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Author Topic: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?  (Read 4635 times)

Stephen Tannhauser

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One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« on: October 05, 2022, 04:45:09 PM »
I was playing with how to handle super-strength in a system design I've had going for a while, and started thinking about one of the limits I wanted to impose on the system: I wanted to keep the mechanics from being able to create damage values so high that even the most grazing hit (this system incorporates degree of success into damage calculation) nonetheless amounted to a fatal blow in one shot. From this I realized what the real goal of that limit was: I have always been profoundly resistant to situations where a single failed roll, or even a single player choice made in ignorance of the circumstances, can cause character death. Hence, the title of the thread: the One-Roll InstaKill -- this encompasses more than combat, of course, and includes things like saving throws or even the classic sphere-of-annihilation-in-the-statue-mouth trap.

In terms of the "Elements of Tactics" article I so often quote from Mr. Brian Gleichman, I prefer systems where the pace of decision -- i.e. how much time and opportunity is available to recover from any specific failure, or more simply, how fast you can lose -- has at least a little room for escape or recovery, even at its grittiest. I have always thought that in practice, even among players who mostly go the min-max power-gaming route, losing a character on which you've spent a great deal of development and game time because of a single bad roll or single uninformed choice is profoundly aggravating. However, I was wondering if other people had different perspectives on this, and where and when they considered such level of instant total risk appropriate.

EDIT: I put this in the general RPG discussion forum because I wanted to get examples from what people have actually seen in play, but if this is a better fit for the Design and Development forum, I ask that it be moved there, with apologies for the inconvenience.
 
« Last Edit: October 05, 2022, 04:48:28 PM by Stephen Tannhauser »
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Jam The MF

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #1 on: October 05, 2022, 04:50:34 PM »
Whatever the Dice Decide.
Let the Dice, Decide the Outcome.  Accept the Results.

Steven Mitchell

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #2 on: October 05, 2022, 07:03:38 PM »
For anyone that cares about this issue, I don't think there is a simple answer.  It can be ignored and/or fudged and/or glossed over as minor.  Lots of people do have fun playing that way.  To the extent that it starts to bug someone, and they want to do something about it, it's tricky.  So I don't think there is any particular correct answer, or even better answers, but I can say how I view and what I did about it.

In D&D, the "saving throw" or "save" got corrupted almost from the beginning.  It was always supposed to be thought of as, "You done screwed up to the point that you should already be feeling the consequences, but we'll give you a free shot to get away with it, or at least mitigate the fallout."  In effect, it's a built in, reusable form of "Hero Points" or "Fate Points" with no points to track!  It's no accident that in early D&D, the saves start pretty crappy and get steadily better as the character advances--that is, the more time the player has in the character, the better chance they have to activate their get out of jail free card.

Of course, the GM has to run a game with that in mind.  It's not "fair" to throw a horde of wraiths at the party out of the blue and drain all their levels.  It is "fair" to convey that nasty things are parked in this corner of the dungeon (however that is done), that they might be wandering around, and then if someone ignores that and bites off more than they can chew, better hope that the save gives them a chance to run for it.  If they keep plugging along, miss saves, die--that's working as designed.

What gets lost is that the saving throw is operational, not tactical.  If you want the tactical equivalent, then that can be done, too, but it would have a different purpose, and thus a different mechanic, probably different math, and definitely needs a different name.  The whole package has to be considered together.

Me, I like a bit of both, operational outs and tactical outs, but still a strong threat of tactical death.  What I ended up with in my D&D-like game:  Saves in the older style.  A hit point buffer that was significant, started higher, scaled slower, topped out lower (e.g. less range between zero and heroes, but still a definite range).  Slightly increased damage and critical hits designed in from the ground up to be more than just simple point damage. "Health Points" split in a Wound/Vitality style (named something else but irrelevant for this discussion). Falling damage has chance to go straight to "Wound".  What would typically be a "save or die" effect is instead also going partially to "Wounds".  "Wounds" are a lot harder to get back naturally and are a bigger drain on magical resources to cure.

Then I emphasized very hard to the players, through play, what Saves are for.

