Death Saving Throw Probability Tables

On Jan 08, 2021 5:54 pm, by Reddit

Content of the article: "Death Saving Throw Probability Tables"

I know that it has been done before, but I thought I would take a crack at this but with the twist of giving numbers for each round, assuming a certain number of saves will fail, and if the saves have advantage. This assumes that no one intervenes during the entire process.

Probabilities are accumulative which means that is the chances of achieving a particular outcome BY that round. Each assumes the # of Failures listed in the first column. The number of rounds possible decreases with the # of Failures assumed. The three results possible are conscious, stable, and dead.

Accumulative probabilities with no advantage.

# Failures	Result	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5
	Conscious	5.0%	9.8%	14.1%	17.0%	18.2%
	Stable	0.0%	0.0%	12.5%	29.4%	41.4%
	Dead	0.0%	4.3%	15.7%	29.7%	40.5%
1	Conscious	5.0%	9.5%	12.8%	14.3%	–
1	Stable	0.0%	0.0%	12.5%	27.5%	–
1	Dead	5.0%	25.5%	44.8%	58.3%	–
2	Conscious	5.0%	7.5%	8.8%	–	–
2	Stable	0.0%	0.0%	12.5%	–	–
2	Dead	45.0%	67.5%	78.7%	–	–

Accumulative probabilities WITH advantage.

# Failures	Result	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5
	Conscious	9.8%	18.5%	26.5%	30.2%	31.3%
	Stable	0.0%	0.0%	34.3%	55.1%	63.4%
	Dead	0.0%	0.1%	1.1%	2.9%	5.3%
1	Conscious	9.8%	18.5%	26.0%	28.9%	–
1	Stable	0.0%	0.0%	34.3%	54.9%	–
1	Dead	0.3%	4.5%	10.3%	16.2%	–
2	Conscious	9.8%	16.6%	21.4%	–	–
2	Stable	0.0%	0.0%	34.3%	–	–
2	Dead	20.3%	34.4%	44.4%	–	–

I think about this type of thing quite often since I usually play as a healer. It is useful to optimize when it is best to bring people back up from death saving throws. Also as a healer, the second table shows the benefits of the spell beacon of hope, which gives advantage to all saving throws. This drastically reduces the changes of death, but also greatly increases the changes of regaining consciousness and getting back into the fight!

As a DM, when a player drops to zero there are usually opportunities to cause damage that will cause an automatic failure. This damage can be from things like falling, spell effects, or additional attacks. This can be weight against when you roughly know how many rounds the healer will take to get to a player.

I had generated some graphs, but couldn't figure out an good way to share all of the images. I ended up copy pasting these tables since it was easiest to share. I generated the tables by writing up a quick python script to run 10 million random trials, tally up the results, and spit out these numbers. So since the second decimal point might be off slightly, I am only listing the first decimal. However this will have a slight round off error, so results might not add up to exactly 100% for the 3 results for each scenario.

Let me know what you think, and hopefully this might be helpful to someone! This could be expanded to things like bless, bane, or bardic inspiration that can change outcomes too.

Source: reddit.com