Time of Unparalleled Darkness

I always thought it's a little weird that enemies just break it off entirely, myself.

Maybe a fair compromise - if one that would require a little more nuance - is to have animals leave them when they're no longer a danger (most would), and sentient humanoids leave you for dead, but the Legion, ie supernatural enemies, are more aggressive.

This would also put the fear of god (or at least werewolves) in the average player.

What do you think?

That'd be an interesting compromise. Especially if there is some way to give certain undead the option to stop attacking and certain none Legion creatures the option of continuing.

Bonus round: vampires stop killing you so they can nom you instead. Mmm, blood...

Possible solution; implement a temporary Sanctuary-like effect where the PC becomes untargettable by NPCs when downed for a brief grace period relative to how long it would take a character to stand back up. Have this duration be long enough that if someone is dropped to negatives in a fight, they aren't immediately stabbed to death by whatever they were fighting, but not so long that if they're alone they can just get up and run off for free.

If someone is out soloing and gets dropped to negatives, I'm not particularly saddened at the prospect of it being almost certain death, since that is one of the risks associated with solo play. But with the above system it provides the opportunity for other party members to clear out the current fight or at least douse the downed player in healing potions before they die off.

This is more or less how I would have to get the AI to ignore a downed player, unless I reprogrammed the whole AI, which as one might imagine would be quite the task to take on.

I think I'll start with making it so that the effect is popped on being downed, then we can work on whatever exceptions to it we think make sense once we have that basic implementation.

There's some things I'll put in other dicussions, but I think I'm going to call the general concepts of bleed-out settled.