Sudden Onset Death
If you’ve never piloted a 3.X barbarian, you’ve never experienced the ass-clenching terror of “Sudden Onset Death.” What’s that, you ask? Well here’s the rule in question:
In a rage, a barbarian temporarily gains…a +4 bonus to Constitution… The increase in Constitution increases the barbarian’s hit points by 2 points per level, but these hit points go away at the end of the rage when his Constitution score drops back to normal. (These extra hit points are not lost first the way temporary hit points are.)
That means that, when combat is over and you’re kicked to shit, dropping out of rage can mean dropping into negative hit points. And as we all know, that way lies Valhalla. It’s moments like that when it pays to keep an insult comic in the party.
I’ve always loved this rule in theory while hating it in practice. I mean, first and foremost, it conjures up this amazing mental image. When your blood is up, and when you’re bleeding from a dozen wounds, and when there’s a circle of broken enemies lying around you on the battlefield, it’s all kinds of satisfying to imagine your big dude grinning a satisfied grin before passing out in the snow. What’s less satisfying is having to roll up a new character for the sake of the cool mental image. Perversely, it even has the effect of making barbarians cautious. The indignity!
So for today’s discussion question, I turn to all your grognard barbarians out there. Have you ever experienced the dire consequences of ending a rage too soon? How did you deal with it? Let’s hear all about your best brushes with sudden onset death down in the comments!
DO YOU LOVE WAITING? If not, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
We had the house rule or rule interpretation: You can’t die when you are magically healed in that round. Especially for our Berserk. So when you drop dead and the Cleric sees his Mistake and starts healing this round. You will be on 1 Hitpoint for a whole day, but you are alive. And dwarven Berserks are the best ! We had the typicall layouts: Orks, Giants, Trolls everyone died by the Berserk but he was more often then not out then.
(DM managed the Hitpoints with the typical: “That blow hurts, you only shruk it off, your are serious bleeding etc) It was a fun time. Only the Dragon was his demise, he didn’t kill it only serious wounded it, the group needed two more rounds to eliminate it and then it was to late.
Given your spelling of “ork,” I’m wondering what system this was in.
Might just be a language slip-up. Where I’m from that’s just how you spell “filthy greenskin”, regardless of wheter they’re flying spaceship, menacing the good people of Lastwall, or hunting some guy with a growth impairment and a stolen piece of jewellery.
Where you from, Cookie? I’m in the States, and “ork” has connotations of 40K ’round these parts.
See, after your answer I started to wonder whether I made a language slip-up of my own and implied that I live in an english-speaking country. But, to answer your question – I’m from Poland, and some years back I could definitely see myself accidentally using “ork” instead of “orc” when writing in english – the two are phonetically identical. As for why that’s the word we use – my guess would be that whoever was doing the Lord of the Rings translation simply chose the path of least resistance and it stuck. I know for a fact that LotR translation is how we got our word for the dwarves, so it’s not so far fetched to think the same would apply to other fantasy races.
Heh. I appreciate that your citing a novel written by a philologist to explain the origins of words. I think Tolkien would have got a kick out of that.
On the off chance that you’re not familiar, “orc” has a fascinating etymology in English too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc#Etymology
In my Pathfinder campaign that I ran I just made the bonus HP work like temp HP and come off first, just because it was too much of a bother to have the barbarian suddenly be dying all the time.
Easy mode barbarian? The shame! 😛
For serious though, this is a case of the cool game fiction clashing with the actual play experience. I can’t fault you for prioritizing the latter.
I never had barbarians in any 3.5 or Pathfinder games, now that I think about it, probably I’d house-rule it to avoid instant death. You can drop unconscious or to negative HP, but you’ll always have at least one turn of peacefully bleeding out.
This reminds me of the Northlands Saga campaign, which has a rule where you can choose (with GM approval) to have your character make a last stand. You get obscene bonuses to attack, similar penalties to AC, and in the end you collapse, dead and un-resurrectable. A sytlish way to retire a character.
Fun design choice! We all want that satisfying final moment, but it’s so hard to manage in-game. Tying it directly to player choice seems like a cool way to make it happen.
