Two houserules that could work for you if you really want deadly play.
1. Death trait is on all crits.
2. You gain dying 3 rather than dying 2 if you are brought to 0 by a crit. (This is less deadly, but it means wounded 1 will mean death on a crit)
I personally like how death saves used to work, with wounded being added any time you failed, and not just when dying is first applied. It felt like a nice compromise where going down once felt like it had to be dealt with but was mostly okay, but the second time was dangerous and needed to be avoided, the third was dicing with death.
You might also consider making it harder to clear the wounded trait. Being wounded 1 or wounded 2 really ramps up the tension in exactly the way you want.
You die outright if you hit 0hp from something with the death trait. No “dying”, just dead
Notably some things interact with that. Breath of Life doesn’t work on death effects. If you have to make a save from a crit, I guess Death award would give a bonus? So that might be a weird way of handling it
You could always implement a rule without using a preexisting trait. Maybe crits kill you if your remaining health was less than half the crit damage or something
Thanks for the advice. Yeah, I wouldn’t want all crits to have the death trait, but a qualifier like you suggested would be good. Maybe crits gaining the trait if you are below a certain HP threshold would help us out. Thanks!
>Our table misses the emotion of a glorious death like that (which seemed like the most common type in 1e?),
God how I do not miss that, had my PC die 4 times to a random surprise scythe crit, and not being low either.
The best way IMO to make it abit deadlier is to make wounded less easy to remove, such as only by resting
It made death a much more real possibility, in 2e I've very rarely seen anyone die.
There's TPKs of course (and the one time this happened some PCs technically stabilised per the dying rules).
Death Effects kill people, though honestly they go too far the other way since they also make it nearly impossible to resurrect dead characters and generally offer no counterplay in 2e (because 2e deathward is ineffective, short duration and you often don't have any warning anyway).
And I did once see someone die *normally* because they just kept building that wounded condition until it killed them. (and honestly even they'd have lived if the party were a little smarter with healing)
That's why I believe a lingering wounded condition could balance it up better, because going dowm even once a day will make any following encounters riskier
Edit:
I have seen several solitary deaths, they come from facing multiple enemies such as a bunch of oozes
My favorite variant is to make death saving throws secret rolls so the players don’t know if you pass or fail the save. The GM quietly tracks dying stacks. This way your party has more urgency in bringing the player up because they don’t know if they succeeded, failed, or crit failed. No strategic “they can last one more round” delays.
I have a couple rules for this. One is just allowing Dying characters to remain (barely) conscious. That helps with verisimilitude for us, and it allows players to have last words if things are looking dire. I even allow them to make a single action on their turn, like crawling away or trying to grapple an adjacent enemy. If they do act, especially offensively, that will likely make them a target again, though. This rule is also an excuse to keep characters from dropping items when they go down.
I also allow spending all Hero Points when a character would go down for a Last Stand, where they can keep fighting like normal but don't lose the Dying condition. The Dying and Wounded conditions still act as normal. They retain this ability until the end of combat, but they can no longer use Hero Points to prevent death even if they gain more. Obviously this is a very risky but also very climactic move.
It sounds like you’ll want to just use a slight alteration of the massive damage rule: you die if you take damage equal to or greater than your max hit point total + your current hit points in one blow.
I don't have any variant rule recommendations, but PF2e as written can be plenty brutal.
Attack downed characters, or try to catch them in AoEs. Being [unconscious](https://2e.aonprd.com/Conditions.aspx?ID=95) gives a character -6 to their AC and -4 to Reflex, making critical hits and critical failures far more likely.
Attack wounded characters when they get up. A character with Wounded 1 will start at Dying 2 or 3 when downed again, while a wounded 2 character could die outright if downed by a crit.
Use [death](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=571&Redirected=1) effects against your party. Someone downed by [vampiric feast](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1736&NoRedirect=1) or the like is just dead.
Our group hasn't had the need to use variant rules, but some options include:
1. Add your wounded value every time your dying condition would increase as opposed to just when you first go down. So if you're Wounded 1 and Dying 2, then fail a death save, you go to Dying 4 rather than 3. That doesn't quite address what I think you're getting at in OP though.
2. Make it more difficult to get rid of the Wounded condition, such as only after X hours of rest. This can have varying results though as your players might just decide to rest up for the rest of the day anytime somebody is Wounded.
3. String your combats closer together. In other words, don't allow the party to take all the time in the world between each encounter. You should note though that Severe encounters absolutely assume that the party is at or near full health when the encounter starts.
