Has the dying errata made things a little too easy?


Playing the Game


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

This is all just personal opinion, so take with a grain of salt. I was into the original playtest dying rules, and thought they had a lot of potential over negative HP. I think the updates may have focused on the wrong issues. The big problem was bringing people back to consciousness with Recovery saving throws once they had 1 HP was confusing and not always fun. It was easy to skip someone's turn, especially since their place in the initiative changed. And it didn't feel like there was a way to actually help your friend get back in the action. It more was more luck than choice.

But what I really liked was the dying condition persisting even if you were above zero HP and were conscious. This made getting knocked to zero much scarier. If you got healed and woke up, you could choose to immediately jump back into the fray-- and risk getting knocked even further down the dying track. The monk in my last star game choose to do this, and got slapped back down to Dying 3 as I recall. The monk didn't wind up dying, but he took his life in his own hands and very well could have. He could have instead chosen to play dead or hang back or hide, but then his allies would be down a man for a round or two and one of them could drop.

I think making a choice like that is what defines the kind of fantasy heroics we are trying to achieve. It has implications both tactically and about who your character is and how far they are willing to go.

The new dying rules remove the weird "regain consciousness" rolls and that's good. But we are left with a system which seems to have very little preventing "whack a mole." It also means that if an enemy wants to keep you down they better attack you while unconscious. The only thing stopping you from leaping back into the fray and soaking another crit for your party is the slowed condition based on your dying value. And that might work... but I don't think it is as fun. A melee character will need to spend an action standing and probably an action to retrieve or draw a weapon. That's not a very interesting turn.

You know what is interesting? Deciding to leap up from the ground before the Heal spell has finished knitting your wounds back together, with your guts still hanging out, and scream in the face of the enemy. Or to bide your time, let the magic do its work, and look for an opening while your friends fight desperately to save you.

The only big problem I see with a persistent dying condition is people seem to find it confusing. How am I dying while I have 20 hit points and am swinging a sword around? But that strikes me as something that could be fixed by changing the terminology. Call it "Mortal Danger 1" instead of "Dying 1" or something.

So yeah. I say bring back the dying condition persisting past consciousness, and get rid of the slowed condition on the turn you wake up. Thoughts?


2 people marked this as a favorite.

You know what's not fun?

Not being at the table because your character is unconscious (and at full health).


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Draco18s wrote:

You know what's not fun?

Not being at the table because your character is unconscious (and at full health).

Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not saying that should come back. I'm saying you should be able to be conscious as soon as someone heals you above 0 but are still at greater risk of dying because the dying condition doesn't go away completely like it does now.


I think it should function like this.

When you are brought to 0 you gain the dying condition. You continue to gain a +1(+2) on a fail (critical fail) till you get to dying 4.

Now if you get brought to 1 or more than the dying continues till you reduce down to 0. Now if you manage to hit dying 4 with full hit points then you don't die you still make the saves. If you fail saves at this level (ONLY dying 4) your life force is draining so you lose HP = level. Then if you hit 0 you die.

Now if you receive healing with the dying condition then you would get a bonus = level (or half level what ever makes more sense. Idk what the math is) on the dying save only.

Silver Crusade

Yeah, I think the new rules go too far. With a cleric around things can get very silly.

In Doomsday Dawn part 2 in one fight the 2 fighters went down something like 4-6 times each. Cleric brought them up, they whacked the bad guy, went down again. Rinse, lather, repeat. Bad guy ran out of hit points before cleric ran out of spells.

It felt like a very silly game of whack a mole


To be fair PF1 was a just a massive game of whack a mole. The fact that you had more resources to bring people back constantly got really dull after awhile and felt a little like playing an MMO (when online character building guides refer to Tanks and DPS then you may as well burn your dice and books).

PF2 rewards clever tactics and makes the party think about what they are doing a little more. The only character in part one of Doomsday who went down in my game stupidly charged into the goblin lair and got attacked by 5 Gobbos on his lonesome.


Would the inclusion of smelling salts and a 'vitalization' spell make the difference with the revision 0 dying rules? Or is that more rules bloat?

For example change stabilize so that if it targets someone at 1 hp they wake up, or with a three action cast it brings someone from 0 hp to 1 hp and awake. Or a extra action that can be applied to any spell/action with the healing trait that wakes them up?

I'm GMing and not liking the whack a mole, it is hurting my immersion. I'm expecting the community to realize that if you wait until your ally is down you will get the most efficiency out of your healing. PF1 had whack a mole games but it came with a very real risk of death.

However, players are liking not having to sit out a fight. After Chapter 1 I was concerned that the front liner was going to always go down in round 1 or 2 of any severe encounter and always end up sitting those out.