This comic reminds me a bit of that scene in Mystery Men
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJsILvEAYTA#t=01m10s
“You dress in the manner of a male prostitute” may be the best insult ever.
I have the unlucky problem of rolling up a series of barbarians with low constitution for some obscene reason. This comic hits really close to home for me.
On a side note, the Pathfinder 2 Playtest treats rage as giving temporary hitpoints. Looking forward to that system because it does a lot of cool things.
I can’t bring myself to straight up read through the rules. I need to find an opportunity to sit down and playtest. From what I hear though, I remain cautiously optimistic.
I don’t recall the entire specifics, but I think one of the 2e Barbarian’s changes is that rage is no longer a rounds per day thing, but rather it’s like “rage for 3 rounds, then be fatigued for 1 round, then you can rage for 3 more rounds again.”
As I said before; I was raised on 2E, skipped 3X, and got back in with 4E, so I have little to no experience with lesser editions, but reading the text on rage makes me feel like I dodged a bullet. Those are some granular, bloated rules.
15 (1e) or 10 (2e) minute per spell level to prepare spells.
sleep “3 + spell level” hours to recharge spell slots.
miniatures and grid are required in AD&D for rules as written.
Personally as a DM I haven’t been confronted to this case but would probably have something like in a coma for some time then have a debuff until restoration or for (damage under 0/mod cons) days.
And thus was born the legend of Snoregon, the narcoleptic barbarian!
As a DM, I used to “ignore them” and treat them as a buffer, effectively telling the player when they had “entered negative” hit points but was obviously able to carry on. So, say, when a 5th level barbarian had his 10 extra points, I’d tell the player something like, “You’re beginning to feel light headed after that wound” (-1 to -5) or “That blow has you beginning to see blackness closing in” (-6 to -10) and the player knew healing was required as the buffer was about to expire. Having a series of words to describe impending unconsciousness was a great way to raise the tension of the encounter as well as keep the action going. Just my solution.
So wait… A barbarian in your game cant go unconscious? Just an immediate jump from fighting to dead?
That’s how SBDS (sudden barbarian death syndrome) works. Barbarians can’t rage while unconscious. They thus effectively take twice their hit dice in virtual damage any time they lose consciousness, which tends to jump them right over the -con unconscious but not yet dead HP buffer, especially since most attacks don’t land them at exactly -1 HP. Theoretically barbarians can land in the narrow zone where they wind up in deep negative HP but not quite dead after losing 4 con, but it’s rare at middling levels and impossible at high level.
Strip their HP!
See the Barbarians fall before you,
And hear the lamentations of the Players!
That is what is best in running a game with Barbarians…
But seriously, I prefer the way GURPS handles it: Berserking places limits on your actions, so go berserk and act like a berserker. No “playing it safe” for you. It doesn’t add HP, but it does make you immune to unconsciousness and death so long as you’re Berserking, you don’t make the rolls. But the moment you stop berserking, you need to make all the “skipped’ unconsciousness and death rolls*. Since unconsciousness rolls are penalized by how far negative you’ve gone, but death rolls aren’t, ye olde “and the Barbarian passes out” is the most often occurrence to going into the negatives.
The last time I played D&D and played a Barbarian (multiclass Barbarian/Ranger/Rogue/Fighter in 3.5) I treated Berserk like a “OH NOES” backup set of HP. If I dropped to “near death” I’d Rage and then go for the potions or fight defensively until the Cleric could throw a heal on.
GURPS Berserkers can still die, but they have to go to -5xHP (everyone autodies at that point), so it can take lot of damage to get there.
Is GUEPS still a thing? I feel like it always comes up as an incredibly complex and granular system with a lot of well-thought-out rules, but none of my acquaintance seem to actually play. I also heard it’s a game where it’s better to learn piecemeal than to try and teach yourself all 2,331 subsystems by reading.
I don’t like to play barbarians, too much bad memories, or lack of them, of elementary school, but some other in my group have played that class but they have never had that problem. Our DM has some bugs, at least after some patches we have resolve the lag problem 🙂
Wait… We’re barbarians the “that guy” class when you were a lad? What happened in middle school?
