I’ll be DMing some more 5e soon and I want to take the opportunity to try some different ways of playing (I’ll post my own suggestions as comments so they can start their own discussion threads). What alternate rules have you tried that you thought worked well? They can be larger changes to the game or little QoL tweaks (though if you can respond to the suggestion with “at this point just play [different game] instead” then that’s probably more than what I’m looking for!)
I really like the idea of secret death saves, definitely feels like it would up the tension a lot when someone drops
It really gets everyone scrambling to help, and it makes more sense for PCs not to know. It’s one of my favorite changes, and it’s so simple, it’s really good.
Maybe let them know the results if they use their action to make a medicine check to try and stabilise, though tbh the only time I’ve seen anyone actually do that is at level 1 when nobody’s got magical healing yet!