Making Death Interesting

I like to play at low levels, so death mechanics often come into play. I don't mind rolling a new character when I've earned a grisly demise, but living with some debilitating injury is usually the more interesting option. It would force me, as a player, to get more creative. Solve problems differently. That's an ideal outcome. So, I like Death & Dismemberment tables.

However, as far as less deadly options go, 5th Edition death saves stink. If my character is going to die, I'd rather him go out in a blaze of glory as opposed to anticlimactically bleeding out.

The dead enjoying themselves (art by Michael Wolgemut)

My last adventure came as part of a longer running campaign, though. The players were a little less reluctant to be quite so flippant with their characters. Instead, I convinced them to roll on an injury table whenever their characters went unconscious, then perform death saves as per 5th Edition rules.

The canned 5th Edition Lingering Injury table turned out to be dull. Most characters could hand-wave away the results. Magical healing is far too plentiful. The table resulted in a trivial injury, or a completely crippling one. So, I created a table with entries that resulted in more varied outcomes.

When you fall to 0 hit points, roll a d20:

1 - Lose an Eye - You have disadvantage on ability checks that rely on sight and on ranged attack rolls. Magic such as the Regenerate spell can restore the lost eye.

2 - Break and Arm - You can no longer hold anything with two hands, and you can only hold a single object at a time. This injury heals after one week of rest in a sanctuary during which you receive magical healing each day.

3 - Festering Wound - Your hit point maximum is reduced by 1 roll of your hit dice immediately and at dawn of every day until you complete a long rest and someone tends the wound with a successful DC 10 Wisdom (Medicine) check.

4-5 - Concussion - You have disadvantage on Intelligence ability checks and you cannot cast spells that require concentration until you complete a long rest.

6-8 - Internal Injury - Whenever you attempt an action in combat, you must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw. On a failed save, you lose your next action and cannot use reactions until the start of your next turn. This injury heals after one week of rest in a sanctuary.

9-10 - Limp - Your speed on foot is reduced by half and you must make a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw after using the Dash action; if you fail, you fall prone. This injury heals after one week of rest in a sanctuary.

11-12 - Disclocated Shoulder - You can no longer hold anything with two hands, and you can only hold a single object at a time. You may reset your shoulder as an action, suffering 1d6 bludgeoning damage. Until you complete one week of rest in a sanctuary, whenever you are hit with a melee attack there is a 2-in-6 chance that the shoulder dislocates again.

13 - Lose Teeth - You have disadvantage on Charisma (Persuasion) checks. When you cast a spell with a verbal component there is a 2-in-6 chance the spell will not work. If the spell fails, you still used your action to try to cast it, but the spell did not use any slots or material components. Magic such as the Regenerate spell can restore the lost teeth.

14 - Tinnitus - You have disadvantage on Initiative rolls and on ability checks that rely on hearing until you complete a long rest in a quiet place.

15 - Horrible Scar - You have disadvantage on Charisma (Persuasion) checks and advantage of Charisma (Intimidation) checks. Magic such as the Heal or Regenerate spell can heal this injury.

16 - Painful Scar - Your scar gives you pain whenever it rains or snows. If you attempt an action in combat and your scar is giving you pain, you must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw. On a failed save, you lose your action and can't use reactions until the start of your next turn. Magic such as the Heal or Regenerate spell can heal this injury.

17-19 - The scar doesn't have any adverse effect, but it looks cool. Magical such as the Heal or Regenerate spell can heal this injury.

20 - You have disadvantage on Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) checks, Dexterity checks to use tools, and on melee attack rolls with heavy and two-handed weapons. Magic such as the Regenerate spell can restore the lost digit.

A man rolling on the injury table

Next time, I will change it up. 

Option 1 - Keep the injury table above, but only allow a save against death every turn until a single failure

Option 2 (More Likely) - Work death results into the table above, and add modifiers to the roll that make bad results more likely based on how much damage the character took

The One Rule

After my honeymoon phase with 5th Edition and its litany of exciting player options ended, each week started to drag. Despite having more than too many possible "character builds," each session and the encounters within felt the same. Whether I played as a PC or the DM, the players were always in control of the situation.

