I didn't see a part where these rules are listed as optional.
The part where it's in the DMG. Also, as written that rule only applies at exactly 0 hp (or optionally if reduced to -1 to -3 by a single attack), though that might just be poor editing.
For me, these are a bunch of solutions for a problem that doesn't really exist. In all my experience, dropping to 0 is a pretty terrible idea because you're forfeiting your turn if you're not healed in time. Action economy is so important in 5e, and if you're going down it's probably a pretty bad time for your team to lose a turn.
Furthermore, if you're not using Healing Word - which really grants a dismally low amount of HP - you're wasting yet another action healing. Healing in combat is just not great period, and I think there are a lot of costs to the "whack-a-mole" strategy that aren't always super apparent when you're not considering the whole combat picture.
The different party members are not equally prone to going down. So, what I think this is penalising is front line characters who often take the brunt of a combat. What you could do is make it so that a character who goes down loses their next turn, regardless if they've been healed to get up.
However, I don't think the whack-a-mole is a problem. Because someone has to use their turn to keep the fighter or whoever in the fray. That's a spellcasters entire turn. I've had combats which were tough and had my fighter going toe-to-toe with a monster way tougher than the party should have been facing. She was going down every other round, if not every round. But it was rapidly burning the clerics spell slots to keep my character on her feet. That was a interesting and memorable combat and by not healing, it would have caused the line to break and the combat to be lost.
Are your players upset about the whack-a-mole? If not, then... is it so important?
For several years of regular play, my table has used the "if you hit 0, you get exhaustion" homebrew and it has worked amazingly. It gives weight to the end of a big battle, requiring a recovery period for everyone who went down and It adds tension to healing, "I've brought the wizard up 4 times and he keeps going down! do I bring him up again? or just stabilize him so the enemies ignore him? we need the damage but the exhaustion is killing him!"
The different party members are not equally prone to going down. So, what I think this is penalising is front line characters who often take the brunt of a combat. What you could do is make it so that a character who goes down loses their next turn, regardless if they've been healed to get up.
However, I don't think the whack-a-mole is a problem. Because someone has to use their turn to keep the fighter or whoever in the fray. That's a spellcasters entire turn. I've had combats which were tough and had my fighter going toe-to-toe with a monster way tougher than the party should have been facing. She was going down every other round, if not every round. But it was rapidly burning the clerics spell slots to keep my character on her feet. That was a interesting and memorable combat and by not healing, it would have caused the line to break and the combat to be lost.
Are your players upset about the whack-a-mole? If not, then... is it so important?
The front line characters are actually not supposed to go down - that's why they take the front line.
Different parties are affected differently, and when you have a lot of characters, that's when it starts getting next to impossible to meaningfully threaten a character without either:
wailing on their downed body with a creature that has many attacks in its multiattack - at least one to take them down, and at least 2 more to hit them another 2 times before healing can be received. Realistically, it needs 5 attacks or more.
TPK'ing the entire party
Hit them with immense damage attacks for auto kill (essentially impossible past a certain level, and not fun anyway)
Character death should be a real threat in the game, even if some modern tables have kind of swerved away from it as a possibility. A character dying here and there can be great for roleplay and storyline development. That's something that the players miss out on when they're unkillable bouncing mole folk.
My 6 character party includes a Bard, a Cleric and a Druid. It's almost impossible to finish one of them off before they get healed up again. Remember that for every turn the PCs lose healing someone back up, the monsters have already lost a turn because even though they put a character to zero, it didn't achieve anything if that character still gets to take their turn. Since you can also do a cantrip/attack and then cast Healing Word, the monsters actually lose action economy by spending a turn knocking a character to zero if this occurs.
In all honesty, the real culprit is just healing word. For future games I'm going to consider banning it, and I think it would positively affect gameplay by making combat more exciting.
Different parties are affected differently, and when you have a lot of characters, that's when it starts getting next to impossible to meaningfully threaten a character without either:
wailing on their downed body with a creature that has many attacks in its multiattack - at least one to take them down, and at least 2 more to hit them another 2 times before healing can be received. Realistically, it needs 5 attacks or more.
TPK'ing the entire party
Hit them with immense damage attacks for auto kill (essentially impossible past a certain level, and not fun anyway)
Leaving an effect that blocks vision will prevent healing word, and any substantial damaging zone will mean they just go down again at the start of their round unless someone drags them out. One thing I've considered is making it so healing word doesn't work on unconscious targets, on the theory that they can't hear it.
Failing your third death save does not mean you bled out. It means you are slain in battle.
It COULD mean that you bled out. It could also mean that a passing monster finally put you out of your misery. It could mean that your heart gave out from the stress and you're just plain dead now. It could mean that a stray shot ended you.
If we shift our focus of HP = 0 from "bleeding out from a grievous wound" to "kneeling down exhausted and beaten", then we make the whole wack-a-mole nature of healing near 0 work a little better. The idea of pushing yourself up to keep fighting with 2 HP after a healing word makes more sense. Also noting that every healing word is a 1st level spell slot of which there are only so many. It's not much more offensive than the paladin who uses 1 HP at a time from lay on hands to pick people up.
The thing about DND is that combat isn't crunchy enough to account for the "less effective fighting". That's a whole layer of rules that all sides would need to keep it "fair" and "balanced." Rather than slowing down the slog to the end, combat keeps going with relative abstractions towards that finish.
My 6 character party includes a Bard, a Cleric and a Druid. It's almost impossible to finish one of them off before they get healed up again. Remember that for every turn the PCs lose healing someone back up, the monsters have already lost a turn because even though they put a character to zero, it didn't achieve anything if that character still gets to take their turn. Since you can also do a cantrip/attack and then cast Healing Word, the monsters actually lose action economy by spending a turn knocking a character to zero if this occurs.
This is relying on a couple assumptions. 1) that spell slots are trivial resources and there's always enough of them to go around, and 2) there there is little difference between cantrip/HW and whatever else you might have done on your turn. If one of these is true, the other is not.
