D&D 5E Making Combat Mean Something [+]

[Flamestrike]

That isn’t a given. There will be peaks and troughs and I don’t want to artificially put constraints on adventure design and player action by playing the resource game to add risk. I just don’t think it works very well.

But you're not putting any artificial constraints on anything by extending the rest frequency. Those contraints are already there in the game you're already running. You're just changing the duration of when they happen.

By your rationale Exhaustion as a fundamental rule hurts martials more.

Yes. That's exactly my point.

And it's objectively true.

You're playing a 5th level Rogue. You have 3 levels of Exhaustion. Your attack rolls and skill checks are now made at disadvantage, and you can no longer employ sneak attack. Your DPR has just been reduced to 10 percent of what it was, and you're now far more likely to fail skill checks.

You've lost (or had severely nerfed) your core class features.

Terry is playing a 5th level GWM Fighter. He also has 3 levels of Exhaustion. His attack rolls also have disadvantage, more than halving his DPR, and rendering his feat moot. What little 'out of combat' stuff he could do, is now next to impossible due to disadvantage.

Im playing a 5th level Wizard with 3 levels of exhaustion.

My spells are: Magic Missile, Shield, Mirror Image, Misty Step, Fireball, Hypnotic pattern, Counter spell, Fly, Invisibility, Levitate

My rituals (iin my book and ready to go) are: Comprehend languages, Detect Magic, Alarm, Tiny Hut, Find Familiar, Floating Disk, Phantom Steed

My cantrips are: Light, Friends, Toll the Dead, Minor Illusion

Assume I have a familiar.

I can literally ignore exhaustion. I retain all my core class features, totally unaltered.

The only thing I care about is disadvantage on my saves (which you and Terry are also copping anyway). I dont give a damn about attack rolls (none of my spells use them, including cantrips) nor do I give a damn about disadvantage on skill checks (I rarely make them anyway, barring Perception checks which my Familiar can make for me anyway, I can sub in a spell for most utility I need, by levitating, reading the language, detecting the magic, waking up automatically if disturbed, using an illusion, carrying heavy loads, sending my familiar in to do the task, or riding off on my magic horse) for the reasons that I just gave, but also because my Familiar can Help me, canceling out the Disadvantage anyway.

Exhaustion utterly wrecks Martials. It cripples them. Casters frankly dont give much of a damn about it (they can just switch to spells that ignore attack rolls, and they rarely need to make skill checks, and when they do, they have a spell that can do it for them). It's an inconvenience to them, nothing more.

 

[Lanefan]

I’m not a fan of gritty realism healing because it just slows down time, it’s the equivalent of just packing more into a day artificially. I don’t like the fact that long rest abilities only kick in once a week.

Fine, but note tha what you propose in the OP is going to be slowing down time anyway while they recover.

 

[Mort]

Personally, I wouldn't do this and have never found the need. Other than cantrips, spells are finite, while weapon attacks are infinite.

Except HP are also finite. Martials cannot, in fact, make attacks "all day" they will run out of HPs long before that. Monsters aren't boards, they hit back.

 

[Flamestrike]

Half h.p. if you're a Wizard could hurt a lot, as half of not much is quite little.

But I (as a caster) can avoid damage in ways Martials cannot. Fly, Levitate, Misty Step, Mirror Image, Absorb elements, Shield etc.

The Fighter, is now stuck having to be up the front doing fighter stuff with his attack rolls (his one core thing) at disadvantage, his HP halved, and what little 'out of combat' utility he does have (skill) equally nerfed.

God help the Rogue who also loses Sneak attack for the rest of the adventure (nixing his DPR to 'why bother playing], and his skills (his core thing) are also nerfed to oblivion.

Any Martial in that sitation has two options: Fall back to rest (buffing the Wizard, and increasing martial-caster disparity) or push on sucking, neither of which are fun options.

Meanwhile the Wizard shrugs. He doesnt care about attack rolls, has ways of avoiding getting into combat to begin with, likely has a familiar that can do it for him (or Help him, negating his disadvantage) and his DPR and Utility remains totally unaffected.

And he's more than happy to fall back and long rest.

 

[Flamestrike]

Except HP are also finite. Martials cannot, in fact, make attacks "all day" they will run out of HPs long before that. Monsters aren't boards, they hit back.

And becuase those monsters are up and involved in the combat at least twice as long (due to disadvantage to attack them back nixing DPR for martials) they deal more damage in return.

You wind up with martials swinging and missing a lot (their one big thing they do) and having damage reduced when they do hit (no GWM or Sneak Attack) getting pounded back in return, with thier HP halved.

Meanwhile the Wizard misty steps away and is otherwise unaffected.

 

[Lanefan]

I find these odds extremely unlikely given my experience of 5e combat (the odds are much more like 50% even for games with few combats), but even if we take this seriously, you are then saying that you want approximately a 1-in-24 (about 4.17%) chance of a character death every single session.

shrug ... I've been running at about that average death rate for well over 35 years and it hasn't been a problem...

(my 3 big campaigns have been, in order, .0463, .0305, and .0476* deaths per session; multiply those numbers by 100 to get the % rate to compare with the 4.17% shown above)

* - in progress, numbers fully up to date.

Or, to put that in slightly different terms, you want approximately 2 character deaths every year assuming weekly sessions (52 weeks with a 1/24 chance of a character death gives 2.6 average deaths per year, SD 1.57) purely due to death by 0-hp exhaustion. This is excluding any other source of death, e.g. failing death saves.

See my above math. You're getting on average 2-3 deaths a year from this.

2-3 deaths a year is nothing. And the game does provide ways and means of revival, remember.