The net effect of all that is that "Save or Die" doesn't happen very often to a fully healthy character (though there is a tiny possibility).  Instead, every time the Wounds goes down, the character is that much closer to having such an event.  A character with one Wound left is functionally identical to a being in the Save or Die camp.  In other words, "Mook" is not a binary flag on a creature.  Anyone with very little Wounds (however they got there) is headed for Mook country.  Other parts of the system put operational pressure on players to sometimes risk adventuring while wounding, but that's a sliding scale too.  Everyone a little banged up, it's worth it to push.  A couple of people clinging to only 1 or 2 Wounds, probably not.  I just set up the gauge.  It's the players that make the call.

Now, possibly none of that is directly useful to what you want to do.  In my case, there's nothing particular special or novel about any mechanic I chose.  It's how they work together, how they are named, how they are presented, and how they work with the rest of the system that makes it work as it does.  I hope it helps a little.

David Johansen

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #3 on: October 05, 2022, 07:28:57 PM »
It depends a bit on medical technology and magic.  "Head vaporized" can be instantly lethal or a short term set back.  As the doctor says in Fifth Element, "There's  a hundred live cells in there, it's more than I need."
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ForgottenF

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2022, 09:49:19 PM »
I'm also not a huge fan of "Save or Die" type mechanics, as I tend to find them anti-climactic. I would pretty much always prefer a player be killed by poor decision making, or tactics, rather than by simple RNG. For things like poison, curses, etc. I prefer the concept of a building status effect (such as the way things like that work in Dark Souls). It's not often implemented on the tabletop, but it could be through something like an effect that deals a percentage of the player's HP per round, rather than rolled damage. That puts the player on notice that they have X number of rounds to remediate the problem before they die, and at least gives them some chance at clever problem solving.

For combat on the other hand, I do think that one hit kills should be a possibility. If your players can never one-shot even a weak enemy, they're never going to feel like their character is truly powerful. At the same time, there are lots of narrative situations (the classic being the city guards holding a player up at crossbow-point) where being able to be instantly slain by an attack is necessary for the verisimilitude of the game. The issue of the players running up against an enemy that can one-shot them I see as being more of a problem of poor GM-ing, rather than system design. Such enemies should be clearly signposted, and the players given reasonable opportunity to avoid fighting them. If a GM chooses to drop a max-level dragon on a low-level party, with no warning, and no opportunity to escape, the flame-breath should have a chance to instantly vaporize them, but the party has every right to consider the GM is being a dickhead.

Lunamancer

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #5 on: October 05, 2022, 11:06:58 PM »
I was playing with how to handle super-strength in a system design I've had going for a while, and started thinking about one of the limits I wanted to impose on the system: I wanted to keep the mechanics from being able to create damage values so high that even the most grazing hit (this system incorporates degree of success into damage calculation) nonetheless amounted to a fatal blow in one shot.

My inclination is always don't get cute, don't get clever. You want to do that, just do it. Maybe the most a grazing hit can ever do is 50% of the target's health. Or 90%. Or whatever you find easy to calculate.

Quote
From this I realized what the real goal of that limit was: I have always been profoundly resistant to situations where a single failed roll, or even a single player choice made in ignorance of the circumstances, can cause character death. Hence, the title of the thread: the One-Roll InstaKill -- this encompasses more than combat, of course, and includes things like saving throws or even the classic sphere-of-annihilation-in-the-statue-mouth trap.

This requires clarification as to what "single" means. I don't think I've ever experienced starting up a new session then right off the bat everyone has to roll save or die. Or for the first time the GM asks, "What do you do?" and the answer leads to instant death. That said, it's not always going to be obvious what "single" means since any instance is only ever arrived at through a series of dice rolls and decisions. It's clear in combat when you say "no single hit", but other than that, what do you mean?

