Gritty Campaigns. How you play one?

Hey guys,

We have been playing a gritty campaigns in 5e for 2 years now. It is a long journey and we tried a lot of things.
This is how we play it now: http://oriaxx77.blogspot.com/2018/04/gritty-d-campaign.html .
I am interested in how you play your gritty campaign, what optional rules you have, what options or rules worked, what didn't.
I am also interested in how your players adapt to a gritty world or environment where you pay a high price for mistakes. (E.g. you forgot to kneel before a king etc...)

p.s.: sorry for my english, I am still learning this lang.

Cheers,
Oriaxx

Welcome to the boards!

I played 1e as my preferred edition from 1981 to 2012 when 5e playtest came out, and I've played WFRP 1e, so I guess you could say gritty D&D is more my preference. Here's what we do when we want a more gritty version:

* house rule healing. Do not heal to full HP after long rests. You get HD back, but that's it.
* DM emphasizes the suck in a narrative fashion: For example, in Tomb of A, go into detail about how much the jungle sucks. Bugs, heat, sweat causing rashes under armor, clothes rotting, exhaustion, illness, unable to sleep, etc
* encumbrance is very important. Armor and weapons weigh a lot. So does gold.
* tracking spell components matters
* magic is limited. No magic shops. Magic wielding NPCs are very rare.

Optional things we sometimes do:
* critical hits against the PCs have a lasting effect until healed. For example, if PC A suffers a cirtical hit from a crocodile, then narratively I'll describe how the croc locks onto the PC's leg and begins to death roll. The PC's movement is reduced by half until healed. Nothing major or directly representing the real life effects one would have by going through that, but something still impactful.
* play AiME, or the very least steal the shadow point system from it (Adventures in Middle Earth is the 5e version of Middle Earth)

It’s been a while since I’ve done a gritty campaign. Really, more than anything I do, the PCs have to be on-board with the game. We all crack jokes during sessions, regardless of game tone. But the PCs have to set the tone. But you can’t have a gritty campaign without the players that take it and the world seriously. Whether you’re running epic sweeping fantasy or grimdark, a murderhobo will likely ruin either.

For me, the biggest thing is fear. Characters need to be afraid. And again, while the DM creates that world, the players need to be the ones that set their approach to the world. A zombie isn’t just a zombie, but a rotting corpse animated by terrifying magic. Losing three-quarters of your HP is seeing your life flash before your eyes.

As for the list in that link, I was pretty on-board save for this one line:

"Women and men are not equal."

That can lead to lazy storytelling and un-fun gameplay. There are better ways to show a grim and perilous world than to rely on sexism.

I took the Aether Charges rules from Planeshift: Kaladesh, and applied it to spell slots and limited-use abilities in addition to magic items. I flavored it as though the players were carrying a bunch of items that they could power with Aether.
Interesting effects I noticed:
-Prepared casters get weird with this system. If I were running this again, I’d definitely sink more time into exploring how they work beforehand.
-Strategy revolves around the “tactical nova.” Since there isn’t a “used per day” limit, the players quickly figured out how to conserve Aether, and burn a couple days’ worth in a heated battle.
-One resource pool made logistics beautiful.
-The players learned to take bribes. This is a huge difference from most D&D games I’ve played, which make the players look kind of incorruptible.

Other things I did:
-the game was set on Kaladesh, which in the M:tG lore had a fairly black and white morality system. I made the players the Consulate Enforcers (stormtroopers, basically), which let me flesh out traditional “bad guys” as underfunded and trying to hold an ungrateful country together. I portrayed the Renegades (revolutionaries) as wide-eyed idealists (lots of good sounding rhetoric, nothing practical)
-I gave all of the players an “escape button-“ a tool or spell that they could use to leave a situation if things really went south.
-I dispensed with the “XP=killing things” nonsense. Your level equals your rank in the Consulate security forces.
-I had three plots running at the same time: the players’ normal missions, which they did “on the record,” and got credit for; the one of the players turned a Renegade minion, and used him to get information about the Renegades.
-The Renegades talked a lot about this guy named N’Fesh. I made it VERY clear that the players couldn’t beat him in a fair fight. I also built him to be an absolute beast.
I’m really proud of my final session, because it felt very “end of season episode,” and demonstrated a lot of the things I liked about my system.
-The players learned where N’Fesh’s hideout was, but got cold feet going in. While they were wondering what to do, N’Fesh figured out where they were, and kicked their wall in.
-The player on lookout did some really awesome work with his crossbows: keeping N’Fesh pinned down long enough for the other players to get their gear.
-One of the other players saw a way to end this. He pulled all his political clout (which he had focused on building for most of the game) and ordered an air strike on the entire block. I played up the bureaucracy/red tape involved, which worked pretty well.
-The air strike was coming in, and one-by-one, the characters pushed their “escape” buttons.
-One of the players who hadn’t left yet (Battlemaster Fighter) realized that someone needed to keep N’Fesh here until the airstrike came in. He jumped into melee with N’Fesh, and every time N’Fesh would try to escape, he Tripping Struck. So N’Fesh beat him like a rug, but the Battlemaster held on until the airstrike came in and they were both buried under a mountain of rubble.

