How to Implement Save or Dies in a Balanced D&D System

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

Alright, so Save or Dies got some flack in the 3E era, but in response to the padded sumo of 4E got some love again. Here's the question. For whatever base amount of lethality in the system, say generally speaking, we want an average of 6 attacks (player turns) to equate to 4 hits which equates to death. In this scenario the success rate of attacks is 66.6% If we wanted to be mathematically fair, we'd say that a save or die attack or an attack that kills on a hit would need to have a 16.6% chance of success.

Now, some people complained that nobody would like attacks that have such a low chance of success. However, I ask what other way you could implement it? You could for instance reduce the # of attacks required to hit a creature and increase the accuracy of each attack, in such a case save or dies could have an increased % of success. Another method would be 3E and previous editions way of puzzle attacks for monsters. For example, you can prepare Charm Person for the day, it has a much higher chance of success than other mundane ways of attacks IF you meet a humanoid. But if you meet a Construct, well tough, your slot is effectively useless.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The only good idea to come out of Mutants and Masterminds was that instead of making Save or Dies all-or-nothing you got a status penalty whose size was dependent on how much you failed your save. You fail it by one or two points and the penalty isn't that large, fail it by 15 and you're out of the fight.

If you get rid of Critical Existence Failure and assign some defense penalty for being wounded, that'd pretty much solve all of the problems right away.

[Tumbling Down]

CAN seems to be what usually gets brought up around these parts whenever someone mentions rocket launcher tag or critical existence failure.

The thread is here.

[hogarth]

I know some people hate the idea, but I don't really have a problem with save-or-die spells just doing a lot of damage, a la 3.5 Harm or PFRPG's save-or-"die" spells.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

The only good idea to come out of Mutants and Masterminds was that instead of making Save or Dies all-or-nothing you got a status penalty whose size was dependent on how much you failed your save. You fail it by one or two points and the penalty isn't that large, fail it by 15 and you're out of the fight.

If you get rid of Critical Existence Failure and assign some defense penalty for being wounded, that'd pretty much solve all of the problems right away.

It doesn't if we're saying if you look at a Gorgon, you're likely to just straight up turn to stone, or if you fail your save, you're levitating 30 ft above the ground and are gonna get pinged with arrows, or if you fail your save you're headed straight for the Plane of Water and are going to drown to death.

There's no sufficient penalty that feels appropriate in these situations.

@If a spell just does a lot of damage, it's either effectively a save or die, or just a high damage attack.

[Josh_Kablack]

There is also the tactical consideration that vanilla save-or-dies do not synergize at all with damage dealing. If each sword swing has a 2/3 chance to hit, doing 25% damage, but a death spell has a 1/6 chance of doing 100% damage the options may be on average equal, but hitting an enemy who has already taken 50-75% damage with a death spell is suboptimal and can invalidate the damage other PCs already did to that ally.

If you want the two attack modes to synergize then you need to
either

• use something like Lago's suggestion of M&M inspired defense penalties,
• or Hogarth's massive damage as save-or-die,
• or make your save or dies work like 3e Power Words, where they only work against targets who are already damaged;
• or make your save-or-dies work like 3.0 Disintegrate, where they do damage on a successful save

But then again, you could reasonably advocate for a game design where they weren't supposed to synergize.

[Red_Rob]

It doesn't if we're saying if you look at a Gorgon, you're likely to just straight up turn to stone, or if you fail your save, you're levitating 30 ft above the ground and are gonna get pinged with arrows, or if you fail your save you're headed straight for the Plane of Water and are going to drown to death.

There's no sufficient penalty that feels appropriate in these situations.

Well, there can be. You can partially resist the Gorgon's gaze, providing a Dex and Move penalty as you fight against the slow calcification. The Levitate can pull you upwards as you fight to stay on the ground, distracting you and giving a penalty to attack and AC. The Planeshift can phase shift you, leaving you disoriented and perhaps with a countdown to full planar transportation.

It's all how you fluff the magic. If it just does its thing and you dodge or you don't, then penalties seem odd. If they are effects that can be resisted and fought against then varying levels of effect can give stronger penalties.

[ishy]

Or you could make them near save or dies. Kinda like 3.0 harm, so you're left with almost no hitpoints or in need of immediate attention.

[A Man In Black]

The only good idea to come out of Mutants and Masterminds was that instead of making Save or Dies all-or-nothing you got a status penalty whose size was dependent on how much you failed your save. You fail it by one or two points and the penalty isn't that large, fail it by 15 and you're out of the fight.