What about Save-or-Die poisons in old school D&D? Generally the monster must first hit, then you fail a save. That's two rolls. Although there's no decision-making in between. And so in a way that amounts to one less-likely-roll. Well, what if you're fighting a bunch of goblins? After your turn, 5 of them attack you, and out of some freak chance they all critical. You don't get to make decisions in between those. Is that really any different from one super-freakish hit? On the other hand, the 5 goblins do have to commit their action to attacking you. They're giving up something else they could have done. So maybe the unit action or opportunity cost has something to do with how you determine what "single" is.


Quote
In terms of the "Elements of Tactics" article I so often quote from Mr. Brian Gleichman, I prefer systems where the pace of decision -- i.e. how much time and opportunity is available to recover from any specific failure, or more simply, how fast you can lose -- has at least a little room for escape or recovery, even at its grittiest. I have always thought that in practice, even among players who mostly go the min-max power-gaming route, losing a character on which you've spent a great deal of development and game time because of a single bad roll or single uninformed choice is profoundly aggravating. However, I was wondering if other people had different perspectives on this, and where and when they considered such level of instant total risk appropriate.

I could give you a lot of different perspectives on this. I'll limit myself to 2.

First, is gamers as a whole have always been bi-polar on this topic. On the one hand, yeah, nobody wants to love their beloved character on a single freakish roll. And by the way, it's always "single" and always "freakish." To me, this kind of sounds like the lady doth protest too much. It speaks of a dire need to dodge all responsibility for your own character's fate. And so I'm often less than sympathetic. The opposite end of the spectrum usually involves a high level D&D fighter intentionally take a header off a cliff. Sort of like a short-cut. Since the player knows the character's got plenty enough hit points to survive the fall. And so the opposite belief is, you should never be so tough that you're invulnerable.

Second, I think it was Legend of Zelda I was playing when I was a kid, my godfather started making fun of it. All these hearts. The videogames he grew up on, it's one hit and you were dead. And I played those videogames, too. And they really do work just fine. Perhaps because we go in knowing that it's one hit and you're dead.

In some ways, I think those old games work even better. Because once you get used to the idea of being able to take multiple hits, a nail-biting  victory becomes equated with losing most of your hits, but not quite all. And so then a good challenging adventure is one in which the player is expected to lose most of their hits. And that can be a problem. Because if you fall behind early, you might enter the latter half of the adventure not able to take the hits the good design expects you to hit. And it's not entirely clear to me that playing those second two hours with no chance of winning is something that should even be done. In baseball, if the home team is up in the bottom of the 9th, the game ends there and then. You don't continue to play things out once the end is set in stone.

Granted, it's not exactly that in an RPG. You could be destined to lose and still fight for your survival. I just question, if you can't afford to take a hit in the first encounter, what actual benefit is there to designing the RPG form such that it sets the expectation that, yes, you can take a hit without going down? Are we actually gaining something by doing this? Is your favorite character actually any safer for my leading you to believe you've got a buffer against death?

Just playing devil's advocate, really. I do take one cue from the old school video games. You usually get 3 lives. So I'm cool calibrating the RPG to 3 hits and you're done. And I guess that might translate to three bad decisions as well. However, one bad decision to fight 5 goblins will kill you just as surely. And if it's possible for one mistake to be that severe--I guess you should have known better than to take on 5 goblins by yourself--then why can't another mistake, one where it's a single but much more powerful adversary, be just as severe. In other words, why shouldn't there be one hit kills? I get there is strength in numbers. But is there not also strength in strength?

Quote
EDIT: I put this in the general RPG discussion forum because I wanted to get examples from what people have actually seen in play, but if this is a better fit for the Design and Development forum, I ask that it be moved there, with apologies for the inconvenience.

You know how in AD&D 2E, there's a massive hit rule, where if you take 50+ damage in one shot, your character has to make a system shock survival check or die? Gary Gygax's Lejendary Adventure RPG has the exact opposite rule. If you take over 50 damage from any single source, you get a special "Disaster Avoidance Check" of which there are two possible degrees of success. The lesser, you take only half damage, but there may be a complication added--broken bone, or something appropriate to the situation. The greater success, you avoid all damage completely. (For context, LA Avatars usually start with more than 50 health. It's possible to start lower, but you pretty much have to do it on purpose.)

