D&D 5E Level drains, old school adventures and 5e - a proposed alternative?

[Ancalagon]

I think any amount of XP loss is unnecessary and makes zero sense. It never did. Does each hit make them temporarily stupid and unable to learn? Is it draining memories and training?

None of that would be "life drain". XP loss for playing the game (you know, doing the very thing that is supposed to earn you XP) is just a very poorly thought out mechanic, and very meta. Which is probably why they dropped it.

Some experiences messes you up, and you come out of them worse off than before. Real world equivalent is PTSD I suppose.

 

[MechaPilot]

I don't know if this will work for the drain you're looking for, but I recently made my players's characters run in terror.

They ran into dark elves from my setting. The dark elves were equipped with poisoned weapons. One poison made you more susceptible to the second poison (disadvantage on the saves against it). The second poison had a save DC of 20, and failing the save filled in one of your failed death save dots. Furthermore, the poison remained in your system. At each long rest you took after being poisoned, you had to roll a death save. A success would remove a filled-in failed-save dot, but only a restoration spell would remove the poison.

 

[Caliban]

Some experiences messes you up, and you come out of them worse off than before. Real world equivalent is PTSD I suppose.

And just being injured by a vampire or other "life drain" creature does that, every single time, without fail. But getting exposed to dragon fear and dragon breath only makes you stronger, right?

 

[Ancalagon]

And just being injured by a vampire or other "life drain" creature does that, every single time, without fail. But getting exposed to dragon fear and dragon breath only makes you stronger, right?

That's tangling with the undead for you...

 

[Ancalagon]

I don't know if this will work for the drain you're looking for, but I recently made my players's characters run in terror.

They ran into dark elves from my setting. The dark elves were equipped with poisoned weapons. One poison made you more susceptible to the second poison (disadvantage on the saves against it). The second poison had a save DC of 20, and failing the save filled in one of your failed death save dots. Furthermore, the poison remained in your system. At each long rest you took after being poisoned, you had to roll a death save. A success would remove a filled-in failed-save dot, but only a restoration spell would remove the poison.

It doesn't work for this situation, but I am definitely borrowing this idea. Yoon-Suin is a land of poisons after all... although a paladin kinda makes this a bit moot :/

 

[MechaPilot]

Glad I could help.

 

[Greg Benage]

I really like the idea of imposing exhaustion levels for life drain. It's intuitive and puts some of the fear back into appropriate undead types -- fear of immediate suckage combined with longer-term debilitation.