D&D General Revised Lycanthropy

[Charlaquin]

If the intent is that infected characters avoid having to make checks at all (because even just 5 days of DC10 Charisma saves, at advantage, is going to knock most characters out of the party), then you should definitely add rules for identifying the contagion and knowing appropriate countermeasures.

So, I feel like people are missing some important details here. You don’t have to make the save every night. You only have to make it when you go unconscious while the moon is in the sky. The moon being in the sky only really coincides with the hours most people sleep for a few days a month, and it is entirely possible not to sleep for a couple of nights if you need to. The times I anticipate these checks actually coming up most during play are when a lycanthrope character gets knocked out in a fight during the day on a new or crescent moon, and that’s when the DC is lowest. During the Gibbous moon, it should be possible to just time your shift taking watch so that the moon sets before you go to bed or rises after you get up. The full moon is really the only time that avoiding sleeping while it’s in the sky is likely to be terribly difficult, and there are a ton of precautions you can take to mitigate the difficulty during those 5 nights a month, including just not sleeping. And during downtime it should be entirely possible to keep pace with the moonrise/moonset simply by going to bed an hour later each night/day.

Is the intent that an infected PC will not know of the contagion until they transform, have to make the first check, or do they know as soon as they have been bitten?

Great questions! In the campaign I’m planning to use this in, the player who wants to play a werewolf (technically a were dire wolf, actually) will have been born with the curse, so they’ll have been dealing with the symptoms since their early teens. I worked with the player to develop these rules, so they are fully aware of them and the precautions they need to take to cope with them. If they do end up shifting and biting one of the other PCs, they’ll be able to inform the other PC of how it works and what to do about it in-character. Out of character, I’ll share these rules with any other player who’s character gets infected, with the understanding that the lycanthrope player’s character can teach them well enough to know how it all works.

Are the mechanical effects, and the countermeasures, common enough knowledge that everyone is aware of them? Or would a knowledge (Nature? Medicine? Arcana?) check be required? Or are they obscure enough that travel to an area that they can be researched is required?

Also great questions. I hadn’t really thought about what a character who was infected during play without someone to teach them would learn about it, since that won’t be a concern in the campaign I plan to use these rules in. I’m inclined to say these measures would not be common knowledge, but could certainly be researched.

What CR have you made lycanthropes given these rules?

I wouldn’t treat “werewolf” (for example) as a standalone monster stat block, I’d take an NPC stat block and apply these mechanics like a template on top of the NPC’s stats. Then I’d increase the NPC’s defensive CR according to the expected increase in effective HP due to the Regeneration feature (probably just increasing their effective HP by 3x the beast’s HP, assuming they successfully regenerate each round for three rounds). I might also have to recalculate their offensive CR based the associated beast’s Bite attack, if that Bite attack increased their damage per round.

All of which is to say, it depends entirely on the NPC and what sort of lycanthropy they have. If you want to throw out an NPC and a Beast to give it lycanthropy for, I could figure out what CR I’d give it, as a thought experiment.