Quote from: One Horse Town;824283That reminds me of the Taken in Glen Cooks Black Company books.

I have to look that up. What I had in mind was Boromir's death scene in the LOTR movie. Took a lot to take him down.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;824262That's why I said at first that the issues seem somewhat irreconcilable. On the one hand, anything you do to combat still runs the same risk of having someone sitting out twiddling their thumbs. So you can either mess with the combat length, or with the characters' mortality. Beyond that, you're going to be doing some stuff outside of character to keep players busy, and some of that could be funky territory.

Let me try summarizing again.

1) The important metric is the percentage of time when you have some players sitting around with nothing to do, and other players continuing to be active in the fight. If in a typical fight, you have at least one player out for 50% or more of the fight, then I consider that too high. Note that increasing or decreasing the overall length of combat doesn't change this percentage.

2) I am happy with this percentage in D&D 5th. However, I am not happy with the believability of the dying and healing rules.

3) The problem is that most changes to make the healing rules more believable - like tracking negative hit points, making characters difficult to heal - also have the effect of increasing the percentage of time that characters are out.

4) While I don't have another idea that I really like other than death saves, I'll toss out a few options even though I don't like them, but they technically fit the criteria:

4a) The characters are cursed such that if any single character is taken out, all characters are taken out. This is similar to the approach of the D&D boardgames like Wrath of Ashardalon, where the whole side loses if any PC is taken out.

4b) There is a ritual spell that ties the characters' life-forces together, such that characters who are dying are still able to act at some penalty, but drain the remaining hit points of the other characters.

4c) There are morale rules such that when a person drops on one side of the fight, the other side gets some sort of benefit due to the boost in morale. So once one PC goes down, the enemy surges and the fight will be over more quickly.

Again, I'm not saying that 4a to 4c are great ideas in general, but they are other options that fit my criteria.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;824262Regarding the tangent on "cat scratches", a crazy thought occurred to me:

What if the final blow needed to take down a PC required a minimum threshold of damage? This would make the PCs pretty badass, and weaker enemies would need to gang up on a PC to finally put her/him down like a rabid dog.

That's interesting. To toss out a suggestion: damage less than half of (hit dice + armor bonus, round down) is ignored. For example, a first level fighter has full chainmail (armor bonus +6) and 1 hit die. He can ignore damage less than 3 hit points. So if an attack does 1 or 2 hit points, he ignores it, but if it does 3 hit points or more, it works normally.

To be more consistent, maybe this could even apply generally instead of only to the final blow. It would be weird if a character could be shredded down to 1hp by a horde of rats, but not taken down or killed. Maybe a well-armored and/or high level character doesn't have to worry about low-level bits of damage.

Quote from: jhkim;824294Let me try summarizing again.

1) The important metric is the percentage of time when you have some players sitting around with nothing to do, and other players continuing to be active in the fight. If in a typical fight, you have at least one player out for 50% or more of the fight, then I consider that too high. Note that increasing or decreasing the overall length of combat doesn't change this percentage.

2) I am happy with this percentage in D&D 5th. However, I am not happy with the believability of the dying and healing rules.

3) The problem is that most changes to make the healing rules more believable - like tracking negative hit points, making characters difficult to heal - also have the effect of increasing the percentage of time that characters are out.

Yup. I thought I was working within those assumptions, but maybe I left some blind spot somewhere. I think that #3 is what I'm getting at. The way I see it, what's causing a believability problem is the post-death stuff, so I think that leaves you with two general options, which have been mentioned:

1) Avoid the post death believability issue by making death (or unconsciousness) harder
2) Shorten the post-death player waiting time

If you think about it, #1 just postpones the post-death/unconsciousness issue, in the end. However, that may be a good enough option if it makes the issue a rarity and nobody in your play group has a problem with PC death being a relatively rare thing. Anything about preventing death or unconsciousness goes here.  

#2 only leaves you the choice of reviving characters (or taking them out of unconsciousness), or making combat much shorter. I guess you could come up with rules for the former, so that a character may be revived/healed but at a ratio less than what you have now. For me this would be too half assed, so if I had an issue with players sitting out during the rest of the combat, I'd just find a way to speed combat either generally, or maybe only once a PC has dropped.

