How have you run hero points and effects that bypass the dying system? Is the wording of the rules only supposed to interact with the dying condition? Or also supposed to work with the dying system? Does this make persistent damage the most dangerous condition in the game?
I view the wording of hero points as they only interact with the dying condition - meaning that instant death effects aren't circumvented by having a hero point. Has yet to come up in a game for me since players are rarely put against death effects or things capable of using the massive damage rules.
For persistent damage... I've actually houseruled that hero points to avoid death also end any ongoing persistent damage effects. Because otherwise persistent damage is ridiculously dangerous, and players in my group really didn't like the feeling of using hero points to remove the dying condition and then immediately going back to dying because of the persistent damage.
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I tend to run using hero points in this way as a sort of absolute 'you don't die now' full stop, until new circumstances may put the character in mortal peril again.
But I know some GMs (and arguably strictest RAW here) only allow it to interact with dying so no hero points out of death effects and persistent damage will just tick that dying condition back up every round.
Couldn't you just use the hero point to reroll the save that killed you?
I agree that ongoing damage is ridiculously scary, but I see it as a good thing. Really spurs the party into action trying to save their comrades. There's nothing quite as exhilarating as those nail-biting edge-of-your-seat moments.
Couldn't you just use the hero point to reroll the save that killed you?
Likely because damage is dealt after the result of the saving throw. You no loner have the ability to reroll the saving throw.
Couldn't you just use the hero point to reroll the save that killed you?Likely because damage is dealt after the result of the saving throw. You no loner have the ability to reroll the saving throw.
Sure, but I mean, it's not like many GMs bother to ask between those steps. Most in my experience just immediately announce the results the moment they hear the save result.
PC:
GM:
PC:
GM:
Remains a perfectly reasonable way to handle it.
How people may GM at their home tables aside (and regardless of how players decide to spend their Hero Points) what about a case such as with Power Word Kill where there is no saving throw?
It seems clear to me that, RAW (and RAI, in my opinion), Hero Points allow you to...
1) Reroll a check
2) Remove the dying condition
The death trait skips right over the dying condition and puts you straight to dead. Sort of one of the benefits of spells and abilities with the death trait.
Yeah, an interesting quirk I discovered mid-encounter was that if a Death tagged spell deals enough damage to drop a player to 0, they still just die. Phantasmal killer can kill a PC outright even if they manage to hero point the saving throw, because anything less than a critical success on the save deals damage. My player and I were both caught by surprise by his sudden demise.
Yeah the question arises about whether the CE soulbound doll with vampiric touch is just a little overturned, or absolutely broken for a level 2 enemy. If you encounter it at level 1, it has better than a 50 % chance of out right killing a PC with that spell. If a hero point can save the character, maybe it’s not that bad, but if not it’s pretty much playing Russian roulette with your PCs.
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Yeah the question arises about whether the CE soulbound doll with vampiric touch is just a little overturned, or absolutely broken for a level 2 enemy. If you encounter it at level 1, it has better than a 50 % chance of out right killing a PC with that spell. If a hero point can save the character, maybe it’s not that bad, but if not it’s pretty much playing Russian roulette with your PCs.
To add a link for reference: James Jacobs seems to think that it warrants errata.
Edit: To clarify, errata for the soulbound doll, not the death trait.
But we have no idea if James’ comment about considering it for errata has anything to do with how hero points work. Not that Ruiz’s was saying it did, but I just want to make it clear that James was not weighing in on that.
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The rules do say you can avoid death.
There are multiple cases of fluff text inside the rules and it can be one (at least, I read it as a fluff text).
Also, if there is no explanation on how it avoid death, it doesn't help. If you're not Desintegrated, what are you then?| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The death trait skips right over the dying condition and puts you straight to dead. Sort of one of the benefits of spells and abilities with the death trait.A benefit for who? Monsters can't use hero points, so it's not like this would ever apply from the players' side.
Would it help if instead of benefit I were to say that it's "one of the qualities of spells and abilities with the death trait"? Death effects kill, that's what they do.
The rules never actually say you can only avoid death when you would die from Dying.
The Air Bud rule only applies to dogs playing basketball, I'm afraid. Much like many feats and spells give descriptive fluff text (as SuperBidi has pointed out), these seems to fall into the same category. Until it provides concrete rules such as...
Spend all your Hero Points (minimum 1) to avoid death. You can do this when your dying condition would increase. You lose the dying condition entirely and stabilize with 0 Hit Points. You don’t gain the wounded condition or increase its value from losing the dying condition in this way, but if you already had that condition, you don’t lose it or decrease its value.
...I would absolutely rule that Hero Points can only be used to reroll a check or to lose the dying condition when your dying condition would increase.