I'll go so far as to say party with a half the players dedicated to healing shouldn't go down. The players have chosen to be strong defensively. You don't challenge that by upping the difficulty until you kill someone, you allow for different failure states that accentuate their choices. They don't have enough damage output to kill the ritualist before the spell goes off. They can't get to the gallows before the executioner throws the lever. Let them be good at the things they have chosen to be good at, and make consequences for the things they neglected to be good at.
Personally, I say any healing (not including temporary HP) done when a party member is at 0 hp puts them at 1 hp, regardless of how much healing was done. The downed player remains prone.
Keeping them a single bad hit away from going back to 0--including the opportunity attack they might incur from the NPC who downed them if that NPC is still standing next to their prone body--has done a decent job at keeping my players from taking these kinds of actions. They still will use healing on a downed bad guy, but the 1 hp of healing is so inefficient that they generally try to keep from dropping to zero in the first place.
This is how I deal with whackamole. There are three ways.
#1 Death roles are made behind the DM screen, the players don't see it. Why? It prevents players from metagaming and letting a player skip a turn of play. They will heal the player up almost immediately to prevent player death.
#2 When a player goes down and then comes up, an increasing DC constitution saving throw is made starting at 5, then 10 then 15 and so on. If a player fails, he rolls on an wounds table to see what happens to them. Some can be quite disastrous. https://worldbuilderblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/lingering-injuries.pdf
#3 Undead will attack you when you are down and kill you. So if you drop, and there are three ghouls around you, you are most likely dead. From there the undead will pull the body away to consume it, making resurrection somewhat difficult depending on what they ate. Reincarnation might be the best choice.
I just think most folk are missing something in this discussion: why are we encouraging more healing in combat? Is it fun? Do people tell tales about that time they healed someone from 28 hitpoints up to 42?
The way healing is balanced in low-to-mid-level 5e makes it rarely worthwhile in combat - you're just not healing enough damage. You spend a turn casting a spell that heals way less than a turn of damage. Wooo? It really seems balanced around healing-from-zero, so that carry-over damage is "healed" too.
Out side getting-them-up heals from zero, it's not only more efficient for your character to help kill the baddies, it's more fun and makes the battle faster.
Getting a healing word on the comrade who is bleeding out feels sort of clutch. It's exciting. Sure it's dopey when we get wack a mole, but I really don't think forcing the players to heal more in combat is the answer.
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That was the point I wanted to make, but as an extra, a bit of a suggestion off the top of my head...?
What if the system continues exactly as-is, but instead of unconscious and prone, the character is just reeling, half-dazed and badly wounded. They get an unavoidable disadvantage to every roll, movement is halved, no spells beyond cantrips, and concentration is impossible.
Everything else stays the same, but it's more fun narratively. Enemies have a reason to keep on attacking, instead of it feeling cheap when you as the DM have an opponent auto-crit a downed character - so in a way it would be more dangerous, because it makes more sense to keep hitting them and forcing failed death saves.
But it all preserves the balance in healing spells, and makes a lot more sense that they're back in the action with some healing.
Different parties are affected differently, and when you have a lot of characters, that's when it starts getting next to impossible to meaningfully threaten a character without either:
wailing on their downed body with a creature that has many attacks in its multiattack - at least one to take them down, and at least 2 more to hit them another 2 times before healing can be received. Realistically, it needs 5 attacks or more.
TPK'ing the entire party
Hit them with immense damage attacks for auto kill (essentially impossible past a certain level, and not fun anyway)
Leaving an effect that blocks vision will prevent healing word, and any substantial damaging zone will mean they just go down again at the start of their round unless someone drags them out. One thing I've considered is making it so healing word doesn't work on unconscious targets, on the theory that they can't hear it.
One thing to always be careful about in these forums:
There is a general issue with common gameplay, e.g. whack-a-mole healing, or characters abusing Blindfighting/Darkness, or the Reckless attack/GWM barbarian dealing 25 damage on every attack while the non-optimised guy is doing 1d6+3.
Suggestions to counter it are made - block line of sight, give enemies truesight, use Hold person on the barbarian...
These suggestions are fine every now and again, but require specific additional planning by the DM, and will not address the issue which can occur every combat
Additionally the suggestions outright neuter a perfectly legitimate character ability or play style
If you only have 1 combat every 3 sessions, then I expect that these work-arounds are viable. But if you play a more combat-favoured game, then the issue will be occurring multiple times per session, in which case
I think your idea about Healing Word can't revive unconscious characters would work to stop the issue; but it also makes Healing Word completely useless. The only function that this spell has is to pop characters back up to consciousness at the cost of a level 1 spell slot. Any other use of the spell is a bad tactical decision (I am baffled when players waste a 3rd level spell slot to change 1d4+4 healing into 3d4+4 healing - an additional 5 hit points for the use of a 3rd level slot over a 1st, and even worse at higher levels). It would be better to ban the spell altogether, since if a character is using it just to heal characters who are still up, they are nigh on always making a mistake.
My 6 character party includes a Bard, a Cleric and a Druid. It's almost impossible to finish one of them off before they get healed up again. Remember that for every turn the PCs lose healing someone back up, the monsters have already lost a turn because even though they put a character to zero, it didn't achieve anything if that character still gets to take their turn. Since you can also do a cantrip/attack and then cast Healing Word, the monsters actually lose action economy by spending a turn knocking a character to zero if this occurs.
This is relying on a couple assumptions. 1) that spell slots are trivial resources and there's always enough of them to go around, and 2) there there is little difference between cantrip/HW and whatever else you might have done on your turn. If one of these is true, the other is not.
I'll go so far as to say party with a half the players dedicated to healing shouldn't go down. The players have chosen to be strong defensively. You don't challenge that by upping the difficulty until you kill someone, you allow for different failure states that accentuate their choices. They don't have enough damage output to kill the ritualist before the spell goes off. They can't get to the gallows before the executioner throws the lever. Let them be good at the things they have chosen to be good at, and make consequences for the things they neglected to be good at.
