Depends what problem you're trying to solve. My problem with healing potions is "okay, you drink the potion and heal for 7 points. The monster then goes and whacks you for 7 points", making it pretty much a wasted action.
But lots of specific things you can take an action to do would be a waste of an action under specific circumstances. That doesn't mean we should turn them all into bonus actions.
Furthermore, drinking a heal to gain 7 hp and then the monster hits you to take you back down 7 hp means you have absorbed that attack which could have hit (and killed) someone else. You've made the monster burn his attack, potentially giving a team mate the time to get into a more advantageous position to take that monster out. So depending on circumstance, using the potion to make the monster burn an attack would actually be a good move.
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I’ve had a few NPC’s with a “two in the head you know he’s dead” approach, but I agree this would generally be an outcome of trying to kill the person versus trying to win the fight.
I interpreted the comment almost more like he’s more or less table ruling that there is one failed death save pretty much ensured, but not necessarily automatically, on the table. You could table rule only 2 death saves, but that wouldn’t burn the second/next attack.
if a double tap favouritism works for the table, I think it’s fine. Most rules are about balance and simplicity, not “realism.” Falling damage, movement/sequential turns/initiative, grappling, armour class, hit points, and level bonus are all pretty sad abstractions if you want something realistic.
What about administering a potion to someone unconscious if spells are gone? My house rule is you get half the roll for the potion because odds are about 50 percent will end up spilled because it’s hard to feed someone liquid when they are dead weight
You guys play how you want but you all seem to be hombrewing stuff because you think it’s unfair to characters ... but this is literally a band aid to try and make players even MORE likely to just stockpile minor potions, healing word every round to revive KOs, Lay on Hands for 1hp...
And that sounds abysmal. It’s like a benefit to be at 1hp. Battles will just be a race for damage and to KO. Strategy is irrelevant, once you figure out the initiative order you can just plunk you’re ally with enough HP to do an action and absorb 40dmg so you can redo it next round.
My solution is literally settled in session 0 and PCs then start using spells and heal properly, and potions get drunk. And not a single issue with “DM vs Players” at all.
The problem I have with with that is that's a "DM change", not a tactical choice made from the perspective of the NPC. E.g. - the NPC the Party is trying to capture and who has turned to fight the Party Rogue who had caught up to them well ahead of the rest of the Party, who gets in a lucky critical and drops the Rogue is going to take the time to stop and kill the Character while the rest of the Party is bearing down on them, because the DM has a tactical doctrine, even though it makes more in-character sense for the NPC to bolt for the shadows to try and escape?
It's very video game, and it's very DM vs. Players.
Again - your style is your style - but not for me. I very much believe that that tactical choices made by monsters/NPCs need to make sense from their perspective. I don't view them as programmed game components put there to pursue optimal tactical doctrines to maximize the drain on Player/Character resources. They're part of the game world.
I love how you’ve made this one like the NPCs should just accept that they’d never kill anyone that’s down while PCs get their kills like normal and how this weird mechanic should be completely ignored by the baddies because you think it’s unrealistic.
You want video games? Play the heal/KO/repeat video game then. Because that’s the PCs “gaming” the system. And do you see PCs saying “oh no, non-lethal damage and run!” as part of their doctrine?
This is why a single session 0 can solve all of these issues and it’s fair to everyone and erases video gamer style of play.
Quote from Jaysburn>>This is very unrealistic in most cases though. Any intelligent enemy isn't going to waste their time stabbing unconscious/presumably dead people, they're going to deal with the threats still at hand. If it's a drawn out encounter and people keep going down and then getting healed back up, then they might start focusing on finishing them off, but more often they'll focus on the individual doing the healing.
There are some creatures that may prioritize attacking/eating a downed enemy over the active threats, but it's definitely a minority.
I love how you’ve rationalized that baddies should act a certain way... that encourages gamification of healing and the turn round. I wish you luck, you’ll just be dealing with the exact issues in this thread and be making homebrew to “fix” it later.
This is very unrealistic in most cases though. Any intelligent enemy isn't going to waste their time stabbing unconscious/presumably dead people, they're going to deal with the threats still at hand.
If the downed people are likely to stand up and start being a problem again, it's most certainly worth the trouble to make sure that doesn't happen. The only reason PCs don't do it is because NPCs don't use the same rules for going to 0 hp.
