Instant Kill Question [Archive] - Wizards Community

Instant Kill Question [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
Solstysse
12-06-07, 04:06 PM It's probably just me having a moment of sadness due to my first character (well not main character but a very special cohort, a celestial grimlakin) death, but I want to find out what everyone thinks about instant kills.

My dm, and husband, uses a variant of the variant critical roll. He uses nat 20 autoconfirms and another 20 instant kills (instead of another roll that has to hit their AC).

So my question is, is there any way to combat the effects of an instant kill. Does it deal hp damage? Does it bring you to 0, -1, or lower? Or does it flat out kill with no save ect.

The reason I ask is I purchased my cohort a collar that lets me know his hp total at all times and trigger it to give him 50 hp once a day, I believe it's a swift or instant. action. Does this help at all?

I'm not holding too much hope but I just wanted to know what y'all thought.
Edymnion
12-06-07, 06:09 PM You should be asking him, not us, since he's using a houserule.
But if he's using the normal triple 20 rule, then no, there is nothing you can do to stop it. Three twenties in a row, and you're just dead, no saves, no hp damage, no way of stopping it, you're just dead. Roll up a new character.

However, it should be pointed out to him that this is far more lethal for the players than it is the monsters. Any given monster will likely only have 5 or 6 attack rolls made against them, while any given player character will have hundreds made against them.

If you don't like this ruling, then you should talk to your DM and see if you can get him to remove it.
Kreistor2
12-06-07, 06:42 PM Criticals kill. You do not normally automatically gain defenses against criticals as you increase in level.

However, monsters gain increasing number of attacks/round. The probability of instant death/round from a critical rule like this is proportional to attacks/round. If my monster has 1 attack/round, he has about a 1/400 chance to kill you. If he has 3 attacks/round, he has about a 3/400 chance per round to kill you. 6 attacks? About 6/400 (no it's not exactly 6/400, but it's close enough). So at low level characters will die from this infrequently, but at high level, their chance to die increases.

That's not very heroic.

Similarly, anyone that uses Critical Miss tables or rules also suffers from the same effect. With 4 attacks per round at L16, a fighter has 4x as much chance of dropping his weapon in one round at L16 as he did at L1. Yeah, that means I'm more effecctive at higher levels, doesn't it?

Where Critical Hits and Misses are used beyond the standard rules, they often come to dominate a game. Criticals can break a great player strategy, or make a great boss fight become trivial. That's realistic in some sense, but it is not high fantasy. When did Driz'zt last drop his weapon by accident? Corum never did. Critical hits and misses cannot be planned for, and so they can never make a battle better in any way. What pride is there in scoring a crit kill on that big huge dragon in the first round? Yay, free stuff, but where's the fun? I personally love a great fight, and criticals have never improved a fight in my campaign.

I don't use Crit Misses at all, but to anyone that does, I highly recommend that the players should never drop their weapon on their extra attack rolls, only the very first attack of a full round attack sequence. Eliminating the chance of dropping a weapon on the second, third, and fourth attacks ensures that the character's risk of dropping their weapon decreases on a /round basis as they increase in level.

Otherwise, if your DM does not do this and persists with weapons dropping on every single attack roll, then abandon your melee characters and pick up the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. The classes in there focus on improving their standard attack action attacks, which advantages the single attack/round style. This ensures an increasing damage/round without increasing weapon droppage/round.
Solstysse
12-06-07, 07:23 PM These are all very good points, thank you. I'll have him read this post and see what he thinks. It's hard to argue with him about these things in game because I'm the wife...so sometimes he tries to be "fair" to others but ends up ruling a little more harshly when it comes to me. It's okay, because I'm a bit of a "if there isn't a way, find one dammit" kind of player and it's gotten our party out of alot of rough situations.

My cohort was ironically killed by a chimera zombie...on an attack made by his second head...attack 2 of 5. Rough. LoL.
Edymnion
12-06-07, 07:53 PM Actually, there is something I just thought of that could protect you.

