Short Update

Having only two people in the party can be a challenge as it is, but when neither one has healing it really makes it difficult to gauge an appropriate challenge.  In the most recent game, and the one before that, at least one character has fallen into negative hit points, and needed to be dragged to a temple for healing.  It seems like the encounters I've been giving are either way too easy, or way too hard, and I'm having some trouble trying to find the middle ground.  Then again, I don't really get a lot of time to find it.

Death and Dying

I found some RPG discussion forums today, and through them came across someone else's house rules for death and dying here. Essentially, it increases the amount below zero a character's hit points can go to before the character is dead, allows normal healing spells to work on a character that has died within 24 hours of death, and removes the ability to bring the dead back to life beyond that timespan completely.

While I understand not liking the revolving door of death, I'm not sure I'm ready to remove those spells just yet, and I don't know that I like normal curing spells bringing someone back from the dead, even at less than 24 hours, without the formerly-deceased also needing something to restore their mental faculties after their brain has been without oxygenated blood for so long. I dunno, I guess that might fall under the same healing spell.

I do like the idea of changing the amount below zero, though, for much the same reason as the person expresses: it reduces the lethality of a higher-level battle, where any hit sufficient to drop your character to negatives is also likely to kill outright. It also makes characters or NPCs with less than 10 hp a bit more realistic. That goblin with 4 hp and your 20 Con, 3rd level Fighter both need to hit -10 to die?

That said, I think making the "death threshold" equal to the inverse of the maximum hp is a bit much. I'm thinking more like half would be reasonable, and allow a bit more wiggle room without making it nigh-impossible to kill anyone at higher levels.

So, a third level fighter with a max of 30 hp gets dropped to -3 from a nasty critical hit. They make a save to resist falling unconscious. If successful, they are awake but still disabled, so they can't move as quick and anything more strenuous than talking causes them to take a point of damage. Unless they get their wound bound or stabilize on their own, they also take a point of damage each round, and if they do get bound it will reopen and need to be bound/stabilized again if they take any strenuous action. On top of that, any time they take damage, they have to resist passing out again. A couple of rounds resisting oblivion and still trying to fend off the enemy puts the fighter at -15. Unless help arrives swiftly, next round they'll die from blood loss.

This is extremely theatrical, allowing scenes similar to Boromir's last stand. I'll probably end up using it.