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

[TheSword]

In all seriousness, the best way to achieve your objective is to play 1E or 2E.

So I can see that would achieve the aim of making combat mean something but I’d just lose so much stuff I love about 5e, like the action economy, the character design, and the magic system. It’s not a trade off I’ll make if I don’t have to. Hence the house rule filling the gap for me.

 

[Velderan]

So Pathfinder 2e handles death like this and I think it could be easily adapted to 5e to help you achieve what you're looking for:

• When a character hits 0 HP, they gain 1 rank of the dying condition (2 if a crit put them down to 0 HP). Death saves are handled similarly to 5e where a save is rolled each round, with a crit save lowering your dying condition by 2 ranks, regular save 1 rank, fail increasing it by 1 rank, and a crit fail being the same except they die if they have the wounded condition. If a character gains 4 levels of the dying condition, they die. How do you get the wounded condition?
• Being healed to 1 HP or more brings them back to fighting shape, but they gain a rank of the wounded condition. If a player with the wounded condition gets knocked to 0 HP again, they gain the same number of dying ranks as their current wounded level. Each time they recover from dying, they gain another wounded level. So each time you go down to 0 HP the risk of actually dying increases. As far as I know, there's no mechanical penalties from having the wounded condition.
• Removing the wounded condition requires either being restored to full HP and resting 10 minutes or a successful Medicine check being used to restore HP.

 

[Blue]

Mechanically, D&D may not be the system for you. It's not based around a combat meaning anything. Mechanically, it's based around attrition. Things like slow healing adjust only one aspect of that attrition, leaving others unaddressed.

And raising the stakes in a combat by making it deadlier exasperates differences in classes with at-will vs. long-rest vs. short-rest recovery models, throwing them out of balance against the other classes.

All together, it means that trying to make individual combats more meaningful either means that they all need win and/or lose conditions outside normal combat (stopping rituals, time limits, etc.), or that a large number of cascading tweaks are needed where another system might be your best bet.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

(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)

This would mean that, if we take the "there's only about a 25% chance even one person drops to 0 HP per session" thing seriously, the proposed rule would effectively double the lethality of the game. Yes, I think it's a pretty significant change to make the game twice as deadly!

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.

Okay. So you're cool with the players taking an entirely mercenary view. Your statements weren't the ones I was responding to; TheSword's were. You can't simultaneously seek to incentivize teamwork and other-valuing choices and incentivize personal survival and self-serving choices. Either you're working at cross purposes (which leads to bad design, design that actively fights against itself), or you're saying one thing but doing another (which leads to deceptive design--a distinct but still serious issue.)

I, personally, very much wanted to encourage characters to act nobly, show compassion, and value people and places inherently, not instrumentally. The proposed rules run directly counter to that; they will almost surely teach players to be murderhobos. I'm a bad fit for a murderhobo game, and told my players as much. As I said in the "endings" thread, I love heroes and happy endings, and I rapidly lose interest in grimdark/"90s antihero"/"Evil vs Evil" type stories, which are lamentably extremely common in fiction today. We have, together, built conditions for a world where dark things really do happen, but the player characters can fight back and make things actually better. Often incompletely or haltingly; real, lasting change is hard, and usually takes a long time. But you can still make a difference and protect things that matter--and you may need to make great sacrifices along the way.

I adore actual teamwork games. D&D, with exactly one exception (you know the one), has manifestly failed to actually support real teamwork. It supports murderhoboism, however, which can create a fragile facsimile of teamwork that dissolves like cotton candy in water at the first sign of danger. In other words, a "teamwork" which does not merit the name. ("...courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality." C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, letter XXIX)

 

[jgsugden]

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....

The first statement: That you want battle to be more meaningful ... and the second: You want PCs to view combat as a risk ... seem fairly unrelated to me.

Meaningful means having a serious, important, or useful quality or purpose. Having a chance for a random roll to kill you has grave impact, but I'm not seeing it providing meaning for the combat. It just adds increased risk that players will lose access to the PC they've built over time. I've had this happen over the decades - a PC with an engaging story walks into a room, rolls poorly to spot the ambush, and then dies due to a critical hit with instant death ... or fails a disintegrate save in AD&D ... or otherwise saw a good story end pointlessly. It absolutely did not add meaning to the combat, or the campaign. It felt like an unrecoverable video game crash that corrupts the save game.

