I love how quickly this segment ended. Brennan gave one bit of pushback that he fully admitted he didn't believe in, and then immediately abandoned the segment entirely to gush about how cool the idea was.
I would say Brennan still brought up the downsides, but those downsides aren't of the "this is bad idea you should never use" sort. There are groups or situations where this wouldn't be a good idea, but you can't honestly discuss those from a position of "this is just bad".
Although, he did end up advancing the idea and making it better. After his first point, I would allow some classes to see the rolls, or at least give them a vague idea of how it's going. It could add an element to allow a character that can feel out life to actually feel the death saves.
@@handgun559I think if you have any sort of healing ability, it can be a high enough dice check to be like sometimes you are able to deduce it in the heat of the battle and sometimes you are unable to sense whether or not they are still conscious. That’s how I would rule it
My DM did this, and when my barbarian went down, she rolled a Failure & a Nat 1. I tried staying quiet in the voice chat, but I couldn't stop myself from saying, "...oh my god." Our healer even tried sending Healing Word my way, but on a perception check, they found out it was long past the time for healing. Incredible moment
i love that you said "she" rolled instead of I rolled, its important to separate yourself from your character, and that is a prime example of doing so.
You attempt to channel your healing magic, but it does not release. It stays within you, because it has no other home. You realize in this moment that you were too late, and that your friend has passed.
Watched a stream of people i knew that went like similar. The player went down, was in the aura of a creature that deals damage on a failed save. He auto fails, gets a nat 1 and immediately dies on the second game with his deeply thought through character. The other players went all out, beat the bbeg of the dungeon in the next turn and someone had revivify prepared. But that was sad to watch first
If you have a Life cleric or someone else who could sense death vs unconscious, they could be asked to roll perception or arcana and the DM could whisper the answer on a success. So tension still stays in RP, but keeps a sense of agency in the character.
@@DSchultz95 to be perfectly honest, I forgot medicine checks were a skill. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to play okay?! 😭 (Totally joking, but I miss playing in a campaign. I’ve done a few oneshots but I want character growth and RP)
@@haydentrumper7473 so they can choose medicine (how badly are they bleeding out), arcana (or whatever you’d associate with connecting to spirits and ghosts who may be crossing over, someone tell me what skill you’d associate with it), or perception (do they notice them not moving at all). Then the details you can provide will clue them into their status. So for example, on two death save fails it could be… Success on Medicine: you see their wounds are severe, their complexion is becoming duller… Success on “Spirit”: you can sense the tether to your friend’s spirit is stretching and fraying… Success on Perception: you notice the ground around them is getting darker and wetter by the second…
When I played with this mechanic, it was very impactful the first time. Super high tension, really felt like the PCs were in peril. Over time though, because each death save was treated the same, it became a reflex of "PC goes down, secret roll, immediately revive them." Maybe it's because I was a grave cleric haha
@edamommy that's the intended purpose though. Your ally is important to your character, so why would the risk the unknown. I can understand how it might become a mechanical choice, but the theme is the important aspect
Death saves in general a are totally bogus mechanic. Totally sucks all the meaning out of character death by taking player agency away for the last several turns before they die. Want to make the sacrifice play? Nope, it's totally impossible with death saves. Want to give a final speech before you die? Nope, it's totally impossible with death saves. Sure, this homebrew makes death saves more intense, but they are a fundamentally flawed mechanic to begin with. What they need is to be replaced, not fixed.
I did this for the climactic battle when I ran Curse of Strahd. The Ranger went down and I had him roll secretly. He got a 1 and died while the fight was still happening. We didn't tell anyone until it was over and the elation of having beaten Strahd gave way to the sudden realisation of the loss they had suffered. It was climactic and amazing and I'll do it this way from now on.
Just a pointer for anyone looking to incorporate this in their games: Remember to keep rolling a d20 on your turn, even if you're already fully dead or stabilized, until someone heals you or rolls high enough on a medicine check to stabilize you.
@@theendofit I don't know that it's necessarily supposed to be especially fun for the person rolling. It builds suspense and raises the stakes for everyone else at the table.
@@theendofitit would for me. I know it adds to my party members' investment in the game. And when they're invested, I'm invested. But maybe that's because I'm usually a DM so I know character death is a climactic of the game.
@Sturmjager except this removes the climactic part of the death. They get to the end of the fight and its "oh yah i died 4 turns ago by the way" Its far mor climatic to be seeing that struggle to have players trying to reach you and possibly failing and knowing in that moment you died. In a movie they even pause the action often to have a moment to sit with a dying character its so important they dont just go "oh yah durring that last action sceene he died"
Brennan actually almost hits a second point to support the secret roll, which is having your players just roll a perception check to see where the downed character is at.
Counterargument: One of the hardest parts as a DM when one of my players is knocked out of combat is the realization that they're basically just sitting out of the game for next 30 minutes to an hour. Ironically, one of the best counters to this is a knack I picked up from Brennan during Fantasy High, when he gave players a description of their death saving throws-instead of just saying "You pass/fail your saving throw," you can give them a moment to roleplay as their character feels death coming upon them, seeing glimpses into the afterlife (whatever that may be for their character), and getting the sense that the stakes here are very real. As soon as I introduced this into my games, I perceived considerably fewer glazed over eyes and checked out expressions from players that had been knocked out of combat; even if they still don't really get to *do* anything beyond some dying mumbles or describing their character's thoughts, it still keeps them engaged in the game, and invested in wanting to see what happens. Counterargument to my counterargument, it'd also be really fun to mix these two strategies, and basically force the rest of the party to play mental gymnastics to decide if I'm describing a successful or failed death saving throw.
yeah, i think that makes sense, as someone close and focusing on the body would have the insight that a barbarian across the room dual wielding axes wouldn't have in the same moment.
It's a great idea. Here's my version of it: Condition Check You can assess a creature's condition and determine how close they are to dying. As a Bonus Action, make a Wisdom/Intelligence (Medicine) Check on a Dying creature you can see. The DC equals the distance between the two of you. If you succeed, you learn how many Death Save Failures they have (and possibly Successes, at the DM's discretion). This makes commonly unused Skills like Medicine more useful, which is a good thing. I also allow Intelligence as an option for this, because it makes sense (IRL Doctors are very INT-based), and variant abilities for Skill Checks are cool IMO.
@@Slexoss I would make the DC 2xdistance since it gets significantly harder to see if a wound is deadly or not if you're not directly next to someone but I like this idea
i really like this idea as well. but also brennan somehow came up with a great counterpoint as well. so i think some kind of compromise can be made. in a typical situation, only the DM and the dying know if they fail or succeed their death saves, but also anyone who should, either canonically or through some acquired homebrewed passive skill or trait, also get to join in on being able to also see the dying roll the death saves alongside the DM. That would honestly be a cool addition to d20's future campaigns as well, in my opinion.
that compromise would also give a little more agency to healer focused clerics. make it a component of deathwatch, since that lets you detect a variety of life conditions.
When I read the title and saw the actual argument, I feel like it was already compromised. I was imagining a Gary gygax style where the DM rolls the death saving throws behind the DM screen and doesn't tell the dying player what it is 😂🤣 I feel like Brendan would have had a much better time arguing against that
You could allow maybe party members to make Perception or medicine checks from a distance to see how "bad" the wound is, or whether the ally is shifting a bit on the ground slowly coming to consciousness.
@@sebcw1204 I like that it would make medicine very useful skill to have on a healer, even if they have good healing magic. Or having if your party has a player with powerful healing, still rewards you for taking medicine. That guy can give back 20hp in a round, but you are the one who can make sure people don't die.
I watched another videos that mentioned this concept and they used LOTR Fellowship film as an example, when frodo is stabbed by the troll, and how everyone rushed to save him. And that's exactly how I imagine someone going down should feel like.
Many in comments are saying that only the DM knowing the roll is even better, because players can't read it off their friend's face/what they might choose to communicate; unfortunately DM-only causes a huge loss of agency because like others have said being told "your character died" is just insanely anti-climatic and emotionally empty. It causes a loss of faith in the DM, and can't help but cause you to wonder whether everything was being truly left to random roll. A DM could take photos of the rolls as proof to dispel that last bit, but if you think about the emotions surrounding a player death, how is a DM "providing proof" via swiping through a few photos going to make that experience more powerful? It isn't going to, it's just going to "gamify" the story and that lost sense of agency will still be there.
I think this is even worse for death saves, because while your down you aren't doing anything. The tension of rolling the death save does a lot to help that lack of action. For me personally, knowing I had this secret knowledge would keep me more invested in the game.
Legit, it's garbage and controlling. When I hear people push the idea that far I just think "Why not roll everything for your players? Them knowing that the monsters AC is 17 because they hit on a 17 and missed on a 16 is too much meta knowledge, roll everything for them, take their dice, they can only speak in character and tell me what they'd like to do." XD
i like the idea of rolling behind the screen and then telling the character what they're at (2-1, 1-0, etc) but NOT telling them which is which. still tense and emotional since a player would be aware that something is about to happen but not fully knowing WHAT that thing is, whether they are on death's door or almost stable. definitely needs thought though!
Dice rolls are entirely random. If you as the player arent allowed to tell people what the roll was, then unless people are cheating you have no more agency if you know the number or not. Instead, not having the number makes the tension of your death saves just as real for you as for everyone else. And if you're in a position where you don't trust your DM to be honest about it, then that should be just as true when they roll any other secret check. If the DM wants you to die and is willing to lie to do it, they can make it happen in any number of ways. You either trust your DM or you don't.
@@torifort717 This is absolutely nonsensical. The tension comes from the randomness of the mechanic, from not knowing until you roll what the outcome will be. Taking away the later part of that and just making a player sit there to hear in a few turns a binary "you died" or "you're stable" is the opposite of tense, it's deflating and anti climactic. Agency IS lost because all players can do is participate in the random mechanics of the game, taking that away from them is a removal of agency. I'd rather trust my players to role play and participate in the world with the mechanics to make the story enjoyable and epic than take information and actions away from them because they should trust me, the former is much more conducive to good storytelling and ttrpg play.
I think the only real argument against this is that it makes an already stressful moment more stressful. The same reason why its so cool for some tables is the reason why other tables won't like it. My group would probably be ecstatic about introducing this rule, but I know there has to be a group that won't like it
true - i think _most_ groups would like this, though. I think rules that align the feelings of the character with the feelings of the player _typically_ produce a more gratifying experience, even if that experience is also a sad one. but nothing is universal.
It probably runs with how your table treats death. This would fit "anyone can die anytime" players but people playing more of an action film adventure want the threat of death to be a narrative beat rather than a hard shot from the dark. Closed rolls could rob them of their control over the game and losing a PC to that can ruin the game for them. But everyone's different!
