D&D 5E Describing Injury

[Hriston]

This isn’t another thread about hit points. It’s about how to describe an injury when an event has occurred in the fiction that would indicate that an injury has resulted.

D&D characters get hurt. We know this because sometimes they die, which is the worst kind of getting hurt.

Yet, except perhaps in some special cases, there is no mechanical output of the core game short of death that says a character is injured.

Sure, there’s the suggestion that a character is described as “bloodied” when below half maximum hit points, having received small cuts and scratches, but there is no mechanical effect of being “bloodied”.

There’s also the suggestion that a character that drops to 0 hit points, and thus incurs the Unconscious condition, is described as having received a “wound”, but again the wound is mere color. The Unconscious condition doesn’t entail a wound and can be as ephemeral as rolling a 20 on your first death save. If you received a wound when dropping to 0, for example, the wound doesn’t miraculously heal if you roll a 20 on one of your death saves. At least, I should hope not.

So given that there’s no mechanical output of the core game, short of death, that would require the narration of an injury, what are the responsibilities of the DM and the other players to describe injuries as having taken place?

In my games, this is part of describing your character.

An injury belonging to a character isn’t part of the environment unless that character is also part of the environment, so it doesn’t necessarily fall to the DM to describe the injury.

I let each player describe their character as injured or not due to any injurious circumstance or the lack thereof. If an event is established as having occurred that suggests an injury may have resulted, I might invite the player to describe how their character is affected, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Likewise, when it comes to describing healing of injuries as having taken place, if it’s an injury sustained by a PC, I leave that up to the player.

Doing it this way, I find that description of injuries and the healing thereof fall within the genre conventions agreed upon by the table.

 

[Shiroiken]

I generally describe true wounds when the attack drops the PC to 0. Everything else is either stamina loss or superficial. The wounds remain when the character recovers HP, but might be mitigated by magical healing. The wounds remain even after HP are fully recovered, and take time to heal on their own. My own character is another DM's game looks like an old boxer, considering that I've been knocked unconscious 7 times in 6 sessions. Since I haven't had any downtime, he just sucks it up, applies some bandages and herbs, and gets back into the fight.

 

[Umbran]

So given that there’s no mechanical output of the core game, short of death, that would require the narration of an injury, what are the responsibilities of the DM and the other players to describe injuries as having taken place?

Responsibility? As in having a duty to do something? In D&D, none whatsoever.

 

[Oofta]

I don't always describe injuries, and generally only do it if it's a critical or a particularly bad situation for the PC. Then I describe it like action movie injuries. Getting shot stabbed in the shoulder is a "mere flesh wound", being hit with a club the size of a tree is a glancing blow that momentarily leaves your arm numb.

My monster had a PC restrained and was chewing on him recently, I described how the PC was almost completely wrapped in the tentacles and the monster was chewing on his shoulder, the monster's saliva and his blood mixing in a stream (the PC doesn't wear armor) that ran down his chest.

So I try to take into consideration the armor the PC is wearing or not, the type of attack, add some flair. I had zombie hell hounds a while back and the creature chewed on a PC's leg like a rawhide bone, teeth breaking off and embedding themselves in the flesh because there was a chance of infection/disease.

 

[generic]

I like to add flavorful but somewhat believable descriptions when blows are exchanged between the PCs, their allies, and the foes. When enemies or PCs are killed outright, I toss buckets of Mortal Kombat-esque gore into my description.

For example, in the last session, the Paladin beat a Drow Cultist to death with the flat of her Silver Greatsword, so I described how to blow cracked open the Drow's skull, sending its contents onto the floor, into the air, and all over the face and armor of the Paladin. Blood was everywhere, and the remainder of the skull's contents pooled in the shattered basin of wet bone.

 

[Hriston]

Responsibility? As in having a duty to do something? In D&D, none whatsoever.

I mean in the sense of fulfilling a role. I think describing your character is part of the player’s role, whereas I think there’s an assumption that describing a character’s injuries is part of the DM’s role.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I mean in the sense of fulfilling a role. I think describing your character is part of the player’s role, whereas I think there’s an assumption that describing a character’s injuries is part of the DM’s role.

A fair general rule of thumb might be to have the player in control of the successful ability describe what it does.

In the case of an attack, that would mean describing what it is and looks like - bolt of flame, thrust of the rapier, whatever - and, if it reduces the target to 0, whether it KOd or killed, and how.

But, if the attack leaves the target with hps, it's their success, and the target describes how they prevented the otherwise deadly consequences of the attack.

 

[Hriston]

A fair general rule of thumb might be to have the player in control of the successful ability describe what it does.

In the case of an attack, that would mean describing what it is and looks like - bolt of flame, thrust of the rapier, whatever - and, if it reduces the target to 0, whether it KOd or killed, and how.

But, if the attack leaves the target with hps, it's their success, and the target describes how they prevented the otherwise deadly consequences of the attack.

That’s generally how things go at my table except if the target reduced to 0 is a PC, I let the player of the PC describe how the PC was knocked unconscious and whether there is any significant injury beyond that.