The reason I fucking looooooove this rule is because it boxcars both ears of the bipolar gamer at the same time.

Look. You get an extra die roll. And that reduces the probability of being killed in a single hit. But there's still a chance. Don't be that jerkoff fighter leaping off a building because you're too lazy to take the stairs. And definitely don't be the guy that's going to stand toe to toe with the Titan of Infinite Strength. Because there's a chance, however small, that it will end you. Enough to be a deterrent.

The flip side of it is, imagine being the min-maxing player pumping your harm up to the high heavens. Knowing that if you deal 50 harm, you deal 50 harm, but if you deal 51 or more, you might only end up dealing 25, or even nothing, that's going to make you really not want to cross that threshold. No. We're not limiting how much harm you can do. You want to make it your obsession, you can approach +infinity harm bonus if you want. But a lot of people are going to not want. Rather than continuing to build up the amount of harm you do, it might behoove you to develop your Avatar in other directions. Like maybe focus on being able to make multiple attacks.

We still preserve the idea of a one-hit kill. That threat always exists, and it helps keep PCs humble. But we reduce both the probability of dealing such a blow as well as reducing the number of characters who ever attain the ability to deal such a blow.
That's my two cents anyway. Carry on, crawler.

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rytrasmi

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #6 on: October 06, 2022, 11:40:42 AM »
What I've seen and do is telegraph one-shot threats. These bejeweled crystalline crabs inject a deadly venom? The fishermen freely tell this rumor to everyone. The venom spike is richly described when the PCs first encounter this monster, etc. etc. At the end, it may be one roll, but there should always be a logical progression to that roll. E.g., the crabs don't hide in an adventure's boots and sting their feet with save-or-die. Or if they do hide in boots, they make a lot of noise. So, I suppose my answer is to fairly and reasonably inform PCs of deadly threats.

I've got a module in front of me that has a 50 ft. deep open pit hidden by an illusionary cave floor. Unless a PC knows and also suddenly decides to cast detect illusion, it's save or die as written. So, again it falls on the GM's shoulders to imagine a way to telegraph this threat. Deep cave holes do not exist in a vacuum. They alter their environment. Sound reverberates differently. Air moves differently. Heat or cold emanates.

Save or die threats should exist. They make the world exciting and dangerous. However, it should not come as a total surprise when a save-or-die roll is made. It's the GM's job to make a save-or-die roll feel fair to the player, and this requires premeditation by the GM.
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Zalman

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #7 on: October 06, 2022, 11:53:21 AM »
I wanted to keep the mechanics from being able to create damage values so high that even the most grazing hit (this system incorporates degree of success into damage calculation) nonetheless amounted to a fatal blow in one shot.

But isn't that exactly what makes a blow from something like a colossus or kaiju so dangerous? Or mooks so weak? I think the mechanics should definitely allow for grazing hits to be fatal at some point. I think the question is just more about exactly where that potentially happens.

The answer will depend on which decision points and tropes the game wants to include.
« Last Edit: October 06, 2022, 11:56:00 AM by Zalman »
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Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #8 on: October 06, 2022, 05:24:28 PM »
Good points about the absence of potential single-roll fatalities undermining the sense of danger and stakes of the game.

To clarify, when I say "single-roll", I generally mean literally only one roll (at most two if in reaction to a GM roll) where the consequences of any failure, no matter how close one comes to success, are immediate and final death regardless of prior PC status, especially if the PC is not given any meaningful choice beforehand that would allow him to avoid that roll. Five low-probability crits in a row, or taking the last hit in a long battle, is not the same thing as facing an enemy where you have no chance to flee and his first successful hit is the end of the line for you, or walking into an undetectable and unavoidable poison-gas trap where you have one roll to survive and that's it. Likewise, situations where the threat of an instant kill is deployed but the PCs have a meaningful capacity to avoid it by other action (e.g. talking your way out of being held at crossbow-point by guards, or simply cooperating with them) don't count.

