Spending ALL Hero Points to Avoid Death...

[Xyyth]

I have one more question/concern. I've been reading the 2nd Edition Core Rulebook.

What does everyone think about the rule of spending all your Hero Points to avoid death?

It seems something like that could be could be overly used. Even if you have just 1 point, you can blow it and not die. Just seems kind of a weird rule.

[Dancing Wind]

Hero Points are a temporary "good luck charm" that only last as long as your gaming session lasts. They do not carry over from one session to another.

The math (and probabilities) of the game are very tight. If you remove Hero Points from the game, you are much more likely to kill off player characters, and/or suffer from a TPK (Total Party Kill).

If you are running pre-written adventures from Paizo, the authors and designers of those events have assumed that Hero Points are available if the dice rolls are unusually low for the party or high for the creatures they are encountering.

How do you think they can be overly used? Hero Points are totally under the control of the GM. And there is a limit of 3 per character at any one time.

What bad thing do you think might happen if you use Hero Points in your games?

[Rysky]

How is it weird?

Most GMs don’t like killing off their PCs.

[breithauptclan]

GMs also control how often characters gain Hero Points. So if they really want to kill off their player's characters, they probably still can.

[breithauptclan]

In my TPK experiences, Hero Points didn't actually prevent a TPK anyway. By the time the players are losing enough that they are using Hero Points to auto-stabilize, the battle is already lost.

What Hero Point auto-stabilize is for is to turn a TPK into a less campaign-ending defeat event.

[HumbleGamer]

To me it's ok if a player wants to save their Hero Points in order to prevent their own death, but I consider this more a player choice rather than some sort of DM kindness.

For example, I tend to use them to reroll ( I think I never saved them with the intent to use them to prevent death ), though it may still happen that my characters has one Hero Ppoint when an enemy bring them down.

Some other player can easily try to save at least one HP "just in case", using the others for reroll, and some other one could even save them all to prevent death.

Keep also in mind that sometimes an Hero Point just slightly delay the character death:

- Persistent damage would still remain
- Aoe damage could also affect downed characters
- Doomed condition might be there to speed things up

In my experience, the sooner the enemies go down, the better.

Meaning that saving 3 hero points to prevent death, for example not using them to reroll failed saves, or attacks, would be a really bad idea because they would inevitabely first lead to less damage or more debuff on the character, and then to delay the enemies death.

[Castilliano]

IMO Hero Points are best spent to reroll critical failures on saves, which are a major component of why one might go down in the first place. And since going from full health to incapacitated (often permanently) due to one poor roll is hardly fun, Hero Points alleviate such dynamic effects from derailing the game, while keeping the spectacle and risk.

To spend Hero Points simply to "not die" once, that's poor usage IMO, as you're still next to death, hardly able to contribute, and had to spend them all when you could've done some cool, or at least tactical, stuff.

[Fumarole]

I can tell you my PCs would be dead several times over without Hero Points/Hero Deck cards. A few sessions ago I implemented a rule where they can spend two to make me re-roll any d20. Since this rule was implemented they started going through their cards much more quickly, and seldom have any left at the end of a session, whereas previously they would often have one remaining each. I give one card to each player at the start of a session, another to everyone who showed up on time and ready to play, and a third goes to the player the party decides was the MVP of the previous session. Because of the on time incentive the players are almost always at my house early, so they go through about nine cards per session now.