Low level spell slots are generally a plentiful resource. Maybe not at very low levels, but it's a rare adventuring day where the party are out of all spell slots, even after 3-4 deadly encounters if they are level 8+. My PCs are level 11 - I really put them through the ringer last session, with 3 back to back Well-Beyond-Deadly encounters against deeply unreasonable CRs. Two of three casters still had slots, although all the high level slots were gone. Consider that the average fight lasts 3-4 turns; you can keep on blowing spell slots every turn, and still have some to spare.
The Bonus Action element isn't the main issue, but it does compound the power of an already very powerful spell (and its power comes from the range). In terms of Cantrip+ Healing Word not being as effective as something else: if a monster uses its whole turn to down a character, and that character is brought back as a Bonus Action, the monster's whole turn is wasted. Monster damage is only relevant if it kills characters or forces a distinct tactical shift from the party - until it does, they haven't actually achieved anything. Yes, the cleric might have preferred to cast Blight, and maybe they'd rather get up close and cast Cure Wounds at 4th level. All of these are fine and good options. The issue is that a single Bonus Action level 1 spell, that means they can still do something else on their turn, is too small a resource consumption to counteract a character getting knocked unconscious. K.O.'ing a character is a BIG achievement for the monsters. It becomes very hard to do at high levels. If Healing Word was a level 3 spell it might feel like there is a fair exchange of resources to counteract the monsters' achievement, but a single level 1 spell slot is just way too low a resource investment. As it's a Bonus Action, you can also Dash, Disengage, Dodge, use the magic doodad crucial to the fight, make a melee attack (with Extra Attack or Sneak Attack and such for the multi-classers), use a magic item etc. Bringing the character back up is a super-useful, powerful action that then couples with further actions.
I think you're making a mistake in thinking that a party with a Druid, a Cleric and a Bard has any focus on healing at all. My players run a Circle of Stars druid (pew pew Guiding bolts, Polymorph, Maelstrom!), a Tempest Cleric (destructive wrath Shatters, Call Lightning, Thunderwaves) and a Glamour Bard (control spells like Irresistible Dance, animate objects etc.). None of them are dedicated in any way to healing, and don't have to be; it's still in their interest to use one spell preparation to take healing word. None of them made their characters to be healers, it's just something that they can toss out if they need it. The larger the party, the more chances are that you'll have multiple Healing Words available each turn before the monsters get in to deliver a coup de grace attack and finish them off. Admittedly, in a party of 3 with a cleric, a fighter and a barbarian, you won't have the same issue at all; take the cleric down and there's no whack-a-mole. The whack-a-mole problem is really kinda specific to larger parties that have access to this spell.
If anything it's telling that Whack-A-Mole would not be an issue for anyone if there was no Healing Word. Nobody minds the paladin jumping in to use a 5 point Lay on Hands, or clerics running forward to cast Cure Wounds. It's only Healing Word that causes the issue.
One way to limit this would simply be to make it a Touch spell, whereupon there is an additional strategic element to being able to bring someone back. Doing so is likely to endanger the caster, and in that case the Bonus Action element wouldn't matter nearly so much, and brings a fair cost. However of course, then there's no point to casting Healing Word since you could just cast Cure Wounds instead.
In AD&D, negative hit points were not a thing; you just died at 0
This is not correct.
You could be taken to -10 hp before you died. You would lose 1 hp per round if nobody helped you. If another PC bound your wounds or used magic, you were stabilized. However being at negative hp really messed you up.
This conversation is making me re-think 0 hp and death saves.
Either way, negative hp or death saves I think I'm going to consider levels of exhaustion for every failed death save or at -4 and -8 hp... Something to think about.
Actually, for AD&D, it was correct depending on which part of the rules you read :)
PHB AD&D p105 "Damage is meted out in hit points. If any creature reaches 0 or negative hit points, it is dead."
However, in the DMG, pg 82 we find the following under Zero Hit Points
"When any creature is brought to 0 hit points (optionally as low as -3 hit points if from the same blow which brought the total to 0), it is unconscious. In each of the next succeeding rounds 1 additional (negative) point will be lost until -10 is reached and the creature dies. Such loss and death are caused from bleeding, shock, convulsions, non-respiration, and similar causes. It ceases immediately on any round a friendly creature administers aid to the unconscious one. Aid consists of binding wounds, starting respiration, administering a draught (spirits, healing potion, etc.), or otherwise doing whatever is necessary to restore life. Any character brought to 0 (or fewer) hit points and then revived will remain in a corna far 1-6 turns. Thereafter, he or she must rest for a full week, minimum. He or she will be incapable of any activity other than that necessary to move slowly to a place of rest and eat and sleep when there. The character cannot attack, defend, cast spells, use magic devices, carry burdens, run, study, research, or do anything else. This is true even if cure spells and/or healing potions are given to him or her, although if a heal spell is bestowed the prohibition no longer applies. If any creature reaches a state of -6 or greater negative paints before being revived, this could indicate scarring or the loss of some member, if you so choose. For example, a character struck by a fireball and then treated when at -9 might have horrible scar tissue on exposed areas of flesh - hands, arms, neck, face."
So depending on which rule book you read - different things happened :)
Also, hitting zero hit points in AD&D, even if you could survive to -10, had really significant consequences. It was one of the reasons that most parties had a cleric whose main job was healing AND the reason the DM often handed out healing potions. However, in AD&D, a cure light wounds spell did only d8 healing while hit points and attacks weren't all that different from 5e. Cure serious wounds was a 4th level spell that did 2d8+1. Basically, healing in AD&D was worse than 5e and yet was used because the penalties of hitting 0 hit points were so extreme. (In fact, they were so extreme that I don't actually recall using them in most games - though that may just be because taking days long rests was far more common to recover from a fight).
These types of rules do tend to give a more "realistic" time scale to a D&D game - sometimes in 5e, the characters can reach level 20 within a few weeks of game time depending on the campaign unless the DM really pushes the use of downtime and narrates time gaps between character adventures.