If you get rid of Critical Existence Failure and assign some defense penalty for being wounded, that'd pretty much solve all of the problems right away.

Isn't that just hit points with a death spiral penalty for losing hit points, though?

[Seerow]

I like the power word style abilities. Lets you take out mooks easily, and makes you use at least some HP damage to save or die on major enemies.



Another alternative, you could make them more like a vorpal attack. ie you normally do damage that is level appropriate, but on a crit (or a saving throw crit fail, if you keep that) they die.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It doesn't if we're saying if you look at a Gorgon, you're likely to just straight up turn to stone, or if you fail your save, you're levitating 30 ft above the ground and are gonna get pinged with arrows, or if you fail your save you're headed straight for the Plane of Water and are going to drown to death.

Why, exactly? Why can't failing a 'turn to stone' roll by a meager amount just, as in God of War or Jade Empire, just turn you to stone for a few seconds rather than permanently? Why can't a Plane Shift that you resist put you out of phase for a round or three before you pop back in?

Isn't that just hit points with a death spiral penalty for losing hit points, though?

It could be, but not necessarily. For example, if you're doing something like Rage Meter or Pissy Boss Mode where dropping someone's hit points would make their defense go down up also make their offense go up. So just cynically dropping straight-up hit point damage has a high chance of backfiring unless you're going against mooks; the ideal situation is to land hit point or defense-lowering attacks and then smack them with a mobility or offense-lowering attack to prevent reprisal.

Or you can just accept the fact that losing health also lowers your attack and it puts you into a death spiral. This favors ambush and iajutsu-strike strategies which works out very well for games like Shadowrun.

Regardless either method 'solves' the problem of people feeling cheated out of combat because someone dropped a save-or-die while also having them in the game.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

In talking about ways of stacking, namely dealing damage on a failed save still does damage whereas a failed save or die often does nothing got me thinking on an alternate system.

We'll introduce a new stat called Death's Door until someone suggests a better name. Whenever a save or die spell (power, maneuver, ability, whatever) fails, it adds an amount to a creatures Death's Door which makes it easier for future save or dies to succeed.

See the below numbers:



In both examples, in roughly 6 attacks a creature will die. However, in the second example, 2 creatures can both use save or dies and have synergy with each other. This has the psychological and real game effect of ensuring that the efforts to get rid of a creature make some difference.

I welcome your thoughts.

[Dean]

Making save or dies just numbers jumbling might well make sense. If you can make a Medusa's Stare have only 1/4 the chance of succeeding but dealing 4X the damage on a successful "attack" you have a working, if uninteresting product.

Combine this with making them often have weird effects upon "death" where when you "die" to medusa's gaze you turn to stone and when you die to Plane Shift you shift planes and drown or whatever is pretty feasible

[ishy]

We'll introduce a new stat called Death's Door until someone suggests a better name. Whenever a save or die spell (power, maneuver, ability, whatever) fails, it adds an amount to a creatures Death's Door which makes it easier for future save or dies to succeed.

In both examples, in roughly 6 attacks a creature will die. However, in the second example, 2 creatures can both use save or dies and have synergy with each other. This has the psychological and real game effect of ensuring that the efforts to get rid of a creature make some difference.

I welcome your thoughts.

Why not just apply a save/defense penalty if they survive?
That sounds cleaner to me.

Problem with your numbers is though that nobody expects the first sod to work.
So unless you really know you can basically do nothing for your first turn, it sucks to use it,

Not to forget sometimes the first one will work and feel anti-climactic. Or you know suck if you are out of the fight as a pc before it even starts based on a 5% chance.

[A Man In Black]

It could be, but not necessarily.

Well, I'm not talking about some hypothetical other system, although you could do interesting things with different modifiers attached to M&M's bruise table. I was just talking about M&M as-written.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

Why not just apply a save/defense penalty if they survive?
That sounds cleaner to me.

Problem with your numbers is though that nobody expects the first sod to work.
So unless you really know you can basically do nothing for your first turn, it sucks to use it,

Not to forget sometimes the first one will work and feel anti-climactic. Or you know suck if you are out of the fight as a pc before it even starts based on a 5% chance.