The thing with death saves is... they're three. So that balance behind mistery and revelation is lost, as it is slowly built. But with this homebrew, for the players is as if it was just one roll, and the dice just keeps rolling on the table before letting you know what happened. The tension behind the uncertainty the players face when they have no clue if their friend is about to die is magnificent.
Immediately implementing this house rule. Nothing takes me out of the game like a character choosing to ignore their dying friend because the player has out of game knowledge that the death saves are going well.
One of my DMs had this rule in their Curse of Strahd game. Death saves were not only rolled blindly by the player so even they didn't know what they rolled (we played online in Foundry) but Death Saves rolled over until a long rest. These Death Save changes didn't cause more character deaths, it only caused one and it became one of the most impactful moments in the entire campaign for our healer when she couldn't keep the Paladin alive after he went down in a fight several times. It's a great rule that sounds scary at first but can add tension to what is usually just another strategic point in combat of "we know he can still fail three we can leave him on the ground for a while if we have to".
Word of caution: my DM has this rule, but a little different. Instead, he rolls it privately behind the screen and not even the player knows the outcome. When implemented in this way, it becomes far too easy for the players to disassociate and the rolling of the save suddenly becomes a nothing thing. Instead of ratcheting up the tension, it completely sucks all tension out because the players are barely even aware it's happening.
could mean as well that the dm has far too much control in that instance to decide the fate of the player, because he could simply lie. You'd really have to trust your DM to not fudge the dice, and while I do know in D&D if need be it's even encouraged to fudge some numbers, the idea that for one of the most important roles of a campaign you just have to trust the DM's word, feels not only scary but unsatisfying as the potential dead player and rest of the party will feel foul play.
I’m pro-private roll, anti-DM roll, honestly. I feel like it takes agency away from the player, and also accountability in a sense? Like I’m not saying it’s a healthy reaction, but it would be a natural reaction to be upset or even a little resentful if *someone else* (effectively) made your character die. Yeah, the rolls are random regardless, but I’d feel weird about someone else telling me that my own character is dead. And this is even if I fully love and trust my DM.
I've been doing that DM rolls thing for like 3+ years as a dm in my current campaign and it always add a fantastic amount of tension. Not sure if it's just your group or if my group is special or something. Never been an issue and we have done it both ways before and it hasn't really been different. (I have also been in a few games like this from the player perspective and also enjoyed it.)
My players asked me to roll their death saves and told me to not tell them the result unless they died. I was like "are you sure?" and that's what they wanted. I rolled 3 nat 1's in a row killing two of them XD Now as a player in a new campaign (same group) someone is tracking nat 1's and nat 20's. I have over double the amount of nat 1's than 20's. I was like "THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T ASK ME TO ROLL FOR YOU GUYS" hahahaha I do think that players should roll their own dice. Your fate should be yours to roll for. The DM rolling should only be done if the player asks for it, but even then I'd caution them against it. Nat 1's are brutal and plentiful in these moments XD
My group's DM has been using this rule for death saves for the whole time I've played with them (for roughly 2 years now) and it really does bring a lot of suspense to the table. Every single time someone goes down, we always immediately scramble to get them back on their feet as soon as possible, simply because our whole table is under the effects of some kind of evil curse that makes us always roll nat 1s when they'd be most devastating. (for anyone unfamiliar, RAW a nat 1 fails 2 death saves instead of just one) The fact that a downed character can be so close to dying so quickly, has a profound impact on how we as players react to a party member going down, and as a result it significantly changes how we as players respond in those situations (in my opinion, for the better).
A House rule I use as DM of my group is: All healing abilities in the game are doubled. When reduced to 0 HP you gain a point of exhaustion. These clear as normal from long rests. The idea is to make healing feel more effective at keeping people up rather than to save them once already down. Also makes being reduced to 0 more impactful. Getting reduced to 0 then getting the old 1 hp restore to get up and back in the fight multipole times per encounter becomes very costly as your character is reduced in ability and scaled by the amount of times you were knocked down until you can die from exhaustion. Basically your body gives out from the amounts of trauma you experienced. 1 year running this rule and we love it. Makes healer feel like a viable play style.
i adopted it. it _works._ had a player death in a run of Light of Xaryxis, only like four sessions in so not a lot of time to really fall in love with the character. in fact, the party had just had a fight amongst themselves the session before, and tensions were high if anything. there were genuine tears at the table over a character no one even liked that much from how hard the moment hit. i should note, as well - i took the rule even a little further. not even the player knew the result. DM only roll, no information until they're up or they're dead.
we have a thing like this, there are only two classes in our campaigns that can tell. The opposite ends of the spectrum, a class focused on life and a class focused on total and absolute darkness. If you aren't either of those, then you don't know until combat is over. We do allow RP on the roll if it's 1-2 or 19-20.
My group has been doing the private death save thing since we've begun playing together. It's been there with us since i was introduced to 5e, and honestly it just feels right. It adds much more tension and helps avoid metagame.
I heard of another homebrew to a similar vein of drama from another youtuber ( Exp to level 3 ). While making death saves the player brings out something their character regrets ( past or future ) bringing out some of their backstory and or giving themselves a bonus to their next death save. giving them a reason to stay at the table and think about things / stay invested.
My best argument againts secret death saving throws... is just Hitchcock. And the build up of tension. Every roll being a tense moment and while a success might give that rush of relief, of being safe... each failure makes the following roll even more stressful. I mean, hell, even if the player rolls above 10... if the rest of their party don't use their turns to try to save them THAT IS A GAMBLE AND THEY KNOW IT. Like when two of my players were down, with two failures both, and the third player had to chose, cause they KNEW the next roll could be the last, whom they would manage to save first (and yes, one of the players actually died on their next roll).
I use this rule since I started DM'ing and I love it. As part of this rule, when a player does a medicine check to stabilize a player, even if they fail, they learn the amount of successes and failures the dying player has. This way, even a player who would not attempt a medicine check (because of a low ability modifier or not having proficiency) has some incentive to do so.
Another bit for death saves I always warn players in session 0: This is a world where magical healing exists, and it is common knowledge that such exists. Don't expect intelligent enemies to let you bleed out slowly waiting for a cleric, they will coup de grace when given the opportunity.
This one definitely depends on system, and I can say that it doesn't work in 5e. Rolls to-hit get advantage and i think you lose either your armor AC bonus or your Dex, but even without that, a hit is an automatic crit. I had it happen to me once while playing a tank, and it was just an issue of "baddie rolled well and the healer couldn't get to me". I roll my one save, and fail it. That's fine, there's still a chance that I might get out of this, until the DM hits me with that coup de grace and now I'm just dead. No chance for recovery, no tension of hoping I might manage to pull out some good rolls and live by the skin of my teeth, just "fuck you, sit out the next hour or so of this combat encounter" (we were too low level for anyone to have a way to revive me mid-fight). Maybe it's more realistic, maybe it's a good chance for there to be some roleplay about what a bastard the big baddie is, etc etc, but the dead player doesn't get to be a part of that. They got shitstomped without any control and the combat has to resolve before anything can happen, so they just get to sit there like a player who went bankrupt in Monopoly.
Another way to get your players to treat death saves with a sense of urgency is to include an enemy that is a little extra bloodthirsty who continues to attack them while they are unconscious. After you do this once they will snap to attention immediately any time someone goes down.
This is a good option for ghouls, vampires, and other voracious creatures especially. Really sells their motivations to have them directly feed on the dying!
I did this for a little bit during my current campaign and the tension was real. Bringing that PC back up became priority #1 for the party. The only reason I stopped doing it was in favor of using two other house rules which the players like a lot more.
This is incredibly validating for me, back when I was making a ruleset for my group a year or so back, hidden death saves was one of my favorite ones I came up with for that ruleset. We haven't used it in my friend's campaign yet since despite being pummelled a lot we hardly go down, however I look forward to the day when hidden death saves comes into play. And after feedback from my group, I also made it so if you are within 15 feet of a dying creature and have proficiency in Medicine, you know how many successes and/or fails they have. I also agree with the revealed DC of public rolls for important moments or moments with quite clear consequences, because I'm more an advocate for "I need this kind of check" rather than "I need this kind of check and the DC is this" because I'm all for the momentary mystery of success or failure, however for moments where the stakes are high whether for good or bad? The emphasis of the known DC just adds to that roll, players and DM alike can have that slow heartbeat moment as the die is cast and the total revealed.
I've been using this rule for 3 campaigns now and it's totally changed the drama of a downned ally. The tension is visible and every one is worried cause you never know
Ooooh, we do this in our Pathfinder campaign (secret saves). It adds SO much tension, because it keeps that instinctual metagame of “oh, they have so many successes, they’re fine” from being a thing. We have NO idea what’s happening, so EVERYONE is now focused on saving that party member and it makes for AMAZING development / team building RP. Main difference for us is even WE don’t know what the roll is. It’s an entirely hidden DM roll, so we don’t know if we’re alive or dead even when combat ends or someone tries to heal us. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.
I sincerely thought that’s how death saves were supposed to be rolled always! My gm has done this since we started our campaign together over a year ago, and since we play online it makes it easier to do private rolls. Adds a lot of good stress for the whole party to what by all means should be an extremely dire situation.
Super respect the framing of this home rule being 1) between the DM and the player and 2) up to the player to opt into. I've almost exclusively seen this idea pushed as the DM rolls secret death saves for the players and I could not disagree with that idea more and believe that is bad DM practice, but keeping the downed players agency in that VERY important moment that could result in death is paramount imo. I personally don't even feel that this version of the rule adds that much to how I play so I can fulfill Brennans role. I've never had any moment where a downed player resulted in other players going "Oh well they'll be fine for a turn or two." (and I'll argue if I witness a player doing that, I'd judge them as not a very good role player or perhaps I've failed at engrossing them into this world and/or forming a connection with these characters.) It's always been tense, and I feel the whole table knowing a pass or a fail serves to add to the tension more than making the rolls a mystery would. If I want to combat that tension waning, I'd implement the optional rule that raises a success on death save to 15, THAT will raise tension.
I think there are pros and cons to both the normal rule and this version of a private roll. Not everyone who plays ttrpg's are "good" role players in that... for some people it is very difficult to divorce meta knowledge from character knowledge and at least anectodotally, combat seems to be where that happens the most... well... other than character creation/leveling right? tons of meta gaming happens there for lots of players where they pick choices based solely on how powerful it will make the character rather than making purely narrative choices. As with everything... it'll depend on the folks round the table what will better serve fun. I don't know that it would change my players behavior much either direction to be honest, but narratively I like that the downed character can feel themselves dying or not... but has no way to communicate that to the party. I'm also not sure a player deciding to wait a turn or two would make them a bad role player right? it would depend on the character. I could easily see a raging barbarian being too caught up in the remaining fight to stop and tend to their fallen comrade, or a selfish character looking out for themselves first, now maybe you want them to have the explicit knowledge so they can counter what the character would do when its too risky... but it could also be fun to have their flaws have a harder time navigating consequences.