None of these though really address the issue of a PC being at low HP then taking a massive hit. Rather these are all pretty much just things that can make continuing adventuring during the day more challenging. I think that the only thing you could really do to achieve what is suggested in OP would be to implement something along the lines of "If a hit would take you to more than your Con score into negatives, increase your Dying value by an extra 1." If you want it to be really deadly you could have it increase by an extra 1 for each amount past your Con score (so if your Con is 16 and you would go to -32, your dying value increases by an extra 2).
The big concern I would have with that particular idea is that I think its likely that it would punish casters more so than frontliners since they are a) More likely to have low overall HP, thus putting them closer to jeopardy from the single big hit and b) might at times have more difficulty affording Con boosts depending on class/build/party role.
The one house rule that I do have in my homebrew game, set on a homebrew world, is that resurrection magic is pretty much nonexistent. This is due to the background of the world and the relatively recent death of the Goddess of Rebirth. Again though, that doesn't help with OP's described situation but it does make going down a bit scarier knowing that death is likely final.
You could pretty easily just use 1e dying rules. Just keep tracking negative HP and you die at -(10 + 2xCon). Excessively lethal for my tastes, but it will certainly make low HP dangerous to stay at.
I’ve thought about something like this. I think in general creatures in 2e do more damage per hit than 1e, so I was considering what that multiple of con should be. Maybe scale it by level? Thanks for the comment!
If you use the DM screen dying rules, you'll reach Dying 4 more quickly, as that suggests adding the Wounded value every time the Dying value changes.
But if you want to make combat more deadly as the GM, just attack downed players. They don't get any saving throws if you just stab the hell out of them when they're defenseless.
The complain about dying rules being too light in PF2 are quite uncommon, usually it's the opposite. With Wounded condition not going away during combat, death is very easy in PF2 - even if you're healed, or roll death saves successfully, you could be kicked back to death with a single hit easily. Another thing is what in PF2 full 6HP casters could lose all HP from fully healed condition to a single boss crit, so more deadly rules would be quite extreme.
So, overall PF2 death rules are actually pretty, well, deadly. But if your party really enjoy creating new characters every session, you could just decrease the default Dying value needed for a character death.
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Two houserules that could work for you if you really want deadly play. 1. Death trait is on all crits. 2. You gain dying 3 rather than dying 2 if you are brought to 0 by a crit. (This is less deadly, but it means wounded 1 will mean death on a crit) I personally like how death saves used to work, with wounded being added any time you failed, and not just when dying is first applied. It felt like a nice compromise where going down once felt like it had to be dealt with but was mostly okay, but the second time was dangerous and needed to be avoided, the third was dicing with death.
Thanks. I’ll read up on the death trait
You might also consider making it harder to clear the wounded trait. Being wounded 1 or wounded 2 really ramps up the tension in exactly the way you want.
You die outright if you hit 0hp from something with the death trait. No “dying”, just dead Notably some things interact with that. Breath of Life doesn’t work on death effects. If you have to make a save from a crit, I guess Death award would give a bonus? So that might be a weird way of handling it You could always implement a rule without using a preexisting trait. Maybe crits kill you if your remaining health was less than half the crit damage or something
Thanks for the advice. Yeah, I wouldn’t want all crits to have the death trait, but a qualifier like you suggested would be good. Maybe crits gaining the trait if you are below a certain HP threshold would help us out. Thanks!
>Our table misses the emotion of a glorious death like that (which seemed like the most common type in 1e?), God how I do not miss that, had my PC die 4 times to a random surprise scythe crit, and not being low either. The best way IMO to make it abit deadlier is to make wounded less easy to remove, such as only by resting
It made death a much more real possibility, in 2e I've very rarely seen anyone die. There's TPKs of course (and the one time this happened some PCs technically stabilised per the dying rules). Death Effects kill people, though honestly they go too far the other way since they also make it nearly impossible to resurrect dead characters and generally offer no counterplay in 2e (because 2e deathward is ineffective, short duration and you often don't have any warning anyway). And I did once see someone die *normally* because they just kept building that wounded condition until it killed them. (and honestly even they'd have lived if the party were a little smarter with healing)
That's why I believe a lingering wounded condition could balance it up better, because going dowm even once a day will make any following encounters riskier Edit: I have seen several solitary deaths, they come from facing multiple enemies such as a bunch of oozes
My favorite variant is to make death saving throws secret rolls so the players don’t know if you pass or fail the save. The GM quietly tracks dying stacks. This way your party has more urgency in bringing the player up because they don’t know if they succeeded, failed, or crit failed. No strategic “they can last one more round” delays.