Quote4c) There are morale rules such that when a person drops on one side of the fight, the other side gets some sort of benefit due to the boost in morale. So once one PC goes down, the enemy surges and the fight will be over more quickly.

I like this. To make it less of a rout for players, maybe for every dead PC, remaining enemies and PCs get a +1 bonus to hit or bonus damage, so that with every PC death the combat is likely to get deadlier.

QuoteThat's interesting. To toss out a suggestion: damage less than half of (hit dice + armor bonus, round down) is ignored. For example, a first level fighter has full chainmail (armor bonus +6) and 1 hit die. He can ignore damage less than 3 hit points. So if an attack does 1 or 2 hit points, he ignores it, but if it does 3 hit points or more, it works normally.

To be more consistent, maybe this could even apply generally instead of only to the final blow. It would be weird if a character could be shredded down to 1hp by a horde of rats, but not taken down or killed. Maybe a well-armored and/or high level character doesn't have to worry about low-level bits of damage.

I like that too, though it would make the PCs much tougher than if it was just harder to give the coup the grace blow at the end. I like the final blow thing because it's kinda dramatic and fits with some of the hollywood type badass death scenes like Boromir, Tony Montana, and even some kung-fu flicks.

Which brings me to something I meant to say, if you're kind of feeling the death charm solution, don't let us discourage you or anything. Whatever your table finds believable is what counts.

Quote from: One Horse Town;824283That reminds me of the Taken in Glen Cooks Black Company books.

That Limper. Couldn't get along with him. Couldn't frickin kill 'em.

One of my few gaming regrets is that I didn't by the D20 Black Company rules that I saw in a game store 9 years ago.

Quote from: jhkim;8242944) While I don't have another idea that I really like other than death saves, I'll toss out a few options even though I don't like them, but they technically fit the criteria:

4a) and 4b) are much worse than the punching clown PC problem that it is trying to solve. To the point that I'd probably refuse to play anything other than a one shot game that used either of these. While I don't find death charms an improvement on the punching clown problem from a what feels reasonable, death charms are infinitely cooler as a concept than either 4a) or 4b).

Quote4c) There are morale rules such that when a person drops on one side of the fight, the other side gets some sort of benefit due to the boost in morale. So once one PC goes down, the enemy surges and the fight will be over more quickly.

This seems like something the GM should already be considering as part of resolving morale.

QuoteTo be more consistent, maybe this could even apply generally instead of only to the final blow. It would be weird if a character could be shredded down to 1hp by a horde of rats, but not taken down or killed. Maybe a well-armored and/or high level character doesn't have to worry about low-level bits of damage.

I'd leave damage blocking armor to systems like Runequest/BRP which do it well rather than adding it to D&D which simulates armor quite differently.

Quote from: jhkim;824294Let me try summarizing again.

1) The important metric is the percentage of time when you have some players sitting around with nothing to do, and other players continuing to be active in the fight. If in a typical fight, you have at least one player out for 50% or more of the fight, then I consider that too high. Note that increasing or decreasing the overall length of combat doesn't change this percentage.

2) I am happy with this percentage in D&D 5th. However, I am not happy with the believability of the dying and healing rules.

3) The problem is that most changes to make the healing rules more believable - like tracking negative hit points, making characters difficult to heal - also have the effect of increasing the percentage of time that characters are out.

So you are happy with the percentage of playtime v. time-out as it relates to combat length. But you don't like the conceit of popping back up. And somehow you want to front-load healing preemptively instead of reactively.

You're over-thinking this. Just fiat declare that healing only Stabilize PCs downed to 0 HP. Then all healing must be used ahead of time, regardless of Lay on Hands, heal spells, or Healer feat. It merely returns the game state to OD&D and AD&D without the negative HP variant. Tah-dah, done.

Quote from: jhkim;8242944) While I don't have another idea that I really like other than death saves, I'll toss out a few options even though I don't like them, but they technically fit the criteria:

4a) The characters are cursed such that if any single character is taken out, all characters are taken out. This is similar to the approach of the D&D boardgames like Wrath of Ashardalon, where the whole side loses if any PC is taken out.

4b) There is a ritual spell that ties the characters' life-forces together, such that characters who are dying are still able to act at some penalty, but drain the remaining hit points of the other characters.