@@notednuance You seem to missunderstand my point, deciding not to jump to your downed allies aid for a role play reason is of course valid. Hence why my example is if players do it solely for mechanical "oh odds are they'll be fine for two turns" which is not fair to the story being told, or that poor fellow player who can do nothing for those two turns. So in that specific example, which is the one that people arguing for this home rule lean on as a crutch, my point is that is a fault that falls on the players attitude, not the mechanics.
Downed players don't have any agency. They can't choose to do (or not do) anything. Rolling the dice is just busywork. Arguably, the player knowing their own proximity to death raises their own level of tension, but tension requires uncertainty. If the other players know how long they have they can just factor it into their decision making and press on. The best way to handle players being "out" while their characters are incapacitated is handing them control of a summon, hireling, or NPC. Even a monster, if the group's dynamic allows for it. A DM I once knew did this, making dead players control monsters and giving a (small) bounty of XP for achieving the enemy's combat goals. 100XP for hitting a player with a special attack, for instance. This XP would be given to their new character. On a related note, increasing the death save DC makes things less tense and more bleak. The level of uncertainty goes way down, because you can bet more solidly on the outcome of saves. All that remains is the knowledge that allies have to be saved more quickly (or abandoned when they go down unless rescue is right at hand). That's a very bleak, uncaring world for adventurers to live in, which may or may not be the intended feel of the game.
@@mrvenom88 Downed players do have agency, we're telling stories here, that player specifically is telling that characters story. A near death experience is a very impactful part of that story. Since this is storytelling giving the player the choice to share the results of their death saves is the storytelling agency that you are stripping if you just tell that player "you're down you can't do anything anyway, here, take control of something you probably don't care about." Tension does not require uncertainty, if you don't know something you just don't know, for you to feel tense about something about to go wrong you have to be aware that it's going wrong and how wrong it could go. Nothing could be more tense than rolling a one on a death save and KNOWING that you rolled a one and it means you are closer to death. Stripping information from your players simply creates panic, not tension. The nonsense excuses are all the same and apparently that hasn't changed in over a year.
@@This_Justin998 Players do not have a choice to share their death saves, either. There's no reason for them to withhold that information (hiding the info is tactically suboptimal), for most tables there's no way for the player to choose *not* to share it (open rolls) and if the rules are such that they cannot share the info then they simply can't. That decision is never in the player's hands, unless they do something outside the remit of the conversation (quit the game, cheat, shoot the GM, set up a side game of Parcheesi, etc.). Also, if your player only cares about their own character you need to fire them on those grounds, death saves be damned. Tension does require uncertainty, and in a twist of fate uncertainty does require some knowledge. I am not uncertain about the presence of a killer whale in my kitchen: there's no reason for me to suspect it's there, and being eaten by it would be a surprise if it happened. If I am in a game of D&D, downed and making death saves I am uncertain about what those death saves will result in, and what actions will be taken by others to save (or kill) me. However I KNOW that death is on the cards, that saves are being made, etc. That's tension, because there is uncertainty, both knowledge and gaps in that knowledge. Hitchcock's example of tension requires the knowledge of the bomb under a table and uncertainty around whether two characters will discover it, react to it, leave in time to evade it, and so on. Knowing you are now on your final death save raises the stakes, for sure, but it doesn't address tension in terms of uncertainty. Indeed, if you are on your last save and the DC is now 15 instead often, you are arguably under less tension because you are 75% likely to die, not 50%. Less gap in your knowledge.
My group have been having the DM roll death saves in secret for a long time now. Makes everything so much more intense and removes the unavoidable meta-game in-combat decision making!
In my games, mechanic knowledge isn't considered metagaming. The same way you know how many HP the barbarian has because you've seen him take hits like that in the past like they were nothing, he's fine. Death saves, you can see the body writhing, desperately putting pressure on the stab wound with a 13 already rolled.... But so can the monster, who, on it's next turn might want to ENSURE that their prey STAYS down.
This came up as a youtube short for me the other day, which got me into checking out the rest of the channel and subscribing. I didn't realize the whole video hadn't come out yet, I thought I just couldn't find it. What a great idea.
There is about a 5% (4.75%) chance that a dying character is dead after 2 rolls. There is about a 19% (19.15%) chance that a dying character is dead after 3 rolls. Are you willing to take those odds? (about 14% (14.4%) chance of death after *exactly* 3 rolls, the chance of them being dead after 3 rolls is about 19%)
Something I personally do to add on to this rule is have "flashbacks" for them. Sort of a life flashing before their eyes moment. I use the alternative where I as the DM roll behind the screen so doing this allows me to keep the downed character's player engaged while the saves are happening since they aren't rolling them. Basically I have a different type of flashback for a success or a failure. Failures are flashbacks to events in their backstory before meeting the party (nothing that would spoil any secrets the party doesn't know about of course), while successes are flashbacks to moments in the campaign that they've shared with the party. This is obviously a bit harder to pull off early on when the party hasn't really made those connections yet, but I tend to try not to throw anything that'll down characters at them until they've had enough of an adventure to call back memories from. If someone catches on and knows based on my descriptions whether it was a success or a fail, then more power to them.
In added to my campaign and it’s such a game changer. Especially for two characters who have history with each other and one of the goes down. It really helps people stay in character in those intense encounters.
My group plays with this, and there has been moments when I really thought my friends characters are DEAD dead. It really makes you care a lot more when a character is downed!
This is the way that we've been rolling death saves in our campaign and it's great! Not only does it let the DM amp up the tension, but so can the player. It is definitely the way to go.
honestly love this idea bc tension gets so heightened. imagine ur party member dies but nobody knows, and when someone goes to heal you, ur dm can be like ur spell doesn’t work bc they r dead. saves and fails all a secret, nobody knows if ur member is alive or dead. Makes it so that the cleric or ppl with healing magic r way more tense and makes it so much more urgent. yipee
I've played with the rule before, and after your buddy having been down for 4 turns (we really couldn't help earlier) it's a really interesting feeling knowing that you might be "wasting" your potion or spell on a dead person. It is really dramatic though to administer your healing potion and then look to the DM/ Player to see if it worked.
The first time I played DnD the DM had this rule and now I always use it when I DM. The players love it - makes for a lot more interesting tension and strategic decisions when the party is in desperation mode. I find it is also very fun for the player who is down because they have secret information and have to watch in awe or horror as the rest of the party tries to figure out what to do.
I'm going to straddle the line: If I'm making death saves, I as the player in control of that character want to know and be informed of the things unfolding involving my character that my character will be aware of...but I totally get hiding that information from the rest of the players at the table, or using that information to contribute to the character's reactions.
I stopped my group from rolling death saves out in the open over a year ago, and my god does it bring some beautiful type of tension to the table. Everyone is now scrambling to decide between saving their friend or dooming them eternally.
I watched a campaign ran by CrashGem and in that campaign, the party also rolled for things like insight and perception blindly through the VTT and it definitely change table dynamics a lot!
My homebrew I want to try is every time you start death saves and then get brought back up through healing, it adds a level of exhaustion. So you might not see huge effects the first or second time you get back up, but it prevents players from constantly playing whackamole where your healer brings you up with healing word on their bonus action every turn, and there's actually incentive to heal players while they're still up and make sure they don't reach 0 HP. Or maybe you get one 'freebie' but the second time you die and get back up, it adds levels of exhaustion each time after that
The problem is that because of action economy, it will always be better to do damage even with those rules in place. Essentially you are just making the game that much harder with limited downs but not really adding any strategy or depth.
There is a similar rule to this in a scifi ttrpg called Mothership. The death save are also concealed, but instead of making the roll between the player and the DM, they are rolled under a cup, so nobody knows if the character is alive or dead until someone checks on the ic. Then they reveal the dice result to see if they survived.
We have hidden rolls in our campaign. It's even more stressful when resurrection magic is virtually unknown in the world we play in. It's definitely made us more aware of when our team members go down
Have the best of both worlds! Roll death saves publicly and record the rolls. Then once they make it to 3 rolls that would be either success of a failure, have the character roll a final die to decide if success was 10 or higher or 10 or lower. Let them decide their own fate!
I’ve ran this in a 2 year long campaign and it worked AMAZING. Someone going down was *always* a big deal and my players LOVED it. It made those scenes TENSE. Would HIGHLY recommend.
I use this in my game and it is amazing. it's amazing to see my players stressing out to see if their party character will be alive next turn and it makes them think before they act. it makes a good story.
I did secret death saves for the first time recently. The STRESS my players exhibited and the urgency with which they treated the situation was MWAH, chef's kiss all round
im really surprised Brennan hadn't heard that rule, from what i can gathered this is one of the most like homebrew rules, i dont think ive actually encountered anyone who hates it lol
My DM wont use it because he worries about people who it would cause undo stress on. Its worth noteing that his daughter is on the spectrum so that seems like a resonable reason not to use it. That being said I love hidden death saves. Not just from the rest of the party but from the player themselvs..so they dont even know if their PC is about to die or not.
i love this idea and the next time i get into a game, im definitely going to suggest it to the playgroup. but i think there is still something to be said about public rolls will have a higher effect when you see your friend rolling their saves and they fail their rolls. there is the whole shock and surprise when they roll a nat 1 on their first save and now suddenly everyone panics because if no one is able to do something about it on their next turn, their is a very real chance that the person dies. its like trading some of the tension from when you see them fail, to when they succeed. i think its a great fun idea but there is a solid argument for why someone might prefer to roll publicly. your trading the highest high for a better low/average.
Following up with this homebrew, after testing it and working with my players, we've come up with some additions to this homebrew. So, the mechanic is largely the same, but my table is happy with only having me (DM) know the results only, not even the player who rolled the save is allowed to know. To balance this, I've included a special action that players can perform during their turns. I've allowed them to use their action or bonus action to perform a DC 13 medicine check on the downed member to check their vitals. I allow either action or bonus action not only as a balance aspect since I'm the only one who would know, but it gives the player less hesitation to plan their action economy with this, rather than having to force an action or a bonus action only if they had something else they wanted to do during their turn. We've seen plenty of moments where bonus actions go unused, or the rare instance where the player can't use their action due to their options being out of reach, but they can do something as a bonus action. When a player checks the vitals and passes the DC, I will secretly tell them where the downed player is in death saves. My players like to roleplay so they will utilize this in roleplaying with one another. They don't really say the results directly, but they'll say things like "I think she might be coming too" "He's still warm and breathing!" or "His pulse is weak!" "Her breathing is shallow!!" This allows players to make informed decisions still as if they were aware of the death saves like normal, while still being immersed in the game. When the player comes back to life by successful saves or healing, I will secretly inform the player that was downed what their rolls were, giving them something they can roleplay with when they get up. Like if they were close to death and were healed, they could play like "I saw the light" "I am.. cold" or if they were close to success or did succeed they would do stuff like "N-No I'm fine! Focus on the fight!" or "J-Just a flesh wound!" This method of play is so much fun for the table, because it helps build a layer of immersion and gives the players more opportunities to roleplay and play into the power fantasy when they succeed, or play into some drama when they are close to death.
in Mothership ttrpg, one death save is rolled using a cup and you leave it under the cup. the roll is kept under the cup and no one gets to look until combat is over and it's safe for the surviving characters can check for a pulse. I love it, it also encourages players to actually value healing in combat
If the player also wants that suspense, I think another way to adjust this which is nice is to have a closed box. Whenever a death save is rolled for that character, they throw a dice into the box. The player doesn't know what the result is, same as the table doesn't. Heck, the DM doesn't know. Only when the player is healed do they get up... or they don't. In the case of many dice thrown and skipping us tracking the order by colors or whatever, if there are more successes than failures, they're stable. If there's more failures and 3+, they're dead. Now, this loses the ability to see if a nat 20 was rolled so that benefit can be traded off for another. Say, if the box opens up and there's a nat 20 in there, the player gets to take a turn immediately as they spring up into action after clawing back from the clutches of death. In the event that a player uses a medicine check to try to stabilize the downed character, maybe that player also gets to look in the box. I feel like this is a rare case where it can feel good that a player knows something that the DM doesn't.