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To the OP ... I also don't like yo-yo healing either - simply because I started with AD&D where the risks and penalties of getting close to dying were far more significant.
You can force the players to use healing by putting significant penalties on hitting zero hit points. The more significant the penalty, the more worthwhile it becomes to use resources long BEFORE a character can hit zero hit points - but it is a very different style of gameplay. On the other hand, with upcasting, and the larger number of healing spells, 5e actually has the capacity for a cleric to effectively heal characters before they hit zero. However, the cleric will be using most or all of their long rest resources on one or two fights in a day.
One suggestion I have seen is to impose a level of exhaustion every time a character comes back from zero hit points. This is a pretty significant on going penalty which allows a character to go down and come back twice without impacting combat (to hit and saves though movement is reduced). Three levels of exhaustion will impose disadvantage on attacks and saves while two imposed 1/2 movement. In addition, a long rest only restores one level of exhaustion/day as does the greater restoration spell - so the impact of hitting 0 in one fight won't usually make the fight impossible but it will have ongoing effects that the party may find significant.
The effect of these consequences on game play is that the characters may spend higher level spell slots and other resources to prevent some of the exhaustion from accruing by keeping a character up - it may not be efficient during a fight but getting rid of the exhaustion afterwards could be even more of a problem. On the other hand, this type of penalty will encourage single big encounter/day game play and a one and done attitude from the characters since they may have to expend significantly more resources on a fight for healing than in a base line 5e game.
Just make them miss a turn if they go to zero. That will be punishment enough.
Or alternatively, you need to cast Healing Word as a touch spell if the target cannot hear you, and a down character cannot hear you (tho this could make low level fights super dangerous).
The different party members are not equally prone to going down. So, what I think this is penalising is front line characters who often take the brunt of a combat. What you could do is make it so that a character who goes down loses their next turn, regardless if they've been healed to get up.
However, I don't think the whack-a-mole is a problem. Because someone has to use their turn to keep the fighter or whoever in the fray. That's a spellcasters entire turn. I've had combats which were tough and had my fighter going toe-to-toe with a monster way tougher than the party should have been facing. She was going down every other round, if not every round. But it was rapidly burning the clerics spell slots to keep my character on her feet. That was a interesting and memorable combat and by not healing, it would have caused the line to break and the combat to be lost.
Are your players upset about the whack-a-mole? If not, then... is it so important?
The front line characters are actually not supposed to go down - that's why they take the front line.
Different parties are affected differently, and when you have a lot of characters, that's when it starts getting next to impossible to meaningfully threaten a character without either:
wailing on their downed body with a creature that has many attacks in its multiattack - at least one to take them down, and at least 2 more to hit them another 2 times before healing can be received. Realistically, it needs 5 attacks or more.
TPK'ing the entire party
Hit them with immense damage attacks for auto kill (essentially impossible past a certain level, and not fun anyway)
Character death should be a real threat in the game, even if some modern tables have kind of swerved away from it as a possibility. A character dying here and there can be great for roleplay and storyline development. That's something that the players miss out on when they're unkillable bouncing mole folk.
My 6 character party includes a Bard, a Cleric and a Druid. It's almost impossible to finish one of them off before they get healed up again. Remember that for every turn the PCs lose healing someone back up, the monsters have already lost a turn because even though they put a character to zero, it didn't achieve anything if that character still gets to take their turn. Since you can also do a cantrip/attack and then cast Healing Word, the monsters actually lose action economy by spending a turn knocking a character to zero if this occurs.
In all honesty, the real culprit is just healing word. For future games I'm going to consider banning it, and I think it would positively affect gameplay by making combat more exciting.
Front line characters are front line because they have the least chance of going down. If your position is that the front line isn't supposed to drop, then what do you have to add in a conversation about players dropping. Is it your experience that the front line is just circumvented and the rear ranks are dropping? Then surely your knowledge of a good front line isn't sound, if they are immediately circumvented. If your characters, especially the front line, aren't going down in combat, then maybe your combats are too easy.
Those combats where a party of 3 or 4 level 8s are taking on a Fire Giant Dreadnaught are pretty memorable. Furthermore, the monster isn't wasting a turn by hitting the front line defences every turn. The Giant can do that every turn, but the players have limited spell slots. The entire encounter is a sort of puzzle, where the players are racing against time to figure out how to stay alive long enough to win. That's a lot more interesting than a fight in which no-one drops and the whole party just fights together, uses a few spell slots, but isn't ever in an immediate danger.
Front line characters are front line because they have the least chance of going down. If your position is that the front line isn't supposed to drop, then what do you have to add in a conversation about players dropping. Is it your experience that the front line is just circumvented and the rear ranks are dropping? Then surely your knowledge of a good front line isn't sound, if they are immediately circumvented. If your characters, especially the front line, aren't going down in combat, then maybe your combats are too easy.
I think it's more accurate to say that front-line tanky builds aren't more likely to go down than rear-line builds. The characters who are most likely to go splat are melee dps types like monks and melee rogues, though if you have fights tuned on high damage you can see lots of characters going down (in my CoS campaign, I've had a couple of fights that happened to occur in close quarters, meaning area damage that is tuned on the assumption of hitting two characters was hitting 4-5. Mass Healing Word and Channel Divinity: Preserve Life is a pretty impressive fight reset when something like that happens).
The different party members are not equally prone to going down. So, what I think this is penalising is front line characters who often take the brunt of a combat. What you could do is make it so that a character who goes down loses their next turn, regardless if they've been healed to get up.
However, I don't think the whack-a-mole is a problem. Because someone has to use their turn to keep the fighter or whoever in the fray. That's a spellcasters entire turn. I've had combats which were tough and had my fighter going toe-to-toe with a monster way tougher than the party should have been facing. She was going down every other round, if not every round. But it was rapidly burning the clerics spell slots to keep my character on her feet. That was a interesting and memorable combat and by not healing, it would have caused the line to break and the combat to be lost.