Now I don't mean they always won or always lived. Shockingly, characters die in 5th Edition campaigns, too. I mean that players were always in control of their next move. They always have a good option to use from their class or subclass. Even if they did get creative, using their class feature was always the optimal choice. So, why bother trying to think of inventive solutions?

However, it's those inventive solutions that make one session feel different from the next. We sneaked past Monster A like this, trapped Monster B like this, and so on. Scenarios feel unique based on the environment, the tools at your disposal, and the players involved. 5th Edition, as its commonly played, rarely results in that kind of game. The environment hardly matters due to character power levels and the tools are always the same because they are class abilities.

Enter "the One Rule." I call it the One Rule not because it's the First Rule or the Most Important Rule, but because it's the one rule that brought a fun creative and inventive spirit back into my fantasy role-playing.

Characters can only gain the benefits of a long rest in a sanctuary, or any place where they have a roof over their heads, a place to sleep safely, and time to rest.

I also explained it to my players this way: if you would have to set a watch, you don't get a long rest.

Heroes camping and probably regaining all of their class abilities (art by Larry Elmore)

The 5th Edition rules implicitly contradict the One Rule when they define a long rest as "a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps or performs light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours." If they expect you to take a watch during a long rest, the imply that a long rest occurs during any 8 hour stretch of staying put, and that's how most people play their 5th Edition games.

The One Rule is neither novel nor innovative. Many people already play this way. It does, however, change the quality of the game more than any other rule or rule change I have made. The roots of the hobby grew from this foundation: everything is a resource, and how you manage those resources - your spells, hit points, and abilities - forms the core of the game. The One Rule helps you return to those roots.

When implementing the rule, stay true to the intent. An empty cave in the woods isn't a sanctuary. An abandoned guard tower isn't a sanctuary. And you will never find a sanctuary in a dungeon. Sanctuaries are "base camp." A town, village, fort, or castle.

I wrapped up my first full campaign to use this rule yesterday, and the memories I have from the adventures aren't all epic battles. They're also the ways my players outsmarted their enemies: giants and gnolls and the gods themselves.

This is the one rule that changes the game.

Determining Surprise

When possible, I prefer to have players make the most important rolls, and I prefer to have their character abilities provide meaningful inputs to those rolls.

Yeah, I know: players aren't their character sheets, spot checks suck, etc. But, I also don't want to ignore when it would make sense for an ability to come into play.

Surprise feels like one of those times when it would make sense. Traditional fantasy RPG rules state that, all other things being equal, each side has a 2-in-6 chance to end up surprised by the other party during a random encounter.

A small humanoid after getting surprised (art by Jeff Easley)

Yet, the stakes here match the criteria of calling for a check or saving throw instead of a purely random chance: the outcomes matter, they are obvious, and they are very much in doubt.

Checking for Surprise

When a random encounter occurs, each player should make a WIS saving throw. On a failure, that player's character is surprised and does not take a turn during the first combat round.

Note that this rule specifically determines whether or not the monsters surprise the PCs. Determine the reverse scenario with the standard 2-in-6 roll. This house rule isn't about verisimilitude or accuracy, it's about giving players the illusion of agency.

Flickering Torches

I play the only human in a party with infravision. Our referee would probably forget about torches and light in general if I let him. But, I find managing light in the dungeon to be part of the fun.

Still, even with my reminders, I disliked how we hand-waved complications during combat. I would toss the torch down and then play on as if I had light. 

Without researching torch rules in other games, I suggested the following house rules:

• During combat, a dropped torch has a 1-in-6 chance to flicker out every round
• If I use the torch as a weapon, it has a 2-in-6 chance to flicker out on a hit
• If the torch gets drenched with water or buffeted by a gust, it has a 3-in-6 chance to go out, increased depending on the magnitude of the splashing or blowing

A fun way to track torches (cool card courtesy of Dyson Logos)

So far, I've only used the first rule. The jury is still out, but it feels better than nothing.

Travel Challenges

For some reason, I like skill challenges.

I think it's the idea of a player stepping into their character and thinking about how the character would solve a problem given their unique talents.

But, every time I've tried to use player-driven skill challenges to depict wilderness travel, it's fallen flat.

