D&D 5E Doing More with Exhaustion

[Saeviomagy]

I would be careful about playing around with exhaustion - it screws Frenzy Barbarians if you give other classes opportunity to use it for additional purposes as they can't afford to do so because they have a core mechanic already adding to it. You're basically giving new abilities to everyone but them...

Allow a frenzying barbarian to ignore all effects of exhaustion for the duration of frenzy.

And yes, that includes dying.

That might actually make frenzy worthwhile.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I had another idea... what if you took out death saves entirely and replaced them with exhaustion?

More specifically:
Get to 0 hitpoints? You may continue fighting and do not make death saves. All other effects of being at zero hitpoints still occur, but instead of 'failed death saves' accruing, you get levels of exhaustion. So yes, any time you take a hit that equals your hitpoints while at 0 hitpoints, you immediately die. Crits give 2 levels of exhaustion. Hits give 1.

The current knockout rules would need to be retired.

Henchment monsters would be interesting - do you just have them die at 0 hitpoints? Or do you use this system? The latter makes henchment pretty resilient, the former makes a really cinematic game, where mooks die left right and centre, but the heroes and villains get badly dusted up and then come out swinging until they are really, totally dead dead dead.

Interesting that in the current system, you are BETTER OFF knocking someone/something out, because then there is no chance they will stand up with a crit death save...

Upsides:
No more "you are unconscious, so this round you do nothing but bleed".
No more whackamole.
No more DM guilt over CDGing people when it makes sense for monsters to do so - death will come because characters choose to keep fighting.

Downsides:
People never become unconscious through damage (although being at stage 6 exhaustion is pretty close).
There's no mechanic to knock someone out (although again, you can get someone to stage 6 exhaustion and not be threatened by them)
Not being able to adventure for a week becomes the driver to be cautious in combat, not death.

Changes that aren't either:
Having lots of very small attacks becomes stronger.
Healing becomes weaker.
Exhaustion restoration becomes much stronger.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I am just going to say don't allow more then One Concentration spell at a time. It can mess up the entire game for Casters and gives them way too many advantages.

So my opinion is just don't allow it's not worth it. Just so someone can feel more powerful.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I would be careful about playing around with exhaustion - it screws Frenzy Barbarians if you give other classes opportunity to use it for additional purposes as they can't afford to do so because they have a core mechanic already adding to it. You're basically giving new abilities to everyone but them...

Perhaps you could combine it with Inspiration - if you have gained inspiration, one of the things you can do is an extra attack or whatever at the cost of both inspiration and gaining a level of exhaustion. That way it is a very limited ability. Or just put a hardcap of once/session or something.

 

[Baumi]

Just wanted to add, that the Recovery Rate is not 100% static, even in the Core Books! The Chase Rules (Dungeon Master Guide) give you Exhaustion for dashing too long, but ALL exhaustion levels gained from this are removed by a SHORT or long rest.

 

[phantomK9]

I am just going to say don't allow more then One Concentration spell at a time. It can mess up the entire game for Casters and gives them way too many advantages.

So my opinion is just don't allow it's not worth it. Just so someone can feel more powerful.

The irony of course is after doing all the mental work to bang out a house rule that I thought would work, only one person in the group is actually going to play a spell caster, and that one will be a Sorcerer with mostly instantaneous damage spells. So concentration may never even come up in the game.

Still this has been a great exercise as I'm seeing a lot of great ideas for using exhaustion. I've been toying with adding rules for when hit points get to certain amounts in the game (kind of like "bloodied" from 4e) but rather than getting special cool benefits you would get one level of exhaustion when at 1/2 hit points, another level at 1/4 hit points and another at 0 hit points. But this I think would be too hard on low level characters, so I haven't spent much time on it. Still there are several ideas up thread which I might just look into, especially getting rid of death saves and replace with some kind of exhaustion mechanic.

 

[phantomK9]

Revisiting the idea of using exhaustion for damage, here is something I thought of:

This came from the latest UA article where they attempted to make a rule using Vitality and Hit Points, but honestly that thing was way to complicated to implement. An alternative using Exhaustion would be, rather than losing Vitality when a critical hit is scored the character takes a level of Exhaustion. This helps to simulate the lasting effects of a particular vicious hit without the equally vicious book keeping from the UA Vitality system.

 

[Jamie Van Doren]

I know this is a little late for the spell casting/concentration issue you were having, but we play tested a mechanic in my game this weekend, and I figured I'd share. In the party we have a Wizard, a Warlock, a Fighter, and a Rogue -- so not much in the way of healing, which may be why this worked out OK.

I allowed our caster to concentrate on one additional spell at the cost of 1 HD per round. If the HD was spent on concentration, it wasn't available for healing during the short rest. If he went beyond the amount of HD available to him, he began burning levels of exhaustion each round. It provided a nice trade off, and an easy way to track, since I give everyone tokens for their HD that they give to me when they spend them. They get the tokens back at the end of a long rest. (anyone else notice how much people like Some kind of physical representation of stuff?)

It played out OK. First big(ish) combat, he buffed himself and the fighter with Protection from Evil/Good. Combat went fairly quickly and all was well. They didn't bother with a short rest. But then they got ambushed by just a couple of goblins. The Wizard got hit during the surprise round for a fair amount of damage, and even though it was an easy fight (except for the surprise) they needed to do a short rest, during which the Wizard suddenly realizes he has no HD left to heal himself.

The next fight and the fighter was all buff me again, and the wizard was like... ummm, sorry maybe I'll save that for when we Really, really need it. So, basically it hasn't seemed to break the game or anything, because now he seems really reluctant to do it. Now that may be because they don't have easy access to a lot of healing magic, so we'll see what happens if we have someone in the party who can heal.

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Btw - I liked someone's idea of a level of exhaustion after hitting 0 HP. I added it, cause it's pretty great. I'm also thinking about adding a mechanic of reducing Con bonus by 1 with every critical hit taken (which would reduce Max HP). It seemed more straight forward than the Unearthed Arcana Vitality rules - plus, less math - and it makes critical hits a little more scary not sure to make them removed with the spending of a HD, a long rest, or something else. Thoughts?