Are your players upset about the whack-a-mole? If not, then... is it so important?
The front line characters are actually not supposed to go down - that's why they take the front line.
Different parties are affected differently, and when you have a lot of characters, that's when it starts getting next to impossible to meaningfully threaten a character without either:
wailing on their downed body with a creature that has many attacks in its multiattack - at least one to take them down, and at least 2 more to hit them another 2 times before healing can be received. Realistically, it needs 5 attacks or more.
TPK'ing the entire party
Hit them with immense damage attacks for auto kill (essentially impossible past a certain level, and not fun anyway)
Character death should be a real threat in the game, even if some modern tables have kind of swerved away from it as a possibility. A character dying here and there can be great for roleplay and storyline development. That's something that the players miss out on when they're unkillable bouncing mole folk.
My 6 character party includes a Bard, a Cleric and a Druid. It's almost impossible to finish one of them off before they get healed up again. Remember that for every turn the PCs lose healing someone back up, the monsters have already lost a turn because even though they put a character to zero, it didn't achieve anything if that character still gets to take their turn. Since you can also do a cantrip/attack and then cast Healing Word, the monsters actually lose action economy by spending a turn knocking a character to zero if this occurs.
In all honesty, the real culprit is just healing word. For future games I'm going to consider banning it, and I think it would positively affect gameplay by making combat more exciting.
Front line characters are front line because they have the least chance of going down. If your position is that the front line isn't supposed to drop, then what do you have to add in a conversation about players dropping. Is it your experience that the front line is just circumvented and the rear ranks are dropping? Then surely your knowledge of a good front line isn't sound, if they are immediately circumvented. If your characters, especially the front line, aren't going down in combat, then maybe your combats are too easy.
Those combats where a party of 3 or 4 level 8s are taking on a Fire Giant Dreadnaught are pretty memorable. Furthermore, the monster isn't wasting a turn by hitting the front line defences every turn. The Giant can do that every turn, but the players have limited spell slots. The entire encounter is a sort of puzzle, where the players are racing against time to figure out how to stay alive long enough to win. That's a lot more interesting than a fight in which no-one drops and the whole party just fights together, uses a few spell slots, but isn't ever in an immediate danger.
This is becoming a deviation from the topic somewhat, but:
You're arguing that the front line characters should be going down and then be healed up, and keep on rising from 0 hit points.
This means there's a problem in the encounter design, because if the front liners - high AC or hit points or both - are firstly squashed, and then not finished, then squashed, then not finished, and repeat. Which means that the monsters, had they gone for the back line, would have taken the back line very fast, and ended the fight almost instantly.
If that was happening, the Fire Giant Dreadnought should have ignore the front line, walked over them and engaged the back line to stop them healing the character repeatedly.
There is nothing wrong with characters going to 0 hit points, front line or back line. It happens all the time. The issue with Whack-A-Mole gameplay is that because it's so easy to healing word a character back to consciousness, even going to 0 hit points doesn't really matter very much. This is exacerbated in larger, high level parties. My current group are level 11, with 3 of them having Healing Word (one of them takes it as his only healing spell). There is always a Healing Word to go around, so much so that there's little threat even when going unconscious. This then forces the DM to give important monsters at least 5 attacks to pose any real threat.
This then forces the DM to give important monsters at least 5 attacks to pose any real threat.
And this opens another real question: What is Threat?
I mean, really, is a TPK the thing your players fear the most? Is it the thing that makes them break out in a sweat at the table? Or is it the embarassment of being unable ot participate because they're at 0? Or the sense that the let the team down if they drop? Or that they let someone ELSE drop?
I'm thinking about my gnoll fight last night and it was pretty beefy. We had an entire session dedicated to two combats, a trash clean up from last week, some exposition and then BOOM it was time for the big bad. He came at them and popped legendary actions, ordered gnolls to take free attacks, used his reactions to force rerolls. He was designed to be tough and the party figured it out fast. He had 3 attacks and in those he usually only hit once but it was always high damage when he did. The party identified him as the greatest threat on the board early and they actually ignored the rest of the baddies to focus on him. Which was partly my fault for not using the minions better.
Either way, there was almost no risk to anyone in the party at any time, really. I got the fighter down to 10, the cleric down to 5 and that was it. Even before chat tossed in a healing potion to the ranger I kind of knew they weren't going to die.
But the players kept talking about how stressful it was. Every miss was a disaster for them. Every time they got hit they had a burst of panic that they couldn't soak the damage. No one needed to be down and bleeding for them to feel the stakes. Now this could be because while my players are decent "DnD'ers" they're not "OSR" players. They have a real deep attachment to these characters and the idea of one of them dying and not coming back is too hard to take. Even the idea of getting "beat" is a stressor.
And my point in all this is: They had fun. They felt pressure, they felt investment, and I didn't have to write homebrew rules to get there. Maybe my group is unique.
The part where it's in the DMG. Also, as written that rule only applies at exactly 0 hp (or optionally if reduced to -1 to -3 by a single attack), though that might just be poor editing.
It would be inordinately difficult to play the game without all of what you are calling "optional" rules that are in the DMG.
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For me, these are a bunch of solutions for a problem that doesn't really exist. In all my experience, dropping to 0 is a pretty terrible idea because you're forfeiting your turn if you're not healed in time. Action economy is so important in 5e, and if you're going down it's probably a pretty bad time for your team to lose a turn.
Furthermore, if you're not using Healing Word - which really grants a dismally low amount of HP - you're wasting yet another action healing. Healing in combat is just not great period, and I think there are a lot of costs to the "whack-a-mole" strategy that aren't always super apparent when you're not considering the whole combat picture.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
The different party members are not equally prone to going down. So, what I think this is penalising is front line characters who often take the brunt of a combat. What you could do is make it so that a character who goes down loses their next turn, regardless if they've been healed to get up.
