Cleaning up Dying

I have been working on developing a version of Dungeon Survivor for Foundry. One of the great things about programming is that it forces clarity of thought. I can’t automate if I don’t really understand. I have the character sheet built—you can choose your dice to make a pool, click a button to have the dice rolled with all the desploding excitement of additional dice coming into the pool, you can heal all your dice (by pressing the Sleep button), and you can manually increment or decrement them as needed. All good. I then started thinking about automating taking damage.
Dice can decrement in two ways in Dungeon Survivor. If you are making an action you can lose dice (if you strain too hard casting fire ball, your Intelligence might go down). If you are on the receiving end of an attack, a poison, a spell, etc., your dice can go down (if a character is attacked by a mind-sucking ooze, its Intelligence might go down.)
In the rules prior to this morning, you were only at risk of dying if your Con dice had all disappeared, but it didn’t matter how that happened. This morning I realized that a better split is between losing dice making an action roll and losing them making a resistance roll. If you lose any ability score making an action, you are basically unconscious—but not dying. If you lose an ability score making a resistance roll, you are dying and receive Death Dice for that ability score (or, I suppose, multiple groups of Death Dice if you lose all the dice from more than one ability score—perhaps there is a dragon whose breath weapon saps your Con and your Dex at the same time…) And of course, when your Death Dice desplode, you are no longer alive.

Image by PeterDargatz from Pixabay. Thank you Peter!