Brennan's DM voice coming in was a little stunning to me because I wasn't expecting it lol - he really does just drop like 2 octaves for serious moments huh
8:29 "what I love about that, too is there are certain mechanics that aid roleplaying by being revealed, and there are certain mechanics that aid roleplaying by being concealed." Give that man all the awards!
I have been using this homebrew rule for years. What I add is that on the player's turn while they are down - I ask the player what is passing through their minds in their last moments. The player typically talk about the funny moments of the campaign they expereinced or very high emotionial points. For example, my player who is a Vengence Paladin talked about how they remember the death of their lover at the hand of the BBEG that they were fighting.
One idea I had a while back - that I haven't been able to test yet - is rolling death saves openly, but having the DC shift slightly with a behind-the-screen roll. DC would be 8+1d4. The chances of living are only negligibly lower, and having 8 be the base isn't hard to remember since it's the same as all caster DCs. The aim is to keep some of the combat awareness that comes with open rolls, while also adding a sprinkle of the tension from behind the screen. Most of the time it's also just as simple as normal death saves. The DC can range from 9 to 12, so anything 8 or below is definitely a fail and anything 13 or above is definitely a success. The DM would only need to actually roll the d4 about 1/5 of the time.
I'm so, so, sooooo glad Brennan didn't fight this argument like he had to win it. I love to hear the pros and cons discussed without artificially making it into some campy game. Great show!
This has been on reddit and in the D&D community for at least 5 years and I've been using it since then. I think just like Brennan, everyone is on board for it.
I have had a couple DMs implement this rule, and I actually don't like, partially for the reason Brennan stated. The bigger thing, though, is that while in concept, it should create tension, in practice it hasn't (for me, at least). It makes the rolls themselves have very little stakes because there is a chance that your friend will wake up with 1 hp or die completely, but the vast majority of the time, the roll happens and there is no immediate result. A death save becomes a null event. Sometimes rolling death saves does increase a feeling of security, but the fear of seeing your party member make a death save while they already have two failures is far and away more drama than I have ever gotten from this rule. Public rolls can also lead to a sense of dramatic irony. For instance, one time two characters were unconscious, one at two failed saves, and my character was at one. I encouraged our conscious party member to heal the person with two failed saves, and then I rolled a natural one and my character died. Lastly, removing players' knowledge makes it impossible to play tactically, which I know was part of the appeal to some people, but having characters run around blind in regards to whether or not their party members are dying makes me as a player feel like I have a bit less agency.
One thing I saw in another video that could be combined with this is a combination of private rolls with the DM and adding a layer of RP. The DMing explaining in a few sentences how the character feels, what they see, or what players near them might observe. This won't flat out tell the other party members if they succeeded or not, but give them a really strong idea with narrative on what they should do next. For example: You roll a fail on your death save, the DM describes how you feel your vision start to blur as you struggle to breath on the ground, or if you succeeded, the DM might describe how you hear the voice of your mother in your ear "this is not your time...get up....". I think it's a cool little layer of added RP that can be introduced to a private death save without flat out telling your party "i'm good, dont worry about my bleeding out on the floor"
My idea is more on the middle-term. As the example of the jump, if the player is on its last death save, reveal the info just before the roll. The impotence and stakes of the roll with pitch high the tension. A nat 1 would kill them suddenly anyway, with no hint as concealed rolls should do. But in the cases the next fail kills, a scene of dread and awareness from the other companions noticing how near their friend is to meet the end, feels like a cool and chills inducing expirience.
Yeah I agree! I haven’t tried the secret death save rule personally, so I might like it. But I feel like death saves are already pretty dramatic RAW? Sometimes the character passes two death saves, so the party doesn’t feel as worried. But sometimes they fail one or two, and that moment is just like maximum tension. I feel like making all death saves secret all the time would make characters going unconscious more dramatic on average, but it might actually be comparatively less dramatic on those situations when a character is one failed death save away from dying and the whole party knows it. Maybe the solution is to keep death saves secret until they’ve failed two.
I've actually been doing this for about a year now. I don't even tell my players when they're dead (though thankfully this has never happened yet). It's super fun, and it prevents the innate metagaming that comes with death saves. My groups actually let me do the rolls as DM so that they don't have to worry about their own luck and stuff.
My dm used to do secret death rolls from the player! It was absolutely terrifying. We also were bad enough to where players died often enough. I think if you get stressed easily (like my new group) don't force this on your players because they will hate it
private roll macros for Roll20 that I use: /gmroll ?{Advantage?|Normal, 1d20|Advantage, 2d20kh1|Disadvantage, 2d20kl1} + ?{Modifier|0} it's not specifically for death saves, you can use it for private skill checks etc
Another addition to this I would love to implement would be to have it be TRULY a hidden roll. Have the other players leave the room or deafen if it's virtual. Then when it is just the DM/GM and PC, you do the roll and if it's low enough, you can explain a specific injury that the PC would then have the choice of concealing for X amount of time and revealing it how or if they see fit or risk passing out randomly if they hide it too long.
after thinking about this and reading a bunch of the debate in the comments i thought of something that maybe preserves the best of both worlds: the player rolls death saves publicly as normal. but when they first hit 0 hp, the dm secretly rolls 1d4+1 (adjusted for your campaign) and that's how many failures or successes they need to either die or stabilize. on the turn where the player is one failure away from death, tell them that right before they roll. this gives the pressure of not knowing how close your friend is to dying, but keeps the suspense of "a 10 or less on this roll and you die," and barely adds any logistical complications it also gives fun room to adjust. like, -1 on the secret dm roll for every time they drop per long rest, or -1 for every multiple of their total hit points into the negative that they go
When I ran dnd 5e, this was an issue I noted right from the start, I was using roll20 at the time, there was a secret roll section where only gm and player could see it, this is how we did death saving throws. I had also homebrewed how going to 0 HP worked so that you simply were not unconscious, I didn't want any mechanics unnecessarily taking my players out of the game, so they were able to talk and were encouraged to roleplay out how dire the injury was or wasn't. I would also at randomly pick NPC's that were felled to also do this to create a really nasty and brutal combat feel. If you shot some goblin in the chest with the longbow, he might end up screaming and writhing on the ground for a couple turns while the combat continues.
I played in a game with this rule for Pathfinder 2e but only the GM saw the role so even the player didn't know. It's an amazing rule and creates lots of tension during combat.
Definitely a big fan of the DM rolling death saves. If you get to the players turn when they're still rolling I'll usually give an ambiguous description of them encountering the afterlife. Or will tell them they're in the process of bleeding out what do they want to do, and give them a pseudo turn where they can't move but might be able to take an action or say something
we just implemented this at our table and i freaking love it! My character rolled below a ten 3 times, used an inspiration roll to reroll the last one and got a ten. our paladin healed me the next turn but i was that close to dying and the party had no idea!
That’s why I like pathfinder 2e - any roll that a character wouldn’t know in-game whether or not they succeeded on isn’t rolled visibly by the player, but by the GM behind a screen, which keeps the implications of whatever they’re told or see less obvious and keeps the feeling centred on what the character themselves would feel.
I have using this rule for about a year as it builds tension at the game and more importantly for me who wants a bit more realism to my games it makes sense. To this end I run with facing indicators when I play online as I rule that the squares behind the characters are the ones that got flanking. If an enemy got tremor sense or blind sight they are immune to flanking. People normally don't have eyes in their back so and it builds team work and makes positioning more important. Some times it's more important that the rogues and barbarian gets advantage. Also it's good for balancing since it does give them advantage if the the bad guys are targeting the squishy casters. Then the two deals massive damage and gives the cleric a chance for a nice awesome inflict wounds with advantage when the bad guy turns around.
![Nat 1's Are Better Than Nat 20's | Adventuring Academy [Brennan Lee Mulligan, Sam Reich]](/img/n.gif)
I love how quickly this segment ended. Brennan gave one bit of pushback that he fully admitted he didn't believe in, and then immediately abandoned the segment entirely to gush about how cool the idea was.
I would say Brennan still brought up the downsides, but those downsides aren't of the "this is bad idea you should never use" sort.
There are groups or situations where this wouldn't be a good idea, but you can't honestly discuss those from a position of "this is just bad".
love your profile picture!
Although, he did end up advancing the idea and making it better. After his first point, I would allow some classes to see the rolls, or at least give them a vague idea of how it's going. It could add an element to allow a character that can feel out life to actually feel the death saves.
@@handgun559I think if you have any sort of healing ability, it can be a high enough dice check to be like sometimes you are able to deduce it in the heat of the battle and sometimes you are unable to sense whether or not they are still conscious. That’s how I would rule it
OMORI PFP SPOTTED
My DM did this, and when my barbarian went down, she rolled a Failure & a Nat 1. I tried staying quiet in the voice chat, but I couldn't stop myself from saying, "...oh my god."
Our healer even tried sending Healing Word my way, but on a perception check, they found out it was long past the time for healing.
Incredible moment
holy shit.. wow. that is incredible I'm speechless
i love that you said "she" rolled instead of I rolled, its important to separate yourself from your character, and that is a prime example of doing so.
This is why I also mute myself when I’m in death saves.
You attempt to channel your healing magic, but it does not release. It stays within you, because it has no other home. You realize in this moment that you were too late, and that your friend has passed.
Watched a stream of people i knew that went like similar. The player went down, was in the aura of a creature that deals damage on a failed save. He auto fails, gets a nat 1 and immediately dies on the second game with his deeply thought through character.
