Injury / Exhaustion / Energy Drain

I want to reuse the Exhaustion table as an all-purpose Injury table that can cover everything from fatigue, to broken arm, to vampiric energy drain, and so on. The Injury table tweaks the Exhaustion table to cover more kinds of injuries.

Mention the parts that you find helpful and suggest any improvements. I call it the ‘Injury table’, but I plan to use it for exhaustion as a kind of injury.



The Dying condition means the possibility of the loss of life ... or limb.

Each time a character is reduced to zero hit points, a deep injury occurs, and the character suffers one increase in the level of injury.



Injury Table
Level 1 (minor): disadvantage on ability check
Level 2 (light): disadvantage on attack, possibly half speed
Level 3 (moderate): disadvantage on save
Level 4 (serious): automatically fail check, attack, and save
Level 5 (critical): nonfunctional, possibly speed 0
Level 6 (catastrophic): permanent loss, possibly amputation, possibly death



The DM specifies the type and location of the injury depending on the narrative context of the cause of injury.

Whether Level 6 results in a death depends on which bodypart becomes lost, such as a lost arm versus a lost heart. Yet, at DMs discretion, even an arm injury might cause death because of internal bleeding, blood loss, or so on. The DM may require death saves if reaching level 6 to determine whether a loss of life or limb, depending on the circumstances.

Treat exhaustion as one of several types of injury.

DM adjudicates whether speed reduces. Examples, a leg injury, exhaustion, dizziness, vampiric energy drain, pain from a burn injury, and so on can reduce speed.



Rate of Healing

Each long rest removes one level of Injury. However, the definition of a long rest increases at higher levels of injury, requiring a longer time to recuperate from an injury.

Level 1: short rest 1 hour, long rest 8 hours
Level 2: short rest 8 hours, long rest 1 week
Level 3: short rest 1 week, long rest 2 months (bone fracture, 3rd-degree burn)
Level 4: short rest 2 months, long rest 6 months
Level 5: short rest 6 months, long rest 1 year
Level 6: nonmagical healing impossible

Note, a higher level of injury can also represent more area of an injury, such as a lengthier gash, extensive burn, multiple bone fractures, or so on.

This is what I use: http://www.mindplaces.com/pictures/wound doc.pdf

I'm gonna ask the same question I always ask when presented with a homebrew/house rule: What are you looking to do here? What issue(s) with the standard rules are you seeking to rectify, or what do you feel is lacking from the game that you want to add?

Lacking from D&D is an elegant system for enduring injuries. It is odd that there are no broken arms in a combat game. Spending hit points, even dropping to zero and bouncing back up again, lacks mechanical consequences to signify the injury sustained. Also, in a less lethal D&D, the possibility of injury rather than death appeals because it wont interfere with the gaming balance of the hitpoint system before reaching zero. Finally, 5e has an exhaustion mechanic, but nobody uses it except mainly barbarian, and it is awkwardly integrated into the rest of D&D. Yet this exhaustion table looks very similar to what one would need to represent any kind of enduring injury (including exhaustion as a kind of enduring injury). If this table can work, it can routinely represent all kind of injuries on the fly, from poison to vampire bite to falling down stairs to a defensive wound from blocking a knife attack with ones hand.

Springheel said:

This is what I use: http://www.mindplaces.com/pictures/wound doc.pdf

Click to expand...

I finally had the time to follow your link. It is exactly what I have in mind here in this thread. The pdf turns out to be short and sweet. It reuses the Exhaustion table as an injury table. Each reduction to zero hit points accumulates a level of injury. Great minds think alike!

The system works as is.

My difficulty with using the Exhaustion table straightforwardly, is as follows.

• The second level, "speed halved", makes less sense if the injury is a broken nose. So I want to slightly tweak it. That is why the table here says, "possibly" speed halved.

• I would like the table to try model reallife medicine, as long as it is strictly simple. For example, a light cut or burn takes roughly seven days (plus or minus) to heal. A broken bone takes roughly seven weeks (plus or minus) to heal. To represent this, I have in mind the "Gritty" option for Resting, in the DMG. So the higher levels of Injury/Exhaustion also increase the length of a "long rest" that is required to remove the level.

• I would like the possibility of the combat game to represent the possibility of limb loss (or coma). But I want it to be rare. I dont particularly want a "gritty" game, but I want the possibility for a player to play a character who was disabled in combat, because I think that can be interesting for the social pillar.

• To represent the possibility of a limb lost in from a particular weapon attack, the Injury table here, has the death saves increase the possibility of high levels of exhaustion.

Maybe it is better to stick with one level per reduction to zero hit points. And not worry about the death saves. In hindsight, it might be better to treat injuries as an abstraction. Similar to the way, a player "spends" hit points to avoid real injury, the player can "spend" exhaustion levels to avoid bodypart loss. So one attack might hit the leg at zero hit points, and an other attack might hit the nose at zero hit points. But ultimately the accumulating injuries and pains and need for rest, are interfering with the combat effectiveness. While more vulnerable, the final injury might be catastrophic.

