Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 9414739" data-attributes="member: 1465">I think yours are very good examples, attaching a narrative description can help a lot. It probably sounds a lot like a wound system, so it may not exactly fit with exhaustion levels when they are supposed to represent simply getting tired, but if we want to use exhaustion levels when dropping to 0hp (the premise of this thread) then your descriptions would work very well. In fact, I think you could also attach some of your narrative description to the PHB standard 5e exhaustion levels if using them at 0hp, no need to create new effects (even though they are nice).As I wrote in my previous post, a wound system works well as a deterrent, or more clearly it should be used sparingly. If you have a lot of PCs often dropping to 0hp in your games, a wound system can become really annoying: you don't want to constantly have multiple PCs in the party with attached penalties. And if your PCs drop to 0hp often, that's normally an indication that there are lots of combats in your game, and perhaps the DM is making battles inevitable, so having half the party constantly injured will mess up with the DM's plans themselves.The ways I see a wound systems working well, is first of all if I use it to replace death. Death is already a deterrent for playing recklessly or lousy. But at the same time death can occur for honest mistakes, players still in their learning phase, DM's incorrect estimations of difficulties, or sheer bad luck, for all of which it makes sense for me not to want to punish a player excessively. So I use lingering penalties or other drawbacks instead of plain death.But then also, it works well if this ends up being as infrequent as maximum 1 or maybe 2 PCs affected by a lingering penalty at the same time, and not more than one penalty per PC. This certainly doesn't create a death spiral, it only gives a penalty substantial enough for the party to change tactics for a while as a result. Maybe the Wizard can't cast spells effectively for the rest of the day, and the party has to quit thinking of solving things with magic, or maybe the Rogue is slowed down and the party cannot count on scouting... the wounded character generally has to step back from their full-skill role, and the party has to adapt around the lost capabilities. That is not at all the opposite of fun for me.</blockquote>

Verification