There would be a save penalty, that's why you notice the numbers increasing by 5% every time. Now, the issue is figuring out how to scale these numbers with level (the chance to affect lower level creatures with the save or die should increase as you level as should your resistance to the save or dies from lower level creatures). Either each creature has to have a Death's Door Stat which lowers after every save or die against them (for a period of time) and a roll from the attacker is what kills them. Or every save or die has a saving throw associated with it and every time a creature fails the roll, they get a penalty on all saving throws (for a period of time).

[BearsAreBrown]

Adding another stat to take care of is not a good solution. It's functionally similar to a save penalty or a CAN system, but with more work.

[MfA]

Now, some people complained that nobody would like attacks that have such a low chance of success. However, I ask what other way you could implement it?

Make damage lower saves and give SoD secondary effects.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

Could you give an example Mfa?

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

Either we add another universal stat (which is not necessarily bad, especially if the system is designed to use it often) or we utilize the existing Fort, Ref, and Will Defenses and implement some elegant way to make attacks that merely do damage have a good chance at beating those defenses and Save or Dies have a worse chance at beating those defense while simultaneously imposing a cumulative save penalty to those stats in level appropriate numbers.

[MfA]

For instance (this is fiddly and requires too much number crunching) use 3e saves but add 10+CR difference then give a 5 save penalty when HP drops below 75%, 10 for 50% and 15 for 25%. A save or die like Flesh to Stone could stun or slow when saves succeed by less than 10.

[Foxwarrior]

I thought it would be pertinent to mention that YARPGS uses a special universal stat to handle Save or Dies. It replaces health.

After all, in swordfighting parlance, an attack which isn't intended to kill is called a "feint".

[ModelCitizen]

Personally I like something like fear and nausea in 3e. If your attack hits/target fails its save/whatever, your target suffers [penalizing condition]. If your target already has [penalizing condition], it suffers [total loss condition] instead. Targets less awesome than you by X amount suffer [total loss condition] regardless. Monsters more awesome than you by Y amount never suffer [total loss condition] but can still suffer [penalizing condition].

The big problem with that is that it rewards the whole party building around the same debuff. You could partially solve that by having lots of related [total loss condition]s work off the same [penalizing condition]. Paralysis, petrification, and sleep all work off Slowed. Frightened and Charmed both work off Demoralized, and so on. You could also solve that in the other direction by just requiring stacking effects to come from the same creature.

I know some people hate the idea, but I don't really have a problem with save-or-die spells just doing a lot of damage, a la 3.5 Harm or PFRPG's save-or-"die" spells.

I got no problem with it for Slay Living, or even Sleep (which could just deal nonlethal damage). But trying to make Charm Monster do HP damage gets all stupid so we need another solution anyway. We might as well figure out that solution first just in case it also works better for Slay Living.

[A Man In Black]

I got no problem with it for Slay Living, or even Sleep (which could just deal nonlethal damage). But trying to make Charm Monster do HP damage gets all stupid so we need another solution anyway. We might as well figure out that solution first just in case it also works better for Slay Living.

There's always the drain defenses/finishing move paradigm, where Charm Monster, Slay Living, and Coup De Grace are all finishing move options you use on foes you've softened up, regardless of whether the softening was done with Swing Axe, Sap Will, or Fireball.

[Murtak]

Save or dies are a shitty mechanic and seriously need to go the way of the dodo. Any non-zero chance at one-shotting a major character has the potential to completely fuck over your story. Even if deal with it happening to the odd dragon and simply disallow it for players it still fucks over your entire world. A world in which anyone or anyone above a certain power threshold has a chance to instantly kill anyone else? Even if that chance is "only" 5%, how the heck do tyrants ever stay in power? At all? Heck, the stereotypical evil wizard overlord lives with a level of paranoia usually reserved for the clinically insane. How would they ever interact with the rest of the world except through elaborate communication schemes explicitely designed to never let anyone come into contact with them?

Basically any save-or-die worth using also destroys staples of fantasy settings. And that is unacceptable. The same goes for save-or-sucks, though to a lesser degree. Any effect that uses flat percentages is also suspect. All of these can only ever be balanced in a specific type of fight and become numerically overpowered or underpowered in other fights and on top of that they have the chance to fuck things up even when underpowered. To make them useable at all save-or-dies have to be useful only against bosses, which is precisely where you do not want them to work.

If you want your liches to snuff out the lifes of peasants like candles hand them a spell that does xd6 times 10 damage if this is enough to kill the target, xd6 times 3 otherwise. Flavor of death magic conserved, stacks with "real" damage, can be used against major characters and peasants alike.