If you want meaning for the combats, I suggest looking at alternate goals to be present in the combat other than survival. Survival as the reason for a combat to exist gets old over time, regardless of the chances of death. To give the combats more meaning, it is more effective to provide other incentives to be in combat and other objectioves to achieve in that combat:

• Fight past the enemies before they can engage something. An enemy cult leader is in the middle of a ritual and you have to fight to where they are (or sneak there) and disrupt the ritual.
• Save someone from the enemies. An NPC ally has been kidnapped and the PCs have to sneak into a lair and get the prisoner free without the enemy killing their NPC ally.
• Protect someone or something from the assualt. The PCs are speaking to an NPC when enemies attack the NPC.
• Keep the enemies from getting away. Someone robs the PCs and they have to stop him before he gets away with the treasure.
• Solve a puzzle before the waves of enemies overcome you or force you to flee. Can you activate the magical artifact before the enemy forces you to flee?
• Race the foes to a target - Two groups are trying to rob a magically trapped house at the same time.
• Stop a reward from decreasing - The PCs find their way to a treasure pile strewn across the floor, but it the floor is collapsing into lava as the PCs fight the guardian of the treasure.
• PCs can't really win with violence, but have to convince targets in the fight to change their views - meaning the PCs can't kill anyone, but they have to survive longenough to change those views.

All of these ideas are things you'll see in TV, movies, comics, books, and other fiction ... but are not used in most D&D games. Instead, most D&D games focus 95% of their combats on survival and pillaging.

If you want the players to find the combats meaningful and care about the combats - this is the focus I'd choose to develop further, regardless of ho well you think you use it now. Thanks Pete

That being said - if you want fear of death to be there, and that is the driving goal, here is the quick and dirty way:

1.) Track hp loss below zero. If you're at 1 and get hit for 7, you're at -6. Apply your negative hp as a penalty to death saves. Yes, this means that most PCs will die in 2 or 3 rounds.

2.) Healing damage at -hp is 2 for 1. If you toss a healing word at a PC at -8 and heal them for 8, they only recover half of that hp total and get to -4 - still dying.

3.) A failed death save deals 5 damage.

Yes, you still die when you hit negative hp equal to your maximum hp. If you want a bit less lethality than all of this, PCs get to use their constitution saving throw bonus for death saves.

If you want to toss in a wound system (where PCs get injuries that hamper you until healed) there are a lot available. i don't use them, but I find that having a deck of injury cards and giving them out if you are hit by a critical hit on the first attack of a turn, or if you go to zero hp, works well enough. The version I built for a friend are homebrew and feature 4 zones on the card with one or more damage types tied to each zone. If the wound is one of the specified types, use the related wound impact. If the type is not present, the PC is not wounded. Each card has a theme based around where the wound is located (digit, arm/tentacle/pincher, leg, lower body, upper body, neck, head, internal injury). If you do not have the body part listed, the DM adapts to make it make sense or discards the wound at their discretion.

 

[TheSword]

The first statement: That you want battle to be more meaningful ... and the second: You want PCs to view combat as a risk ... seem fairly unrelated to me.

Meaningful means having a serious, important, or useful quality or purpose. Having a chance for a random roll to kill you has grave impact, but I'm not seeing it providing meaning for the combat. It just adds increased risk that players will lose access to the PC they've built over time. I've had this happen over the decades - a PC with an engaging story walks into a room, rolls poorly to spot the ambush, and then dies due to a critical hit with instant death ... or fails a disintegrate save in AD&D ... or otherwise saw a good story end pointlessly. It absolutely did not add meaning to the combat, or the campaign. It felt like an unrecoverable video game crash that corrupts the save game.

