Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 delugeia Sep 02, 2009 17:01:58	(There's another thread discussing a dying penalty in regards to the penalty suffered after a Raise Dead ritual.  This is in regards to a house rule about the condition of Dying (I'm not Dead yet) during combat.) I love 4e, but damn is hard to kill the players.  Not that I am a killer DM; I am certainly not.But the sting of death seems so trivial to my players.  So I am wondering if this little change would help at all or would hurt too much (revision to HEALING A DYING CHARACTER: PHB p. 295)... Become Conscious: As soon as you have a current hit point total that's higher than 0, you become conscious and are no longer dying. Until the end of the encounter, you take a -1 penalty to all attack rolls, skill checks, saving throws, and ability checks. (You are still prone until you take an action to stand up.) I left the penalty as untyped, meaning for it to stack each time the character went into Dying state in a single encounter.  Note also that this would effect Death Saves meaning it would be harder each time. Thoughts?
#2 thunderforge8 Sep 02, 2009 17:11:52	This seems pretty reasonable to me and would definitely make the game a bit deadlier. The only problem I forsee is that you're cheating players who take one of the feats that give you a bonus after being knocked unconscious (don't have any books with me, but I think there was one that gave +1 to attacks after being knocked unconscious the first time). With your houserule, those feats are more of a security thing rather than an actual bonus, which makes them weaker. Still, if players don't have those feats, I would totally implement this sort of rule.
#3 Neutronium_Dragon Sep 02, 2009 20:12:33	In addition to what Thunderforge mentioned, being knocked out and revived already has a substantial cost in actions lost/used to bring it about (the KOed PC loses actions, and so does whomever takes the time to revive them), and healing surges (if you hadn't been KOed then you'd probably be spending less of them on recovery). Not only does imposing penalties beyond that reduce the value of the feats, it also makes it less desirable for the other PCs to try to revive the KOed one. That's liable to lead to problems.