Part of why it was character superstrength, specifically, that started me thinking about one-roll fatalities was that unlike things like local venomous fauna (which characters can learn about), and obvious uber-destructors like colossi and kaiju, humanoid superstrength isn't always something you can anticipate before engaging. Which goes to another cogent point raised above: The real frustration isn't just a single-roll/single-choice potential fatality, but an uninformed single-roll/single-choice fatality. For any given gamble to be meaningful you have to know what the stakes are first.

My own thought is that this reflects generally changed expectations in roleplaying overall. In the real old-school days of D&D and AD&D1E, the idea that one wrong choice or one bad roll could, and probably would, mean the end of at least some PCs over the course of a campaign seemed to be more generally accepted, if not particularly liked. Nowadays I see much more resistance to that idea, partly because (I think) the time needed, and encouraged, to be spent on character creation and development has increased considerably, which makes the experience of instant, unpredictable, and anticlimactic loss of those characters more frustrating and aggravating.

(Edit: It has just occurred to me that this was, of course, one of the unstated but fairly common reasons to have henchmen and hirelings along on the old-school dungeon crawls: so that if any such unforeseeable instant-death threat came by, the PCs could learn about it by finding a body in the morning.)
« Last Edit: October 06, 2022, 05:29:04 PM by Stephen Tannhauser »
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ForgottenF

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #9 on: October 06, 2022, 05:26:29 PM »
Second, I think it was Legend of Zelda I was playing when I was a kid, my godfather started making fun of it. All these hearts. The videogames he grew up on, it's one hit and you were dead. And I played those videogames, too. And they really do work just fine. Perhaps because we go in knowing that it's one hit and you're dead.

In some ways, I think those old games work even better. Because once you get used to the idea of being able to take multiple hits, a nail-biting  victory becomes equated with losing most of your hits, but not quite all. And so then a good challenging adventure is one in which the player is expected to lose most of their hits. And that can be a problem. Because if you fall behind early, you might enter the latter half of the adventure not able to take the hits the good design expects you to hit. And it's not entirely clear to me that playing those second two hours with no chance of winning is something that should even be done. In baseball, if the home team is up in the bottom of the 9th, the game ends there and then. You don't continue to play things out once the end is set in stone.

Granted, it's not exactly that in an RPG. You could be destined to lose and still fight for your survival. I just question, if you can't afford to take a hit in the first encounter, what actual benefit is there to designing the RPG form such that it sets the expectation that, yes, you can take a hit without going down? Are we actually gaining something by doing this? Is your favorite character actually any safer for my leading you to believe you've got a buffer against death?

This may come across as pedantic, but there's a couple things I think are worth pointing out about those old games. For one thing, a lot of older games were made to be punishingly difficult, either to extract quarters from kids in an arcade, or to cover the fact that the game itself was actually extremely short. Also, if you die in a videogame, you get to start over and play the same game again (roguelikes excluded), so part of the game is learning from past mistakes in order to make further progress each time. That's an opportunity you don't get in a tabletop RPG. More importantly, games where you die in a small number of hits usually are not RPGs. They're action games (or platformers or Action-RPGs), where the player's manual skill at the game can allow them to avoid those hits. It's a lot less fair to the player to impose that level of punishment when their being hit is a matter of stats and randomness, rather than a matter of skill.

Wisithir

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #10 on: October 06, 2022, 10:48:43 PM »
If a player decision leads to a one roll instant kill, I am fine with it. There is always room to check for internal consistency first. "Are you sure you want to do that? As a trained adventurer you do know that..." In combat, it is best to telegraph the move allowing for a player decision. "You see the scaly monster inhale deeply" Now is the PC hangs out in the breath weapons arc of fire, it's the player that got the character killed.

Mishihari

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #11 on: October 07, 2022, 12:57:48 AM »
I find this a difficult issue to deal with, because in doing so, one must also deal with two different, contradictory methods to make the game fun.  On the one hand, instant kills are realistic.  If a sniper head shots you then you’re done.  There ain’t no such thing as hit points in real life.  And realism is fun becomes the game becomes more impactful and engaging.  On the other hand, having control of your character and playing the same character for a while is also fun, and instakills take away from these quite a lot. 