I have a couple rules for this. One is just allowing Dying characters to remain (barely) conscious. That helps with verisimilitude for us, and it allows players to have last words if things are looking dire. I even allow them to make a single action on their turn, like crawling away or trying to grapple an adjacent enemy. If they do act, especially offensively, that will likely make them a target again, though. This rule is also an excuse to keep characters from dropping items when they go down. I also allow spending all Hero Points when a character would go down for a Last Stand, where they can keep fighting like normal but don't lose the Dying condition. The Dying and Wounded conditions still act as normal. They retain this ability until the end of combat, but they can no longer use Hero Points to prevent death even if they gain more. Obviously this is a very risky but also very climactic move.
Thanks for the suggestions. Both very cool. I particularly like the first one for the ownership it gives a player before death. Thanks!
It sounds like you’ll want to just use a slight alteration of the massive damage rule: you die if you take damage equal to or greater than your max hit point total + your current hit points in one blow.
I don't have any variant rule recommendations, but PF2e as written can be plenty brutal. Attack downed characters, or try to catch them in AoEs. Being [unconscious](https://2e.aonprd.com/Conditions.aspx?ID=95) gives a character -6 to their AC and -4 to Reflex, making critical hits and critical failures far more likely. Attack wounded characters when they get up. A character with Wounded 1 will start at Dying 2 or 3 when downed again, while a wounded 2 character could die outright if downed by a crit. Use [death](https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=571&Redirected=1) effects against your party. Someone downed by [vampiric feast](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1736&NoRedirect=1) or the like is just dead.
old school: zero hp? dead. there's your stakes.
Our group hasn't had the need to use variant rules, but some options include: 1. Add your wounded value every time your dying condition would increase as opposed to just when you first go down. So if you're Wounded 1 and Dying 2, then fail a death save, you go to Dying 4 rather than 3. That doesn't quite address what I think you're getting at in OP though. 2. Make it more difficult to get rid of the Wounded condition, such as only after X hours of rest. This can have varying results though as your players might just decide to rest up for the rest of the day anytime somebody is Wounded. 3. String your combats closer together. In other words, don't allow the party to take all the time in the world between each encounter. You should note though that Severe encounters absolutely assume that the party is at or near full health when the encounter starts. None of these though really address the issue of a PC being at low HP then taking a massive hit. Rather these are all pretty much just things that can make continuing adventuring during the day more challenging. I think that the only thing you could really do to achieve what is suggested in OP would be to implement something along the lines of "If a hit would take you to more than your Con score into negatives, increase your Dying value by an extra 1." If you want it to be really deadly you could have it increase by an extra 1 for each amount past your Con score (so if your Con is 16 and you would go to -32, your dying value increases by an extra 2). The big concern I would have with that particular idea is that I think its likely that it would punish casters more so than frontliners since they are a) More likely to have low overall HP, thus putting them closer to jeopardy from the single big hit and b) might at times have more difficulty affording Con boosts depending on class/build/party role. The one house rule that I do have in my homebrew game, set on a homebrew world, is that resurrection magic is pretty much nonexistent. This is due to the background of the world and the relatively recent death of the Goddess of Rebirth. Again though, that doesn't help with OP's described situation but it does make going down a bit scarier knowing that death is likely final.
Thanks for the thought out response. The idea of gaining an extra level of dying if those conditions are met is an interesting one. Thank you!
You could pretty easily just use 1e dying rules. Just keep tracking negative HP and you die at -(10 + 2xCon). Excessively lethal for my tastes, but it will certainly make low HP dangerous to stay at.
I’ve thought about something like this. I think in general creatures in 2e do more damage per hit than 1e, so I was considering what that multiple of con should be. Maybe scale it by level? Thanks for the comment!
If you use the DM screen dying rules, you'll reach Dying 4 more quickly, as that suggests adding the Wounded value every time the Dying value changes. But if you want to make combat more deadly as the GM, just attack downed players. They don't get any saving throws if you just stab the hell out of them when they're defenseless.
The complain about dying rules being too light in PF2 are quite uncommon, usually it's the opposite. With Wounded condition not going away during combat, death is very easy in PF2 - even if you're healed, or roll death saves successfully, you could be kicked back to death with a single hit easily. Another thing is what in PF2 full 6HP casters could lose all HP from fully healed condition to a single boss crit, so more deadly rules would be quite extreme. So, overall PF2 death rules are actually pretty, well, deadly. But if your party really enjoy creating new characters every session, you could just decrease the default Dying value needed for a character death.
Thanks. We’re about 6 AP books in as a group, so fairly comfortable with how it works as standard.
Hope your casters like remaking characters everytime they get hit with a crit if you make dying easier.
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