Heavy Fortitude armor. 100% immunity to critical hits. If he insists on keeping the houserule for the triple crit kill, then get this armor ASAP.
ArcTan
12-06-07, 08:03 PM It's probably just me having a moment of sadness due to my first character (well not main character but a very special cohort, a celestial grimlakin) death, but I want to find out what everyone thinks about instant kills.

My dm, and husband, uses a variant of the variant critical roll. He uses nat 20 autoconfirms and another 20 instant kills (instead of another roll that has to hit their AC).

So my question is, is there any way to combat the effects of an instant kill. Does it deal hp damage? Does it bring you to 0, -1, or lower? Or does it flat out kill with no save ect.

How would I know? That's his rule, not a rule from the books.

Ask him what he thinks would be a good way to balance it out.
ArcTan
12-06-07, 08:05 PM You should be asking him, not us, since he's using a houserule.
But if he's using the normal triple 20 rule, then no, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

"Normal" based on what? Is this one of the variant sidebars in the DMG?

If I had a rule like this I'd make it work like massive damage in d20 Modern -- it reduces you instantly to -1 HP but doesn't instantly kill.
Edymnion
12-06-07, 08:23 PM "Normal" based on what? Is this one of the variant sidebars in the DMG?Possibly, but I don't remember for sure.
But I have seen "If you get 3 natural 20's in a row on somebody, they automatically die" being used countless times all the way back to 2e.
Kreistor2
12-06-07, 08:50 PM I don't know of any variant crits in the DMG. I don't claim to know every page, but that's one thing I just don't remember seeing at all.

Crit kills are even more problematic in Eberron with some people playing with greatly reduced access to Raise Dead. Crit kills can't be avoided (except with Edy's suggestion above), and this type of death is not a player mistake.
Solstysse
12-06-07, 11:07 PM The Instant Kill variant rule is on page 28 of the 3.5v DMG. It's at the bottom in those little sidebars...but my DM doesn't play with that, he just wants two nat 20s not two nat 20s and a confirm of hitting their AC.

As much as I don't like it, he's not really buying anything I'm saying so that's that. My cohort is deadness.

My only other arguement is that "instant kills" are never said to be "death effects" which cannot be healed. Dead in DnD is -10 hp...so if I could heal him before the damage was all dealt then he wouldn't be dead dead...but that argument isn't going anywhere really either.
Kreistor2
12-07-07, 02:07 AM All you can do, then, is find a new DM.
skrap-san
12-07-07, 03:01 AM All you can do, then, is find a new DM.

And the only logical way to do that is to get a divorce, since he is your husband and all. (this is a joke by the way, just so you don't take me for a moron).
Solstysse
12-07-07, 10:10 AM *laughs*

It's okay...sometimes I'm his DM too. I'm a "impress me and you can pull just about anything off" kind of DM though...(too much exalted playing I think).

But thank you to everyone who gave advice, I appreciate it!!
Edymnion
12-07-07, 12:42 PM My only other arguement is that "instant kills" are never said to be "death effects" which cannot be healed. Dead in DnD is -10 hp...so if I could heal him before the damage was all dealt then he wouldn't be dead dead...but that argument isn't going anywhere really either.Not a good argument though. You can't heal death with anything short of ressurecting them. Once you're at -10, you're dead, and no amount of Cure X Wounds can do anything about it. A triple 20 that instantly kills them would, in HP terms, do max hp +10 damage all at once. They would go from full hp to dead instantly, there would be no time interval between when it happened, and them dying that you could even attempt to save them in.

Its like putting a gun to someone's head and pulling the trigger. One instant they're alive, the next instant their brains are scattered across the room. There simply isn't any time between pulling the trigger and someone realizing what happened to act in. One second they're alive, next they're not.
ArcTan
12-07-07, 09:25 PM My only other arguement is that "instant kills" are never said to be "death effects" which cannot be healed. Dead in DnD is -10 hp...so if I could heal him before the damage was all dealt then he wouldn't be dead dead...but that argument isn't going anywhere really either.