First, no. Second, lots of things. Also,why is Oracle tending barbarian wounds. Why she didn’t cast a spell, or better yet let someone with better sights than a female Magoo to do it. Sorcerer surely has some spell for the occasion 😉
Not every material and somatic component looks the same. Oracle uses bandages for her healing spells. Deal with it. 😛
Sorry for destroying your theory but according to my DM the material component of a spell needs to look like it says on the book. I can’t pay a resurrection spell with a diamond worth 1000 GP that looks like a copper piece. According to him no priest will ever believe that a diamond was cut like a little square a covered in copper to hide a diamond from thieves 🙂
I’m sorry. Was there some part of “deal with it” that you didn’t understand? Let’s try it with a visual aid:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/331/934/b88.jpg
😛
🙂
Let’s talk about the Barbarian’s insaner cousin, Frenzied Berserker.
Frenzied Berserker’s get a class feature called “Deathless Frenzy” which says that they can’t die from hit point loss while their Frenzy lasts.
I have been in a party with one Frenzied Berserker once before. His feat combos meant that he could take AC penalties in exchange for massive damage bonuses. The FB player decided not to invest in any AC bonuses, reasoning that raising his AC from -5 to 3 was a lot of work to still get hit every time.
Fights regularly ended with his hp deep into the negatives and our (heal specced) cleric frantically trying to heal him back up to positive numbers before Frenzy ran out and the FB suddenly turned into jam.
The most memorable moment was when the FB got in WAAAAY over his head and “won” the fight with -300hp.
Yes, minus three hundred.
The cleric made the call to just let him die and cast Revivify him.
The FB was eventually retired for being just too ridiculous, although that was for his ability to dish out damage as much his capacity to take it.
I had a dude with a similar build in a lunar Exalted game. If you’re fighting you can’t die. Wound up using a weird martial arts technique to give him a challenge. This magic mink mind-whammied the board into an alternate reality where everyone had to fight using bureaucracy and social graces. It was great. 😀
Tell me more of this Lunar build, please. 🙂
It involved this thing:
http://ninjasensei.wikidot.com/lunarcharms:unstoppable-juggernaut-incarnation
I believe he generated motes when he took damage and had some mess to convert aggravated to lethal. All three combined with the standard healing option…
http://ninjasensei.wikidot.com/lunarcharms:halting-the-scarlet-flow
…meant that he “couldn’t die.” Dude got pretty bored during talky scenes though. Going all-in on combat in d10 system is always a risky proposition in that regard.
I remember my 3.5 barbabrian back in the day falling unconcious pretty often but he never managed to die from it.
And looking at my Bloodrager (8th lvl) backup for our Pathfinder game, I doubt he’ll ever directly die from stopping his rage. I’d had to be pretty much already at 0 HP to die. And at the end of combat there are lot’s of people with healing sticks around.
You never get knocked down zero? Our bloodrager recently got down to -43 thanks to an unlucky city + bloodrage ending, and it was a terrifying moment wondering whether breath of life would bring him back into “unconscious and dying” territory.
I enjoy playing Barbarians, and as I say all the time, a Barbarian that survives past level 5 isn’t doing their job hard enough.
But the sudden death syndrome does make a lot of narrative sense to me. Ignoring pain and debilitating conditions only to die after finishing your duty is a very noble and heroic death, and there’s many a character in fiction (and non-fiction) that died that way. It really amazes me that in a game where you can play a heroic fantasy, so many people complain about a class with a mechanic that gives one of the more heroic types of deaths so readily. It often comes with a “pass the torch/burden” kinda scene. Maybe it would have been better received if players were more willing to retreat from battle or if the Barbarian’s refusal to die distracted enemies enough to give the victory to his allies. That heroic and narrative spin might alleviate some issues with sudden-onset death.
I guess the most recent and vivid memory of having encountered the sudden death syndrome was denied due to the realization that Vow of Poverty grants the Regeneration ability. Would that my Primeval Warshaper could truly die in a glorious battle as was his lifelong dream! Instead, we realized he could not be killed without fire or acid.