If you want meaning for the combats, I suggest looking at alternate goals to be present in the combat other than survival. Survival as the reason for a combat to exist gets old over time, regardless of the chances of death. To give the combats more meaning, it is more effective to provide other incentives to be in combat and other objectioves to achieve in that combat:

• Fight past the enemies before they can engage something. An enemy cult leader is in the middle of a ritual and you have to fight to where they are (or sneak there) and disrupt the ritual.
• Save someone from the enemies. An NPC ally has been kidnapped and the PCs have to sneak into a lair and get the prisoner free without the enemy killing their NPC ally.
• Protect someone or something from the assualt. The PCs are speaking to an NPC when enemies attack the NPC.
• Keep the enemies from getting away. Someone robs the PCs and they have to stop him before he gets away with the treasure.
• Solve a puzzle before the waves of enemies overcome you or force you to flee. Can you activate the magical artifact before the enemy forces you to flee?
• Race the foes to a target - Two groups are trying to rob a magically trapped house at the same time.
• Stop a reward from decreasing - The PCs find their way to a treasure pile strewn across the floor, but it the floor is collapsing into lava as the PCs fight the guardian of the treasure.
• PCs can't really win with violence, but have to convince targets in the fight to change their views - meaning the PCs can't kill anyone, but they have to survive longenough to change those views.

All of these ideas are things you'll see in TV, movies, comics, books, and other fiction ... but are not used in most D&D games. Instead, most D&D games focus 95% of their combats on survival and pillaging.

If you want the players to find the combats meaningful and care about the combats - this is the focus I'd choose to develop further, regardless of ho well you think you use it now. Thanks Pete

That being said - if you want fear of death to be there, and that is the driving goal, here is the quick and dirty way:

1.) Track hp loss below zero. If you're at 1 and get hit for 7, you're at -6. Apply your negative hp as a penalty to death saves. Yes, this means that most PCs will die in 2 or 3 rounds.

2.) Healing damage at -hp is 2 for 1. If you toss a healing word at a PC at -8 and heal them for 8, they only recover half of that hp total and get to -4 - still dying.

3.) A failed death save deals 5 damage.

Yes, you still die when you hit negative hp equal to your maximum hp. If you want a bit less lethality than all of this, PCs get to use their constitution saving throw bonus for death saves.

If you want to toss in a wound system (where PCs get injuries that hamper you until healed) there are a lot available. i don't use them, but I find that having a deck of injury cards and giving them out if you are hit by a critical hit on the first attack of a turn, or if you go to zero hp, works well enough. The version I built for a friend are homebrew and feature 4 zones on the card with one or more damage types tied to each zone. If the wound is one of the specified types, use the related wound impact. If the type is not present, the PC is not wounded. Each card has a theme based around where the wound is located (digit, arm/tentacle/pincher, leg, lower body, upper body, neck, head, internal injury). If you do not have the body part listed, the DM adapts to make it make sense or discards the wound at their discretion.

By meaningful - I mean the choice to engage in combat or seek other methods is meaningful. As I mentioned earlier I genuinely believe that combat is the easiest method to achieve most aims in D&D. Why sneak through a house when you can just bump the person off and search the house - or tie them up and interrogate them. I want not fighting to be an option.

However, if you’re going to have less combats then you have to deal with the fact that D&D derives it’s difficulty from attrition. If the attrition isn’t there then the game is too easy. Unless of course you are going to increase the difficulty of foes to an excessive degree.

So the alternative is to make combat a greater challenge. In my case by making it so that at 0 hp while not dead necessarily (as in earlier editions) you are essentially battered. At that point the party must re-evaluate their behavior and come up with another idea or risk death of one or more characters.

I totally take on board @Ruin Explorer and @Flamestrike ’s feeling that this disproportionally affects martials but I think that is lessened by using One D&D playtest and ensuring that the encounter design spreads the pain and makes it harder for one character to easily tank. The role of tank is not a good choice in this kind of campaign essentially.

The alternative is to leave combat as a fairly weak diversion which little consequence, risk or uncertainty - in essence meaningless.

 

[Andvari]

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. 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. Possibly more, since there's something of a domino effect in D&D stuff--I'm just working off of your stated expectation that someone drops to 0 HP in only 25% of sessions. And, as I said, my experience with 5e combat indicates that that is wildly underestimating the actual rate.

A 4% death rate per session and 2-3 deaths in a whole year of playing is quite low, yet this is written as if this is a high death rate? I mean, even if you more than double it to 10%, that would only mean 1 death every 10 sessions on average...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Survival as the reason for a combat to exist gets old over time, regardless of the chances of death.

Indeed. That combat means you may not live past it makes it concerning; it does not make it matter. It is the things which give value to survival that matter. Conflating meaning with utility is a lamentably common mistake.

A 4% death rate per session and 2-3 deaths in a whole year of playing is quite low, yet this is written as if this is a high death rate? I mean, even if you more than double it to 10%, that would only mean 1 death every 10 sessions on average...