The other players went all out, beat the bbeg of the dungeon in the next turn and someone had revivify prepared. But that was sad to watch first
If you have a Life cleric or someone else who could sense death vs unconscious, they could be asked to roll perception or arcana and the DM could whisper the answer on a success. So tension still stays in RP, but keeps a sense of agency in the character.
Perception maybe, but arcana check? Are medicine checks just a joke to you?
@@DSchultz95 to be perfectly honest, I forgot medicine checks were a skill. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to play okay?! 😭
(Totally joking, but I miss playing in a campaign. I’ve done a few oneshots but I want character growth and RP)
I always want to play but none of my friends are interested 😅
I suggest broadening it out it someone with proficiency in medicine will know the death save results. Makes medicine a bit more impactful.
@@haydentrumper7473 so they can choose medicine (how badly are they bleeding out), arcana (or whatever you’d associate with connecting to spirits and ghosts who may be crossing over, someone tell me what skill you’d associate with it), or perception (do they notice them not moving at all). Then the details you can provide will clue them into their status. So for example, on two death save fails it could be…
Success on Medicine: you see their wounds are severe, their complexion is becoming duller…
Success on “Spirit”: you can sense the tether to your friend’s spirit is stretching and fraying…
Success on Perception: you notice the ground around them is getting darker and wetter by the second…
Hidden rolls is my favourite death save mechanic
(Suffers in ACOC and NeverAfter)
When I played with this mechanic, it was very impactful the first time. Super high tension, really felt like the PCs were in peril. Over time though, because each death save was treated the same, it became a reflex of "PC goes down, secret roll, immediately revive them." Maybe it's because I was a grave cleric haha
That's literally just Horcruxes, what do you mean?
@edamommy that's the intended purpose though. Your ally is important to your character, so why would the risk the unknown. I can understand how it might become a mechanical choice, but the theme is the important aspect
Death saves in general a are totally bogus mechanic. Totally sucks all the meaning out of character death by taking player agency away for the last several turns before they die. Want to make the sacrifice play? Nope, it's totally impossible with death saves. Want to give a final speech before you die? Nope, it's totally impossible with death saves. Sure, this homebrew makes death saves more intense, but they are a fundamentally flawed mechanic to begin with. What they need is to be replaced, not fixed.
I did this for the climactic battle when I ran Curse of Strahd. The Ranger went down and I had him roll secretly. He got a 1 and died while the fight was still happening. We didn't tell anyone until it was over and the elation of having beaten Strahd gave way to the sudden realisation of the loss they had suffered. It was climactic and amazing and I'll do it this way from now on.
That's so cool!
Just a pointer for anyone looking to incorporate this in their games: Remember to keep rolling a d20 on your turn, even if you're already fully dead or stabilized, until someone heals you or rolls high enough on a medicine check to stabilize you.
Oh yeah, that's a good point. Keep rolling a d20 for five turns, because that's the maximum number of turns you would need to reach a conclusion.
Does that sound fun to you? You being already dead and having to roll for no reason
@@theendofit I don't know that it's necessarily supposed to be especially fun for the person rolling. It builds suspense and raises the stakes for everyone else at the table.
@@theendofitit would for me. I know it adds to my party members' investment in the game. And when they're invested, I'm invested. But maybe that's because I'm usually a DM so I know character death is a climactic of the game.
@Sturmjager except this removes the climactic part of the death. They get to the end of the fight and its "oh yah i died 4 turns ago by the way"
Its far mor climatic to be seeing that struggle to have players trying to reach you and possibly failing and knowing in that moment you died.
In a movie they even pause the action often to have a moment to sit with a dying character its so important they dont just go "oh yah durring that last action sceene he died"
Brennan actually almost hits a second point to support the secret roll, which is having your players just roll a perception check to see where the downed character is at.
Medicine
@Squeekysquid perception is already the best skill in the game and medicine is super niche. I say give it to medicine if you're gonna try the idea.
Counterargument: One of the hardest parts as a DM when one of my players is knocked out of combat is the realization that they're basically just sitting out of the game for next 30 minutes to an hour. Ironically, one of the best counters to this is a knack I picked up from Brennan during Fantasy High, when he gave players a description of their death saving throws-instead of just saying "You pass/fail your saving throw," you can give them a moment to roleplay as their character feels death coming upon them, seeing glimpses into the afterlife (whatever that may be for their character), and getting the sense that the stakes here are very real.
As soon as I introduced this into my games, I perceived considerably fewer glazed over eyes and checked out expressions from players that had been knocked out of combat; even if they still don't really get to *do* anything beyond some dying mumbles or describing their character's thoughts, it still keeps them engaged in the game, and invested in wanting to see what happens.
Counterargument to my counterargument, it'd also be really fun to mix these two strategies, and basically force the rest of the party to play mental gymnastics to decide if I'm describing a successful or failed death saving throw.
One thing I might add is letting someone within 5 ft do a bonus action medicine check to see how close to dying they are.
yeah, i think that makes sense, as someone close and focusing on the body would have the insight that a barbarian across the room dual wielding axes wouldn't have in the same moment.
I like that idea
It's a great idea. Here's my version of it:
Condition Check
You can assess a creature's condition and determine how close they are to dying. As a Bonus Action, make a Wisdom/Intelligence (Medicine) Check on a Dying creature you can see. The DC equals the distance between the two of you. If you succeed, you learn how many Death Save Failures they have (and possibly Successes, at the DM's discretion).
This makes commonly unused Skills like Medicine more useful, which is a good thing. I also allow Intelligence as an option for this, because it makes sense (IRL Doctors are very INT-based), and variant abilities for Skill Checks are cool IMO.
@@Slexoss I would make the DC 2xdistance since it gets significantly harder to see if a wound is deadly or not if you're not directly next to someone but I like this idea
I changed one part I overlooked. The DC is 10 + the distance between both of you, so there's actually a DC when you're up close
It really speaks to Brennan's improvisation skills that he managed to come up with a compelling counterargument to an idea he loves so much
Having someone narrate a short life flashback when they fail a death saving throw, is one of the most genius ideas I've ever heard in my life.
so glad they called this out in the new dmg
i really like this idea as well. but also brennan somehow came up with a great counterpoint as well. so i think some kind of compromise can be made. in a typical situation, only the DM and the dying know if they fail or succeed their death saves, but also anyone who should, either canonically or through some acquired homebrewed passive skill or trait, also get to join in on being able to also see the dying roll the death saves alongside the DM. That would honestly be a cool addition to d20's future campaigns as well, in my opinion.
that compromise would also give a little more agency to healer focused clerics. make it a component of deathwatch, since that lets you detect a variety of life conditions.
When I read the title and saw the actual argument, I feel like it was already compromised. I was imagining a Gary gygax style where the DM rolls the death saving throws behind the DM screen and doesn't tell the dying player what it is 😂🤣 I feel like Brendan would have had a much better time arguing against that
You could allow maybe party members to make Perception or medicine checks from a distance to see how "bad" the wound is, or whether the ally is shifting a bit on the ground slowly coming to consciousness.
Or have them roll a medicine check as a bonus action maybe
@@sebcw1204 I like that it would make medicine very useful skill to have on a healer, even if they have good healing magic.
Or having if your party has a player with powerful healing, still rewards you for taking medicine.
That guy can give back 20hp in a round, but you are the one who can make sure people don't die.
I watched another videos that mentioned this concept and they used LOTR Fellowship film as an example, when frodo is stabbed by the troll, and how everyone rushed to save him. And that's exactly how I imagine someone going down should feel like.
Many in comments are saying that only the DM knowing the roll is even better, because players can't read it off their friend's face/what they might choose to communicate; unfortunately DM-only causes a huge loss of agency because like others have said being told "your character died" is just insanely anti-climatic and emotionally empty. It causes a loss of faith in the DM, and can't help but cause you to wonder whether everything was being truly left to random roll. A DM could take photos of the rolls as proof to dispel that last bit, but if you think about the emotions surrounding a player death, how is a DM "providing proof" via swiping through a few photos going to make that experience more powerful? It isn't going to, it's just going to "gamify" the story and that lost sense of agency will still be there.
I think this is even worse for death saves, because while your down you aren't doing anything. The tension of rolling the death save does a lot to help that lack of action.
For me personally, knowing I had this secret knowledge would keep me more invested in the game.
Legit, it's garbage and controlling. When I hear people push the idea that far I just think "Why not roll everything for your players? Them knowing that the monsters AC is 17 because they hit on a 17 and missed on a 16 is too much meta knowledge, roll everything for them, take their dice, they can only speak in character and tell me what they'd like to do." XD
i like the idea of rolling behind the screen and then telling the character what they're at (2-1, 1-0, etc) but NOT telling them which is which. still tense and emotional since a player would be aware that something is about to happen but not fully knowing WHAT that thing is, whether they are on death's door or almost stable. definitely needs thought though!
Dice rolls are entirely random. If you as the player arent allowed to tell people what the roll was, then unless people are cheating you have no more agency if you know the number or not. Instead, not having the number makes the tension of your death saves just as real for you as for everyone else.
And if you're in a position where you don't trust your DM to be honest about it, then that should be just as true when they roll any other secret check. If the DM wants you to die and is willing to lie to do it, they can make it happen in any number of ways. You either trust your DM or you don't.
@@torifort717 This is absolutely nonsensical. The tension comes from the randomness of the mechanic, from not knowing until you roll what the outcome will be. Taking away the later part of that and just making a player sit there to hear in a few turns a binary "you died" or "you're stable" is the opposite of tense, it's deflating and anti climactic. Agency IS lost because all players can do is participate in the random mechanics of the game, taking that away from them is a removal of agency. I'd rather trust my players to role play and participate in the world with the mechanics to make the story enjoyable and epic than take information and actions away from them because they should trust me, the former is much more conducive to good storytelling and ttrpg play.
I think the only real argument against this is that it makes an already stressful moment more stressful. The same reason why its so cool for some tables is the reason why other tables won't like it. My group would probably be ecstatic about introducing this rule, but I know there has to be a group that won't like it
true - i think _most_ groups would like this, though.
I think rules that align the feelings of the character with the feelings of the player _typically_ produce a more gratifying experience, even if that experience is also a sad one. but nothing is universal.
I dont think it's that stressful tho. That's the problem
I play with a lot of neurodivergent players. This is definitely something that would be inappropriate at some of our games.
It probably runs with how your table treats death. This would fit "anyone can die anytime" players but people playing more of an action film adventure want the threat of death to be a narrative beat rather than a hard shot from the dark. Closed rolls could rob them of their control over the game and losing a PC to that can ruin the game for them. But everyone's different!
I love Brennan's face here. He loves the idea so much just because it might be another way to mess with his players lmao
The thing with death saves is... they're three. So that balance behind mistery and revelation is lost, as it is slowly built. But with this homebrew, for the players is as if it was just one roll, and the dice just keeps rolling on the table before letting you know what happened. The tension behind the uncertainty the players face when they have no clue if their friend is about to die is magnificent.
