D&D 5E A Simple Way of using the Lingering Injuries Table

[Fralex]

This is just an idea I want to try out that uses wounds to make HP loss more meaningful than just a score decreasing.

-HP doesn't represent any one particular thing, but in this case I'm interpreting it as a measure of how much "fight" someone has left in them. Normal hits are just grazing blows that wear a character down and make it harder for them to avoid serious injury from future hits.
-A critical hit, or any hit that reduces you to 0 HP, is a "real" hit. It means you messed up and took an actual blow that physically damaged your body in a severe way.
-Any time you take a critical hit, roll on the Lingering Injuries table. Make the roll with advantage if you have at least half your max HP before the hit.
-Any time you're reduced to 0 HP, roll on the Lingering Injuries table with disadvantage.

I can't quite decide whether rolling with advantage should happen if you still have half your HP left AFTER the blow, or before. I'll playtest it and see what happens, and for now I'm favoring the more forgiving version.

The end result of these rules, I'm hoping, is something where the severity of your injury varies depending on the severity of the hit. If you're doing more or less OK in combat, a crit is more likely to give you something minor, like a scar or mildly inconvenient injury. If someone's hit nearly KILLS you, however, you're looking at lost body parts, or at least a limp or debilitating internal injury. When a player survives near-death, I feel it should be memorable and harder to fully recover from. The major hits a character takes will all leave their marks, and hopefully make the consequences of fighting monsters feel more real.

What do you think of this idea?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I don't like the idea that someone might suffer several severe wounds in succession during the period between the first KO and finally getting out to safety.

 

[Daern]

I think the double trouble from the Critical hits is a bit much.
I roll for Grievous wounds at 0hp. Players roll a d6 and the corresponding stat has Disadvantage to all rolls until healed or some weeks of rest.

 

[Fralex]

Saelorn : Hmm, that's a valid point. I still want to test the rules as-written before making changes, but that definitely sounds like something that could be a problem. If it is, how about I make it so that you can't suffer a second KO-wound until you recover at least half your HP after the first KO-wound? Any blows that knock you out before then aren't major hits like the first one, you're just too debilitated from your previous wound to stand up to them like you ordinarily could.

 

[Fralex]

I think the double trouble from the Critical hits is a bit much.

The important thing about wounding crits is that it applies to both players AND monsters. Monsters rarely recover from 0 HP, so without that rule it would feel like using the table serves only to hurt the PCs. This way, players get a chance to dismember and deocculize their foes. I'm thinking of tying the lingering injuries table to some of the damage-boosting feats, so that a player using one can sacrifice some of the extra 10 damage to give the target a specific wound.

 

[pukunui]

What I decided to do was make it optional. When a PC suffers a critical hit, they can choose to turn it into a normal hit by suffering a lingering injury. Likewise, if the PC dies (such as by failing a third death save), the player can choose to have the PC suffer a lingering injury instead of dying. Depending on the circumstances, I will then either roll my special hit location d12 or choose an appropriate type of injury (bludgeoning damage might result in broken bones, while fire damage might leave a disfiguring scar, and so on).

The point of making it optional, though, is that it becomes the player's choice to deal with a debilitating injury. Not everyone likes being saddled with such a thing, and forcing it on such a player can lead to bad feelings.

 

[Daern]

I don't think its worth it to roll a Wound for each Crit. There's a lot of crits and monsters don't usually last that long anyways. For me, it's more fun to just describe the death blow and move on.

 

[Fralex]

What I decided to do was make it optional. When a PC suffers a critical hit, they can choose to turn it into a normal hit by suffering a lingering injury. Likewise, if the PC dies (such as by failing a third death save), the player can choose to have the PC suffer a lingering injury instead of dying. Depending on the circumstances, I will then either roll my special hit location d12 or choose an appropriate type of injury (bludgeoning damage might result in broken bones, while fire damage might leave a disfiguring scar, and so on).

The point of making it optional, though, is that it becomes the player's choice to deal with a debilitating injury. Not everyone likes being saddled with such a thing, and forcing it on such a player can lead to bad feelings.

Interesting. How did this work out? How often did people take the injury?

One thing I would do if I were to use this rule is either edit spare the dying or invent a new cantrip that ends any one effect magical healing of 1st level can end, without actually restoring HP.

 

[pukunui]

Unfortunately, no one's taken me up on the offer yet.

 

[Sunseeker]

The big concern here is going to be multiple attacks. A Goblin crits just as well as a Red Dragon, and you can be fighting both at the same time and indeed, probably should be. In such situations it's not surprising to be facing a dozen low-level foes. Over time, lingering injuries would be much more likely to stem from large fights against weak foes than against smaller fights against stronger foes. This IMO, makes no sense to me. Why on earth should 20 goblins be more of a threat to a 10th-level character than say, an adult dragon, simply due to statistics?

I would add some kind of secondary-conditional modifier to appropriately moderate threat levels, such as either a level-based condition or an HP-based condition. Say, when a crit deals more than 25% of your health. This would keep lower-level foes dangerous to lower-level enemies, but because 25% is an adjusting number representing smaller portions of your health as your health goes down, it would make lower-level threats less dangerous to a full-HP character, but more dangerous to a less than full-HP character, which fits in with your visualization of HP as how much "fight" a person has left in them. Less fight? More vulnerable to lingering injuries. This would shield high-level characters from being utterly devastated by mobs of cats without neutering the danger presented by high-level foes.