4c) There are morale rules such that when a person drops on one side of the fight, the other side gets some sort of benefit due to the boost in morale. So once one PC goes down, the enemy surges and the fight will be over more quickly.

Again, I'm not saying that 4a to 4c are great ideas in general, but they are other options that fit my criteria.

Well, they are not great ideas to be sure, especially since by then you should be playing another game instead of D&D.

a) Is essentially one-hit-wonder territory for the party. Everyone has to buy up CON, and the second the most fragile member goes down the whole team stops play & resets from there. That's like quite a few bad video games I know (or entertaining one-off challenge quests).

b) Is Tunnels and Trolls. Really, it doesn't fix anything. It paints on a veneer of a different system with more needless cruft in between.

c) Is morale, and that should be going on anyway for NPCs on the GM side of the screen. However locking PCs' party to morale rules is basically telling players how to play, and well, best not to go there.

Look, your solution is an easy one; I just mentioned it up above. Zero HP PCs are only Stabilized by healing of any sort. (Also remove the relevant bulleted function in the Healer feat, too.) Thus healing is best used preventively before reaching 0 HP.

There, that was an easy fix.

Quote from: jhkim;8242943) The problem is that most changes to make the healing rules more believable - like tracking negative hit points, making characters difficult to heal - also have the effect of increasing the percentage of time that characters are down.

The mistake is to force, require or expect fights where pcs are routinely taken down. IMC the PCs fear being taken down, they avoid fights where they are likely to go down. The result is plenty of excitement and no one out of action yet.

Encounter-building is a bad idea in general unless you are running a truly encounter-centric game like 4e D&d. Taking a naturalistic approach solves a lot of problems.

The current GoT RPG uses the concept of "taken out" called Defeated. You can avoid this by taking wounds. As soon as your HP are 0, you are Defeated and at the mercy of your enemy (they can kill you or capture you).

Consider some gotchas;

Classes have HD which map to HP which will represent staying power. If you come up with a way to both "equalize" the staying power in combat and prevent  unrealistic recovery mid-combat you will likely eliminate any advantage this may have granted.

Here's my suggestion:

• Use alternative Long Rest rule where you recover only 1/2 HD not HP.
• Classes with a d8 or less HD continue to have HD listed.
• Classes with HD higher than d8 are reduced to d8 HD.
• All characters start with CON in Resiliency Points (RP).
• Those with a d10 HD get 1 RP per level.  Those with a d12 get 2 RP per level.
• If your HD is not normally above a d8, your RP do not increase per level.
• Your HP represent your luck, skill and endurance.
• Your Resiliency Points represent your ability to stay up in combat. Once you start losing RP, you are effectively becoming more and more exhausted and injured.
• When you reach 0 HP you gain one level of Exhaustion. You don't fall unconscious at 0 HP, instead start reducing RP.
• When you reach 1/2 RP, you gain another level of Exhaustion.
• When you reach 0 RP you fall unconscious and gain another level of Exhaustion.
• Negative HP. Once all HP and RP are eliminated, you go into negatives. Just keep tracking it. While in negatives, you are dying until stabilized. Make death saving throws as normal.
• You CAN be stabilized at negative HP with a successful healing roll. If you are more than -CON, the healer has Disadvantage on the healing roll. ANY magical healing at negative HP gives a healer Advantage on the roll to stabilize.
• You regain consciousness once your RP are brought back to 1, you spend 1 HD to heal from a rest, you receive magical healing, or someone succeeds at a DC15 WIS (healing) check.
• Taking any damage in negatives immediately knocks the character unconscious and the character is dying once again.
• Stabilized conscious characters in negative HP have a move of 5', have Disadvantage on all checks, and can only remain active for half they normally could. Excessive activity will cause the character to fall unconscious and begin dying again.
• Healing restores RP/HP per normal.
• You first regain your RP, then your HP using HD or magical healing.
• If you are stable and at negative HP, you can recover and spend HD per normal if you are being attended by a healer. Unconscious characters require feeding of broth or sustenance of some kind or starve to death.
• Exhaustion recovers at the standard rate.

I think that would keep people up longer, however offering some consequences when you run out of HP. It has the effect of a longer-term injury system kind of built in for a gritty "I just slogged through a tough combat" feel.