oriaxx77 said:

p.s.: sorry for my english, I am still learning this lang.

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Don't worry. You're killin' it, O.

Since I felt a bit left out, here's our working definition of "gritty" from Oriaxx's blog:

For me, a gritty D&D campaign is a campaign where the characters are not superhero murderhobos, but normal humans (elves, dwarves) who - while more powerful than the average - still susceptible to normal problems. They still need to deal with the nuances of their daily life. As they progress and gain level they will have more power, some tasks will become easier, even mundane, but they will not be some kind of godlings who can do whatever they want without any consequences because of they power. A gritty campaign has lots of medieval elements when lots of things are different than as of now.

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I'm glad you brought up "medieval elements" because that's what I'd like to see in a gritty campaign: famine, disease, and war. Oppression, theocracy, no iPhones...gritty. When you mentioned "daily life" nuances, I thought of an entirely new pillar of D&D: marriage. Specifically, you'd need some new mechanics for spouse nagging

Gritty is pretty hard to do in D&D because, well, hit points:

DM: the guillotine blade slices through you, and suddenly you're looking up at the stump of your neck. You're dead.
PC: yeah, but how much damage does a guillotine blade do? As much as a greataxe? I can get hit by a greataxe (does some calculations) 24.3 times before dying.

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The last time I ran gritty in D&D, I applied it mostly to the NPCs by keeping their levels low. So a good arrow wound would kill or incapacitate most people, but the PCs had a good amount of luck following them around. The PC levels didn't get out of control either, but it was the NPCs who maintained the gritty feeling.

P.S. "Killing it" means doing very well

Under this definition of gritty:

For me, a gritty D&D campaign is a campaign where the characters are not superhero murderhobos, but normal humans (elves, dwarves) who - while more powerful than the average - still susceptible to normal problems. They still need to deal with the nuances of their daily life. As they progress and gain level they will have more power, some tasks will become easier, even mundane, but they will not be some kind of godlings who can do whatever they want without any consequences because of they power. A gritty campaign has lots of medieval elements when lots of things are different than as of now.

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It would seem to me the only thing you need to do is focus on Lifestyle Expenses and Downtime Acitivities to some degree. Slow Natural Healing and Gritty Realism variant rules (DMG p. 267) might force a greater focus on Lifestyle Expenses and Downtime Activities because there'll be a lot more sitting around waiting to heal up unless the players have access to magical healing. I would, of course, expect an uptick in the number of healers in the group to offset these variant rules which may be undesirable for the theme, so you may want to think about how you'll deal with that.

oriaxx77 said:

I am interested in how you play your gritty campaign, what optional rules you have, what options or rules worked, what didn't.
Oriaxx

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One thing I learned while surfing the messageboards is that "gritty" doesn't not necessarily means the same for everyone. For some, it's simply about the state of the world, for others, it's about low-resource management, for others, it's about the high probability of death, or dismemberment, or lasting consequences of injuries, or emphasizing on "mundane" factors such as weather, exhaustion, disease etc. so assuming you mean a bit of everything...

A gritty campaign is principally in the way the DM runs it, and describes it. Still, it works best when the rules support the theme, or at the very least, don't go against it. Your blog already mention a few.

IMO, a less generous rest mechanics is required. The DMG proposes the "gritty realism" variant, which is a good start. One needs to be careful however, that variant does not make anything "grittier" or more "realistic", all it does is stretch the adventuring day over an adventuring week. Still, a good start, but any rest variant that translates in "adventurers are not fresh as a rose after 8 hours of crappy camping" will do. Longer refresh time on spell slots also put an acceptable break on the "magic is the solution to every problem" element of D&D.