Immediately implementing this house rule. Nothing takes me out of the game like a character choosing to ignore their dying friend because the player has out of game knowledge that the death saves are going well.
One of my DMs had this rule in their Curse of Strahd game. Death saves were not only rolled blindly by the player so even they didn't know what they rolled (we played online in Foundry) but Death Saves rolled over until a long rest. These Death Save changes didn't cause more character deaths, it only caused one and it became one of the most impactful moments in the entire campaign for our healer when she couldn't keep the Paladin alive after he went down in a fight several times. It's a great rule that sounds scary at first but can add tension to what is usually just another strategic point in combat of "we know he can still fail three we can leave him on the ground for a while if we have to".
I would LOVE to see Brennan run a session of Ten Candles. I think he would do extraordinarily well in that setting and I would PAY to see it XD
Homebrew feat or Cleric ability: You get to see behind the screen for other players' death saving rolls.
Word of caution: my DM has this rule, but a little different. Instead, he rolls it privately behind the screen and not even the player knows the outcome. When implemented in this way, it becomes far too easy for the players to disassociate and the rolling of the save suddenly becomes a nothing thing. Instead of ratcheting up the tension, it completely sucks all tension out because the players are barely even aware it's happening.
could mean as well that the dm has far too much control in that instance to decide the fate of the player, because he could simply lie. You'd really have to trust your DM to not fudge the dice, and while I do know in D&D if need be it's even encouraged to fudge some numbers, the idea that for one of the most important roles of a campaign you just have to trust the DM's word, feels not only scary but unsatisfying as the potential dead player and rest of the party will feel foul play.
I’m pro-private roll, anti-DM roll, honestly. I feel like it takes agency away from the player, and also accountability in a sense? Like I’m not saying it’s a healthy reaction, but it would be a natural reaction to be upset or even a little resentful if *someone else* (effectively) made your character die. Yeah, the rolls are random regardless, but I’d feel weird about someone else telling me that my own character is dead. And this is even if I fully love and trust my DM.
I've been doing that DM rolls thing for like 3+ years as a dm in my current campaign and it always add a fantastic amount of tension. Not sure if it's just your group or if my group is special or something. Never been an issue and we have done it both ways before and it hasn't really been different. (I have also been in a few games like this from the player perspective and also enjoyed it.)
My players asked me to roll their death saves and told me to not tell them the result unless they died. I was like "are you sure?" and that's what they wanted. I rolled 3 nat 1's in a row killing two of them XD Now as a player in a new campaign (same group) someone is tracking nat 1's and nat 20's. I have over double the amount of nat 1's than 20's. I was like "THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T ASK ME TO ROLL FOR YOU GUYS" hahahaha I do think that players should roll their own dice. Your fate should be yours to roll for. The DM rolling should only be done if the player asks for it, but even then I'd caution them against it. Nat 1's are brutal and plentiful in these moments XD
It just feels cheap failing a roll for your character that you didn't roll. No thanks
My group's DM has been using this rule for death saves for the whole time I've played with them (for roughly 2 years now) and it really does bring a lot of suspense to the table.
Every single time someone goes down, we always immediately scramble to get them back on their feet as soon as possible, simply because our whole table is under the effects of some kind of evil curse that makes us always roll nat 1s when they'd be most devastating. (for anyone unfamiliar, RAW a nat 1 fails 2 death saves instead of just one)
The fact that a downed character can be so close to dying so quickly, has a profound impact on how we as players react to a party member going down, and as a result it significantly changes how we as players respond in those situations (in my opinion, for the better).
A House rule I use as DM of my group is:
All healing abilities in the game are doubled. When reduced to 0 HP you gain a point of exhaustion. These clear as normal from long rests.
The idea is to make healing feel more effective at keeping people up rather than to save them once already down. Also makes being reduced to 0 more impactful.
Getting reduced to 0 then getting the old 1 hp restore to get up and back in the fight multipole times per encounter becomes very costly as your character is reduced in ability and scaled by the amount of times you were knocked down until you can die from exhaustion. Basically your body gives out from the amounts of trauma you experienced.
1 year running this rule and we love it. Makes healer feel like a viable play style.
Mechanically, feels a lot like Death's Door from Darkest Dungeon.
i adopted it. it _works._
had a player death in a run of Light of Xaryxis, only like four sessions in so not a lot of time to really fall in love with the character. in fact, the party had just had a fight amongst themselves the session before, and tensions were high if anything.
there were genuine tears at the table over a character no one even liked that much from how hard the moment hit.
i should note, as well - i took the rule even a little further. not even the player knew the result. DM only roll, no information until they're up or they're dead.
we have a thing like this, there are only two classes in our campaigns that can tell. The opposite ends of the spectrum, a class focused on life and a class focused on total and absolute darkness. If you aren't either of those, then you don't know until combat is over. We do allow RP on the roll if it's 1-2 or 19-20.
I love Brennans reaction as soon as the meat of the idea came across the table, like you can tell he immediately loved it
My group has been doing the private death save thing since we've begun playing together. It's been there with us since i was introduced to 5e, and honestly it just feels right. It adds much more tension and helps avoid metagame.
"An eleven or higher and you live" The depth and gravity of his voice with those few words...
I heard of another homebrew to a similar vein of drama from another youtuber ( Exp to level 3 ).
While making death saves the player brings out something their character regrets ( past or future ) bringing out some of their backstory and or giving themselves a bonus to their next death save.
giving them a reason to stay at the table and think about things / stay invested.
My best argument againts secret death saving throws... is just Hitchcock. And the build up of tension. Every roll being a tense moment and while a success might give that rush of relief, of being safe... each failure makes the following roll even more stressful. I mean, hell, even if the player rolls above 10... if the rest of their party don't use their turns to try to save them THAT IS A GAMBLE AND THEY KNOW IT. Like when two of my players were down, with two failures both, and the third player had to chose, cause they KNEW the next roll could be the last, whom they would manage to save first (and yes, one of the players actually died on their next roll).
I use this rule since I started DM'ing and I love it.
As part of this rule, when a player does a medicine check to stabilize a player, even if they fail, they learn the amount of successes and failures the dying player has.
This way, even a player who would not attempt a medicine check (because of a low ability modifier or not having proficiency) has some incentive to do so.
Another bit for death saves I always warn players in session 0: This is a world where magical healing exists, and it is common knowledge that such exists. Don't expect intelligent enemies to let you bleed out slowly waiting for a cleric, they will coup de grace when given the opportunity.
This one definitely depends on system, and I can say that it doesn't work in 5e. Rolls to-hit get advantage and i think you lose either your armor AC bonus or your Dex, but even without that, a hit is an automatic crit. I had it happen to me once while playing a tank, and it was just an issue of "baddie rolled well and the healer couldn't get to me". I roll my one save, and fail it. That's fine, there's still a chance that I might get out of this, until the DM hits me with that coup de grace and now I'm just dead. No chance for recovery, no tension of hoping I might manage to pull out some good rolls and live by the skin of my teeth, just "fuck you, sit out the next hour or so of this combat encounter" (we were too low level for anyone to have a way to revive me mid-fight).
Maybe it's more realistic, maybe it's a good chance for there to be some roleplay about what a bastard the big baddie is, etc etc, but the dead player doesn't get to be a part of that. They got shitstomped without any control and the combat has to resolve before anything can happen, so they just get to sit there like a player who went bankrupt in Monopoly.
Another way to get your players to treat death saves with a sense of urgency is to include an enemy that is a little extra bloodthirsty who continues to attack them while they are unconscious. After you do this once they will snap to attention immediately any time someone goes down.
*Spoilers for A Crown of Candy* Also known as the Sir Keradin Deeproot strategy
This is a good option for ghouls, vampires, and other voracious creatures especially. Really sells their motivations to have them directly feed on the dying!
I did this for a little bit during my current campaign and the tension was real. Bringing that PC back up became priority #1 for the party. The only reason I stopped doing it was in favor of using two other house rules which the players like a lot more.
This is incredibly validating for me, back when I was making a ruleset for my group a year or so back, hidden death saves was one of my favorite ones I came up with for that ruleset. We haven't used it in my friend's campaign yet since despite being pummelled a lot we hardly go down, however I look forward to the day when hidden death saves comes into play. And after feedback from my group, I also made it so if you are within 15 feet of a dying creature and have proficiency in Medicine, you know how many successes and/or fails they have.
I also agree with the revealed DC of public rolls for important moments or moments with quite clear consequences, because I'm more an advocate for "I need this kind of check" rather than "I need this kind of check and the DC is this" because I'm all for the momentary mystery of success or failure, however for moments where the stakes are high whether for good or bad? The emphasis of the known DC just adds to that roll, players and DM alike can have that slow heartbeat moment as the die is cast and the total revealed.
I've been using this rule for 3 campaigns now and it's totally changed the drama of a downned ally. The tension is visible and every one is worried cause you never know
Ooooh, we do this in our Pathfinder campaign (secret saves). It adds SO much tension, because it keeps that instinctual metagame of “oh, they have so many successes, they’re fine” from being a thing.
We have NO idea what’s happening, so EVERYONE is now focused on saving that party member and it makes for AMAZING development / team building RP.
Main difference for us is even WE don’t know what the roll is. It’s an entirely hidden DM roll, so we don’t know if we’re alive or dead even when combat ends or someone tries to heal us. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.
I sincerely thought that’s how death saves were supposed to be rolled always! My gm has done this since we started our campaign together over a year ago, and since we play online it makes it easier to do private rolls. Adds a lot of good stress for the whole party to what by all means should be an extremely dire situation.
Damn it John! How dare you be so thoughtful and evocative.
Super respect the framing of this home rule being 1) between the DM and the player and 2) up to the player to opt into. I've almost exclusively seen this idea pushed as the DM rolls secret death saves for the players and I could not disagree with that idea more and believe that is bad DM practice, but keeping the downed players agency in that VERY important moment that could result in death is paramount imo. I personally don't even feel that this version of the rule adds that much to how I play so I can fulfill Brennans role. I've never had any moment where a downed player resulted in other players going "Oh well they'll be fine for a turn or two." (and I'll argue if I witness a player doing that, I'd judge them as not a very good role player or perhaps I've failed at engrossing them into this world and/or forming a connection with these characters.) It's always been tense, and I feel the whole table knowing a pass or a fail serves to add to the tension more than making the rolls a mystery would. If I want to combat that tension waning, I'd implement the optional rule that raises a success on death save to 15, THAT will raise tension.
I think there are pros and cons to both the normal rule and this version of a private roll. Not everyone who plays ttrpg's are "good" role players in that... for some people it is very difficult to divorce meta knowledge from character knowledge and at least anectodotally, combat seems to be where that happens the most... well... other than character creation/leveling right? tons of meta gaming happens there for lots of players where they pick choices based solely on how powerful it will make the character rather than making purely narrative choices. As with everything... it'll depend on the folks round the table what will better serve fun.