If he says that the critical death kills you *dead*, then that means it takes you all the way down to -10 HP. If it sent you down to -1 HP instead it wouldn't be death.
Nived
12-07-07, 10:42 PM That'd be a much fairer compromise, provided normal crit damage didn't kill you outright.
Kreistor2
12-08-07, 03:04 AM If it was HP damage, then Close Wounds would actually save that person's life.

It has to be a death effect. Death effects don't do any HP damage at all: you're just dead.
ArcTan
12-09-07, 02:28 AM That's not the definition of a "death effect". A "death effect" is something with the [Death] spell descriptor (because it's using "death magic"). Coup de Grace and similar save-or-die effects aren't death effects just because they're save-or-dies.
Kreistor2
12-09-07, 03:16 AM Really? I just searched the SRD and couldn't find that definition for death effect. Where is it defined? I really don't have time to search the entire PHB for it, and since I don't find it listed in the Index, and you seem to know that definition, you could save me the trouble if you know it off the top of your head...

I just checked the DMG definition of that Critical triple-20 kill. It says "instantly slain", so whether or not it is a death effect, it has the same mechanic as a death effect. It does not deal HP damage, you just die.
ArcTan
12-09-07, 06:25 PM Apparently it doesn't state it as clearly (in the SRD, anyway) as I remember, but if you cross-reference these:

Death Attacks

In most cases, a death attack allows the victim a Fortitude save to avoid the affect, but if the save fails, the character dies instantly.

* Raise dead doesn’t work on someone killed by a death attack.
* Death attacks slay instantly. A victim cannot be made stable and thereby kept alive.
* In case it matters, a dead character, no matter how she died, has -10 hit points.
* The spell death ward protects a character against these attacks.

And this:

The subject is immune to all death spells, magical death effects, energy drain, and any negative energy effects.

It's clear that "death effects" are meant to describe a class of magical effects, not all save-or-die effects.
Kreistor2
12-10-07, 12:45 AM Which means it is open to interpretation. Someone can take those effects, recognize the similarity in mechanics, and decide to extend the concept of death effect to include them, especially if they feel Death Ward should prevent instant death from the variant critical or massive damage.

I'll agre that your interpretation is acceptable, ArcTan, but it is simply not the only allowed interpretation.
skrap-san
12-10-07, 02:21 AM Now I don't remember the details of the spell, not even sure if I got the name right, but one could use the heart attack spell from the assasins spell list as a model. I seem to remember that it instantly sent you to -9 no matter how much HP you had. That would give you two chances to stabilize:
1. The natural 10% chance 2. By the use of action points.

I am not saying this is the best solution, but i think its a good solution, it ads a bit of fairness to it all.
Beavisfett
12-12-07, 03:22 AM Possibly, but I don't remember for sure.
But I have seen "If you get 3 natural 20's in a row on somebody, they automatically die" being used countless times all the way back to 2e.

I have only seen the like in varriat crit charts published in magazines and I have been playing since 75.
Beavisfett
12-12-07, 03:24 AM Not much you can do except talk to your hubby and get him to get rid of the instant kill crit, never liked them myself. Before 3.0 we did a natural 20 did double rolled damage done that pretty much since I started playing back in 75
Solstysse
12-12-07, 08:53 AM They actually came out with a book called Dragon Compendium that is a compilation of the Dragon magazines in which the crit charts were origionally published. So they're in there...I like the crit charts...I think they should be reserved for higher level play as doing 2 con and 2 str damage to a 2nd level character is...well...not fun.

He came up with a compromise that I'm too excited about but that's life. It's super early so I can't really remember what it was and he's not going to bring my sweet little cohort back either. *tear* He was such a cool little bugger. I guess only girl gamers manage to take the leadership feat and make themselves cuddly little BA cohorts...LoL.
Solstysse
12-13-07, 04:05 AM ***glee***

Our group just finished a story arch, 10 months of gameplay. We ended up killing Vedim Olrik Omar (sp?) and got the books of the listless dead...and I ended up being able to have my cohort rezed.

