It’s worth thinking on how hard it is to kill 5E PCs, outside of corner cases like disintegrate. Instant death happens if you drop to 0 and the remaining damage equals or exceeds your HP maximum.

— Alphastream (@Alphastream) October 21, 2019

Here’s a possible way to modify the Massive Damage instadeath rule to make things easier for low-level characters and harder at high levels.

You instantly die if you take damage that drops you to 0 and the remaining damage equals or exceeds your Constitution score. This makes it easy for an ogre to coup de grace a KO'd squishy character with its greatclub (13 avg damage), but harder to knock a wizard from full to dead in a single hit.

Being at 0 then becomes VERY scary, even at high levels.

— James 🍗 Haeck (@jamesjhaeck) October 21, 2019

Once you get into even tier 2 you're still looking at easy kills on downed PCs. Fighting something with any kind of serious damage aoe? Forget about it.

Caught in an even low-roll fireball while you're down? Ooops. Sorry. Toast.

That's a pass for me outside specific games.

— Dan Dillon 👥 (@Dan_Dillon_1) October 21, 2019

It definitely makes going down to 0 a lot scarier. It adds a lot of value to damage negation and in combat, whereas healing outside of combat has basically always been more efficient in D&D.

— James 🍗 Haeck (@jamesjhaeck) October 21, 2019

I think character death in both 4E and 5E is much less likely than in any previous edition. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I suppose it depends on the taste of the individual group. It’s not hard to make 5E deadlier with house rules if someone wants a more high risk game. Definitely agree 5e is less deadly than 3e, and holy moly less so than earlier editions.

That irked me a little initially, but that was me grognarding a bit and I got over it. The game is presenting to a different greater audience these days, and I think this approach is better.

— Dan Dillon 👥 (@Dan_Dillon_1) October 22, 2019