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

[Flamestrike]

Lol. I’ve made them very clear and set my solution for achieving them.

Ok, well if it's not up for debate, why post them in a forum for discussion then?

It seems you've made up your mind. Best of luck to you.

 

[TheSword]

You have the right idea with the slow healing, but the other two adds too much complexity beyond just "die at 0 hp.".

Having a player roll for an injury (broken arm/leg, et cet) is a very cool idea though, I've wanted to employ something like that myself.

It might be better if you have the character roll for those injuries (even mental trauma) once they've reached below their level in hit points, and leave the dead-at-zero rule alone. This would even be compatible with the bloodied mechanic from 4e, and to simplify things, the character starts to bleed out once at or below that bloodied threshold. You get knocked unconscious if you fail a CON save after taking critical damage.

I really do like the idea of an injuries table - but it creates a lot of tracking and healing long term injuries in 5e. I found the 5e rules for lingering injuries a bit lacking. I like the idea of the player choosing the injuries and how they will roleplay them, and the game effects lasting for as long as the exhaustion does.

 

[TheSword]

Ok, well if it's not up for debate, why post them in a forum for discussion then?

It seems you've made up your mind. Best of luck to you.

To see what people thought of them. You’ve had your say and I’ve listened… and agreed to an extent. 1D&D exhaustion is better as it doesn’t involve advantage and we need to affect casters too. You’re pretty categorically against even the principle of it though, so we’re clearly not on the same wavelength beyond that. We want different things from the game so I don’t really see the point of trying to convince you why I should want something, when I could be discussing with other folks reasonable amendments.

 

[ClusterFluster]

I'm not as familiar with the 5e rules concerning that just yet, been away from RPG's for a while. I will try to look that up later.
How would this exhaustion work? Is it like a penalty to attacks and checks that stacks over combat?

 

[TheSword]

I'm not as familiar with the 5e rules concerning that just yet, been away from RPG's for a while. I will try to look that up later.
How would this exhaustion work? Is it like a penalty to attacks and checks that stacks over combat?

Slightly different for 5e and the new 1D&D playtest that I will use. The former has escalating levels 1-6 that have different effects - half move, disadvantage on saves and attacks, half hit points etc.

1D&D has 1-10 levels and each level adds a -1 penalty to various things including attack rolls and spell save DCs.

 

[ClusterFluster]

Slightly different for 5e and the new 1D&D playtest that I will use. The former has escalating levels 1-6 that have different effects - half move, disadvantage on saves and attacks, half hit points etc.

That's interesting, but you may have trouble building that hierarchy of effects if the player can choose being injured somewhere other than what the exhaustion level might suggest.

 

[TheSword]

That's interesting, but you may have trouble building that hierarchy of effects if the player can choose being injured somewhere other than what the exhaustion level might suggest.

You’re right. It’s another reason why the new play test rules work much better with this house rule, on top of the earlier feedback from @Ruin Explorer and @Flamestrike about casters being less effected and some classes being more affected.

 

[ClusterFluster]

You’re right. It’s another reason why the new play test rules work much better with this house rule, on top of the earlier feedback from @Ruin Explorer and @Flamestrike about casters being less effected and some classes being more affected.

Hang on, I may have missed something: Do you mean they can choose the injury, and then a severity is applied to that injury?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So, death rates by class or class group, then? OK.

Er...why not? It's far more concrete than someone sayng "Well, going by what I've seen I think the death rate for warriors is x but the death rate for casters is y". Those observations are nigh-meaningless even if only talking about your own game if you don't have actual numbers to back it up.

Same goes for other game stats e.g. what classes or species get rolled up and-or played how often, etc.

Sure, but to me something you call "hard data" is not merely gathered in a non-transparent way which is essentially anecdotal and dependent entirely on the DMs involved and what sounds like a game system which isn't D&D, isn't specified, and maybe isn't publicly available at all, but some kind of home-built system?

It's organised data, but that doesn't make it "hard". Like, I gathered the DPR and kill data for an entire D&D 5E campaign one time, and even if I'd done it for, say, 10 or 20 campaigns, I wouldn't call that "hard data". It's anecdotal, it's highly specific, it's non-transparent, and so on.

Like, for example, does your data set include "cause of death" in every single case? Does say whether they were in combat, to traps, to disease, to poison, to falling, to judicial execution? Or does it just include who got killed and so on? Is it manually logged? Is from a VTT? Which VTT if so? Hell we don't even know the mechanics by which characters get downed/killed in your system. And even with 5E, anyone playing at home is going to massively bias things by what they're running, group size, group composition, preferred encounter difficulties and so on - so we need all that data as well to consider it in any way "serious data", let alone hard, as inarguable.

There's so much more you'd need to call it "hard data".

 

[el-remmen]

Boy, am I glad I have never seen "rocket tag" happen at my table. It seems like the easy solution to that is to just make sure the players can never really know how many encounters there may be in a given day and enforcing the no more than one long rest in 24 hours rule.

Anyway, I do use a version of the Lingering Wounds option, but in my games it is based on a Con check made if you have two failed death saves but manage to survive.

We also use an "Extended Rest" house rule, which is in addition to a Long Rest and Short Rest, and is defined by a week of uninterrupted nightly Long Rests and light activity otherwise. There are certain forms of damage or effects (like some Lingering Wound results) that require one or more extended rests to recover from (such as undead energy drain).