I guess this conversation has moved away from healing potions at this point. But i kind of like the double tapping NPCs. At least occasionally. I have been finding the ko/heal/repeat thing a bit tedious. Ive KOd my players countless times but no one ever seems to die. Recently I had a player stuck in a rug of smothering and he was KOd and healed 5 times before the players realized he was gonna die at the start of his turns anyways. I kind of fudged it, it was the end of a long session and i think everyone was a bit fuzzy but i cant help but think there should have been more severe consequences and i worry my players wont care as much about being KOd. Maybe negative health is a good idea.
If the downed people are likely to stand up and start being a problem again, it's most certainly worth the trouble to make sure that doesn't happen. The only reason PCs don't do it is because NPCs don't use the same rules for going to 0 hp.
That's true but... Even in Champions we had this issue. When someone in Champions goes to 0 STUN or below, that character is "unconscious" (not dying, just KO'ed). Additional blows won't kill them but will KO them into deeper unconsciousness. At 0 to -10 STUN, you get a recovery on your next phase. At -11 to -20, you get a recovery only on post-segment 12 (roughly equivalent to once every 3 or 4 rounds in D&D). At -21 to -30, it's once per minute (a turn in Champions is 12 seconds, so this effectively takes you out of the battle, as it would in D&D). And at -31 and below it is "GM discretion" (though typically we made it 10 minutes). This is with no one helping you recover.
What we found was that if villain NPCs were given the chance to take recoveries just like heroes from the 0 to -10 range of KO, the heroes would blast KOed villains "for good measure" (they could never be sure "how far out" the villain was), to make sure he wasn't getting up. We decided after a very short while that it was extremely unheroic to have Superman or Iron Man blasting someone lying there unconscious (I mean, really???), although tactically it was the most efficient thing to do (defenses are down, your blow does full damage, and you will be 100% certain that the villain will not be getting up if you just do that extra blow to the KOed guy). The resulting decision for the group of GMs was, "KOed villains don't get recoveries." Yes, it makes the battle easier for the heroes (but that's fixable... just make the villains a little tougher while conscious). But it also gets rid of the extremely unheroic pattern of behavior.
Now villains are bad, and you could see that villains might want to hit KO'ed heroes. And GMs did give the players recoveries, just not the villains. But we generally, unless the villain was exceptionally murderous, did not have villains attack KOed heroes either. We did this because we wanted the PCs to be able to recover because it sucks to sit there watching while the battle goes on for another 45 minutes. But also, even though they are villains, we did not thing it was "in theme" for even villains to be beating up KOed characters. We wanted fights to happen between active participants, not people swinging at unmoving bodies.
I feel the same way for D&D. When the monsters go to 0 hp, I count them as "dead" unless the party has declared they are fighting to subdue. I do not make Death Saving Throws for them. I'd rather just put an extra monster or two into the fight to begin with, than monitor DST's for every KOed enemy in the game and have to deal with them getting up, getting kOed back down, up, down, up down. No... to me this would completely destroy the action of the battle.
So yeah, in my game, PCs can come back from 0 hp, monsters can't. PCs have no reason to attack enemies just lying on the ground, so they never do. And since they don't, it follows that the monster's don't either -- it's not a situation in which monsters are avoiding doing something players do.
Again if someone is particularly murderous, like the BBEG. Yes. BBEG (whom they are not even close to meeting yet) would absolutely do it, period. But I'm not going to do that with some Carrion Crawlers or Kobolds or something.
I love how you’ve rationalized that baddies should act a certain way... that encourages gamification of healing and the turn round. I wish you luck, you’ll just be dealing with the exact issues in this thread and be making homebrew to “fix” it later.
Rationalizing how bad guys act... is literally what DMs are supposed to do, all the time. I love how you respond to everything with "I love how," doesn't come off as the least bit obnoxious.
For my table, usually 3-6 players, I allow health potions to be taken as a bonus action for the PC who has them, but it takes and action to administer them to another PC.
For my table, usually 3-6 players, I allow health potions to be taken as a bonus action for the PC who has them, but it takes and action to administer them to another PC.
That's a perfectly reasonable way to do it. Whatever you find works best for your table is how you should do it.
Honestly this hasn't even come up yet in my game. 10 sessions in, the only time they have taken a healing salve (half-strength heal) or healing potion is out of combat so far. And although the party has like 8 potions of various things by now other than healing, I don't believe they have tried to use any of them in combat. So I will have to see what I think of it as we go forward.
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I feel like drinking a potion as an action is underpowered (maybe that’s because of small group) but a little OP as a bonus action.