A character dying every ten weeks would mean that by the end of the year, you'd have practically a brand new party. (EV: 5.2, SD: 2.16) Heck, there's a better than 25% chance that by the end of the first year, you'll have more than 6 deaths!

And no, I don't think 2-3 deaths in a year is low. I think it is quite high. Especially since this is 2-3 extra deaths, completely separate from deaths due to failing death saves or other effects that kill characters (that is, petrification, the "chunky salsa" rule, etc.) 2-3 deaths a year means literally any investment I might put into my fellow characters is pointless; either my character will die, and thus nothing they cared about will matter, or most of their friends will die, and thus it won't matter that they were friends. Death is the ultimate investment killer. Why bother when you can be almost certain it'll all be gone in a few months?

Or to use Dorothy Jones Heydt's "eight deadly words": "I don't care what happens to these people."

 

[TheSword]

Mechanically, D&D may not be the system for you. It's not based around a combat meaning anything. Mechanically, it's based around attrition. Things like slow healing adjust only one aspect of that attrition, leaving others unaddressed.

And raising the stakes in a combat by making it deadlier exasperates differences in classes with at-will vs. long-rest vs. short-rest recovery models, throwing them out of balance against the other classes.

All together, it means that trying to make individual combats more meaningful either means that they all need win and/or lose conditions outside normal combat (stopping rituals, time limits, etc.), or that a large number of cascading tweaks are needed where another system might be your best bet.

You win EnWorld Thread Bingo! We’ll done. I’ve been playing D&D for 30+ years I get to decide if it’s for me.

Tweaking rules to make the game work better for you is part of the joy of being a long time player, gaming with friends. What I’m interested in (note + thread) are what are the consequences or the other tweaks needed.

 

[Quickleaf]

Will your players still be able to conga line through healing spirit?

 

[TheSword]

Indeed. That combat means you may not live past it makes it concerning; it does not make it matter. It is the things which give value to survival that matter. Conflating meaning with utility is a lamentably common mistake.


A character dying every ten weeks would mean that by the end of the year, you'd have practically a brand new party.

No, I don't think 2-3 deaths in a year is low. I think it is quite high. Especially since this is 2-3 extra deaths, completely separate from deaths due to failing death saves or other effects that kill characters. 2-3 deaths a year means literally any investment I might put into my fellow characters is pointless; either my character will die, and thus nothing they cared about will matter, or most of their friends will die, and thus it won't matter that they were friends. Death is the ultimate investment killer. Why bother when you can be almost certain it'll all be gone in a few months?

Or to use Dorothy Jones Heydt's "eight deadly words": "I don't care what happens to these people."

We play monthly for the record. Live for the moment.

For the record I mentioned earlier I’m leaning to 2d6-1 exhaustion levels under 1D&D so a one in 36 chance of a fresh PC dying instantly.

 

[TheSword]

Will your players still be able to conga line through healing spirit?

I’m not sure healing spirit works like that anymore.

Though to be honest - I find HP for PCs long term to be a very trivial thing to replenish. Spending HD usually gets most PCs healed unless they were very badly damaged.

I just don’t see clerics being needed to do large amounts of in combat healing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

We play monthly for the record. Live for the moment.

For the record I mentioned earlier I’m leaning to 2d6-1 exhaustion levels under 1D&D so a one in 36 chance of a fresh PC dying instantly.

Er...what? 2d6-1 would have 6 levels of exhaustion as the most common result. Unless you mean something else or have expanded it to 11 levels of exhaustion...?

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

I agree that a lot of monsters can seem like ‘bags of hit points’, both because of how a lot of them are designed and because of how how combat is sometimes DM’d.

I also agree that there should be more and better reasons to avoid going to zero HP.

But I’m confused because I don’t see the relationship between the two. How does making zero HP more undesirable change the ‘big bag of hit points’ nature of combat itself?

 

[Stormonu]

Are you changing non-rest-based healing (spells and similar) to adjust for the increased deadliness of being dropped? Currently a healer burning all of their slots can't generally match the incoming damage of most encounters. With these rules, there will be a lot more incentive to just nova as hard as you can at the beginning of a fight to reduce the number of combatants and therefore incoming damage unless using those resources to heal during the fight is made more realistic. The reduces number of encounters per day will also encourage, and increase the ability to nova for those classes with repeated nova capability.

