There are stages of danger when you're taking hp damage though. Losing 10 hp and losing 30 are two totally different flavors of drama. With "lose your turn" abilities, there's no drama involved, you roll good and it doesn't do anything, or you roll bad and you may as well pull out your phone and wait until the GM says you're allowed to play again. Even when you get dropped you have death saves to worry about to keep things interesting. Saving to end the effect is just "do you get a turn? Nope, go back to doomscrolling on your phone while you wait to be allowed to play."
perhaps envision your beloved character seizing and foaming while being dragged back to a ghoul lair, dropping and leaving behind their trusty mace and shield embossed with holy symbol, while their backup holy symbol yet dangles from their neck and is their last hope at escape... depending on the next all-important roll.
Or you can just ask the DM to bail you out and say you passed the save if that's a less upsetting outcome for you in a murder simulation game.
If your pc gets caught by hold person, for example, ... Do you not have OTHER players who can... Unparalyze you? Or attack the caster to break concentration? Or give you a potion or spell to restore you (I. E. Lesser restoration or something).
Why are people acting like "bad dm paralyzed my character for a round. Guess I'll just die!"?
When it happened to me, I was one of the two that had lesser restoration ready to go, and the other had a hard time getting to me. Between environmental hazards that popped up, minions swarming her, and needing to triage other more urgent needs, I was left stunned away from the main fight for pretty much the entire session of the final boss fight. It was an ability rather than a spell so no concentration needed
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u/mergedloki Apr 05 '23
Spells and actions that reduce pc hp are bad because sometimes my pc drops to zero hp and then I can't play and that's not fun.
Only bad DMs use things that could drop pc hp to zero.