Maybe I should run it as a action to drink or a bonus action to drink but you have to spend your reaction too (due to the fact that it takes time to think and realistically drinking would place someone in a tight spot)
IDK is this rule good or absolute trash as an idea?
I love how you’ve rationalized that baddies should act a certain way... that encourages gamification of healing and the turn round. I wish you luck, you’ll just be dealing with the exact issues in this thread and be making homebrew to “fix” it later.
Rationalizing how bad guys act... is literally what DMs are supposed to do, all the time. I love how you respond to everything with "I love how," doesn't come off as the least bit obnoxious.
I love it because you’re rationalizing all these changes because you think a kobold would just naturally just assume a PC is dead and un-heal-able as soon as they’re KO’d... which, if you think about it, is like pretending that the KO mechanic is some brand new thing that catches baddies by surprise every time they fight PCs (“so weird, these ones don’t die when we kill them, I’ll just keep knocking them out and see if that works!”).
And so the solutions you all have to all this frustration you have is to change healing mechanics because nobody ever uses it, it doesn’t work, nobody likes Heal/KO battles... when a simple Session 0 solves the problem.
No, I assume that rather than waste their action attacking an unconscious body, enemies will typically focus on the active threats.
Say you got in a fight in real life, you versus a handful of people, and you get a good shot in early and knock one person out. Do you then start kicking this unconscious person on the ground, as the remaining people bear down on you? No, obviously you don't, that's incredibly unrealistic. You focus on the people that are actively attacking you.
Mhm. Honestly it is a good house rule, makes potions far more desirable and interesting.
It is a good house rule and it's also a great tool for the DM to decide how they want the use of potions in combat to affect the action economy. In my campaign, I am pretty loose with minor healing potions and I do this because I know the characters have to weigh the benefit of an HP boost in combat against the cost of using an action to heal themselves.
Purely subjective, but having it require an action works better for the flow combat in my campaign.
No, I assume that rather than waste their action attacking an unconscious body, enemies will typically focus on the active threats.
Say you got in a fight in real life, you versus a handful of people, and you get a good shot in early and knock one person out. Do you then start kicking this unconscious person on the ground, as the remaining people bear down on you? No, obviously you don't, that's incredibly unrealistic. You focus on the people that are actively attacking you.
In reality, it's not very clear when someone is actually unconscious, so quite a lot of beating on targets that are currently incapable of fighting back happens. The main problem with finishing blows in D&D is that it's actually really hard to do, you have to hit them three times to make sure they won't stand up again. Usually best solved by dropping a damaging zone on top of them.
Unconscious or not, you don't waste your time continuing to hit the person you knocked down while you have others still attacking you. Until they get back up, they're not a threat, at least not nearly as much as the people who are still standing and actively attacking you.
Unconscious or not, you don't waste your time continuing to hit the person you knocked down while you have others still attacking you. Until they get back up, they're not a threat, at least not nearly as much as the people who are still standing and actively attacking you.
Neither reality nor game mechanics agrees with you. Reality is "Now that he's down I'll stop punching him and kick him instead". Game mechanics is "it's a waste of time knocking people down if they don't actually stay down".
@Jaysburn You say that, and I generally agree when its a new action. However I do like to play multiattacks out on the same person for frenzied beasts (as another example of something that might double-tap someone).
I like potions as a bonus action, that's how I run it (although my group doesn't tend to use them). I also hope that it means they might use other types of potion in combat more readily.
Unconscious or not, you don't waste your time continuing to hit the person you knocked down while you have others still attacking you. Until they get back up, they're not a threat, at least not nearly as much as the people who are still standing and actively attacking you.
Neither reality nor game mechanics agrees with you. Reality is "Now that he's down I'll stop punching him and kick him instead". Game mechanics is "it's a waste of time knocking people down if they don't actually stay down".
You've never even seen a fight, have you? I'm not talking about one on one. If there are multiple threats, you deal with the threats, not the people who are no longer a threat.
This is the same in game. If they spend their next turn attacking a downed person, they'll just get mobbed by the rest of their enemies. That's just dumb.
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But lots of specific things you can take an action to do would be a waste of an action under specific circumstances. That doesn't mean we should turn them all into bonus actions.
Furthermore, drinking a heal to gain 7 hp and then the monster hits you to take you back down 7 hp means you have absorbed that attack which could have hit (and killed) someone else. You've made the monster burn his attack, potentially giving a team mate the time to get into a more advantageous position to take that monster out. So depending on circumstance, using the potion to make the monster burn an attack would actually be a good move.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I’ve had a few NPC’s with a “two in the head you know he’s dead” approach, but I agree this would generally be an outcome of trying to kill the person versus trying to win the fight.
