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Message: <blockquote data-quote="empireofchaos" data-source="post: 6773612" data-attributes="member: 6800918">Just wanted to get people's take on the Lingering Injuries optional rule in the DMG (p. 272).Background to the question: initially, I was well-disposed toward this rule, because I like grittier, AD&D-style combat (and injury recovery rules). Not because I'm mean (well, I am mean), but because I want to encourage non-combat play by making combat risky and dangerous. In the beginning, things worked well because my game was more of an intrigue and social interaction game, and combat was quite rare. Once the characters attained 3rd level, I stopped being quite so cautious about putting them in dangerous situations, and they began to explore a series of caves en route to an underground city. Long story short, combat became more common (at least for the time being), and so did rolls on the Lingering Injury Table as a result of enemy criticals and PCs being knocked to 0 HP.What I began to find is that "Internal Injury" began to come up in virtually every session, and that I began to ignore the roll. It's not that I mind PCs having internal injuries (which require DC15 to perform an action afterwards) - for all the above reasons. But sometimes, the roll didn't make any sense - they were fighting giant spiders who can kill you with poison, but probably not give you an internal injury by biting you. Sometimes, I ignored it for the sake of expediency - I wanted combat to zip along without reading the table. And during the last session, I ignored it because I had made a minor mistake in calculating the damage, so the character would not have quite gone down from the hit (I figured it was a good compromise - no retroactive actions, but no punishing the character for what was my mistake; as it turned out, the character dropping was immaterial to the outcome of the battle). But it was also becoming increasingly clear to me that if it really comes down to it, I would much rather have them continue to explore this underground realm than to rush home for a cure. There is an additional issue. The (optional) rule says that this lingering injury heals if the character receives magical healing, but it does not specify which type. As it happens, two of the four characters in the game have the ability to provide magical healing (Cure Wounds), and the party also possesses a few magical healing mushrooms. So if lingering injuries can be addressed through any magical healing, what's the point of bothering, really? If the rule is read to mean that you need a special type of magical healing for what is a special type of injury, it still stands to reason that Lesser Restoration will do the trick, and the 3rd level druid in the party can provide it easily enough, even it costs him a 2nd level spell slot, or a long rest.I'm not really looking for advice on what to do in this particular situation, because I'm perfectly happy to keep playing it by ear for the time being, and because I haven't brought it up with the players, so they are none the wiser at this point. But I did want to know, generally:a) whether people use the Lingering Injury options;b) what their reasoning behind choosing to use it or not to use it is;c) people's take on whether things like internal injuries come up too often, and how they cope with the frequency;d) and, how people read the stipulation about magical healing (whether any magical healing removes the injury, or whether it has to be a specific kind of (higher level) spell?</blockquote>

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