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I am pretty sincerely uncertain that there is an “obvious” answer to how to read this.
My first reading was that it only explains how to handle death in relationship to they dying condition, but if the sentence about the dying condition were not there, the ability would still work exactly the same, when your character would die, they don’t. They stabilize at 0 hp. They don’t increase their wounded condition.
I also highly recommend people do not approach PF2 with the idea that some text is intended purely for flavor and other text for mechanics. If that was a design intent, you separate those two types of text more clearly than by butting them together in the same paragraphs or sentences. The intention of PF2 is the description of what happens with an ability is supposed to help guide the table in interpreting it mechanically.
I don’t know that provides a clear answer to this situation, but it does seem possible that a player would be within their right to describe for themselves how they avoid death from a death effect or massive damage and end up unconscious but stable instead and that is covered by both the exact words and the intent of the hero points.
It just feels like such an explicitly not pathfinder/ not crunch mechanic, and so much more like an exclusively narrative focused system that having a rule that just says “do this and you don’t die,” with no exceptions is incredibly jarring. Clarity would certainly be welcome. Maybe PF2 was designed to be more forgiving about death than a lot of tables are running it.
Until clarity is provided about intent. It is probably best a topic for GMs to discuss with their players and take into consideration the tone of the campaign. Even if it is clarified in Errata one way or another, no one would be doing it wrong to make it apply only to dying condition situations in a gritty game or to all death situations in a pulpier game.
The primary value in getting clarification from a design perspective is to figure out how murderously terrifying creatures and situations with one off death trait effects and the ability to do massive damage should be.
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Both Unicore and Zapp are noting that if we removed the mechanical portion of the rules ("You can do this when your dying condition would increase. You lose the dying condition entirely and stabilize with 0 Hit Points.") you're left with "Spend a Hero Point to avoid death." But that doesn't clarify anything. You aren't cutting away extraneous information, but rather keeping only the extraneous.
Hero Point rules state that they can do two things: reroll and avoid death. They are then clarified mechanically what they mean. Without that explanation, "avoid death" is so ambiguous in a mechanical sense as to be entirely worthless. Can I avoid dying of old age? Can I not drown? Can I survive the vacuum of space? Can I ingest lava?
I believe it's fully within the realm of possibility for a GM to allow players to use Hero Points to not die from death effects. As a matter of fact, I encourage that at tables just as much as I encourage GMs allowing a player who is having an unlucky night get a free reroll, no Hero Points needed. However, while you may see the wording as ambiguous, without the context for how the ability actually operates, it creates more problems then is solves by RAW.
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I disagree with you, Ruzza. Rules can't explain everything. Using Hero Points to avoid death is enough. You know the intent, it's your charge as a GM to handle it. It doesn't have to be explained clearly.
The problem is that this sentence is followed by a detailed one. So, we can either consider the second sentence as an explanation of the first one or the second sentence as a separate case.
The issue of taking a sentence out of the blue and expecting it to be applicable alone is that language doesn't work like that. Most of the time, we use multiple sentences to explain one point. As such "Spend all your Hero Points (minimum 1) to avoid death." is not a complete statement. The complete statement is "Spend all your Hero Points (minimum 1) to avoid death. You can do this when your dying condition would increase. You lose the dying condition entirely and stabilize with 0 Hit Points. You don’t gain the wounded condition or increase its value from losing the dying condition in this way, but if you already had that condition, you don’t lose it or decrease its value.". As such, it's quite clear it only works when your dying condition increases.
Now, it may not be the intent (only Paizo can state that) but if it's not it's badly worded.
So, I will rephrase my previous statement : "Spend all your Hero Points (minimum 1) to avoid death." is not fluff text, it's a part of a rule, but it can't be applied alone.
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Just a note.
It was my (quite decent front liner with expert Fortitude saves) character dying that prompted Andrews post in that thread that caused James to realize how broken the monster that James had used actually was.
And my GM made it very, very, very apparent to me that failing the save was NOT a good idea. I took the hint and used my hero point. Needing to roll a 13 on the dice not too surprisingly I still failed :-(.
I'd have been seriously irked if the GM had NOT strongly hinted to me that it was REALLY important to make that save. Some level of meta is definitely warranted when it is quite literally Save or Die.
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We have two sections detailing the use of Hero Points to avoid death in the CRB. Everyone here seems to be focusing on the text under the section of Hero Points, particularly the first line.
Spend all your Hero Points (minimum 1) to avoid death. You can do this when your dying condition would increase. You lose the dying condition entirely and stabilize with 0 Hit Points. You don’t gain the wounded condition or increase its value from losing the dying condition in this way, but if you already had that condition, you don’t lose it or decrease its value.
