Every edition of Dungeons and Dragons has warty parts. 3.5 had flanking, which caused the conga line of death. 4e had abilities run wild which caused unnaturally strong PCs even at low levels. 5e has a few warts as well.
So what do I not like about 5e? Death has no sting. In 5e, when a character is reduced to 0hp, he has to start making Death Saving Throws (simple d20 roll of 10+ to pass, 3 saves to survive and 3 fails to die). It’s an OK mechanic I guess. There are 2 problems: First, if you go down you probably have 4 rounds of combat before things get scary for you. And that is a lot of combat. It isn’t just -10hp (which is surprisingly easy to do). There is plenty of time for someone to stabilize you. DMs have to change their tactics in the way they attack nearly dead PCs to counter this. You need to attack in groups of creatures that can put at least 3 attacks on the person. You want to put them down with 1 death save if there are no healers, and 2 death saves if somebody has healing word.
Oh that’s the worst part about death in 5e. It is the 5e version of the conga line of death in regards to lame mechanics. Me and my friends have started calling it the death yoyo. The only realistic penalty for dropping to 0 hit points is that you have to wait. So healing word will rebound a person in exchange for a level 1 spell slot. It is the most efficient way to play the game (unless you are facing monsters who can kill you from massive damage in single swings which is unlikely). So players will die and fall down, be healing word’d back to life, stand up to attack, then get hit and die again. And that will repeat many times. Thus your tankier players will spend most of the combat standing up and lieing down interspersed with attacks.
This can be addressed many ways, but it is surprisingly hard to do so without house rules. First, you can try and attack the healers first. This is often not easy because clerics, paladins, and druids are hard to drop. Clerics and paladins will probably have 20AC and a big pool of hit points. Druids are never within reach or are a big bear with ablative health. Bards will whisper you away and then high tail it out the door. And that is the real problem. Everyone who can take healing word should take healing word to enable the death yoyo.
Why didn’t the death yoyo work in 3.5? After all, clerics could just touch heal you back if you fell then too. One word: hit dice. OK that was two words. In 3.5, there were potions and spell slots for healing, and not much else. Resting was a multi-day affair. Hit dice provide a very large pool of hit points that players have access to that we don’t really think about as DMs because they have to short rest to use them. I am not actually sure that hit dice were included in monster xp budgets because of the profund impact it has. But if you ever make an encounter that a standard encounter and think to yourself, “hm. They made that look incredibly easy,” this is probably the root cause since they can be at full fighting strength almost immediately after the combat (since short rests are often freebees) and have not used spell slots to get there.
As a DM, this is life in 5e. You can’t get rid of the death yoyo without houserules. The combination of death saving throws + healing word is far too synergistic. And the monsters are tuned to allow for this so that the game feels more tense with players dropping frequently. It permeates the entire system. And true tension only exists when players are without the safety net of healing word. But what can you do to mitigate it?
1) Penalize Long Rests
I haven’t said anything about this yet, but this is probably the most important. The best way to prevent the death yoyo is to tax player resources heavier.
Spiking the door and resting in a dungeon is really unrealistic when you think about it. If there are superior forces, they’re going to know where you are and react to that. And you give them 8 hours where they can plan. If they don’t have superior forces (it is common to long rest right before the last boss), why would the boss stay there and not flee when you give him more than ample chances? He should at least have re-inforcements and be sporting a potion of invulnerability or something when they wake up.
Sooner or later, players realize that they are trading hp and spell slots for xp and gold. That is the player resource in the dungeon economy. If they can infini-rest (5 minute adventure days anyone?), then they have infinite resources. And when most of your encounters exist soley to let players exchange resources for xp/gold, you are effectively giving them something for nothing. Thus, if long rests are permittable, and the players make it impossible to ambush them, they will find an angry hornet’s nest waiting for them to get out of their tiny hut. Mitigating long rests by increasing monster damage (or lessining the damage your monsters take with potions and extra AC) will increase the value of their spells again because they will not be at full capacity.
2) Ambush Healers Midfight
This actually works pretty well. Take your encounter, and remove a few monsters from it, and have them jump the healer in the 2nd round of combat. I actually usually keep a side bar of xp reserved for a few monsters just for this. That way I can pull in the monster in a believable way. Oozes from the ceiling, Ghosts from behind, etc. Even a swarm of bats can be effective. 5e combats are difficult on the players when you tie down people in combat who would prefer to not be tied down. Whisps are a great template for this by the way. Drop 4-6 of those around the players when they weren’t expecting it and they will have a hard time coping with it. Most of them will attack the healers and pressure them. You want to drop them to 0. This won’t work by itself, because if at least one healing word spell is still available, the entire group will just get back up next turn.
3) Environmental Damage
I hesitate to put this on here because of the difficulty in balancing it. I usually only use these on serious fights after the party has rested as a way of getting some catch up while increasing dramatic tension. You always want to have a way for them to turn the effect off by the way even if it is just a guarded switch. The bard will spend his time trying to deal with that. If the combat is proving to be far too easy, kill that bard with method #2 and ravage his body with a death save or two. That will force a reaction and let you regain tension in the combat.
4) Silence and Counterspell
A silence in combination with #2 is extremely potent. Would I counterspell a level 1 spell? Absolutely, if I’m looking at having 3 casters next turn vs 1 I’ll counterspell it every time.
5) Force Healing Spells Early
The idea here is to explode damage onto a few people early in the combat to weaken everyone. Then you can drop 1-2 players a turn easily. It lets you get ahead of the action economy curve. That puts strain on their healing output because you are also dealing damage at the front liners (so to speak). I have started running wizard NPCs with apprentices sort of like the Sith. For starters, caster enemies die in 2 rounds regardless. So they absolutely need to shoot their most powerful spells all the time. Having 2 wizards lets you 1) win the counterspell war and 2) let the players receive cone of cold + fireball in one round of combat. My apprentice is usually invisible or hiding safely too. This will put the party in really tough spots, so be careful how you use this. That is a ton of XP too, so your encounter will probably be a little “glass cannon”. You can also do this with a single mage and something like water elementals (who will engulf the weak players) or some beefed up gladiators. Also, if your encounter has non-humanoids, make them “go for the throat” so to speak, and continue to attack downed players. This forces healers to engage that situation or deal with a death letting you wail on the barbarians and fighters more.
In the end, the players are going to win. It’s not a GM vs the players game after all! The goal is for combat to be desperate, gritty, and close. Players who go thru the game without ever seeing someone die (or dieing themselves) are fundamentally playing a different game. And techniques like this will make them adapt their plans around the situations more. They’ll budget their hit dice more appropriately, full rest before they’re nearly dead (and vulnerable), and not blindly ignore mooks. And yeah, you’ll have less death yoyo because they’ll realize it isn’t working and change their tactis up, maybe to set up assassinations, thin numbers by devious espionage, etc. People are their most creative when you take something away.