I don't know that it would change my players behavior much either direction to be honest, but narratively I like that the downed character can feel themselves dying or not... but has no way to communicate that to the party. I'm also not sure a player deciding to wait a turn or two would make them a bad role player right? it would depend on the character. I could easily see a raging barbarian being too caught up in the remaining fight to stop and tend to their fallen comrade, or a selfish character looking out for themselves first, now maybe you want them to have the explicit knowledge so they can counter what the character would do when its too risky... but it could also be fun to have their flaws have a harder time navigating consequences.
@@notednuance You seem to missunderstand my point, deciding not to jump to your downed allies aid for a role play reason is of course valid. Hence why my example is if players do it solely for mechanical "oh odds are they'll be fine for two turns" which is not fair to the story being told, or that poor fellow player who can do nothing for those two turns. So in that specific example, which is the one that people arguing for this home rule lean on as a crutch, my point is that is a fault that falls on the players attitude, not the mechanics.
Downed players don't have any agency. They can't choose to do (or not do) anything. Rolling the dice is just busywork. Arguably, the player knowing their own proximity to death raises their own level of tension, but tension requires uncertainty. If the other players know how long they have they can just factor it into their decision making and press on.
The best way to handle players being "out" while their characters are incapacitated is handing them control of a summon, hireling, or NPC. Even a monster, if the group's dynamic allows for it. A DM I once knew did this, making dead players control monsters and giving a (small) bounty of XP for achieving the enemy's combat goals. 100XP for hitting a player with a special attack, for instance. This XP would be given to their new character.
On a related note, increasing the death save DC makes things less tense and more bleak. The level of uncertainty goes way down, because you can bet more solidly on the outcome of saves. All that remains is the knowledge that allies have to be saved more quickly (or abandoned when they go down unless rescue is right at hand). That's a very bleak, uncaring world for adventurers to live in, which may or may not be the intended feel of the game.
@@mrvenom88 Downed players do have agency, we're telling stories here, that player specifically is telling that characters story. A near death experience is a very impactful part of that story. Since this is storytelling giving the player the choice to share the results of their death saves is the storytelling agency that you are stripping if you just tell that player "you're down you can't do anything anyway, here, take control of something you probably don't care about." Tension does not require uncertainty, if you don't know something you just don't know, for you to feel tense about something about to go wrong you have to be aware that it's going wrong and how wrong it could go. Nothing could be more tense than rolling a one on a death save and KNOWING that you rolled a one and it means you are closer to death. Stripping information from your players simply creates panic, not tension. The nonsense excuses are all the same and apparently that hasn't changed in over a year.
@@This_Justin998 Players do not have a choice to share their death saves, either. There's no reason for them to withhold that information (hiding the info is tactically suboptimal), for most tables there's no way for the player to choose *not* to share it (open rolls) and if the rules are such that they cannot share the info then they simply can't. That decision is never in the player's hands, unless they do something outside the remit of the conversation (quit the game, cheat, shoot the GM, set up a side game of Parcheesi, etc.).
Also, if your player only cares about their own character you need to fire them on those grounds, death saves be damned.
Tension does require uncertainty, and in a twist of fate uncertainty does require some knowledge. I am not uncertain about the presence of a killer whale in my kitchen: there's no reason for me to suspect it's there, and being eaten by it would be a surprise if it happened. If I am in a game of D&D, downed and making death saves I am uncertain about what those death saves will result in, and what actions will be taken by others to save (or kill) me. However I KNOW that death is on the cards, that saves are being made, etc. That's tension, because there is uncertainty, both knowledge and gaps in that knowledge. Hitchcock's example of tension requires the knowledge of the bomb under a table and uncertainty around whether two characters will discover it, react to it, leave in time to evade it, and so on.
Knowing you are now on your final death save raises the stakes, for sure, but it doesn't address tension in terms of uncertainty. Indeed, if you are on your last save and the DC is now 15 instead often, you are arguably under less tension because you are 75% likely to die, not 50%. Less gap in your knowledge.
My group have been having the DM roll death saves in secret for a long time now. Makes everything so much more intense and removes the unavoidable meta-game in-combat decision making!
In my games, mechanic knowledge isn't considered metagaming. The same way you know how many HP the barbarian has because you've seen him take hits like that in the past like they were nothing, he's fine. Death saves, you can see the body writhing, desperately putting pressure on the stab wound with a 13 already rolled....
But so can the monster, who, on it's next turn might want to ENSURE that their prey STAYS down.
This came up as a youtube short for me the other day, which got me into checking out the rest of the channel and subscribing. I didn't realize the whole video hadn't come out yet, I thought I just couldn't find it. What a great idea.
Started a new campaign about 9 months ago and this is how the dm is doing death saves and it's the best. So tense every time
Been doing this for a while now. Heard about it first from XP to level 3 and it is one of the best pieces of advice for DnD I’ve ever heard.
There is about a 5% (4.75%) chance that a dying character is dead after 2 rolls. There is about a 19% (19.15%) chance that a dying character is dead after 3 rolls.
Are you willing to take those odds?
(about 14% (14.4%) chance of death after *exactly* 3 rolls, the chance of them being dead after 3 rolls is about 19%)
Something I personally do to add on to this rule is have "flashbacks" for them. Sort of a life flashing before their eyes moment. I use the alternative where I as the DM roll behind the screen so doing this allows me to keep the downed character's player engaged while the saves are happening since they aren't rolling them. Basically I have a different type of flashback for a success or a failure. Failures are flashbacks to events in their backstory before meeting the party (nothing that would spoil any secrets the party doesn't know about of course), while successes are flashbacks to moments in the campaign that they've shared with the party. This is obviously a bit harder to pull off early on when the party hasn't really made those connections yet, but I tend to try not to throw anything that'll down characters at them until they've had enough of an adventure to call back memories from. If someone catches on and knows based on my descriptions whether it was a success or a fail, then more power to them.
In added to my campaign and it’s such a game changer. Especially for two characters who have history with each other and one of the goes down. It really helps people stay in character in those intense encounters.
My group plays with this, and there has been moments when I really thought my friends characters are DEAD dead. It really makes you care a lot more when a character is downed!
I love that this topic immediately broke Brennan from taking the opposing stance and turned this into 9 minutes of enthusiastic agreement
I will forever be using this at my table going forward. I love this so much.
Starting a campaign in two days and I’m absolutely adding that rule. What a great episode
This is the way that we've been rolling death saves in our campaign and it's great! Not only does it let the DM amp up the tension, but so can the player. It is definitely the way to go.
honestly love this idea bc tension gets so heightened. imagine ur party member dies but nobody knows, and when someone goes to heal you, ur dm can be like ur spell doesn’t work bc they r dead. saves and fails all a secret, nobody knows if ur member is alive or dead. Makes it so that the cleric or ppl with healing magic r way more tense and makes it so much more urgent. yipee
I've played with the rule before, and after your buddy having been down for 4 turns (we really couldn't help earlier) it's a really interesting feeling knowing that you might be "wasting" your potion or spell on a dead person. It is really dramatic though to administer your healing potion and then look to the DM/ Player to see if it worked.
The first time I played DnD the DM had this rule and now I always use it when I DM. The players love it - makes for a lot more interesting tension and strategic decisions when the party is in desperation mode. I find it is also very fun for the player who is down because they have secret information and have to watch in awe or horror as the rest of the party tries to figure out what to do.
I'm going to straddle the line: If I'm making death saves, I as the player in control of that character want to know and be informed of the things unfolding involving my character that my character will be aware of...but I totally get hiding that information from the rest of the players at the table, or using that information to contribute to the character's reactions.
Johnny is jacked
yeah he's a football player
I stopped my group from rolling death saves out in the open over a year ago, and my god does it bring some beautiful type of tension to the table. Everyone is now scrambling to decide between saving their friend or dooming them eternally.
I watched a campaign ran by CrashGem and in that campaign, the party also rolled for things like insight and perception blindly through the VTT and it definitely change table dynamics a lot!
Oh man, hidden Death Saves is such a good rule.
This is how my DM does it, and I love it. I do like Brennan’s idea of having certain subclasses being able to get a sense of what’s going on.
My homebrew I want to try is every time you start death saves and then get brought back up through healing, it adds a level of exhaustion. So you might not see huge effects the first or second time you get back up, but it prevents players from constantly playing whackamole where your healer brings you up with healing word on their bonus action every turn, and there's actually incentive to heal players while they're still up and make sure they don't reach 0 HP. Or maybe you get one 'freebie' but the second time you die and get back up, it adds levels of exhaustion each time after that
The problem is that because of action economy, it will always be better to do damage even with those rules in place. Essentially you are just making the game that much harder with limited downs but not really adding any strategy or depth.
We do this at my table, it really hypes up the drama between the players and the dm its amazing!
There is a similar rule to this in a scifi ttrpg called Mothership.
The death save are also concealed, but instead of making the roll between the player and the DM, they are rolled under a cup, so nobody knows if the character is alive or dead until someone checks on the ic. Then they reveal the dice result to see if they survived.
We have hidden rolls in our campaign.
It's even more stressful when resurrection magic is virtually unknown in the world we play in.
It's definitely made us more aware of when our team members go down
Have the best of both worlds! Roll death saves publicly and record the rolls. Then once they make it to 3 rolls that would be either success of a failure, have the character roll a final die to decide if success was 10 or higher or 10 or lower. Let them decide their own fate!
Ooooh now that is interesting. I like that.
I’ve ran this in a 2 year long campaign and it worked AMAZING. Someone going down was *always* a big deal and my players LOVED it. It made those scenes TENSE.
Would HIGHLY recommend.
I use this in my game and it is amazing. it's amazing to see my players stressing out to see if their party character will be alive next turn and it makes them think before they act. it makes a good story.
I did secret death saves for the first time recently.
The STRESS my players exhibited and the urgency with which they treated the situation was MWAH, chef's kiss all round
im really surprised Brennan hadn't heard that rule, from what i can gathered this is one of the most like homebrew rules, i dont think ive actually encountered anyone who hates it lol
This was the first time I've heard of it as well. There's dozens of us!!
My DM wont use it because he worries about people who it would cause undo stress on. Its worth noteing that his daughter is on the spectrum so that seems like a resonable reason not to use it. That being said I love hidden death saves. Not just from the rest of the party but from the player themselvs..so they dont even know if their PC is about to die or not.
I started doing this about a year ago, and I've never gone back. I'm ecstatic to see someone else doing this.
i love this idea and the next time i get into a game, im definitely going to suggest it to the playgroup. but i think there is still something to be said about public rolls will have a higher effect when you see your friend rolling their saves and they fail their rolls. there is the whole shock and surprise when they roll a nat 1 on their first save and now suddenly everyone panics because if no one is able to do something about it on their next turn, their is a very real chance that the person dies. its like trading some of the tension from when you see them fail, to when they succeed. i think its a great fun idea but there is a solid argument for why someone might prefer to roll publicly. your trading the highest high for a better low/average.
my thoughts exactly!