I interpreted the comment almost more like he’s more or less table ruling that there is one failed death save pretty much ensured, but not necessarily automatically, on the table. You could table rule only 2 death saves, but that wouldn’t burn the second/next attack.
if a double tap favouritism works for the table, I think it’s fine. Most rules are about balance and simplicity, not “realism.” Falling damage, movement/sequential turns/initiative, grappling, armour class, hit points, and level bonus are all pretty sad abstractions if you want something realistic.
What about administering a potion to someone unconscious if spells are gone? My house rule is you get half the roll for the potion because odds are about 50 percent will end up spilled because it’s hard to feed someone liquid when they are dead weight
You guys play how you want but you all seem to be hombrewing stuff because you think it’s unfair to characters ... but this is literally a band aid to try and make players even MORE likely to just stockpile minor potions, healing word every round to revive KOs, Lay on Hands for 1hp...
And that sounds abysmal. It’s like a benefit to be at 1hp. Battles will just be a race for damage and to KO. Strategy is irrelevant, once you figure out the initiative order you can just plunk you’re ally with enough HP to do an action and absorb 40dmg so you can redo it next round.
My solution is literally settled in session 0 and PCs then start using spells and heal properly, and potions get drunk. And not a single issue with “DM vs Players” at all.
I love how you’ve made this one like the NPCs should just accept that they’d never kill anyone that’s down while PCs get their kills like normal and how this weird mechanic should be completely ignored by the baddies because you think it’s unrealistic.
You want video games? Play the heal/KO/repeat video game then. Because that’s the PCs “gaming” the system. And do you see PCs saying “oh no, non-lethal damage and run!” as part of their doctrine?
This is why a single session 0 can solve all of these issues and it’s fair to everyone and erases video gamer style of play.
I love how you’ve rationalized that baddies should act a certain way... that encourages gamification of healing and the turn round. I wish you luck, you’ll just be dealing with the exact issues in this thread and be making homebrew to “fix” it later.
If the downed people are likely to stand up and start being a problem again, it's most certainly worth the trouble to make sure that doesn't happen. The only reason PCs don't do it is because NPCs don't use the same rules for going to 0 hp.
I guess this conversation has moved away from healing potions at this point. But i kind of like the double tapping NPCs. At least occasionally. I have been finding the ko/heal/repeat thing a bit tedious. Ive KOd my players countless times but no one ever seems to die. Recently I had a player stuck in a rug of smothering and he was KOd and healed 5 times before the players realized he was gonna die at the start of his turns anyways. I kind of fudged it, it was the end of a long session and i think everyone was a bit fuzzy but i cant help but think there should have been more severe consequences and i worry my players wont care as much about being KOd. Maybe negative health is a good idea.
That's true but... Even in Champions we had this issue. When someone in Champions goes to 0 STUN or below, that character is "unconscious" (not dying, just KO'ed). Additional blows won't kill them but will KO them into deeper unconsciousness. At 0 to -10 STUN, you get a recovery on your next phase. At -11 to -20, you get a recovery only on post-segment 12 (roughly equivalent to once every 3 or 4 rounds in D&D). At -21 to -30, it's once per minute (a turn in Champions is 12 seconds, so this effectively takes you out of the battle, as it would in D&D). And at -31 and below it is "GM discretion" (though typically we made it 10 minutes). This is with no one helping you recover.
What we found was that if villain NPCs were given the chance to take recoveries just like heroes from the 0 to -10 range of KO, the heroes would blast KOed villains "for good measure" (they could never be sure "how far out" the villain was), to make sure he wasn't getting up. We decided after a very short while that it was extremely unheroic to have Superman or Iron Man blasting someone lying there unconscious (I mean, really???), although tactically it was the most efficient thing to do (defenses are down, your blow does full damage, and you will be 100% certain that the villain will not be getting up if you just do that extra blow to the KOed guy). The resulting decision for the group of GMs was, "KOed villains don't get recoveries." Yes, it makes the battle easier for the heroes (but that's fixable... just make the villains a little tougher while conscious). But it also gets rid of the extremely unheroic pattern of behavior.
Now villains are bad, and you could see that villains might want to hit KO'ed heroes. And GMs did give the players recoveries, just not the villains. But we generally, unless the villain was exceptionally murderous, did not have villains attack KOed heroes either. We did this because we wanted the PCs to be able to recover because it sucks to sit there watching while the battle goes on for another 45 minutes. But also, even though they are villains, we did not thing it was "in theme" for even villains to be beating up KOed characters. We wanted fights to happen between active participants, not people swinging at unmoving bodies.