Every Goliath Barbarian I’ve played throughout the years (my favorite race substitution levels!) died easy, but that was through a combination of factors. Every such character I’ve played gets the feat “Reckless Rage”, which adds an additional +2 Strength and Constitution for an additional -2 penalty to AC. It’s an incredibly fun feat though, and can create a character that instantly gibs foes without even needing to roll for damage (since few level 2 foes have more than 17 HP). But alas, they die so easily.
Also, there’s a Lawful only class I wish could share its abilities with Barbarians, but alas they can’t.
The Knight (PHB II) has an ability called Test of Mettle where you challenge every enemy with a CR “greater than or equal to” your character level to attack you. If they fail a will save, they must attack you any way they can.
If a Knight could use that and Rage, I would just be overjoyed, because that would truly fulfill the fantasy of “knight at the center of battle shrugging off all wounds and injuries, sacrificing himself for his allies”.
Did you get your appropriately heroic/narrative deaths out of all those fragile Goliath reckless ragers?
I wouldn’t say yes about narrative deaths, but that’s one of the things about the game: death is always following you. Anyone can die in real life without resolving all their issues, and players that expect their characters to get that seem a bit entitled to me.
Heroic though, I’d say from my point of view those deaths are heroic. If you charge a foe every time they try to chase down an injured ally, you’re being heroic, making that sacrifice. And really, who’s going to care about that rogue that is getting away when there’s a 9′ tall hulk of a man with an axe the size of your chest trying to kill you?
I guess I’d separate the two claims though. In a narrative, it does seem heroic to die that way. But I guess the way I hear most people complain about Sudden Onset Death is that it leaves a lot unresolved with their characters. Resolution is for people that live their lives cautiously, not for people that throw themselves at the evil necromancer’s minions.
Spoken like a true barbarian!
Enchanted armor. I played a high level barbarian once and got myself armor with a spell, forget which one, that auto-heals when you drop below zero. It wasn’t much, but it was helpful because not only would it save me from sudden onset death from rage ending, it also saved me at least once from dying while IN rage. So that’s cool.
Well that’s gonna drive me nuts. I just spent 10 minutes looking through the lists for that armor but couldn’t find the silly thing. Any clue as to its name?
Maybe Death Ward?
I’ve barely ever played Barbarians. I like them conceptually, but I hate Rage as a mechanic. Having basically all of my important class features tied to a limited use per day effect really grates on me as the kind of person who has the tendency to worry about holding onto limited resources in case I need them later. Especially in situations like rage where it’s very easy to accidentally waste a use of it on what turns out to be a short encounter and then wind up not having it in a later encounter where you’d really need it.
I also don’t much like that the feature basically turns off your ability to think and even in 5e it has gotcha mechanics for it ending early. (Like say enemies deliberately not attacking you while making sure to stay far enough away from you that you can’t get close enough to make an attack.)
Yeah, I always found 5e Rage to be weird. In Pathfinder you get a certain number of rounds per day, which after the first few levels is functionally forever. I mean, how many days are you going to have more than 15 rounds of serious combat? This also gives it a secondary function for characters that take a 1-or-2 level dip of Barbarian or Bloodrager, where they have just enough rage that they can activate it in an emergency, like a last-second adrenaline surge or warrior focus state, helping them on that one crucial blow or to get just a bit more HP to stay in the game, or as a backup when all of their normal class resources have been lost. Sometimes, you just need that singular moment of all-in greatness.
This dynamic right here is the conflict at here in Rage design. It does some cool things that people love, it does some annoying things that people hate, and there is no perfect way to please all people. I guess that’s why there are multiple classes in the game.
See, this here, the “functionally forever” thing bugs me. If the designers don’t care if it’s effectively “always on” why can’t they just make it actually always on and not make those of us who are resource hoarders/paranoid more able to use the class? Or at least bring it close enough to “no seriously, you’re not likely to even run out” that we don’t worry about it?
Though yeah. In 5e it’s farther away from that and my concern of not having it at the right moment is completely justified. And I don’t know why they designed it that way. I really wish there was some option or variant version for the class where I just got an always on effect that was weaker instead.
Non-snarky suggestion: that may just be called “fighter.”
Well yes and no. The unarmored fighter that can take an unreasonable amount of hits is something only Barbarians are mechanically set up to do.