But there is also this from the section under "Hit Points, Healing, and Dying."
Heroic Recovery
If you have at least 1 Hero Point (page 467), you can spend all of your remaining Hero Points at the start of your turn or when your dying value would increase. You lose the dying condition entirely and stabilize with 0 Hit Points. You don’t gain the wounded condition or increase its value from losing the dying condition in this way, but if you already had that condition, you don’t lose it or decrease its value.
This section appears to be more clear in establishing only two circumstances in which you can use the ability, either when your turn starts or when your dying condition increases. Since death effects ignore the dying condition and generally aren't a part of your turn starting - you never get a chance to use hero points in that instance (unless you can reroll a saving throw).
The two main schools of thought I've seen are one that takes "avoid death" as the absolute effect and the "you can do this when your dying condition would increase" as an outlining of how that works in a specific mechanical scenario (whereas in other scenarios it requires more Gm adjudication) and another that takes "avoid death" to be descriptive text and "you can do this when your dying condition would increase" as an absolute rule.
I guess which you fall into determines how you use hero points.
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The key is it explains exactly how to do it afterward. Yes, technically it could've just read you "avoid death" and GMs would have to figure it out, but Paizo would've been foolish to have that be the full explanation, and it would entirely break the format they use for the rest of the rulebook.
The book tells you what you can do with an ability. Not everything you can't do. Besides, if the following sentences were an example and not an explanation, there's a really nice phrase that they could've put in. Namely: "for example", "such as", and so on.
Instead, they described the details of when you can (i.e. are allowed to) do this, and gave no indication of some other way of doing it.
Also, I'd like to point out that a lot of abilities start with flavor text. Look at feats, even. Most of them say the flavor of what you're doing, then describe the mechanics.
P.S. I pulled up the core rulebook PDF and searched for the first reference to "you can do this", and this is what I found on page 72 under the Alchemy class feature of alchemists:
"You understand the complex interactions of natural and unnatural substances and can concoct alchemical items to meet your needs. You can do this using normal reagents and the Craft activity, or you can use special infused reagents that allow you to craft temporary items quickly and at no cost..."
So, if the hero point text is unclear, then so is the above, and I should be able to "concoct alchemical items to meet [my] needs." Any reference to what it says about the details of how this can be done are now irrelevant, because it doesn't say that I can't do other things to concoct alchemical items to meet my needs. What they describe is just an example...
Yeah, see how quickly that falls apart?
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-laughs- if it was meant to avoid all death it would simply say
"Spend all your Hero Points (minimum 1) to avoid death. You lose stabilize with 0 Hit Points and if you had the dying condition you lose it. You don’t gain the wounded condition or increase its value from losing the dying condition in this way if you had it, but if you already had that condition, you don’t lose it or decrease its value."
Let's have a look at Banishment
"You send the target back to its home plane."
Cool, no saves and it always does this right... regardless of the enemy or conditions of the spell... no...
"The target must attempt a Will save."
"The component must be a specially gathered object that is anathema to the creature, and not from a material component pouch."
"This spell fails if you aren’t on your home plane when you cast it."
All matter as well. The first descriptive line of a rule should never be read in isolation when it is followed by CLEAR MECHANICAL INSTRUCTIONS.
RAI, maybe they intended it to block massive damage, death effects and spells that can cause instant death without hitting zero. I would need to see some sort of justification for this though.
Our group have decided to house rule it this way:
Massive Damage - Hero Points
Spend all of your hero points (if you have at least 1) to turn instant death into a regular critical hit.
So you would be still downed and dying 2 without any remaining hero points, but that is still better then outright just dying (my players did hate that).
I too read the the hero point rules RAW with the assumption that they do not apply to massive damage or death effects. That is how I run it too, but I do see why someone would read it the other way, and I am not sure the game is better for running it the way I read it. I’d much rather players who’s single biggest fear is that their character dies, be able to usage and use a hero point to save their character from death, while a player who is more concerned about their character being boring and anti heroic to spend hero points liberally and occasionally face the real risk that the character may die, rather than force the mechanic to only work for one of the players.
Plus, it is a lot more forgiving on the GM to let players just squarely stop their characters from dying with a hero point, when doing things like putting an elite soulbound doll in a fight against level 1 PCs, and that to be perfectly fine if you make any other narrative choice than having the doll be chaotic evil and have access to a 6d6 damage death effect.
Obviously, I think people should run it as a GM how best fits their table, but conceptually the hero point is intrinsically a mechanic designed to break the system to give players a way to have increased control of when and how they feel narratively heroic. If your players are feeling that the system is too hard and unforgiving, simplifying hero points into the player’s favor might help alleviate that.