Your proposed rules do not give any incentive for fighting like a team. They in fact do very much the opposite. It is every man for himself, because a single bad round is enough to put you at risk of instant death. The rules you have proposed will punish players who make desperate last stands unless they have already accepted and embraced that their death is inevitable. That is the whole point of (as you term it) "making combat mean something." To go into combat is to court death. This creates the incentive: "Do everything you can to avoid combat, and if you engage in combat and it goes poorly, do everything you can to escape."

For me, that would be the point: to return to the idea of survival being a goal in itself. Put another way, when five characters head out into the field where danger potentially lurks at every turn there shouldn't be any guarantee that five characters will come back.

 

[Lanefan]

But I (as a caster) can avoid damage in ways Martials cannot. Fly, Levitate, Misty Step, Mirror Image, Absorb elements, Shield etc.

The Fighter, is now stuck having to be up the front doing fighter stuff with his attack rolls (his one core thing) at disadvantage, his HP halved, and what little 'out of combat' utility he does have (skill) equally nerfed.

God help the Rogue who also loses Sneak attack for the rest of the adventure (nixing his DPR to 'why bother playing], and his skills (his core thing) are also nerfed to oblivion.

Any Martial in that sitation has two options: Fall back to rest (buffing the Wizard, and increasing martial-caster disparity) or push on sucking, neither of which are fun options.

Meanwhile the Wizard shrugs. He doesnt care about attack rolls, has ways of avoiding getting into combat to begin with, likely has a familiar that can do it for him (or Help him, negating his disadvantage) and his DPR and Utility remains totally unaffected.

And he's more than happy to fall back and long rest.

You still haven't given an opinion on my idea of reducing available spell slots with each degree of exhaustion, which would seem to answer many of your qualms here.

 

[Enrahim2]

I want their to be a real risk of dying and not just because the GM targeted a fallen PC.

I take issue with this. Are you certain what you really want isn't a real risk of  losing?

The reason the game is made to make it so hard to die is that brutal experience has shown that dying just are not any fun in most rpgs. However it is very possible to lose in ways that are much cooler. Let the enemy get away with the mcguffin. Let the characters wake up in a cell. Let the enemy kill the escorted. All of these are classics.

If you first insist on changing rules, how about having the characters panic at 0 rather than fall unconcious and die? Much more embarrassing, keeps the balance of the game similar, and avoids the pain of having to go trough the motions of constructing a new character.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So it will be no secret that I have long been looking for a way to make combat more meaningful - instead of the whack-a-mole - sacks of hit points that opponents turn into in 5e. I want their to be a real risk of dying and not just because the GM targeted a fallen PC. I want PCs to view combat as a risk and think about ways to improve their odds or avoid it all together.

I’d like to recreate the danger of combat with three simple rules which I hope in combination will make combat far more meaningful - and interesting to me as a DM.

- Firstly dropping to 0 hp doesn’t mean unconscious. It means a serious wound - a real medical emergency but not completely out. They still take death saves as normal but when on 0 hp characters can’t rise from prone but can take a single bonus action, a single action, or move (but not stand up). Taking any action or move forces them to make an additional death save.

- Secondly, I’ll be using the slow healing rules. Spending HD is the only way to regain wounds, which represent bandaging and rest. No spending 8 hours to wake fresh as a daisy.

- Thirdly, and this is the doozy, I want dropping to 0 hp to cause the Pc to gain 1d6 levels of exhaustion. Yes the PC has a 1/6 chance of dying instantly when dropped to 0 hp. When their head gets lopped off. The exhaustion represents their wound - which they are free to describe as they like. When their exhaustion is gone (through the normal means) their wound is gone.

This campaign won’t be the typical dungeon crawl hack and slash. Combats will be rarer - one to three per day. With most adventures to have 1-3 combats potentially. It will also mostly be operating at a low-ish level 3-7. What are peoples though, could it work cohesively.

So the two major issues I see here are that D&D 5E doesn't balance damage and particularly doesn't balance people getting "downed" across the party.

Dropping to 0 HP wildly disproportionately happens to the frontliners, who are typically 25-50% of the party. They account for easily 80% of "dropped to 0 HP" incidents.

It also puts a massive burden on the healers - healing in combat in D&D 5E is usually a weak strategy - obviously it'll be a better one here. But that means any casters who can heal, are likely to be pumping many of their spell slots into the frontliners.

I can think of nothing worse than having low hp and low AC in these circumstances.

Being an Arcane caster will still be the best experience here. You won't have to blow spell slots on healing, and you're extremely unlikely to be downed - you might use more on defense than usual, but still not many.

These are the issues with a lot of attempts to "make combat matter", because what they actually amount to is "make combat punishing for frontliners and repetitive for healers, whilst leaving it the same for other full casters". This is certainly nothing new - 2E could often head this way, for example.

 

[TheSword]

I take issue with this. Are you certain what you really want isn't a real risk of  losing?

The reason the game is made to make it so hard to die is that brutal experience has shown that dying just are not any fun in most rpgs. However it is very possible to lose in ways that are much cooler. Let the enemy get away with the mcguffin. Let the characters wake up in a cell. Let the enemy kill the escorted. All of these are classics.

If you first insist on changing rules, how about having the characters panic at 0 rather than fall unconcious and die? Much more embarrassing, keeps the balance of the game similar, and avoids the pain of having to go trough the motions of constructing a new character.

I’d like the risk of death to affect behavior.

One of the fundamental problems with 5e as written when it comes to goals is that combat is usually the most efficient method to get what you want. Want that Magic item - kill the person who has it. Want to find the information the person holds - beat them to 0hp and tie them up. Let’s have some other choices.

I get that it being hard to die is good for new players - particularly those raised on story mode computer games and save points. I just don’t think it’s necessary or a good idea for experienced players. Anyway, we’re again drifting into the ‘should combat be dangerous’ discussion.