D&D (2024) How many of you would implement the drop to 0 HP, get 1 level of exhaustion house rule?

[DrJawaPhD]

I think everyone should just make up and use whatever house rules they want to get the effect they are looking for in their game... rather than not do that and instead just constantly complain that the rules suck.

This is true to a point, but yo-yo healing is a fairly widely disliked feature of how 5e works, so it's not unreasonable to hope for rule changes to something that many people view is an issue.

I handle it with a Lingering Injury table, which is officially available as an Variant Rule (for 2014 books anyways), although I do homebrew the table a bit. Players are much less content to hover at single digit HP if they have to roll a lingering injury each time they hit 0

 

[AnotherGuy]

If it involves multiple d20's, get in line.

Heh, no

 

[UngainlyTitan]

That's still more stick than carrot.

That is a point of view but i think a lot more carrot than the puny healing currently in play. I reserve my future position until I can see the new rules and try them in play.

 

[deadman1204]

2 levels seems better than 1. The idea that you can just keep virtually killing someone is pretty dumb. Give a dying person 1 hp and they are as strong as full hp. Then they take massive damage and almost die, and get healed 1 hp again to restart the cycle.

I'd say 2-3 levels of exhuastion. Almost dying should be something that lasts and has effects. Not something you can just shrug off. Once almost dying has a penalty, then players start coordinating better so that people don't hit zero.

edit: I'm expecting to much from players. They'll just whine per usual.

 

[the Jester]

Never. I hate death spirals.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Don't reach for Exhaustion, it is the wrong mechanic. It's an existing and underused track that seems like it would be a good fit, but reflection on the nature of it shows it is the wrong tool for the job, and inflict a long term issue on someone who is likely not at fault. And, it actively encourages a selfishness of play that I find opposite of what I want at my table.

Spoiler: D&D is a team game.

D&D is a team game. A character going down is rarely their sole fault, it's a team failure. A tank that was too good at their job of blocking all the foes and took too many hits so they go down. Or a tank that wasn't as good and let a foe get to a low AC & HP member of the party. A cleric that prioritized healing one party member over another and it was the wrong choice. Or just bad luck on getting critted or some failed saves. Having some sort of detriment to whack-a-mole healing (which is intentional in 5e) I can see. But having it last all day (or multiple) affecting one player when they may not have had a lot to do with them going down is punitive.

Third, front line is a valid and needed niche. Being willing to get hit and be in the fray, even if it's a heavily armored cleric who isn't using melee, is a definite thing in D&D. But, as the ones getting attacked the most they are the ones most likely go down to when luck runs poorly. So you are punishing a player for making a choice to play a character that protects others. The melee battlemaster and the archer battlemaster are just as resilient, but one will be targeted a heck of a lot more.

We have a penalty that only goes away once per long rest, but frontliners can get it more than once a combat. They fall, get Healing Word, and then are dropped again. Healing from zero is intentional design paradigm, as the game is supposed to be fun and making players sit out as a penalty is boring, especially in combat which is mechanically heavy so it takes a long time. Yet the way it interacts with the designer-intentional heal-from-zero can make it stack up quickly. So they can accumulate and accumulate throughout an adventure, only dropping by the smallest amount (-1) on a day they completely avoid dropping at all.

So Exhaustion gives inappropriate penalties, for a punitively long period, to someone who likely doesn't deserve it, and unjustly penalizes a class of characters that protect others and therefore penalizes play that I want to see (teamwork and selflessness).

Sicne heal-from-zero is intentional and not something we want to remove, there's no reason to have it in the first place. So it's a bunch of problems, to "solve" an intended benefit. It's there's no upside and plenty of downside.

You could make it group exhaustion then.
Every failed death saving throw, a random PC gets exhaustion. Not necessarily the same person.
Alternatively, tanks can reduce a level of exhaustion on a short rest. Or ignore their first X levels of exhaustion.

I think the notion that having a PC go down is a failure of the team as a whole more than the individual certainly rings true. Perhaps an answer then is to preserve the basic premise, but swap out exhaustion for something else.

Perhaps a party where a PC drops to 0 gets a 'Morale' or 'Readiness' Wound.* Experience Points earned from the engagement would suffer some level of depletion -- maybe 100/(100+20 x #-of-such -wounds) % of normal. Perhaps more importantly, a team that has suffered such are noticeably less in charge of the situation. This will impact attempts to intimidate, impress, project confidence, and so-forth.*Morale would be the one I think fits best for a quasi-medieval setting, but we theoretically still have a morale mechanic in 5e. In modern parlance I think Redcon would work, but seems hopelessly modern.

 

[SteveC]

If you're going to do something like this, I recommend the way Pathfinder 2 handles it. I am running a game of PF2 and play in Pathfinder Society games (their Adventurers League) and have found this works well. PF2 is not 5E but I would call it 5E adjacent.

Here's how dying works:

You are bleeding out or otherwise at death's door. While you have this condition, you are unconscious. Dying always includes a value, and if it ever reaches dying 4, you die. When you're dying, you must attempt a recovery check at the start of your turn each round to determine whether you get better or worse. Your dying condition increases by 1 if you take damage while dying, or by 2 if you take damage from an enemy's critical hit or a critical failure on your save.

If you lose the dying condition by succeeding at a recovery check and are still at 0 Hit Points, you remain unconscious, but you can wake up as described in that condition. You lose the dying condition automatically and wake up if you ever have 1 Hit Point or more. Any time you lose the dying condition, you gain the wounded 1 condition, or increase your wounded condition value by 1 if you already have that condition.

The key is the Wounded condition. This is the thing that keeps the yo-yo from going crazy. It looks like this:

You have been seriously injured. If you lose the dying condition and do not already have the wounded condition, you become wounded 1. If you already have the wounded condition when you lose the dying condition, your wounded condition value increases by 1. If you gain the dying condition while wounded, increase your dying condition value by your wounded value.

The wounded condition ends if someone successfully restores Hit Points to you using Treat Wounds, or if you are restored to full Hit Points by any means and rest for 10 minutes.

So once you get Wounded, if you get dropped again, you start at progressively lower Dying values.

Now, in between combats, PF2 has a short rest mechanic that's 10 minutes. As part of that, you can make a Treat Wounds check with a healer's kit and remove Wounded, so this is mostly an in-combat issue and doesn't persist from encounter to encounter.

I have found that this works effectively to increase tension in combat. I wouldn't just drop it into 5E without some serious consideration, though, since PF2 has things like Hero Points, which you can use to not die at Dying 4, and other mechanics like Toughness, adding +1 to your maximum Dying value. But I think it's a start.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I love how the 2024 Exhaustion rules works in combination with VRGtR Stress!

I think I'll use both on my games. A PC dropping to 0hp is 1 exhaustion level and a DC 15 Wis save for the rest of the group to avoid 1 level of Stress.

 

[Vael]

Conceivably for like a Dark Sun campaign, but not in general.

If this is mainly about wanting to stop the process of waiting to heal a PC until they get dropped, then may I suggest instead BG3 house rule of losing one's action the turn after being revived?

 

[Xeviat]

If exhaustion was cured 1 level on a short rest for everyone (as it really should be, why else do we get breaks and lunches at work), I'd totally be down for frequently using exhaustion as a penalty. I'd probably want to use 10 steps before incapacitation/death, but a -5 penalty would put most people out anyway (unless you're level 20 adventurers with 5 levels of exhaustion fighting weaker threats, which is kind of cool).

In fact, now I'm thinking about that...