Moldvay Musings XX: Saving Throws

"Save or die is so stupid! One bad die roll and my PC is dead?! LAME!"

I can't count the number of times I've heard these complaints or some variation of them. It's a hallmark of old-school D&D, like dying during Traveler character generation, that gets repeated as a standard dismissal or condemnation of the older rules sets.

Yes, a saving throw comes down to a single die roll. And yes, a failed one can result in a character dying. But allow me to present some of the rationale behind them and how I interpret them in my games not as a rebuttal necessarily, but at least to show another perspective. I should point out I am far from the first to do this and many of my thoughts are based upon others'.

First of all, what is a saving throw? Well, in Moldvay it's defined as "...the chance that a special attack may be avoided or will have less than the normal effect." (B26). Not to get pedantic, but let's look at the wording of this for just a moment, shall we?

"a special attack may be avoided"

Many special attacks require a successful to-hit before a save is even necessary. Poison attacks are the obvious example of this. The snake must successfully bite you before you need to worry about its venom. So right there you have multiple "buffers" between you and the dreaded Save or Die.

1. You are forced to fight the snake. This isn't a forgone conclusion, what with things like reactions, encounter distances, and running away taken into account.
2. The snake successfully hits you. Depending on things like initiative, marching order, and armor class, the snake might not even get a hit in before being dealt with.
3. Assuming the above two sets of factors go against you, THEN you make your saving throw.

Some attacks have areas of effects (breath weapons) and/or are magical (wands, spells, etc.) and don't roll to-hit. However these are generally from more powerful foes that low-level characters should seriously think twice about facing unprepared. That's not to say sutff doesn't happen, but it should mitigate things somewhat.

Finally, it should be pointed out a couple concepts that have been touched on a bit on this blog before.

1.  "D&D characters die frequently" - Frank Mentzer. In older versions of D&D, it was fully expected to rack up a body count, especially at lower levels. Character creation was simple enough that the loss of your 1st level fighter was a 10 minute interruption at best. Once you got to higher levels and had some investment in the PC, well then point #2 comes into it.
2. Death is a speedbump at mid-to-higher levels. Even if your party doesn't have a cleric capable of casting Raise Dead, you can probably find an NPC that can. Likewise, spells like Resist Fire are going to make that red dragon less scary. Sure, your 10th level Thief might get unlucky with a cockatrice, but Flesh to Stone isn't quite so hard to find as it once was, is it?
3. I wish I could find the original for this, which I believe is attributed to Gary, but to paraphrase, "A saving throw usually means that you've already screwed up and should probably be dead. It's a chance to avoid the worst of the consequences." So when the fireball goes off and you only take half damage, maybe you got luck and were partway behind something. Or maybe you managed to dive out of the way. But it started with you standing there in the line of fire.