However, I don't think the whack-a-mole is a problem. Because someone has to use their turn to keep the fighter or whoever in the fray. That's a spellcasters entire turn. I've had combats which were tough and had my fighter going toe-to-toe with a monster way tougher than the party should have been facing. She was going down every other round, if not every round. But it was rapidly burning the clerics spell slots to keep my character on her feet. That was a interesting and memorable combat and by not healing, it would have caused the line to break and the combat to be lost.
Are your players upset about the whack-a-mole? If not, then... is it so important?
For several years of regular play, my table has used the "if you hit 0, you get exhaustion" homebrew and it has worked amazingly. It gives weight to the end of a big battle, requiring a recovery period for everyone who went down and It adds tension to healing, "I've brought the wizard up 4 times and he keeps going down! do I bring him up again? or just stabilize him so the enemies ignore him? we need the damage but the exhaustion is killing him!"
The front line characters are actually not supposed to go down - that's why they take the front line.
Different parties are affected differently, and when you have a lot of characters, that's when it starts getting next to impossible to meaningfully threaten a character without either:
Character death should be a real threat in the game, even if some modern tables have kind of swerved away from it as a possibility. A character dying here and there can be great for roleplay and storyline development. That's something that the players miss out on when they're unkillable bouncing mole folk.
My 6 character party includes a Bard, a Cleric and a Druid. It's almost impossible to finish one of them off before they get healed up again. Remember that for every turn the PCs lose healing someone back up, the monsters have already lost a turn because even though they put a character to zero, it didn't achieve anything if that character still gets to take their turn. Since you can also do a cantrip/attack and then cast Healing Word, the monsters actually lose action economy by spending a turn knocking a character to zero if this occurs.
In all honesty, the real culprit is just healing word. For future games I'm going to consider banning it, and I think it would positively affect gameplay by making combat more exciting.
Leaving an effect that blocks vision will prevent healing word, and any substantial damaging zone will mean they just go down again at the start of their round unless someone drags them out. One thing I've considered is making it so healing word doesn't work on unconscious targets, on the theory that they can't hear it.
Crazy idea to shift your focus:
Failing your third death save does not mean you bled out. It means you are slain in battle.
It COULD mean that you bled out. It could also mean that a passing monster finally put you out of your misery. It could mean that your heart gave out from the stress and you're just plain dead now. It could mean that a stray shot ended you.
If we shift our focus of HP = 0 from "bleeding out from a grievous wound" to "kneeling down exhausted and beaten", then we make the whole wack-a-mole nature of healing near 0 work a little better. The idea of pushing yourself up to keep fighting with 2 HP after a healing word makes more sense. Also noting that every healing word is a 1st level spell slot of which there are only so many. It's not much more offensive than the paladin who uses 1 HP at a time from lay on hands to pick people up.
The thing about DND is that combat isn't crunchy enough to account for the "less effective fighting". That's a whole layer of rules that all sides would need to keep it "fair" and "balanced." Rather than slowing down the slog to the end, combat keeps going with relative abstractions towards that finish.
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This is relying on a couple assumptions. 1) that spell slots are trivial resources and there's always enough of them to go around, and 2) there there is little difference between cantrip/HW and whatever else you might have done on your turn. If one of these is true, the other is not.
I'll go so far as to say party with a half the players dedicated to healing shouldn't go down. The players have chosen to be strong defensively. You don't challenge that by upping the difficulty until you kill someone, you allow for different failure states that accentuate their choices. They don't have enough damage output to kill the ritualist before the spell goes off. They can't get to the gallows before the executioner throws the lever. Let them be good at the things they have chosen to be good at, and make consequences for the things they neglected to be good at.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Personally, I say any healing (not including temporary HP) done when a party member is at 0 hp puts them at 1 hp, regardless of how much healing was done. The downed player remains prone.
Keeping them a single bad hit away from going back to 0--including the opportunity attack they might incur from the NPC who downed them if that NPC is still standing next to their prone body--has done a decent job at keeping my players from taking these kinds of actions. They still will use healing on a downed bad guy, but the 1 hp of healing is so inefficient that they generally try to keep from dropping to zero in the first place.
This is how I deal with whackamole. There are three ways.
#1 Death roles are made behind the DM screen, the players don't see it. Why? It prevents players from metagaming and letting a player skip a turn of play. They will heal the player up almost immediately to prevent player death.
#2 When a player goes down and then comes up, an increasing DC constitution saving throw is made starting at 5, then 10 then 15 and so on. If a player fails, he rolls on an wounds table to see what happens to them. Some can be quite disastrous. https://worldbuilderblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/lingering-injuries.pdf
#3 Undead will attack you when you are down and kill you. So if you drop, and there are three ghouls around you, you are most likely dead. From there the undead will pull the body away to consume it, making resurrection somewhat difficult depending on what they ate. Reincarnation might be the best choice.
I just think most folk are missing something in this discussion: why are we encouraging more healing in combat? Is it fun? Do people tell tales about that time they healed someone from 28 hitpoints up to 42?
The way healing is balanced in low-to-mid-level 5e makes it rarely worthwhile in combat - you're just not healing enough damage. You spend a turn casting a spell that heals way less than a turn of damage. Wooo? It really seems balanced around healing-from-zero, so that carry-over damage is "healed" too.
Out side getting-them-up heals from zero, it's not only more efficient for your character to help kill the baddies, it's more fun and makes the battle faster.
Getting a healing word on the comrade who is bleeding out feels sort of clutch. It's exciting. Sure it's dopey when we get wack a mole, but I really don't think forcing the players to heal more in combat is the answer.
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That was the point I wanted to make, but as an extra, a bit of a suggestion off the top of my head...?
What if the system continues exactly as-is, but instead of unconscious and prone, the character is just reeling, half-dazed and badly wounded. They get an unavoidable disadvantage to every roll, movement is halved, no spells beyond cantrips, and concentration is impossible.
Everything else stays the same, but it's more fun narratively. Enemies have a reason to keep on attacking, instead of it feeling cheap when you as the DM have an opponent auto-crit a downed character - so in a way it would be more dangerous, because it makes more sense to keep hitting them and forcing failed death saves.
