Khrux
Happy to see you here, I think your stories have been quite influential on my next character and I presumed I’d have seen the last of you at the beginning of July when I stopped being able to use Reddit due to prefering mediums without ads.
I’m a big fan of the use of a dying condition, or at least being reduced to 0 hitpoints being referred to as dying, just because it’s so clunky to accurately refer to it at the moment.
The thing I can see in yours that is perhaps an oversight (perhaps planned) is that anything that is designed to modify all saving throws such as the monks proficiency in all saves or the paladin’s aura of protection would make succeeding by 10 or more easier in a way that’s not currently covered by requiring a natural 20. (Both of these abilities currently apply to death saving throws but do not make natural 20s easier of course). Also bless, and any bonus to all saves from magic items work on death saving throws too. This also impacts the ability to fail by more than 10, making it effectively impossible without a different homebrew feature creating a penalty to the roll.
Seperatly you call it a check, which means it wouldn’t be impacted by these saving throw alterations but would be impacted by anything which alters all ability checks such as the bard’s Jack of all Trades, or more concerningly, the combination of the rogue’s reliable talent and any way to gain proficiency in it, which is basically an automatic success.
There are a few currently niche cases where characters gain a bonus to all saving throws or specifically death saving throws which is intentionally factored into the power of the feature, and makes them exciting and useful, that are either hugely buffed (depending on how you rule their use) or totally discarded in replacement to other features that weren’t balanced around this ability.
Something I do love in this is the ability to introduce the wounded condition outside of being unconscious. Imagine how scary something like a nightwalker would be if it’s aura didn’t do necrotic damage but instead just forced a con save Vs getting a point to your wounded condition.
Personally the way I’d handle this is to make dying a condition that is basically identical to the death saving throws mechanic currently in 5e, but have it reset when you gain hitpoints by any means, if then disconnect being unconscious from it entirely at a mechanical level and just say if you gain hitpoints when unconscious you may choose to instantly end the condition. This would mean everything that currently works in the game to offer a bonus to death saves remains, and in very rare cases, you may make death saving throws while not unconscious, either counting from there when you fall unconscious or dying while on your feet at 3 failures.
I’d also change taking damage while unconcious to just force you to make a threatened dying save, which is just like a normal death saving throw except you don’t mark a success if you get 10 or more, you may only fail. This means that you can wail on an unconscious PC without worrying about killing them without agency. I’d probably also make the spare medicine checks function as a protected dying save, where you can’t fail and can only gain a success on 10 or higher.
Edit: I didn’t know this was pathfinder, I just assumed it was your homebrew for 5e.
People generally agree that the published adventure is in the middle of the pack, I personally don’t run published adventures as I barely find time to get through my own adventures. If you don’t run published adventures either, then that’s 1/3rd of this content not appealing to you.
As with any monster book, your milage will vary with the usage and quality of each creature. 60 monsters is reasonable though, although if you’re hankering for monsters alone, just head over to open5e.com, a collection of products released under various licenses, collated into searchable databases like D&DBeyond does with WotC content. There may be 1000+ high quality monsters there, and plenty that fit the tone of Planescape.
So finally there is the part that I’m most interested in, the setting guide. This slipcase in it’s entirety is shorter than some previous setting guides were, so if you’re after this specifically, you will be recieving 1/4 of the content than you would from one of the setting guides from earlier in 5e’s lifespan like Eberron. If you’re keen on this product as a Planescape fan, then this will appeal to you the most and, of course, it’s shallow, because it has to be on its pagecount.
I want to love slipcases. My heart is forever at the physical table using hard cover books, even when practically I DM with a computer. The slipcase allows you to only bring what you need to each session and control what content you may pass to players without depriving yourself of anything. However for me to love them, they’d need to be 175% the size of the books from 2017, but instead with the larger font size and lower page count, they’re 60% of the legnth. Also of course the price is higher than ever due to inflation, which is reasonable to price them effectively, but I have no more expendable cash than I did in 2017 and post the OGL fiasco, I’m far more likely to recommend non WotC 5e content which often prides itself on being denser and deeper than official content.
I think I’d build my caster’s to have low enough Constitutions that they probably would have a 50/50 or similar. If someone is focusing on attacking the caster, I want to reward them by making the chance to end the concentration high.
Besides, for most games I’ve played, I recon right up into tier 3, most damage still comes in at under 20 per attack, so it’s still a DC 10 save.
I ran a 1-17 game and typically as a DM I wasn’t consistently dealing over 20 damage per attack until I was using CR 13 or greater monsters or higher, and I’d typically prefer several monsters per encounter to one, so that probably happened consistently around the time the party were level 12 ish, and even beyond that, I would say I generally didn’t focus on massive damage output because knocking PCs out the fight in 1-2 rounds doesn’t give them enough time to assess the battle and then deprives them of agency through a particularly slow segment of the game.
I’m currently a player, playing a trickery cleric 9 rogue 2 and loving it, but I think I use my 4th or 5th level spell slots for a damaging spell about once every 5 encounters, because those spell slots are better for exciting spells like polymorph, scrying or modify memory, or at least I find those more exciting than making my number go high. In that game, the paladin 6 bard 5 may on occasion do a spike of damage via a smite but his spellcasting is also primarily utility too, and our only massive damage dealer is our draconic sorcerer. A lot of our consistent damage comes from our barbarian who is probably putting out 40 damage per round but rarely over 20 in a hit when not critting.
As players, if we want to knock an enemy out of concentration, we’re more likely to pepper them with small secondary attacks, forcing them to make 3+ DC 10 saving throws per round, which has generally been more successful than one 30 damage attack and a one DC 15 save, just because of how the odds fall.
Looking back at some of the monsters I used, which were generally official monsters or from tome of beasts 1 or 2, they traditionally were dealing about 84 damage per round if it hit all attacks but only 21 per attack. I remember using an adult white dragon (CR 13) while the players were about level 10. That’s going to either use it’s breath (54 but 22 on a save), or any other combo of attacks that wouldn’t deal over 20 withousome lucky dice rolls, averaging 13-17 damage per attack, and 58 damage if it uses its legendary action to use it’s tail once and hits every attack.
Also my table sounds like a different experience to yours. All the players are people I’m friends with in person and as we’ve become more experienced with RPGs, were played different games rather than optimising 5e, and we tend towards storytelling focused RPGs like Fate or collaborative storytelling games like For The Queen. If we are looking for difficulty, we’re likely to seek a full horror experience over 5e. I enjoy the content Matt Colville but I know his style isn’t for me, it’s very tactical and all about combat, while when I play 5e, I find combat often becomes a necessary chore that the system is built around that only engaged each player half the time and takes far too long to warrant the storytelling it provides.
7 ton seems pretty big and I think they were warm-blooded, I recon they’ll start starving before I run out of food. They may not be dead by day 30 but on those final nights of starving unconciousness you could probably stick it with the knife. Large birds of prey may only eat once per day but they still starve within a couple of days, and the bigger they are, the hungrier they get.
I’m not sure I agree with the take for farenheit. It’s an arbitraty choice, and to me who grew up in a country that uses celsius, I find that far easier to understand and farenheit may as well be random numbers to me.
I do feel that slowly, edition by edition, D&D is moving closer to it’s recourse management being tied to it’s round based action economy which I actually enjoy.
As a player, it’s already pretty easy to play this way, before counting subclasses, the rogue has literally no abilities that are limited by anything but once per turn, and if you pick some fun narrative spells as warlock and rely on invocations and eldritch blast, you can be totally effective without any resource management. Both of these exclude hitpoints of course but that is a pretty reasonable resource for a combat focussed fantasy game.
