Save vs. Awesome!

Another house rule has favored the players strongly.

Last session, we experienced our first meaningful character death: the bard entered melee with a foe that possessed a vorpal weapon. She was decapitated on the very next action of said enemy. A small outcry arose, and the party's warmage declares an attack on the bard's killer. The warmage lands a crit of his own (thanks to his choice of Improved Critical: Ranged Touch at lvl 12) on a Sudden Empowered Orb of Fire, and ends up doing 40d6+24 damage to the target. That's a damage range of 64-264 fire damage. The warmage then roles all 40d6 at once, being very dramatic, and totals a modest 153 damage. Factor in fire resistance, and the target took 148 damage, 2 hp shy of being dropped in one hit.

However, I run rules for death from massive damage. Each creature has a threshold based on size, and if you exceed that threshold in a single attack, you must make fortitude save of 10+damage over threshold. For example, a medium creature has a massive damage threshold of 50 damage, for a large creature it's 65, for huge it's 80, etc.

So, the target of this Empowered Orb of Fire was subject to a DC 108 fortitude save.

Good job Danny, you killed the bad guy.