And now before I leave for basic training he's letting us play a pretty high level game (lvl 15) so that'll be fun!!!!

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Solstysse 12-06-07, 04:06 PM	It's probably just me having a moment of sadness due to my first character (well not main character but a very special cohort, a celestial grimlakin) death, but I want to find out what everyone thinks about instant kills. My dm, and husband, uses a variant of the variant critical roll. He uses nat 20 autoconfirms and another 20 instant kills (instead of another roll that has to hit their AC). So my question is, is there any way to combat the effects of an instant kill. Does it deal hp damage? Does it bring you to 0, -1, or lower? Or does it flat out kill with no save ect. The reason I ask is I purchased my cohort a collar that lets me know his hp total at all times and trigger it to give him 50 hp once a day, I believe it's a swift or instant. action. Does this help at all? I'm not holding too much hope but I just wanted to know what y'all thought.
Edymnion 12-06-07, 06:09 PM	You should be asking him, not us, since he's using a houserule. But if he's using the normal triple 20 rule, then no, there is nothing you can do to stop it. Three twenties in a row, and you're just dead, no saves, no hp damage, no way of stopping it, you're just dead. Roll up a new character. However, it should be pointed out to him that this is far more lethal for the players than it is the monsters. Any given monster will likely only have 5 or 6 attack rolls made against them, while any given player character will have hundreds made against them. If you don't like this ruling, then you should talk to your DM and see if you can get him to remove it.
Kreistor2 12-06-07, 06:42 PM	Criticals kill. You do not normally automatically gain defenses against criticals as you increase in level. However, monsters gain increasing number of attacks/round. The probability of instant death/round from a critical rule like this is proportional to attacks/round. If my monster has 1 attack/round, he has about a 1/400 chance to kill you. If he has 3 attacks/round, he has about a 3/400 chance per round to kill you. 6 attacks? About 6/400 (no it's not exactly 6/400, but it's close enough). So at low level characters will die from this infrequently, but at high level, their chance to die increases. That's not very heroic. Similarly, anyone that uses Critical Miss tables or rules also suffers from the same effect. With 4 attacks per round at L16, a fighter has 4x as much chance of dropping his weapon in one round at L16 as he did at L1. Yeah, that means I'm more effecctive at higher levels, doesn't it? Where Critical Hits and Misses are used beyond the standard rules, they often come to dominate a game. Criticals can break a great player strategy, or make a great boss fight become trivial. That's realistic in some sense, but it is not high fantasy. When did Driz'zt last drop his weapon by accident? Corum never did. Critical hits and misses cannot be planned for, and so they can never make a battle better in any way. What pride is there in scoring a crit kill on that big huge dragon in the first round? Yay, free stuff, but where's the fun? I personally love a great fight, and criticals have never improved a fight in my campaign. I don't use Crit Misses at all, but to anyone that does, I highly recommend that the players should never drop their weapon on their extra attack rolls, only the very first attack of a full round attack sequence. Eliminating the chance of dropping a weapon on the second, third, and fourth attacks ensures that the character's risk of dropping their weapon decreases on a /round basis as they increase in level. Otherwise, if your DM does not do this and persists with weapons dropping on every single attack roll, then abandon your melee characters and pick up the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. The classes in there focus on improving their standard attack action attacks, which advantages the single attack/round style. This ensures an increasing damage/round without increasing weapon droppage/round.
Solstysse 12-06-07, 07:23 PM	These are all very good points, thank you. I'll have him read this post and see what he thinks. It's hard to argue with him about these things in game because I'm the wife...so sometimes he tries to be "fair" to others but ends up ruling a little more harshly when it comes to me. It's okay, because I'm a bit of a "if there isn't a way, find one dammit" kind of player and it's gotten our party out of alot of rough situations. My cohort was ironically killed by a chimera zombie...on an attack made by his second head...attack 2 of 5. Rough. LoL.
