Injuries? Do you use them and how?

[strangebloke]

Hey all!

Starting a new campaign, and the players are down with injury conditions. I've never run a game with injuries before, and this is the table I came up with:

Lingering Injuries/Exhaustion
-When a character takes damage from a single source equal to or greater than half his his point maximum, he must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. If he fails, he is stunned until the end of his next turn. If he fails by 5 or more, he drops to zero hit points.
-When a character is hit by a critical hit, the DM rolls on the injury table with advantage. If the total damage of the critical hit is less than your level, no roll is made.
-When a character drops to 0 hit points but isn’t killed outright, the DM rolls on the injury table (if he was reduced to 0 hit points by a blow that took half his maximum hitpoints, roll with disadvantage) and the character gains a level of exhaustion.

Injury Table
d20
Injury
1 Irreparable Damage: You lose an eye, hand, or foot. If an eye, you have disadvantage on Wisdom(Perception) checks. If you lose two eyes, you go blind. If a leg or arm, you suffer the effects of the Broken Arm or Broken Leg condition, respectively. Regardless, the condition gained can only be removed by Regeneration, a magical prosthesis, or a similar effect.

2 Broken Arm: You cannot use one of your hands. Healing magic of 5th level or higher can remove this injury. If you spend a long rest in complete bedrest, someone can make a DC 15 Wisdom(medicine) check to attempt to remove this injury.

3 Broken Leg: Your base land speed is reduced by 10 feet. If you take this injury twice or you don’t have a crutch or prosthesis, you cannot stand. Healing magic of 5th level or higher can remove this injury. If you spend a long rest in complete bedrest, someone can make a DC 15 Wisdom(medicine) check to attempt to remove this injury.

4 Internal Injury: If you attempt to both use an action and move in the same round, 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. This condition goes away if you spend a long rest in complete bedrest, or if healing magic of greater than 5th level is used on you.

5-7 Broken Ribs: Same as internal injury, but the DC is 5, and the required healing magic level is 4.

8-10 Limp:Your movement speed is reduced by 5. If you take the dash action, make a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw or fall prone. Magical healing can remove the limp

11-13 Festering Wound:Your HP maximum is reduced by 1 for each of your maximum hit dice. If you are magically healed, you can forgo some of the healing effect to recover a number of maximum hit points equal to the amount of healing that you gave up. Otherwise, over the course of a short or long rest, a character can make a medicine check with a DC equal to the number of maximum hit points lost + 5 to restore the lost hit points.

14-16 Horrible Scar: You have disadvantage on Charisma(Persuasion) checks and advantage on Charisma(Intimidation) checks that reference the scar. Magical healing can remove this effect.

17-20 Minor Scar:No adverse effect. Can be removed by magical healing (if desired)


Yes, yes, I know. This reinforces the trend in DND fights where a bad fight can turn ugly really fast, but I kind of embrace that structure. A couple of accumulated injuries can and will prevent a party from finishing their allotted adventure schedule. Sometimes, that means that they'll lose and I'm ok with that. What do you all think? How do you run it?

(The long rests referenced in these rules are 'gritty realism' long rests.)

[Rowan Wolf]

If you are starting at 1st level things could get a bit rough. I used the rules from the dmg on injuries while running Hoard of thee Dragon Queen and I found that swingy(?) nature of low level combat the wounds got ridiculous. Some of that could have been the comp of the group and their collective play style though.

[lperkins2]

My advice: don't use them. They're fiddly, and will slow down combat. They almost never net-benefit the party. Depending on the nature of the campaign, they can make a character unusable, especially at low level. They don't really add any meaningful complexity. If you want a system where injuries are serious, d&d (of any edition) probably isn't the system you want.

Edit: Also, they mostly penalize the martial characters, who have a hard enough time contending with polymorph/teleport/wish as it is.

[Pelle]

In a former 3.5 campaign I ran, instead of PCs dying as normal according to the rules, they rolled on a permanent injury table instead.

It worked quite well. There was very low chance of PC death, yet still there was a risk to combat. And if the character would become unplayable, there was always the opportunity to retire it and make a new one. Better than having it killed without any options.

I wouldn't add injuries in addition to death as normal, unless your players enjoy having their characters suffer. Some people can't stand that, but I think it can be fun...