D&D’s solution is hit points, which I consider ablative plot armor.  Each near death experience (like getting hit by a sword – take a real solid hit from a sword in real life and you’re probably dead) makes it more dramatically reasonable that your character will die.  When it becomes reasonable enough, he does so.  This isn’t a bad solution, as long as you don’t try to think about it too hard.  You get both character longevity and sudden death when it becomes appropriate. 

The question in my mind is why should there be mechanics that bypass this?  Yes it gives some variety to damage mechanics, which to be fair are pretty monotonous:  “You take x points damage.  You take y points damage.  You take z points damage.”  And it spices up the game for bored players who think their characters are safe because they still have buckets of hp.  But you go back to the downside of a realistic game, and lots of folks are not okay with this.  It also bugs me to have multiple damage mechanics; it’s not an elegant solution.

The approach I like the best of those I’ve seen so far is one I came up with myself.  First get rid of saves.  Then instant effect spells do a high amount of damage, and if (and only if) one takes all of your hit points then the spell takes full effect.  Frex, petrify might do 50 hp damage, and if it “kills” a character, then he turns to stone rather than dying.  It’s a tradeoff versus just using a moderate damage spell of the same level:  it hits hard, but it’s much easier to recover from, using stone to flesh rather than raise dead.  This keeps hit points intact and serving their purpose, but also allows instant effect spells.

Lots of variations are possible, depending on how close to baseline D&D you want to be.  Maybe if the victim has more than 50 hp in the above example, they are slowed for a few rounds and no damage is done.  Maybe the damage is special petrify damage, tracked separately, and stone to flesh heals it, or maybe multiple stone to flesh are required until enough healing is done to reverse the effect.  Maybe stone to flesh returns the character at 1 hp.

And different effects would need to be reworked.  For something like deadly poison, I’d be inclined to say that it does 50 point of damage d6 rounds after the attack, unless a cure poison removes the effect first.  There’s a lot of room for creativity.

The only downside I see to such a system is that it would be a lot of work to develop.  I haven’t because I’m busy right now with other RPG products, but maybe someday.


« Last Edit: October 07, 2022, 12:59:24 AM by Mishihari »

mAcular Chaotic

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #12 on: October 07, 2022, 12:58:15 AM »
Good points about the absence of potential single-roll fatalities undermining the sense of danger and stakes of the game.

To clarify, when I say "single-roll", I generally mean literally only one roll (at most two if in reaction to a GM roll) where the consequences of any failure, no matter how close one comes to success, are immediate and final death regardless of prior PC status, especially if the PC is not given any meaningful choice beforehand that would allow him to avoid that roll. Five low-probability crits in a row, or taking the last hit in a long battle, is not the same thing as facing an enemy where you have no chance to flee and his first successful hit is the end of the line for you, or walking into an undetectable and unavoidable poison-gas trap where you have one roll to survive and that's it. Likewise, situations where the threat of an instant kill is deployed but the PCs have a meaningful capacity to avoid it by other action (e.g. talking your way out of being held at crossbow-point by guards, or simply cooperating with them) don't count.

Part of why it was character superstrength, specifically, that started me thinking about one-roll fatalities was that unlike things like local venomous fauna (which characters can learn about), and obvious uber-destructors like colossi and kaiju, humanoid superstrength isn't always something you can anticipate before engaging. Which goes to another cogent point raised above: The real frustration isn't just a single-roll/single-choice potential fatality, but an uninformed single-roll/single-choice fatality. For any given gamble to be meaningful you have to know what the stakes are first.

My own thought is that this reflects generally changed expectations in roleplaying overall. In the real old-school days of D&D and AD&D1E, the idea that one wrong choice or one bad roll could, and probably would, mean the end of at least some PCs over the course of a campaign seemed to be more generally accepted, if not particularly liked. Nowadays I see much more resistance to that idea, partly because (I think) the time needed, and encouraged, to be spent on character creation and development has increased considerably, which makes the experience of instant, unpredictable, and anticlimactic loss of those characters more frustrating and aggravating.