I appreciate the pdf. In the spirit of it, I will probably update the original post to remove the role of death saves. For the moment, I still want to have the levels in the Exhaustion table, to have alternatives to "speed" changes − for those injuries that dont significantly interfere with walking.

I am updating the original post. The original original post is

[Sblock="here."]I want to use an all purpose Exhaustion table that can cover everything from fatigue, to broken arm, to vampiric energy drain, and so on. Mention the parts that you find helpful and suggest any improvements. I call it the ‘Injury table’, but I plan to use it for exhaustion too.



Hit points work normally. They represent the ability to avoid damage. Halfway thru the hit points, the character looks ‘bloodied’. But once one hits zero hit points, a devastating injury occurs − that’s gonna leave a mark!

Each time a character reaches zero hit points, it always leaves some kind of scar to memorialize the incident. The type of scar depends on the type of injury: fire, cold, slash, etcetera.

Scars are scars. Word of Healing and Cure Wounds can close a wound, but they cannot remove the scar. Only spells of level 6 or higher can actually remove a scar, such as Regeneration, Heal, or a lower spell like Word of Healing that heightens up to spell slot of level 6 or higher.



The Dying condition means the possibility of the loss of life ... or limb.

The idea is. When a character fails ‘death saves’, they dont normally die. They get injured! For example, an arm might get broken and take weeks to fully heal.

Instead of three failed death saves causes death. It actually takes seven. But each failure increases the level of injury. Make all of these rolls at the same time as the injury so as to describe the nature of the injury.



Attempting to Use the Injured Bodypart
Failure 1 (light): disadvantage on ability check
Failure 2 (moderate): disadvantage on attack, possibly half speed
Failure 3 (serious): disadvantage on save (short rest 8 hours, long rest 7 days)
Failure 4 (critical): automatically fail check, attack, and save (short 7 days, long 7 weeks)
Failure 5 (catastrophic): nonfunctional, possibly speed 0 (short 7 weeks, long 1 year)
Failure 6 (destroyed): permanently nonfunctional or amputated (possibly coma)
Failure 7 (death)

Note, even a leg injury might cause death because of internal bleeding or so on.[/sblock]

Yaarel said:

• The second level, "speed halved", makes less sense if the injury is a broken nose. So I want to slightly tweak it. That is why the table here says, "possibly" speed halved.

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I think there are many ways to justify "speed halved" with all kinds of injuries, including a broken nose.

However, my beef with the second level of exhaustion (speed halved) is that it encourages a "fight to death" approach since you can't properly run away. In itself that is not an issue since D&D in general tends to be rather binary in terms of victory/defeat, but in my experience, games that stress the use of the exhaustion table - or houserule the use of the exhaustion table as a health track to mimic injuries - are usually aiming at dialing the super-hero knob down a notch or two. And these are the games where players are most likely to run from a threat rather than stand and fight in all-or-nothing stakes.

Laurefindel said:

However, my beef with the second level of exhaustion (speed halved) is that it encourages a "fight to death" approach since you can't properly run away. In itself that is not an issue since D&D in general tends to be rather binary in terms of victory/defeat, but in my experience, games that stress the use of the exhaustion table - or houserule the use of the exhaustion table as a health track to mimic injuries - are usually aiming at dialing the super-hero knob down a notch or two. And these are the games where players are most likely to run from a threat rather than stand and fight in all-or-nothing stakes.

Click to expand...

For me, I consider all of the ‘morale’ possibilities, during the ‘bloodied condition’ when characters and monsters reduce to half hit points or less.

This is when Intimidation checks to force surrender are possible, and especially when monsters decide whether to flee the fight or not. By this time, everyone has an idea of what the strength of the opponent is, and decides accordingly.

Especially in urban environments, where the police are a prominent part of keeping the peace, it is the halfway hit point ‘bloodied condition’ that concludes most fights by surrender or escape, rather than zero hit point ‘dying condition’.

Regarding speed.

D&D standard speed is already HALF of the reallife normal speed. It is already super slow. The idea is, the character can use the attack action to move the other half of the reallife speed.

Thus the other half of the reallife speed is instead being used to slow down to focus on alertness, combat defenses, and so.

So, slowing the speed down even further makes less to sense to me, unless the character is physically unable to walk.

I guess because of famous cases, I was under the impression that a coma lasts for a year or more. But it turns out, a coma normally lasts for several days to several weeks. So I am unsure how to handle it mechanically. Causes of a coma mainly relate to lack of oxygen to the brain, including blood loss or brain hemorrhage. As such, it seems a possible outcome if failing death saves.