[Dungeon-noob]

A VERY important question when looking at this table is at what level your players are starting. At 1st, this makes it ten times more lethal, as just about every hit will force rolls, and quickly reduce characters to piles of slag. If starting at 3rd, less extremely deadly, still very debilitating with many wounds unhealable for quite a while. If starting at 5th or higher, then it becomes a lot more dealable, as the wounds can be healed well enough, and the rolls will be infrequent enough not to destroy characters in one combat.

I mean, if your players are okay with it (have they already seen this specific mechanic?), then who are we online to argue? It's your table to play at. Just remember that the impact of this is going to vary wildly between levels and parties. Not having a healer means that playing martials is basicly out with this.

[kamap]

Our Dm doesn't do injuries perse but anything that does more then half hp in one go will leave a scar, only esthetical things though.
In combat you might get hit somewhere specific and you'll suffer disadvantage till you heal some of the damage but nothing crippling or long lasting.
For example: You might go blind in a fight by beeing hit in the face by a firebolt but once you heal the dmg your eyes will function again but there will be scarring around your eyes, if the firebolt did enough damage to knock off half of your hp.


Like lperkins2 said it gimps the martial classes more then the caster.
Chop of my legs, I'll use a floating disk or tiny servant a chair.
Make me blind, I'll look trough my familiars eyes.
I only need one hand to cast whatever I want.

So some casters, can be a one handed, no legged blind person and still be viable to play, there will be some problems but its doable.
A fighter, rogue, barbarian, paladin, ranger or a monk are all screwed. With even one of those injuries.

[NinaWu]

I like gritty realism and a campaign we're playing currently, first half DM'd by one of the group, I'm doing the second half, we decided to run with lingering injuries instead. Crit hits leave their mark as do attacks dealing massive damage, from wobbly ankles that affect mobility and travel, to head knocks that disorient from time to time. It allows you to get very creative and add some sort of realism to combat and adventuring.

[strangebloke]

Alright, going off of feedback here it seems that there are three major pieces of commentary.

1. Martials get hit more, and need their fiddly bits to function.

This is a fair criticism. Albeit, lower HP is even more of a risk here because it puts you at risk for massive damage saves (which casters are worse at) so I don't think the 'get hit more' half really applies. Injuries having more of an impact, though is a consideration.

Perhaps several of the injuries have effects target more at casters? Forcing concentration checks?

2. massive damage is quite a low threshold at low levels.

Very true. I designed this system with the idea that after a hard-fought battle, even a high-level character should be pretty winded. I don't know if this achieves that well.

Perhaps only 'massive damage' higher than 20 triggers these rules?

3. Its fiddly.

This is true, but only if the players are regularly dropping to zero. In my experience, that doesn't happen often if the player are smart and tactical. I could get rid of the rules for critical hits, but that seems unnecessary.

[Anymage]

If you like the aesthetic of adventures being banged around a bit after combat instead of being daisy fresh, remember that reserve hit dice matter at least as much as raw HP. You're within your rights to implement a flavor rule that wounds must be tended in order to spend HD, even if this requires zero in-game resources. Action heroes may wince a bit after a fight scene, but it doesn't practically slow them down.

If you want a wound system, it's probably better to scrap what you have and start from the ground up. Critical injury systems that just happen to the target mean that one unlucky roll can damage or destroy a character's whole concept. The ones I've seen that worked well allowed the player to chose to take a specific wound to mitigate a certain other effect. D&D doesn't do this as well as some other systems; it's unlikely that blunting one hit will have much long-term effect. But placing it in player hands instead of the whims of the dice tends to cause a lot less frustration when RNG swings against you.

[MilkmanDanimal]

Would never do that in this system; 5e has a certain elegant simplicity to it, and this just adds extra bookkeeping and things to track. I think of 5e characters as basically superheroes in a fantasy setting, as they're hard to kill, have all sorts of amazing abilities, and they're just so much more capable than normal people. That's what I like about 5e, and "gritty realism" just doesn't feel right for the system.

There are lots of systems that support that sort of thing, but tacking it onto 5e just doesn't feel like it fits the system. And yeah, it's going to be ugly for lower-level characters, as higher-level characters will have access to the kind of healing magic that could presumably fix this.

[Vogie]

I'd use injuries only for cinematic purposes, based on specific attacks from specific monsters... or to act as a sort of McGuffin for an upcoming encounter

[Mellack]

It really punishes anyone who wants to play a tank. Their job is to have the baddies attack them, so they will get injuries. Seems like they would have short careers.