But it all preserves the balance in healing spells, and makes a lot more sense that they're back in the action with some healing.
One thing to always be careful about in these forums:
If you only have 1 combat every 3 sessions, then I expect that these work-arounds are viable. But if you play a more combat-favoured game, then the issue will be occurring multiple times per session, in which case
I think your idea about Healing Word can't revive unconscious characters would work to stop the issue; but it also makes Healing Word completely useless. The only function that this spell has is to pop characters back up to consciousness at the cost of a level 1 spell slot. Any other use of the spell is a bad tactical decision (I am baffled when players waste a 3rd level spell slot to change 1d4+4 healing into 3d4+4 healing - an additional 5 hit points for the use of a 3rd level slot over a 1st, and even worse at higher levels). It would be better to ban the spell altogether, since if a character is using it just to heal characters who are still up, they are nigh on always making a mistake.
Low level spell slots are generally a plentiful resource. Maybe not at very low levels, but it's a rare adventuring day where the party are out of all spell slots, even after 3-4 deadly encounters if they are level 8+. My PCs are level 11 - I really put them through the ringer last session, with 3 back to back Well-Beyond-Deadly encounters against deeply unreasonable CRs. Two of three casters still had slots, although all the high level slots were gone. Consider that the average fight lasts 3-4 turns; you can keep on blowing spell slots every turn, and still have some to spare.
The Bonus Action element isn't the main issue, but it does compound the power of an already very powerful spell (and its power comes from the range). In terms of Cantrip+ Healing Word not being as effective as something else: if a monster uses its whole turn to down a character, and that character is brought back as a Bonus Action, the monster's whole turn is wasted. Monster damage is only relevant if it kills characters or forces a distinct tactical shift from the party - until it does, they haven't actually achieved anything. Yes, the cleric might have preferred to cast Blight, and maybe they'd rather get up close and cast Cure Wounds at 4th level. All of these are fine and good options. The issue is that a single Bonus Action level 1 spell, that means they can still do something else on their turn, is too small a resource consumption to counteract a character getting knocked unconscious. K.O.'ing a character is a BIG achievement for the monsters. It becomes very hard to do at high levels. If Healing Word was a level 3 spell it might feel like there is a fair exchange of resources to counteract the monsters' achievement, but a single level 1 spell slot is just way too low a resource investment. As it's a Bonus Action, you can also Dash, Disengage, Dodge, use the magic doodad crucial to the fight, make a melee attack (with Extra Attack or Sneak Attack and such for the multi-classers), use a magic item etc. Bringing the character back up is a super-useful, powerful action that then couples with further actions.
I think you're making a mistake in thinking that a party with a Druid, a Cleric and a Bard has any focus on healing at all. My players run a Circle of Stars druid (pew pew Guiding bolts, Polymorph, Maelstrom!), a Tempest Cleric (destructive wrath Shatters, Call Lightning, Thunderwaves) and a Glamour Bard (control spells like Irresistible Dance, animate objects etc.). None of them are dedicated in any way to healing, and don't have to be; it's still in their interest to use one spell preparation to take healing word. None of them made their characters to be healers, it's just something that they can toss out if they need it. The larger the party, the more chances are that you'll have multiple Healing Words available each turn before the monsters get in to deliver a coup de grace attack and finish them off. Admittedly, in a party of 3 with a cleric, a fighter and a barbarian, you won't have the same issue at all; take the cleric down and there's no whack-a-mole. The whack-a-mole problem is really kinda specific to larger parties that have access to this spell.
If anything it's telling that Whack-A-Mole would not be an issue for anyone if there was no Healing Word. Nobody minds the paladin jumping in to use a 5 point Lay on Hands, or clerics running forward to cast Cure Wounds. It's only Healing Word that causes the issue.
One way to limit this would simply be to make it a Touch spell, whereupon there is an additional strategic element to being able to bring someone back. Doing so is likely to endanger the caster, and in that case the Bonus Action element wouldn't matter nearly so much, and brings a fair cost. However of course, then there's no point to casting Healing Word since you could just cast Cure Wounds instead.
Actually, for AD&D, it was correct depending on which part of the rules you read :)
PHB AD&D p105 "Damage is meted out in hit points. If any creature reaches 0 or negative hit points, it is dead."
However, in the DMG, pg 82 we find the following under Zero Hit Points
"When any creature is brought to 0 hit points (optionally as low as -3 hit points if from the same blow which brought the total to 0), it is unconscious. In each of the next succeeding rounds 1 additional (negative) point will be lost until -10 is reached and the creature dies. Such loss and death are caused from bleeding, shock, convulsions, non-respiration, and similar causes. It ceases immediately on any round a friendly creature administers aid to the unconscious one. Aid consists of binding wounds, starting respiration, administering a draught (spirits, healing potion, etc.), or otherwise doing whatever is necessary to restore life. Any character brought to 0 (or fewer) hit points and then revived will remain in a corna far 1-6 turns. Thereafter, he or she must rest for a full week, minimum. He or she will be incapable of any activity other than that necessary to move slowly to a place of rest and eat and sleep when there.
The character cannot attack, defend, cast spells, use magic devices, carry burdens, run, study, research, or do anything else. This is true even if cure spells and/or healing potions are given to him or her, although if a heal spell is bestowed the prohibition no longer applies. If any creature reaches a state of -6 or greater negative paints before being revived, this could indicate scarring or the loss of some member, if you so choose. For example, a character struck by a fireball and then treated when at -9 might have horrible scar tissue on exposed areas of flesh - hands, arms, neck, face."
So depending on which rule book you read - different things happened :)
Also, hitting zero hit points in AD&D, even if you could survive to -10, had really significant consequences. It was one of the reasons that most parties had a cleric whose main job was healing AND the reason the DM often handed out healing potions. However, in AD&D, a cure light wounds spell did only d8 healing while hit points and attacks weren't all that different from 5e. Cure serious wounds was a 4th level spell that did 2d8+1. Basically, healing in AD&D was worse than 5e and yet was used because the penalties of hitting 0 hit points were so extreme. (In fact, they were so extreme that I don't actually recall using them in most games - though that may just be because taking days long rests was far more common to recover from a fight).