Edymnion 12-06-07, 07:53 PM	Actually, there is something I just thought of that could protect you. Heavy Fortitude armor. 100% immunity to critical hits. If he insists on keeping the houserule for the triple crit kill, then get this armor ASAP.
ArcTan 12-06-07, 08:03 PM	It's probably just me having a moment of sadness due to my first character (well not main character but a very special cohort, a celestial grimlakin) death, but I want to find out what everyone thinks about instant kills. My dm, and husband, uses a variant of the variant critical roll. He uses nat 20 autoconfirms and another 20 instant kills (instead of another roll that has to hit their AC). So my question is, is there any way to combat the effects of an instant kill. Does it deal hp damage? Does it bring you to 0, -1, or lower? Or does it flat out kill with no save ect. How would I know? That's his rule, not a rule from the books. Ask him what he thinks would be a good way to balance it out.
ArcTan 12-06-07, 08:05 PM	You should be asking him, not us, since he's using a houserule. But if he's using the normal triple 20 rule, then no, there is nothing you can do to stop it. "Normal" based on what? Is this one of the variant sidebars in the DMG? If I had a rule like this I'd make it work like massive damage in d20 Modern -- it reduces you instantly to -1 HP but doesn't instantly kill.
Edymnion 12-06-07, 08:23 PM	"Normal" based on what? Is this one of the variant sidebars in the DMG?Possibly, but I don't remember for sure. But I have seen "If you get 3 natural 20's in a row on somebody, they automatically die" being used countless times all the way back to 2e.
Kreistor2 12-06-07, 08:50 PM	I don't know of any variant crits in the DMG. I don't claim to know every page, but that's one thing I just don't remember seeing at all. Crit kills are even more problematic in Eberron with some people playing with greatly reduced access to Raise Dead. Crit kills can't be avoided (except with Edy's suggestion above), and this type of death is not a player mistake.
Solstysse 12-06-07, 11:07 PM	The Instant Kill variant rule is on page 28 of the 3.5v DMG. It's at the bottom in those little sidebars...but my DM doesn't play with that, he just wants two nat 20s not two nat 20s and a confirm of hitting their AC. As much as I don't like it, he's not really buying anything I'm saying so that's that. My cohort is deadness. My only other arguement is that "instant kills" are never said to be "death effects" which cannot be healed. Dead in DnD is -10 hp...so if I could heal him before the damage was all dealt then he wouldn't be dead dead...but that argument isn't going anywhere really either.
Kreistor2 12-07-07, 02:07 AM	All you can do, then, is find a new DM.
skrap-san 12-07-07, 03:01 AM	All you can do, then, is find a new DM. And the only logical way to do that is to get a divorce, since he is your husband and all. (this is a joke by the way, just so you don't take me for a moron).
Solstysse 12-07-07, 10:10 AM	laughs It's okay...sometimes I'm his DM too. I'm a "impress me and you can pull just about anything off" kind of DM though...(too much exalted playing I think). But thank you to everyone who gave advice, I appreciate it!!
Edymnion 12-07-07, 12:42 PM	My only other arguement is that "instant kills" are never said to be "death effects" which cannot be healed. Dead in DnD is -10 hp...so if I could heal him before the damage was all dealt then he wouldn't be dead dead...but that argument isn't going anywhere really either.Not a good argument though. You can't heal death with anything short of ressurecting them. Once you're at -10, you're dead, and no amount of Cure X Wounds can do anything about it. A triple 20 that instantly kills them would, in HP terms, do max hp +10 damage all at once. They would go from full hp to dead instantly, there would be no time interval between when it happened, and them dying that you could even attempt to save them in. Its like putting a gun to someone's head and pulling the trigger. One instant they're alive, the next instant their brains are scattered across the room. There simply isn't any time between pulling the trigger and someone realizing what happened to act in. One second they're alive, next they're not.
ArcTan 12-07-07, 09:25 PM	My only other arguement is that "instant kills" are never said to be "death effects" which cannot be healed. Dead in DnD is -10 hp...so if I could heal him before the damage was all dealt then he wouldn't be dead dead...but that argument isn't going anywhere really either. If he says that the critical death kills you dead, then that means it takes you all the way down to -10 HP. If it sent you down to -1 HP instead it wouldn't be death.