That said, I do really like 5e Fighters. I’ve probably played more Fighters in 5e than any other class.
Ah, this one was a player of mine, but it went well.
The party was totally outclassed by a powerful ogre barbarian and his many ogre allies. Their cool, strong, dual-axe ranger NPC friend who’d gallantly held a choke point for them (while they dealt with the consequences of having triggered three rooms encounters at once) took a single power attack from the big ogre barbarian and died on the spot.
The party’s own barbarian decided it was time to be cunning. She knew how to beat this guy, because she knew how to beat herself: Stall. Run away, staying just ahead of him, and if he dares to drop out of rage, turn around and beat him down.
It was a risky plan and ended with three PCs and two more NPC allies unconscious, but all ogres except the big one down as well. Only the PC paladin was left on his feet and fighting the barbarian ogre, and he was barely laying on hands fast enough to stay conscious.
Then the ogre barbarian hit him hard, and the paladin dropped. It was a TPK… Or was it?
Every single PC was down, but not one of them was dead yet, and before he could coup-de-grace even one of them, that ogre ran out of rounds of rage and promptly dropped dead on the spot. He’d also been the last enemy alive in that dungeon, and every PC (and those two allies) stabilized. A couple of hours later, the first of them woke up–very sore–to find that they’d won!
Now see, this is the kind of awesome moment that this rule can provide. I love it a lot, and am grinning ear to ear imagining the players cheering like fools when they realized they’d won.
My experience with the extra hit points from barbarian rages, is less “and then the battle was over and Crom collapsed” and more “barbarians don’t fall unconscious from combat, they go directly from fighting to dead”.
This was because Rage ends if the barbarian becomes unconscious and there being relatively few negative hitpoints before someone died, so losing twice your levels worth would almost always put them over the edge.
Particularly in 3.5 where you died at -10, so at level 5+ it was a mathematical certainty.
In pathfinder it lasts until the barbarian take the feat that let them continue to rage while unconscious so that their friends have a chance to heal them.
We’re there no “rage while unconscious” fixes in 3.5? No way to stem the bleeding, as it were?
I guess you could take both Endurance and Diehard, but two feats was a lot of investment considering what else you could take and how small the chance still was that those 10 extra hit points with limits on your action from being staggered would save you (both because 10 is not many, and because since you still were a target the enemy would just attack you again.)
There was also the Frenzied Berserker prestige class, but since that made you attack your allies if you ran out of enemies it was pretty unpopular.
You know, I never really dipped my toes into the Barbarian pool back in the day. By the time I have it a shot, it was with the suicide-proof Unchained version. Also, he was built like a swashbuckler, so it’s… hardly the same thing.
I’ve thought about playing a Skald, though. They kind of do the same thing, but with a lower bonus so the threshold of going from full-to-dead. Thankfully, there’s a feat to allow your performance to persist for a few rounds, so you’ve got a safety net.
It’s weird how so many “safety nets” spring up around a “flavorful death” mechanic. It seems to me like designers and a subsection of players are going for very different things here. Always intriguing to see different philosophies butt heads!
In my early days, I was more open with what I played, but I ended up in some scenarios and adventures (and in one case, an entire campaign) where my character was effectively useless. It wasn’t until I started reading bad GM stories on /tg/ and reading optimization guides on forums that began to understand the idea of making a character with the purpose of being reliable.
That’s what it’s about for me, at least. I don’t mind sitting out while a specialist gets the spotlight for a thing he does, but extended periods of feeling useless or like a liability drive me nuts. It’s why I consider the Core Fighter an NPC class.
The last barbarian I played cheated. It was a monster-PC game, and I played a troll. With Diehard and fire resist items.
Torgal, son of Torgal, son of Torgal, son of look, it be Torgals all the way down, ended most fights in the negatives, but still alive, standing, and conscious. He ended some fights far enough in the negatives that he would be dead if not for regeneration. He ended a few fights farther in negatives than he had HP to begin with.
On one glorious occasion, he ended the fight at negative triple digits.
Is there an anti-extraordinary ability field? I feel like that needs to be a thing.