Massive Damage

[TwilightKnight]

I know its a sanctioned rule, but how many people remember to actually enforce it? I admit that once I am into the flow of the game, I rarely if ever remember to see if massive damage is in effect. I'm not the most prolific GM but I am running two home campaigns in addition to semi-regular org play and I have never remembered to apply massive damage when it applied and I do not recall a single table of org play I have played at where the GM enforced massive damage.

[HammerJack]

I've noticed when characters came really close to that threshold and double-checked whether it was enough damage that massive damage would apply, and the one time a massive damage death happened in a starfinder scenario I was running, I applied the rule there.

[Christopher Waterfield]

Nope

[Ferious Thune]

Every time I play or GM a 1st level bounty/quest or low tier 1-4 scenario. Other than that, it’s so unlikely to come up, that I do tend to forget about it.

[Blake's Tiger]

More often than not, when I crit against a PC, I've got to check to see if it applied. My only 2 massive damage kills were during the magus/summoner playtest using PFS character creation and scenarios but not reportable tables.

[Nefreet]

I'm always cognizant of it around Level 1-2, but it's usually not a concern later on.

Although there was a Crit Fail on a high damage Fireball once that was pretty dicey for a moment there..

[pauljathome]

As others have said, it only really ever comes up with very low level characters.

It seems to me that some GMs are a little bit subjective in when they notice it. They are more likely to ask what a characters total hit points are when it is an experienced player (or, at least, a player playing their -12 character :-)) than when it is an inexperienced player.

And I have absolutely no problem with that. I'm a firm believer in fudging things a little for new players. Especially at in person games (I vaguely remember what those were like :-)) where you're more likely to be able to tell how upset the new player will be if their character dies).

I may be totally misinterpreting things, of course, and there may not actually be such a bias.

[Gary Bush]

I actually had a character die from massive damage when I played the earlier version of 2-11. A crit on 1st level caster with only 15 hp.

Of course I didn't die because all damage was non-lethal and there is a rule in 2e that prevents massive damage with non-lethal.

As a GM, a 3rd level caster failed a save for an aoe that did high damage. They used a hero point to reroll and got a crit fail. I refused to accept the reroll because I don't think a hero point should be used to kill a character. I ruled the player still had the hero point and the character was down and dying 1.

[Cordell Kintner]

It's only a problem at low levels. I had a post long ago explaining the math and why the rule was unfair toward low levels. People have mentioned that rolling double the die rather doubling the damage lowers the chances of massive damage a significant amount.