Nived 12-07-07, 10:42 PM	That'd be a much fairer compromise, provided normal crit damage didn't kill you outright.
Kreistor2 12-08-07, 03:04 AM	If it was HP damage, then Close Wounds would actually save that person's life. It has to be a death effect. Death effects don't do any HP damage at all: you're just dead.
ArcTan 12-09-07, 02:28 AM	That's not the definition of a "death effect". A "death effect" is something with the [Death] spell descriptor (because it's using "death magic"). Coup de Grace and similar save-or-die effects aren't death effects just because they're save-or-dies.
Kreistor2 12-09-07, 03:16 AM	Really? I just searched the SRD and couldn't find that definition for death effect. Where is it defined? I really don't have time to search the entire PHB for it, and since I don't find it listed in the Index, and you seem to know that definition, you could save me the trouble if you know it off the top of your head... I just checked the DMG definition of that Critical triple-20 kill. It says "instantly slain", so whether or not it is a death effect, it has the same mechanic as a death effect. It does not deal HP damage, you just die.
ArcTan 12-09-07, 06:25 PM	Apparently it doesn't state it as clearly (in the SRD, anyway) as I remember, but if you cross-reference these: Death Attacks In most cases, a death attack allows the victim a Fortitude save to avoid the affect, but if the save fails, the character dies instantly. * Raise dead doesn’t work on someone killed by a death attack. * Death attacks slay instantly. A victim cannot be made stable and thereby kept alive. * In case it matters, a dead character, no matter how she died, has -10 hit points. * The spell death ward protects a character against these attacks. And this: The subject is immune to all death spells, magical death effects, energy drain, and any negative energy effects. It's clear that "death effects" are meant to describe a class of magical effects, not all save-or-die effects.
Kreistor2 12-10-07, 12:45 AM	Which means it is open to interpretation. Someone can take those effects, recognize the similarity in mechanics, and decide to extend the concept of death effect to include them, especially if they feel Death Ward should prevent instant death from the variant critical or massive damage. I'll agre that your interpretation is acceptable, ArcTan, but it is simply not the only allowed interpretation.
skrap-san 12-10-07, 02:21 AM	Now I don't remember the details of the spell, not even sure if I got the name right, but one could use the heart attack spell from the assasins spell list as a model. I seem to remember that it instantly sent you to -9 no matter how much HP you had. That would give you two chances to stabilize: 1. The natural 10% chance 2. By the use of action points. I am not saying this is the best solution, but i think its a good solution, it ads a bit of fairness to it all.
Beavisfett 12-12-07, 03:22 AM	Possibly, but I don't remember for sure. But I have seen "If you get 3 natural 20's in a row on somebody, they automatically die" being used countless times all the way back to 2e. I have only seen the like in varriat crit charts published in magazines and I have been playing since 75.
Beavisfett 12-12-07, 03:24 AM	Not much you can do except talk to your hubby and get him to get rid of the instant kill crit, never liked them myself. Before 3.0 we did a natural 20 did double rolled damage done that pretty much since I started playing back in 75
Solstysse 12-12-07, 08:53 AM	They actually came out with a book called Dragon Compendium that is a compilation of the Dragon magazines in which the crit charts were origionally published. So they're in there...I like the crit charts...I think they should be reserved for higher level play as doing 2 con and 2 str damage to a 2nd level character is...well...not fun. He came up with a compromise that I'm too excited about but that's life. It's super early so I can't really remember what it was and he's not going to bring my sweet little cohort back either. tear He was such a cool little bugger. I guess only girl gamers manage to take the leadership feat and make themselves cuddly little BA cohorts...LoL.
Solstysse 12-13-07, 04:05 AM	*glee* Our group just finished a story arch, 10 months of gameplay. We ended up killing Vedim Olrik Omar (sp?) and got the books of the listless dead...and I ended up being able to have my cohort rezed. And now before I leave for basic training he's letting us play a pretty high level game (lvl 15) so that'll be fun!!!!