(Edit: It has just occurred to me that this was, of course, one of the unstated but fairly common reasons to have henchmen and hirelings along on the old-school dungeon crawls: so that if any such unforeseeable instant-death threat came by, the PCs could learn about it by finding a body in the morning.)
That changes things. How often does such an unlikely scenario ever happen except when the DM has decided to railroad the players to a TPK?

Even if it's a single hit kill save or die trap, since it's just sitting there waiting for you to trigger it, there are tons of things you can do to approach it. So it's not just one decision, so to speak.
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jeff37923

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #13 on: October 07, 2022, 04:15:20 AM »
Good points about the absence of potential single-roll fatalities undermining the sense of danger and stakes of the game.

To clarify, when I say "single-roll", I generally mean literally only one roll (at most two if in reaction to a GM roll) where the consequences of any failure, no matter how close one comes to success, are immediate and final death regardless of prior PC status, especially if the PC is not given any meaningful choice beforehand that would allow him to avoid that roll. Five low-probability crits in a row, or taking the last hit in a long battle, is not the same thing as facing an enemy where you have no chance to flee and his first successful hit is the end of the line for you, or walking into an undetectable and unavoidable poison-gas trap where you have one roll to survive and that's it. Likewise, situations where the threat of an instant kill is deployed but the PCs have a meaningful capacity to avoid it by other action (e.g. talking your way out of being held at crossbow-point by guards, or simply cooperating with them) don't count.

Part of why it was character superstrength, specifically, that started me thinking about one-roll fatalities was that unlike things like local venomous fauna (which characters can learn about), and obvious uber-destructors like colossi and kaiju, humanoid superstrength isn't always something you can anticipate before engaging. Which goes to another cogent point raised above: The real frustration isn't just a single-roll/single-choice potential fatality, but an uninformed single-roll/single-choice fatality. For any given gamble to be meaningful you have to know what the stakes are first.

My own thought is that this reflects generally changed expectations in roleplaying overall. In the real old-school days of D&D and AD&D1E, the idea that one wrong choice or one bad roll could, and probably would, mean the end of at least some PCs over the course of a campaign seemed to be more generally accepted, if not particularly liked. Nowadays I see much more resistance to that idea, partly because (I think) the time needed, and encouraged, to be spent on character creation and development has increased considerably, which makes the experience of instant, unpredictable, and anticlimactic loss of those characters more frustrating and aggravating.

(Edit: It has just occurred to me that this was, of course, one of the unstated but fairly common reasons to have henchmen and hirelings along on the old-school dungeon crawls: so that if any such unforeseeable instant-death threat came by, the PCs could learn about it by finding a body in the morning.)
That changes things. How often does such an unlikely scenario ever happen except when the DM has decided to railroad the players to a TPK?

Even if it's a single hit kill save or die trap, since it's just sitting there waiting for you to trigger it, there are tons of things you can do to approach it. So it's not just one decision, so to speak.

Every TPK or player kill I have handed out has been to reward aggressive stupidity in players. So much so, that I am loathe to change that. This includes the guy who insisted his normal human character could survive in vacuum, the guy who jumped on a grenade and claimed his character would survive because he had enough hit points, the monk who thought he could punch a gelatinous cube with no ill effects, the free trader vs a patrol cruiser pointless fight, the first level party screaming "Charge!" and attacking a fully grown black dragon with no preparation, etc, etc.

Stupidity kills in my games. A leading cause of death is second hand stupidity (don't stand next to someone throwing rocks at a guy with a shotgun).
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Steven Mitchell

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Re: One-Roll InstaKills: How to handle?
« Reply #14 on: October 07, 2022, 07:30:19 AM »

The only downside I see to such a system is that it would be a lot of work to develop.  I haven’t because I’m busy right now with other RPG products, but maybe someday.

I think you will also run into a downside dealing with conversion ratios for special cases to hit points.  It becomes "hit points by indirection", which has its own problems.  I found dealing with those problems less elegant than simply designing for two tracks.  Because it really gets back to how you want the game to feel.  Hit points protect you from X but don't help you against Y.  The only way to make that seem right (to a particular person) is to find out what they put into X and Y, then engineer the system to accommodate it.  YMMV.