The "threat" of the mundane world needs to be significant enough to deter players from ignoring it. In D&D (across pretty much every edition), a high level character has little to fear against the 20 king's guards that have come to arrest him/her. Or just cold, wet rain. Or the steep ascension between this town and the next. Or wading through snow, or any type of difficult terrain, even if the temperature are mild. Not to mention food and water. The easiest way to convey that is to keep the characters at low levels (like 1-5, mayyyybe 1-7). The problem with that is often about player satisfaction; they have the impression that they are playing only 1/4 of the game (not without reason). Otherwise you can re-write the NPC blocks, but it will still be a problem once the characters get to level 11+.

HP work well as an abstract health bar, but it doesn't represent injuries well. The spiral of death is somewhat of a slippery slope; you need it for grittiness, but it can cause rapidly degenerating conditions that can frustrate players. Of all the houserules, any type of death spiral is the one that moves the game experience the furthest from "vanilla" D&D. Personally, I like the "one exhaustion level when dropped to 0-hp, which disappears when character is brought back to full hp" rule. I also heard of "exhaustion levels as death saves" but never experienced it. Exhaustion levels are VERY punishing, but so should be gritty combat.

About that, I've toyed with injury (resulting in exhaustion level) on receiving crit and rolling 1 on save or ability check made to avoid damage, but it was a bit too much. Put that in the "what didn't work" bin.

This brings me to exhaustion; physical and psychological fatigue is an important part of grittiness. You can deal with it naratively, but 5e does have a mechanical representation for it. Difficult travel, forced march, harsh weather, prolonged stress and tension, antagonistic social situations; all have the potential to cause exhaustion levels and should be enforced by the DM. You can add mental and social situations to add the potential for WIS or CHA saves vs exhaustion too. I considered adding a "winded" level-0 exhaustion level with no drawback, primarily serving as a warning in long rest = 1 week games.

So in my personal and anecdotal experience: you can't represent a gritty setting perfectly with 5e rules, but you can get pretty close. As you say, the players need to be on board with it because it will feel very different. Beyond the feeling that the king's guards will always be stronger than you, players need to be ok with the definition of heroism not as slaying dragons, but as being pressing forward despite the exhaustion levels, the partial hit points, the limited assortment of spell slots, and the low resources. This change in paradigm is the biggest "what didn't work" I've encountered. Sometimes players just want to slay dragons, and that's cool with me.

'findel

I'm reaching back over two decades, so well pre-5E, but the #1 thing not already mentioned is there was no flashy magic. That means things like Divination, Illusion, Abjuration, Enchantment, and (for evil NPCs) Necromancy are fine, but Evocation is most definitely not and Conjuration and Transmutation need major scrutiny.

oriaxx77 said:

I am interested in how you play your gritty campaign, what optional rules you have, what options or rules worked, what didn't.

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I am not running one, but if I did, I'd mainly do these:

- keep track of food and water supplies as well as ammunition
- use encumbrance rules and monitor equipment weight carefully
- limit magic items to the minimum (at least no magic shops, for magic items in treasure it depends on the setting)
- narrate travel and its effects more accurately, try to feature many environmental nuisances and hazards
- use exhaustion rules (the 5e ones might need some tweaking)
- modify some monsters by adding long-term debilitating effects

I would personally like to play in a game where also exact spells components are tracked, but this may be too much for most players. I'd do it only if all spellcaster players are fine with it.

In general I wouldn't want to house rule healing, but I would rather lengthen the time required to have rests. However this will have consequences on the party capabilities to handle many consecutive encounters, so it has to be considered together with the story!

I see lots of great advice here, though I personally don't fiddle with the core healing rules. Now, that's partially because in my games I don't allow full casters as PCs, so nobody has any magical healing at all.

I also seriously dial back the presence of magic items; effectively, exactly one of any non-perishable item exists in the world. You want a staff of the python? You better hope that either the current owner is willing to give it up or that you can take it from them.

Even perishable and single-user items are rare. No casters means no potion shops, so the players have to be careful what they do. I relented and allow keoghtom's ointment as a non-magical salve, and I ramped up the alchemy aspects of the game.

TL,DR: just cut cut out magical healing and PC casters. That's all it takes.