Making the Game Harder.

[Kalthanis]

I'm working on making 4th edition a grittier and more taxing version of itself. My goal is to make combat more dangerous with few additions.

What do you guys think of...

1. If a creature takes more than CON damage in any single HIT, they must roll a CON check greater than the damage taken or be Dazed (save ends).

2. If healed from Dying (negative hit points), a creature is immediately Stunned (save ends).

3. Subtract 1 hit point per level off every class.

4. On a critical hit, extra damage from things like Sneak Attack and Warlock's Curse are rolled and not maxed.

5. Death Saves are reset only from an extended rest instead of short rests.

It's supposed to be a low magic world so I'm also thinking about things like... arcane casters needing to take a minor action to Channel before casting a spell, and if not the spell does damage the caster equal to twice it's level. (And similar things for the other casters). To offset this flavor, I'm thinking about giving DR to the Heavy Armors but saying that magic sources circumvent that. My standard DR of 1/2 level to minions rule would apply.

These are just ideas. Do you think that any of them are just morbidly over the top and would kill a party at whatever level?

 

[Asha'man]

Why rule number 4? It feels like the odd rule out..

 

[Hadrian the Builder]

Well you've got tp balance fun vs. feel. Dazing and stunning characters will make combat drag out longer and will reduce the opportunities for players to do something.

Why subtract a hit point off every class, when you can simply bump up the monster damage?

Critical hits are fun. Nerfing them is not.

 

[Fanaelialae]

1. If a creature takes more than CON damage in any single HIT, they must roll a CON check greater than the damage taken or be Dazed (save ends).

2. If healed from Dying (negative hit points), a creature is immediately Stunned (save ends).

3. Subtract 1 hit point per level off every class.

4. On a critical hit, extra damage from things like Sneak Attack and Warlock's Curse are rolled and not maxed.

5. Death Saves are reset only from an extended rest instead of short rests.

1. Favors monsters much more than PCs as the game scales (monsters gain +1 Con every other level whereas a PC gains somewhere between +2 and +8 over 30 levels). This also effectively eliminates the "average Constitution" defender. Finally, this could easily make rogues godly (rogues hit pretty hard to begin with, so you're effectively adding daze (save ends) to most of their attacks, which could allow them to chain sneak attacks).
I would base this off of something that scales with level (like bloodied value). That said, I don't really like the idea much since getting hit for a large chunk of your hp seems penalty enough to me.

2. This will make it really hard for the party to recover from having a party member go unconscious. If you're the type of DM who focus fires a single PC at a time, I'd say this will lead to frequent TPKs. If you spread the damage out a lot, it's probably feasible, but I expect the PCs to be encouraged to favor healing powers since hitting 0 hp could easily mean you're out of the fight til the end (you're a sitting duck with only a quarter of your hps, which could well mean you'll be unconscious again before you can make that save).

3. PCs will be more delicate. Not a big deal at low levels, but at higher levels it will shorten the workday (at level 28 it means 28 less hp, which means your healing surge value is 7 less, so a character with 10 surges would have 98 less hp per day than a normal PC). In other words, relative to the base game, the PCs will get weaker the higher they get in level.

4. Not sure how this would make the game grittier. Plenty of skirmishers and lurkers have "sneak attack" damage so all this would do is make crits less valuable to strikers, skirmishers, and lurkers than to other roles.
That said, I don't see how it would break the game.

5. This (along with 2) will encourage smart players to heavily favor healing (to minimize the chance of anyone ever falling unconscious). Additionally, it has the potential to seriously cut short the workday (if the defender fails two death saves in the first encounter there's a strong chance he'll die today if the PCs press on).

*. I'm also not crazy about penalizing arcane classes while buffing heavy armor wearing classes. On the other hand, this might work in favor of your setting's theme, discouraging players from arcane classes while encouraging them to play the heavy armor wearing classes. Depending on the DR bonus, it could easily make Paladins superior to Swordmages.
It might be more straightforward and balanced to simply ban arcane classes and forget about the DR for armor though.

1 and 2 seem excessive and more likely than not to cause TPKs. 5 seems okay for a gritty game so long as you don't necessarily mind a 5 minute workday. 3 might be okay. 4 doesn't seem terribly unbalanced but also doesn't strike me as gritty at all.

All in all, I expect that these houserules would encourage your players to focus on classes with healing and heavy armor (warlord, cleric, paladin, etc) and shorten the workday, which will likely encourage your players to nova (if you're only going to have 1 or 2 encounters a day because the defender will be down to his last death save by that point, might as well go all out and use up those dailies) which will likely run counter to the gritty feel you want to establish.

Then again, every group is different, so some or all of this might not apply to you and yours. YMMV.

 

[jstomel]

D&D isn't really a "gritty" game and trying to force it into that mode will probably result in less fun than simply getting a grittier game like GURPS or warhammer. That being said, if you want the game to be grittier you could get rid of the "raise dead" ritual and only allow the players to spend one healing surge between encounters with a short rest. The "dazed" and "stunned" rules you introduce could work, but should be only for one round rather than save ends. Remember that you will also have to lower the average level of encounter your party faces, unless you want to bring back the old Dark Sun trick of having everyone show up to the table with three characters every week.

 

[Mesh Hong]

5. Death Saves are reset only from an extended rest instead of short rests.

Don't death saving throws already only reset after an extended rest?

 

[Fanaelialae]

Don't death saving throws already only reset after an extended rest?

Death saves reset after any rest, short or extended (PHB 295).

 

[Mesh Hong]

Death saves reset after any rest, short or extended (PHB 295).

Call me hardcore if you like but I have always run as extended rest. Resetting them at a short rest seems far too trivial for my taste, in fact from my experience it would make the whole mechanic pretty much worthless.

 

[Sporemine]

I aggree with mesh on the death saves.

 

[Mesh Hong]

I am not sure how relevant this will be to the discussion, but I've written it now so I may as well post it.

My main points of advice for someone who wants to make the game grittier would be to:

1) increase the damage dealt by monsters.
2) add some sort of long term damage system, probably based on recieving serious wounds when you are subject to a critical attack, or an attack that has been designed to do a specific wound (as a primary or secondary effect).
3) Remove or seriously discourage resurrection.
4) Run the game with a gritty attitude. This would probably be more than 50% of the vital element needed. If the world you create is gritty and harsh then everything is going to feel gritty and harsh (as long as your players buy into it).