Boring travel (painting by Stefano di Giovanni)

The fault lies with me, as the referee. Even if I set basic parameters, my players lack enough detail about the environment and the consequences to devise their own interesting obstacles. Sure, they can come up with something ("I jump over the chasm with Athletics"), but do those really add to the experience?

But, as soon as I start giving them more detail to set the scene, I ask myself "if I'm doing all of this work anyway, why not just run a hex crawl?"

In the future, I plan to take my favorite part of my travel challenges - the failure conditions and ramifications - and meld them into more traditional wilderness travel.

Getting Lost

• Whenever players take a wilderness turn to travel, roll an encounter die. The most common result is a travel challenge or obstacle rolled on a region-specific table (1-in-2 chance).
• Players propose a solution to the obstacle. If there is risk involved, call for a saving throw.
• A failure results in immediate repercussions and a failure added to the journey's tally. Then, they roll up another challenge: players cannot advance to the next hex until they overcome one.
• If the players accumulate 3 failures, they've wandered off course. Roll to find out what they've wandered into (typically a wandering monster).

I like the idea that getting lost isn't a binary failure but a series of blunders that leads to travel's fail state.

A more improvisational referee could do without the region-specific obstacle table and come up with challenges on the fly, but if I tried that they'd probably end up pretty boring.

Simple Species

Two things bother me about "race" in fantasy RPGs.

1. Non-humans treated as a monoculture. All elves love nature. All dwarves have beards. Racial attribute bonuses bug me the most. All gnomes are smart and all elves are nimble. If you're going to allow non-humans as PCs, make those non-humans as diverse as humans. Some are strong, some are weak, some are wise, some are naive, etc. In gameplay terms, bonuses give players a non-choice during character creation: either your archer is an elf for that sweet +2 DEX, or you made the wrong choice. Lame.

Fantascience (art by Todd Lockwood)

2. The word race has inescapable connotations that hearken back to ugly 19th century faux-science used to excuse inequality and mistreatment. I like the taxonomic approach (used by Mausritter for its rodents and other mammals). If you add non-humans to your game, treat them as different species of the genus Homo, as different from Homo sapiens as Homo neanderthalensis.

Still, I like the idea of fantastic humanoids in my fantasy games. Deep mines aren't the same without abandoned dwarven halls.

I'd like to try to differentiate each species with a single trait - something useful that isn't purely a stat bonus. This includes humans. I've had enough of the tired trope that humans are unique because they can do anything.

• DWARVES can see in the dark with infravision.

• ELVES do not require sleep or rations.

• HALFLINGS reroll all 1s, but must keep the second roll.

• HILLFOLK roll again when they roll max damage.

• HUMANS can sense the presence of magic.

Infravision! How could I? More on that later ...

Slot-Based Encumbrance

Last night, my broke players stumbled on a windfall: thousands of gold and silver pieces. Despite actually taking a minute to look up the exact encumbrance rules of 5th Edition, we quickly came to an unspoken agreement communicated through a moment of silence.

An encumbered man

No one had the desire to start tracking the weight of their stuff even though we all knew that the fiction of this moment demanded a choice: drop something important or leave most the money.

So, after a few seconds, I declared they could all grab 250 coins with a hand wave. In future dungeon delves, I hope to test out a slot-based encumbrance system like this:

• Every player character has 2 hand slots, 4 body slots, and pack slots equal to their STR score

• Items take up inventory slots equal to the number of hands it takes to hold them (1 slot for a book, 2 slots for a bedroll, and anything that takes 3 hands you can't carry alone)

• You can bundle small items together equal to the number you can hold in a single hand (3 glass vials per slot, a pouch of 100 coins per slot, something like that)

• Armor takes up slots and must occupy body slots to contribute to your AC

• You can grab any item stored in a body slot as a free action

• Store your pack items in order and include a dice roll to retrieve them or lose your action trying (Troika! has a great simple 2d6 mechanic for this)

• Once you fill all of your slots, you can't carry any more; no rules for being encumbered or any nonsense like that

If you keep the rules for encumbrance simple, your players are more likely to follow them. Once you implement this system, you can expand on it later by adding injuries or conditions as items that fill up your slots (as used in Mausritter).

A system that players actually use is a system that leads to interesting decisions during the game. I can't wait to try it out.