persistent damage can be quite time consuming and resource intensive


Running the Game

Silver Crusade

I just ran the Rose Street Revenge and I'm unhappy with the way that the bleed damage from the Bat Swarm played out.

3 characters were taking bleed damage. During combat it was something of an annoyance but nothing major.

AFTER combat it became more annoying. We lost over 5 minutes of game time to people making Medicine checks, flat DC 15 rolls, etc.

And I was being quite nice. I allowed continual Medicine checks to allow another roll of the flat check.

Some of it was bad luck, but a lot of it is that play is quite swingy. Its reasonably likely. There is an ~5% chance to fail to get a 15 8 rolls in a row.

And lots of resources were being spent. Obviously these results don't matter in a quest but in a "normal" adventure the PCs would pretty much have had to rest for the day after the swarm.


I think they get an extra roll (DC 15) every time someone helps, up to all three actions. So post-combat, it should be a breeze. In combat, very taxing.

Silver Crusade

Castilliano wrote:

I think they get an extra roll (DC 15) every time someone helps, up to all three actions. So post-combat, it should be a breeze. In combat, very taxing.

Even out of combat it took quite a few rolls, some resources, and a fair bit of table time.

The players rolls certainly weren't great but they also weren't THAT bad. It is very, very possible to fail quite a few 30% rolls :-(


If a party of four focuses all of their actions on one character he gets to roll 13 times (12 actions plus one free) to stop the persistent condition. There is a 0.97% chance of the condition remaining at the end of that. And of course as soon as it it stops any remaining actions shift to the next character.

Admittedly this can be different for low level bleed effects because you need a successful medicine check to lower the flat check rather than just spending an action to make it happen.

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