As a side note, in my games, I've trained the players into leaning heavily into using HD between combats and rarely use healing spells or healing potions (healing potions are extremely rare in my games, and the party sees them as real treasures). I haven't quite figured out what to do with Paladin lay on hands (considering making it 2 hp/level healing), but then again no one tends to play paladins in my game for some odd reason.

The cleric & druid players enjoy this because they get to use their more interesting spells instead of having to load up on every type of healing spell that comes along.

As far as dropping to 0 HP in a fight, for my own games I'm not so worried about that initial drop to 0. However, I keep a table for when that first death save is failed for "lingering injuries". It consists of scars, broken bones, torn muscles and other injuries that potions and cure magic simply can't fix. They all have a progression for a subsequent second failed death save - for example, the broken leg is actually also crushed and even if it heals you may always have a limp. Get to 3 failed death saves but get brought back revivify*? Well, you may be alive once again, but it may be that leg is gone...

This also has consequences if the PC happens to fixed back up and drop again. Could be the first time it was their leg. Second time maybe their sword arm. A third? Possibly a concussion. It also gives some reasons why old war veterans and adventurers might be missing an eye, walk with a limp or sport other old wounds that are a testimony to such a dangerous life.

* I also have a mundane system that allows those who have failed 3 death saves to be "brought back", but usually at the cost of a permanent scar or other side effect at their brush with death. Though just as many times I'd have players prefer to stat up a new character rather than bring the old back to life.

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

That’s an interesting idea.

Although, since I believe in agency, I would make it a choice you make at zero HP. Maybe between unconscious (as per rules), a level of exhaustion, or panic. Or something like that.

 

[TheSword]

Er...what? 2d6-1 would have 6 levels of exhaustion as the most common result. Unless you mean something else or have expanded it to 11 levels of exhaustion...?

One D&D has 10 levels of exhaustion. Each one adding -1 to a number of rolls. You die at 11.

 

[TheSword]

I agree that a lot of monsters can seem like ‘bags of hit points’, both because of how a lot of them are designed and because of how how combat is sometimes DM’d.

I also agree that there should be more and better reasons to avoid going to zero HP.

But I’m confused because I don’t see the relationship between the two. How does making zero HP more undesirable change the ‘big bag of hit points’ nature of combat itself?

The issue for me is that the big bag doesn’t really mean anything when it empties, because folks spring back up like whack-a-mole. So not only is it a resource it doesn’t make much difference when it runs out. By having 0 mean something, now every HP counts.

 

[Blue]

You win EnWorld Thread Bingo! We’ll done. I’ve been playing D&D for 30+ years I get to decide if it’s for me.

Tweaking rules to make the game work better for you is part of the joy of being a long time player, gaming with friends. What I’m interested in (note + thread) are what are the consequences or the other tweaks needed.

I was trying to help, not everyone has a lot of experience outside of D&D. No insult was intended.

If you're looking for a Battletech experience, and decide that Poker is the game for you - well, I'm sure you can tweak it enough make it work. But that doesn't mean that another system might not be designed foundation-up to better fit what you are looking for.

You can stay with Poker. All I said was that there may be others ones that fit.

 

[Andvari]

And no, I don't think 2-3 deaths in a year is low. I think it is quite high. Especially since this is 2-3 extra deaths, completely separate from deaths due to failing death saves or other effects that kill characters (that is, petrification, the "chunky salsa" rule, etc.) 2-3

Fair point as I was thinking in total deaths, in which case 2-3 deaths total in a year as quite mild if you play every week. But you're right that those 2-3 deaths would be in addition to deaths by means other than being reduced to 0 hit points.

My current group has only had 1 death in 24 sessions, but they've had 5 close calls in total and had they not been quite lucky on 2 of those occasions, they would have suffered 3 deaths. The character that died had his own "side quest" based on his backstory, but the rest of the party is still pursuing it as they are invested in seeing it through. But even if they weren't, introducing a new character into the main adventure is easy.

They're nearly level 5 by now. And in a few levels, if they set some gold aside, they'll be able to pay the local temple to resurrect a dead character. Not sure if TheSword allows for raise dead and the like, but it's not uncommon to remove those spells. One of the players even requested no resurrection, but the rest of us were less enthusiastic about that one.