Following up with this homebrew, after testing it and working with my players, we've come up with some additions to this homebrew.
So, the mechanic is largely the same, but my table is happy with only having me (DM) know the results only, not even the player who rolled the save is allowed to know. To balance this, I've included a special action that players can perform during their turns. I've allowed them to use their action or bonus action to perform a DC 13 medicine check on the downed member to check their vitals. I allow either action or bonus action not only as a balance aspect since I'm the only one who would know, but it gives the player less hesitation to plan their action economy with this, rather than having to force an action or a bonus action only if they had something else they wanted to do during their turn. We've seen plenty of moments where bonus actions go unused, or the rare instance where the player can't use their action due to their options being out of reach, but they can do something as a bonus action. When a player checks the vitals and passes the DC, I will secretly tell them where the downed player is in death saves. My players like to roleplay so they will utilize this in roleplaying with one another. They don't really say the results directly, but they'll say things like "I think she might be coming too" "He's still warm and breathing!" or "His pulse is weak!" "Her breathing is shallow!!" This allows players to make informed decisions still as if they were aware of the death saves like normal, while still being immersed in the game. When the player comes back to life by successful saves or healing, I will secretly inform the player that was downed what their rolls were, giving them something they can roleplay with when they get up. Like if they were close to death and were healed, they could play like "I saw the light" "I am.. cold" or if they were close to success or did succeed they would do stuff like "N-No I'm fine! Focus on the fight!" or "J-Just a flesh wound!"
This method of play is so much fun for the table, because it helps build a layer of immersion and gives the players more opportunities to roleplay and play into the power fantasy when they succeed, or play into some drama when they are close to death.
in Mothership ttrpg, one death save is rolled using a cup and you leave it under the cup. the roll is kept under the cup and no one gets to look until combat is over and it's safe for the surviving characters can check for a pulse. I love it, it also encourages players to actually value healing in combat
If the player also wants that suspense, I think another way to adjust this which is nice is to have a closed box. Whenever a death save is rolled for that character, they throw a dice into the box. The player doesn't know what the result is, same as the table doesn't. Heck, the DM doesn't know. Only when the player is healed do they get up... or they don't. In the case of many dice thrown and skipping us tracking the order by colors or whatever, if there are more successes than failures, they're stable. If there's more failures and 3+, they're dead. Now, this loses the ability to see if a nat 20 was rolled so that benefit can be traded off for another. Say, if the box opens up and there's a nat 20 in there, the player gets to take a turn immediately as they spring up into action after clawing back from the clutches of death. In the event that a player uses a medicine check to try to stabilize the downed character, maybe that player also gets to look in the box. I feel like this is a rare case where it can feel good that a player knows something that the DM doesn't.
Brennan's DM voice coming in was a little stunning to me because I wasn't expecting it lol - he really does just drop like 2 octaves for serious moments huh
8:29 "what I love about that, too is there are certain mechanics that aid roleplaying by being revealed, and there are certain mechanics that aid roleplaying by being concealed."
Give that man all the awards!
Johnny was such a cool guest
I have been using this homebrew rule for years. What I add is that on the player's turn while they are down - I ask the player what is passing through their minds in their last moments. The player typically talk about the funny moments of the campaign they expereinced or very high emotionial points. For example, my player who is a Vengence Paladin talked about how they remember the death of their lover at the hand of the BBEG that they were fighting.
One idea I had a while back - that I haven't been able to test yet - is rolling death saves openly, but having the DC shift slightly with a behind-the-screen roll.
DC would be 8+1d4. The chances of living are only negligibly lower, and having 8 be the base isn't hard to remember since it's the same as all caster DCs. The aim is to keep some of the combat awareness that comes with open rolls, while also adding a sprinkle of the tension from behind the screen.
Most of the time it's also just as simple as normal death saves. The DC can range from 9 to 12, so anything 8 or below is definitely a fail and anything 13 or above is definitely a success. The DM would only need to actually roll the d4 about 1/5 of the time.
I'm so, so, sooooo glad Brennan didn't fight this argument like he had to win it. I love to hear the pros and cons discussed without artificially making it into some campy game. Great show!
This has been on reddit and in the D&D community for at least 5 years and I've been using it since then. I think just like Brennan, everyone is on board for it.
I have had a couple DMs implement this rule, and I actually don't like, partially for the reason Brennan stated. The bigger thing, though, is that while in concept, it should create tension, in practice it hasn't (for me, at least). It makes the rolls themselves have very little stakes because there is a chance that your friend will wake up with 1 hp or die completely, but the vast majority of the time, the roll happens and there is no immediate result. A death save becomes a null event. Sometimes rolling death saves does increase a feeling of security, but the fear of seeing your party member make a death save while they already have two failures is far and away more drama than I have ever gotten from this rule. Public rolls can also lead to a sense of dramatic irony. For instance, one time two characters were unconscious, one at two failed saves, and my character was at one. I encouraged our conscious party member to heal the person with two failed saves, and then I rolled a natural one and my character died. Lastly, removing players' knowledge makes it impossible to play tactically, which I know was part of the appeal to some people, but having characters run around blind in regards to whether or not their party members are dying makes me as a player feel like I have a bit less agency.
My DM has been doing hidden death saves for a long time now. It really makes combat more interesting.
I want an in-depth discussion about who is going to shovel salami into the furnace in Brennan's back.
Also, the answer is always almonds!
wow that brings back memories
One thing I saw in another video that could be combined with this is a combination of private rolls with the DM and adding a layer of RP. The DMing explaining in a few sentences how the character feels, what they see, or what players near them might observe. This won't flat out tell the other party members if they succeeded or not, but give them a really strong idea with narrative on what they should do next.
For example: You roll a fail on your death save, the DM describes how you feel your vision start to blur as you struggle to breath on the ground, or if you succeeded, the DM might describe how you hear the voice of your mother in your ear "this is not your time...get up....".
I think it's a cool little layer of added RP that can be introduced to a private death save without flat out telling your party "i'm good, dont worry about my bleeding out on the floor"
My idea is more on the middle-term. As the example of the jump, if the player is on its last death save, reveal the info just before the roll. The impotence and stakes of the roll with pitch high the tension. A nat 1 would kill them suddenly anyway, with no hint as concealed rolls should do. But in the cases the next fail kills, a scene of dread and awareness from the other companions noticing how near their friend is to meet the end, feels like a cool and chills inducing expirience.
Yeah I agree! I haven’t tried the secret death save rule personally, so I might like it. But I feel like death saves are already pretty dramatic RAW? Sometimes the character passes two death saves, so the party doesn’t feel as worried. But sometimes they fail one or two, and that moment is just like maximum tension. I feel like making all death saves secret all the time would make characters going unconscious more dramatic on average, but it might actually be comparatively less dramatic on those situations when a character is one failed death save away from dying and the whole party knows it. Maybe the solution is to keep death saves secret until they’ve failed two.
I've actually been doing this for about a year now. I don't even tell my players when they're dead (though thankfully this has never happened yet). It's super fun, and it prevents the innate metagaming that comes with death saves. My groups actually let me do the rolls as DM so that they don't have to worry about their own luck and stuff.
My dm used to do secret death rolls from the player! It was absolutely terrifying. We also were bad enough to where players died often enough. I think if you get stressed easily (like my new group) don't force this on your players because they will hate it
private roll macros for Roll20 that I use:
/gmroll ?{Advantage?|Normal, 1d20|Advantage, 2d20kh1|Disadvantage, 2d20kl1} + ?{Modifier|0}
it's not specifically for death saves, you can use it for private skill checks etc
I have made this a rule for my games. Adds so much more drama and realism to combat
Another addition to this I would love to implement would be to have it be TRULY a hidden roll. Have the other players leave the room or deafen if it's virtual. Then when it is just the DM/GM and PC, you do the roll and if it's low enough, you can explain a specific injury that the PC would then have the choice of concealing for X amount of time and revealing it how or if they see fit or risk passing out randomly if they hide it too long.
after thinking about this and reading a bunch of the debate in the comments i thought of something that maybe preserves the best of both worlds:
the player rolls death saves publicly as normal. but when they first hit 0 hp, the dm secretly rolls 1d4+1 (adjusted for your campaign) and that's how many failures or successes they need to either die or stabilize. on the turn where the player is one failure away from death, tell them that right before they roll.
this gives the pressure of not knowing how close your friend is to dying, but keeps the suspense of "a 10 or less on this roll and you die," and barely adds any logistical complications
it also gives fun room to adjust. like, -1 on the secret dm roll for every time they drop per long rest, or -1 for every multiple of their total hit points into the negative that they go
When I ran dnd 5e, this was an issue I noted right from the start, I was using roll20 at the time, there was a secret roll section where only gm and player could see it, this is how we did death saving throws. I had also homebrewed how going to 0 HP worked so that you simply were not unconscious, I didn't want any mechanics unnecessarily taking my players out of the game, so they were able to talk and were encouraged to roleplay out how dire the injury was or wasn't. I would also at randomly pick NPC's that were felled to also do this to create a really nasty and brutal combat feel. If you shot some goblin in the chest with the longbow, he might end up screaming and writhing on the ground for a couple turns while the combat continues.
I played in a game with this rule for Pathfinder 2e but only the GM saw the role so even the player didn't know. It's an amazing rule and creates lots of tension during combat.
Definitely a big fan of the DM rolling death saves. If you get to the players turn when they're still rolling I'll usually give an ambiguous description of them encountering the afterlife. Or will tell them they're in the process of bleeding out what do they want to do, and give them a pseudo turn where they can't move but might be able to take an action or say something
we just implemented this at our table and i freaking love it! My character rolled below a ten 3 times, used an inspiration roll to reroll the last one and got a ten. our paladin healed me the next turn but i was that close to dying and the party had no idea!
That’s why I like pathfinder 2e - any roll that a character wouldn’t know in-game whether or not they succeeded on isn’t rolled visibly by the player, but by the GM behind a screen, which keeps the implications of whatever they’re told or see less obvious and keeps the feeling centred on what the character themselves would feel.
I have using this rule for about a year as it builds tension at the game and more importantly for me who wants a bit more realism to my games it makes sense.
To this end I run with facing indicators when I play online as I rule that the squares behind the characters are the ones that got flanking. If an enemy got tremor sense or blind sight they are immune to flanking. People normally don't have eyes in their back so and it builds team work and makes positioning more important. Some times it's more important that the rogues and barbarian gets advantage. Also it's good for balancing since it does give them advantage if the the bad guys are targeting the squishy casters. Then the two deals massive damage and gives the cleric a chance for a nice awesome inflict wounds with advantage when the bad guy turns around.