I feel the same way for D&D. When the monsters go to 0 hp, I count them as "dead" unless the party has declared they are fighting to subdue. I do not make Death Saving Throws for them. I'd rather just put an extra monster or two into the fight to begin with, than monitor DST's for every KOed enemy in the game and have to deal with them getting up, getting kOed back down, up, down, up down. No... to me this would completely destroy the action of the battle.
So yeah, in my game, PCs can come back from 0 hp, monsters can't. PCs have no reason to attack enemies just lying on the ground, so they never do. And since they don't, it follows that the monster's don't either -- it's not a situation in which monsters are avoiding doing something players do.
Again if someone is particularly murderous, like the BBEG. Yes. BBEG (whom they are not even close to meeting yet) would absolutely do it, period. But I'm not going to do that with some Carrion Crawlers or Kobolds or something.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Rationalizing how bad guys act... is literally what DMs are supposed to do, all the time. I love how you respond to everything with "I love how," doesn't come off as the least bit obnoxious.
For my table, usually 3-6 players, I allow health potions to be taken as a bonus action for the PC who has them, but it takes and action to administer them to another PC.
That's a perfectly reasonable way to do it. Whatever you find works best for your table is how you should do it.
Honestly this hasn't even come up yet in my game. 10 sessions in, the only time they have taken a healing salve (half-strength heal) or healing potion is out of combat so far. And although the party has like 8 potions of various things by now other than healing, I don't believe they have tried to use any of them in combat. So I will have to see what I think of it as we go forward.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I feel like drinking a potion as an action is underpowered (maybe that’s because of small group) but a little OP as a bonus action.
Maybe I should run it as a action to drink or a bonus action to drink but you have to spend your reaction too (due to the fact that it takes time to think and realistically drinking would place someone in a tight spot)
IDK is this rule good or absolute trash as an idea?
I love it because you’re rationalizing all these changes because you think a kobold would just naturally just assume a PC is dead and un-heal-able as soon as they’re KO’d... which, if you think about it, is like pretending that the KO mechanic is some brand new thing that catches baddies by surprise every time they fight PCs (“so weird, these ones don’t die when we kill them, I’ll just keep knocking them out and see if that works!”).
And so the solutions you all have to all this frustration you have is to change healing mechanics because nobody ever uses it, it doesn’t work, nobody likes Heal/KO battles... when a simple Session 0 solves the problem.
No, I assume that rather than waste their action attacking an unconscious body, enemies will typically focus on the active threats.
Say you got in a fight in real life, you versus a handful of people, and you get a good shot in early and knock one person out. Do you then start kicking this unconscious person on the ground, as the remaining people bear down on you? No, obviously you don't, that's incredibly unrealistic. You focus on the people that are actively attacking you.
It is a good house rule and it's also a great tool for the DM to decide how they want the use of potions in combat to affect the action economy. In my campaign, I am pretty loose with minor healing potions and I do this because I know the characters have to weigh the benefit of an HP boost in combat against the cost of using an action to heal themselves.
Purely subjective, but having it require an action works better for the flow combat in my campaign.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
In reality, it's not very clear when someone is actually unconscious, so quite a lot of beating on targets that are currently incapable of fighting back happens. The main problem with finishing blows in D&D is that it's actually really hard to do, you have to hit them three times to make sure they won't stand up again. Usually best solved by dropping a damaging zone on top of them.
Unconscious or not, you don't waste your time continuing to hit the person you knocked down while you have others still attacking you. Until they get back up, they're not a threat, at least not nearly as much as the people who are still standing and actively attacking you.
Neither reality nor game mechanics agrees with you. Reality is "Now that he's down I'll stop punching him and kick him instead". Game mechanics is "it's a waste of time knocking people down if they don't actually stay down".
@Jaysburn You say that, and I generally agree when its a new action. However I do like to play multiattacks out on the same person for frenzied beasts (as another example of something that might double-tap someone).
I like potions as a bonus action, that's how I run it (although my group doesn't tend to use them). I also hope that it means they might use other types of potion in combat more readily.
You've never even seen a fight, have you? I'm not talking about one on one. If there are multiple threats, you deal with the threats, not the people who are no longer a threat.
This is the same in game. If they spend their next turn attacking a downed person, they'll just get mobbed by the rest of their enemies. That's just dumb.