[mephnick]

I use injuries on dropping to 0, but allow a CON check to avoid them. All my injuries come with levels of exhaustion as well. To heal an injury with magic you have to use a spell of a certain level. None of that "heal 1hp and you're fine" stuff. (ie. for a level 3 injury, you must use a level 3 spell slot to heal the injury).

However, to offset this, I allow Medicine checks over rests to reduce injury and exhaustion and changed Lesser Restoration to cure a level of exhaustion. I also never start a game lower than level 3, so the swinginess won't destroy characters right away.

[Derpaligtr]

Injuries are typically used as roleplaying devices and we basically use the "action movie" approach.

After a car wreck, you see someine limping or holding their side? Yeah broken ribs. However, they're able to still do awesome things. Or like the old martial artist that hobbles 90% of the time, suddenly stands up and messes someone up (onpy to be taken out by thr BBEG, but, anyone else and the old dude would have won).

A fantasy character should be able to work almost any injury, in some way, because they aren't normies. The base rules expect PCs to be a cut above others and while injuries have alt rules in the DMG, those still go against a lot of what D&D/5e is in general.

[KorvinStarmast]

My advice: don't use them. They're fiddly, and will slow down combat. This. Unless your players are all very experienced and will run the limitation themselves, this isn't worth tracking as a DM.

[Laserlight]

I wouldn't do the injuries thing; I don't want combat to take longer unless it also adds more interesting tactics, which this doesn't.

Each time they hit zero HP, give them a level of exhaustion. We had one guy get three levels in one day; after that he didn't play quite so foolishly, and I don't think anyone else ever (quite) dropped to zero.

[lperkins2]

Alright, going off of feedback here it seems that there are three major pieces of commentary.

1. Martials get hit more, and need their fiddly bits to function.

This is a fair criticism. Albeit, lower HP is even more of a risk here because it puts you at risk for massive damage saves (which casters are worse at) so I don't think the 'get hit more' half really applies. Injuries having more of an impact, though is a consideration.

Perhaps several of the injuries have effects target more at casters? Forcing concentration checks?

2. massive damage is quite a low threshold at low levels.

Very true. I designed this system with the idea that after a hard-fought battle, even a high-level character should be pretty winded. I don't know if this achieves that well.

Perhaps only 'massive damage' higher than 20 triggers these rules?

3. Its fiddly.

This is true, but only if the players are regularly dropping to zero. In my experience, that doesn't happen often if the player are smart and tactical. I could get rid of the rules for critical hits, but that seems unnecessary.

So, interesting or complicated side effects of characters dropping to 0 is probably fine. This is something that shouldn't happen often, unless the players are using the lack of negative HP as a way to maximize healing benefits. If they are, lingering penalties for hitting 0 may help, as does killing downed PCs.

The injury roll for losing more than half health in a single blow is also probably fine. At higher levels, this is unlikely to come up much, and actually does help the caster/frontliner divide marginally.

It's the critical hit that's the issue. First, critical hits are what are actually likely to do more than half the max HP in damage, so in a sense, they're already covered. I see you tried to put a... protection in there against crits being too insane, in the form of requiring the crit to do damage equal to the character's level before counting it. The problem is that the minimum damage from critical hit from an eagle, not a giant eagle, not a goblin, but a normal eagle (CR 0) is 4, the average is 7, and the max is 10. That means a character has to reach level 5 before a min-damage crit from a CR 0 monster is no longer a threat, a hit that does 10% of their max HP in damage (less if they're a fighter or barbarian). How's it look when we consider actual enemies, not woodland creatures? A hobgoblin with a friend, CR 1/2, does 4d6+2d10+1 on a critical hit, that's an average of 26 damage, enough to leave injuries on a level 20. In fact, the level 20 only has an 11% chance to not be 'injured' by the attack.

Here's the core of the problem. 5e lacks any mechanics for changing crit frequencies. Well, that's not quite true, the Champion gets improved critical. This means rate of critical hits scales linearly with number of attacks. If critical hits leave lingering injuries, the rate of lingering injuries then scales with the number of attacks. Martial characters are balanced around exchanging higher and higher numbers of attacks as they gain levels. This means that a higher level fighter, in a level appropriate encounter, is more likely to be 'injured' than a lower level fighter in an equally challenging fight. Meanwhile, the casters, whose HP doesn't scale based on the assumption that they'll be on the frontline, have more and more options for avoiding the frontline. Hence the disparate impact.