Silver Crusade

Talsharien wrote:
To be fair PF1 was a just a massive game of whack a mole.

I think PF2 is worse. Several factors combine in PF2

1) ranged healing is much easier to get
2) the fact that negative hit points aren't a thing GUARANTEES that the area effect channel gets everybody back up
3) resetting dying to 0 greatly reduces the risk in whack a mole. In PF1 past the early levels it is VERY dangerous to be at single digit hit points from a heal spell
4) the fact that going unconscious moves you in initiative means that when you become conscious you are guaranteed to get at least one hit on the bad guy who put you down


DM Livgin wrote:
After Chapter 1 I was concerned that the front liner was going to always go down in round 1 or 2 of any severe encounter and always end up sitting those out.

Which is pretty true. Both main front line tanks in my group went down in the first round against Drakus. In chapter 2 the front line fighter went down early against one of the big critters inside the mountain. It also had a reaction power that prevented any retreat, as well, just to lick salt into the wound.


pauljathome wrote:
4) the fact that going unconscious moves you in initiative means that when you become conscious you are guaranteed to get at least one hit on the bad guy who put you down

For most frontline combatants their first turn conscious should look like (1) stand up (2) pick up dropped weapon (3) lose action to being slowed from having been dying.

Or am I mixed up on the current dying/slowed rules?


Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:
pauljathome wrote:
4) the fact that going unconscious moves you in initiative means that when you become conscious you are guaranteed to get at least one hit on the bad guy who put you down

For most frontline combatants their first turn conscious should look like (1) stand up (2) pick up dropped weapon (3) lose action to being slowed from having been dying.

Or am I mixed up on the current dying/slowed rules?

No, that's right.

Silver Crusade

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:
pauljathome wrote:
4) the fact that going unconscious moves you in initiative means that when you become conscious you are guaranteed to get at least one hit on the bad guy who put you down

For most frontline combatants their first turn conscious should look like (1) stand up (2) pick up dropped weapon (3) lose action to being slowed from having been dying.

Or am I mixed up on the current dying/slowed rules?

Realizing that they were about to go down again the characters grabbed their weapon and hit from the ground. They had almost no chance of staying up the round anyways

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 16

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Back in the day of AD&D, characters knocked below 0 HP were considered disabled and unable to fight until they rested and recovered. I really preferred that to the current "whack a mole" standard. Please consider keeping some penalty for characters knocked down to death's door.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I addressed this in PF1e by having players suffer 2 Con damage each time they went negative, but there's not really any good way to rule that in 2e, I think, since ability damage is out...


MaxAstro wrote:
I addressed this in PF1e by having players suffer 2 Con damage each time they went negative, but there's not really any good way to rule that in 2e, I think, since ability damage is out...

Drained might be what you are looking for.

Alternatively: Enervated (very severe), or (less severe) Enfeebled, Sluggish and/or Stupefied.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

I think every time you go down you also add a Drained value. That way there's a "persistent" effect like last time and Drained also gives you a minus on Fort saves which means if you get dropped 3 times you're Drained 3 so you get a -3 on Fort saves, making it much harder to make the fort saves. It would make getting dropped in combat A LOT more lethal as well.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Oh, that's smart, that's not that far off from "2 Con damage". I like it.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

I feel like in PF1e your margins of being knocked out but not dead got crazy thin as you level up anyway, so the odds of someone ending up with that Con damage seem awfully low. (And lower if they actually get any Con damage to boot.) And lower level characters are so fragile that Con damage seems really harsh.

DM Livgin wrote:

Would the inclusion of smelling salts and a 'vitalization' spell make the difference with the revision 0 dying rules? Or is that more rules bloat?

For example change stabilize so that if it targets someone at 1 hp they wake up, or with a three action cast it brings someone from 0 hp to 1 hp and awake. Or a extra action that can be applied to any spell/action with the healing trait that wakes them up?

I'm GMing and not liking the whack a mole, it is hurting my immersion. I'm expecting the community to realize that if you wait until your ally is down you will get the most efficiency out of your healing. PF1 had whack a mole games but it came with a very real risk of death.

However, players are liking not having to sit out a fight. After Chapter 1 I was concerned that the front liner was going to always go down in round 1 or 2 of any severe encounter and always end up sitting those out.

Again, I really don't think having people stay knocked out when their hit points are positive is the right solution. It just isn't fun. (Though yeah, having something like smelling salts would make it a lot more palpable. )

But having the dying conditions persist means that players can choose to leap back into the fray at great personal risk.

Community / Forums / Archive / Pathfinder / Playtests & Prerelease Discussions / Pathfinder Playtest / Player Rules / Playing the Game / Has the dying errata made things a little too easy? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Playing the Game