These types of rules do tend to give a more "realistic" time scale to a D&D game - sometimes in 5e, the characters can reach level 20 within a few weeks of game time depending on the campaign unless the DM really pushes the use of downtime and narrates time gaps between character adventures.
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To the OP ... I also don't like yo-yo healing either - simply because I started with AD&D where the risks and penalties of getting close to dying were far more significant.
You can force the players to use healing by putting significant penalties on hitting zero hit points. The more significant the penalty, the more worthwhile it becomes to use resources long BEFORE a character can hit zero hit points - but it is a very different style of gameplay. On the other hand, with upcasting, and the larger number of healing spells, 5e actually has the capacity for a cleric to effectively heal characters before they hit zero. However, the cleric will be using most or all of their long rest resources on one or two fights in a day.
One suggestion I have seen is to impose a level of exhaustion every time a character comes back from zero hit points. This is a pretty significant on going penalty which allows a character to go down and come back twice without impacting combat (to hit and saves though movement is reduced). Three levels of exhaustion will impose disadvantage on attacks and saves while two imposed 1/2 movement. In addition, a long rest only restores one level of exhaustion/day as does the greater restoration spell - so the impact of hitting 0 in one fight won't usually make the fight impossible but it will have ongoing effects that the party may find significant.
The effect of these consequences on game play is that the characters may spend higher level spell slots and other resources to prevent some of the exhaustion from accruing by keeping a character up - it may not be efficient during a fight but getting rid of the exhaustion afterwards could be even more of a problem. On the other hand, this type of penalty will encourage single big encounter/day game play and a one and done attitude from the characters since they may have to expend significantly more resources on a fight for healing than in a base line 5e game.
Just make them miss a turn if they go to zero. That will be punishment enough.
Or alternatively, you need to cast Healing Word as a touch spell if the target cannot hear you, and a down character cannot hear you (tho this could make low level fights super dangerous).
Front line characters are front line because they have the least chance of going down. If your position is that the front line isn't supposed to drop, then what do you have to add in a conversation about players dropping. Is it your experience that the front line is just circumvented and the rear ranks are dropping? Then surely your knowledge of a good front line isn't sound, if they are immediately circumvented. If your characters, especially the front line, aren't going down in combat, then maybe your combats are too easy.
Those combats where a party of 3 or 4 level 8s are taking on a Fire Giant Dreadnaught are pretty memorable. Furthermore, the monster isn't wasting a turn by hitting the front line defences every turn. The Giant can do that every turn, but the players have limited spell slots. The entire encounter is a sort of puzzle, where the players are racing against time to figure out how to stay alive long enough to win. That's a lot more interesting than a fight in which no-one drops and the whole party just fights together, uses a few spell slots, but isn't ever in an immediate danger.
I think it's more accurate to say that front-line tanky builds aren't more likely to go down than rear-line builds. The characters who are most likely to go splat are melee dps types like monks and melee rogues, though if you have fights tuned on high damage you can see lots of characters going down (in my CoS campaign, I've had a couple of fights that happened to occur in close quarters, meaning area damage that is tuned on the assumption of hitting two characters was hitting 4-5. Mass Healing Word and Channel Divinity: Preserve Life is a pretty impressive fight reset when something like that happens).
This is becoming a deviation from the topic somewhat, but:
You're arguing that the front line characters should be going down and then be healed up, and keep on rising from 0 hit points.
This means there's a problem in the encounter design, because if the front liners - high AC or hit points or both - are firstly squashed, and then not finished, then squashed, then not finished, and repeat. Which means that the monsters, had they gone for the back line, would have taken the back line very fast, and ended the fight almost instantly.
If that was happening, the Fire Giant Dreadnought should have ignore the front line, walked over them and engaged the back line to stop them healing the character repeatedly.
There is nothing wrong with characters going to 0 hit points, front line or back line. It happens all the time. The issue with Whack-A-Mole gameplay is that because it's so easy to healing word a character back to consciousness, even going to 0 hit points doesn't really matter very much. This is exacerbated in larger, high level parties. My current group are level 11, with 3 of them having Healing Word (one of them takes it as his only healing spell). There is always a Healing Word to go around, so much so that there's little threat even when going unconscious. This then forces the DM to give important monsters at least 5 attacks to pose any real threat.
And this opens another real question: What is Threat?
I mean, really, is a TPK the thing your players fear the most? Is it the thing that makes them break out in a sweat at the table? Or is it the embarassment of being unable ot participate because they're at 0? Or the sense that the let the team down if they drop? Or that they let someone ELSE drop?
I'm thinking about my gnoll fight last night and it was pretty beefy. We had an entire session dedicated to two combats, a trash clean up from last week, some exposition and then BOOM it was time for the big bad. He came at them and popped legendary actions, ordered gnolls to take free attacks, used his reactions to force rerolls. He was designed to be tough and the party figured it out fast. He had 3 attacks and in those he usually only hit once but it was always high damage when he did. The party identified him as the greatest threat on the board early and they actually ignored the rest of the baddies to focus on him. Which was partly my fault for not using the minions better.
Either way, there was almost no risk to anyone in the party at any time, really. I got the fighter down to 10, the cleric down to 5 and that was it. Even before chat tossed in a healing potion to the ranger I kind of knew they weren't going to die.
But the players kept talking about how stressful it was. Every miss was a disaster for them. Every time they got hit they had a burst of panic that they couldn't soak the damage. No one needed to be down and bleeding for them to feel the stakes. Now this could be because while my players are decent "DnD'ers" they're not "OSR" players. They have a real deep attachment to these characters and the idea of one of them dying and not coming back is too hard to take. Even the idea of getting "beat" is a stressor.
And my point in all this is: They had fun. They felt pressure, they felt investment, and I didn't have to write homebrew rules to get there. Maybe my group is unique.
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