Major and minor vulnerability

[Greywander]

5e is a bit too streamlined in some areas, and while this makes it easier to play, the game loses a bit of depth as a result. When you have or don't have resistance, the game has to be more reticent to hand out resistance given how strong it is. I've determined that if I wanted to implement a minor and major resistance, keeping moderate resistance as the default 50%, then minor should offer 25% reduction and major 75% reduction. (Keep in mind that immunity is 100% reduction, so resistance should never hit 100%.)

Then there's vulnerability. It's a pretty hefty penalty, so much so that you rarely see it used for monsters. And it's almost never inflicted on PCs because of how debilitating it is. What this leads me to believe is that the default 100% increased damage should actually become major vulnerability, rather than moderate. So the question then is what minor and moderate vulnerability should be.

My initial thought is that minor should inflict 33% (1/3) more damage, and moderate should inflict 67% (2/3) more damage, but those could be awkward values to compute without using a computer. Perhaps 25% and 50% would work better, but then there's a pretty hefty jump from moderate to major. Or perhaps should 100% be moderate and major be even higher?

What do you think? Also, are there some other methods of handling damage resistance and vulnerability? Flat damage reduction is fine, but is only meaningful with either low damage or high reduction. And the reverse, damage addition for vulnerability, can turn a series of weak attacks into deadly blows since each hit would add the bonus damage. I suppose something to do with dice rolls could also work. For example, vulnerability 1 would reroll any die that shows a 1, taking the second result (even another 1), vulnerability 2 would reroll 1s and 2s, vulnerability 3 would reroll 1s, 2s, and 3s, etc., while resistance 1 would reroll any dice that roll the highest amount (e.g. an 8 on a d8), resistance 2 would reroll highest and second highest (7 and 8 on a d8), etc.

I suppose there are maybe a few other methods of handling resistance and vulnerability that I should perhaps explore.

[Humnhapymeal]

I like this and will probably be stealing it for my future campaigns.
That being said i think that odd value percentages are a little cumbersome for most people, so sticking to 25/50/75/100 is probably the way to go
Minor vuln = 25%
moderate Vuln= 50%
Major Vuln= 75%
Full Vuln 100%

Haveing 4 levels will give the DM increased flexibility with how they handle damage and help balance encounters

[Yakk]

I honestly don't think multiplying by 3/4 is worth it.

Vulnerability: 2x damage
Weakness: +1/2 damage (so x1.5)
Resistance: x1/2 damage.

Attackers can swap which kind of damage they do, so resistance halving things isn't that nasty.

Similarly, swapping to focus on vulnerability is easier; so a +50% (also easy to calculate, just halve and add) is something I'd be more tempted to hand out.

[Humnhapymeal]

I honestly don't think multiplying by 3/4 is worth it.

Vulnerability: 2x damage
Weakness: +1/2 damage (so x1.5)
Resistance: x1/2 damage.

Attackers can swap which kind of damage they do, so resistance halving things isn't that nasty.

Similarly, swapping to focus on vulnerability is easier; so a +50% (also easy to calculate, just halve and add) is something I'd be more tempted to hand out.

i mean the math is pretty easy for 25 and 75 (x 1.25 and x1.75 respectively) i understand the feeling to simplify since that what D&D5e does very well, but the OP's problem comes from a lack of depth in the system, what you are proposing is basically just adding 1 extra step in weakness. i can certainly see adding a weakness in most homebrew games in order to bridge that gap though.

[PhantomSoul]

i mean the math is pretty easy for 25 and 75 (x 1.25 and x1.75 respectively) i understand the feeling to simplify since that what D&D5e does very well, but the OP's problem comes from a lack of depth in the system, what you are proposing is basically just adding 1 extra step in weakness. i can certainly see adding a weakness in most homebrew games in order to bridge that gap though.

Huh, I was projecting that you could have multiple levels of resistance stacking (1 -> 1/2 -> 1/4 -> 1/8 -> ...), but that wasn't in Yakk's post!

[Greywander]

I like this and will probably be stealing it for my future campaigns.
That being said i think that odd value percentages are a little cumbersome for most people, so sticking to 25/50/75/100 is probably the way to go
Minor vuln = 25%
moderate Vuln= 50%
Major Vuln= 75%
Full Vuln 100%

Haveing 4 levels will give the DM increased flexibility with how they handle damage and help balance encounters
I agree with Yakk, I don't think +75% damage is as meaningful. +25% is a nice penalty without being too harsh, weak enough that it could be a racial bonus penalty for a PC without debilitating them too much. +50% is probably what vulnerability should have been all along, and maybe then we would have seen it pop up more often. +75% is kind of in a weird space between +50% and +100%, it's probably better just to make it one or the other instead of something in between.

If you like this idea, then you might also be interested in another aspect of this I didn't mention in the post (since it wasn't relevant to this specific topic). Resistance (and vulnerability) can stack, but it's not as simple as you might think. If you have three or more sources of minor resistance, then it upgrades to a single source of moderate resistance. Three or more sources of moderate resistance upgrades to major resistance. Note that no matter how many sources of minor resistance you have, it will only ever count as one source of moderate resistance. This allows these abilities to stack, while providing a cutoff where you no longer have to hunt for more bonuses. Vulnerability would work the same way, and the two would cancel each other out as well.


I honestly don't think multiplying by 3/4 is worth it.

Vulnerability: 2x damage
Weakness: +1/2 damage (so x1.5)
Resistance: x1/2 damage.

Attackers can swap which kind of damage they do, so resistance halving things isn't that nasty.

Similarly, swapping to focus on vulnerability is easier; so a +50% (also easy to calculate, just halve and add) is something I'd be more tempted to hand out.
This isn't a bad idea either. Simply adding a new category that only adds +50% damage is not quite as extreme as vulnerability, so it might work better as a PC trait and actually see some more widespread use on monsters.

No matter what I decide to go for, it's going to be a monster of a chore to go through and tweak monster stat blocks, or write my own Monster Manual from scratch. But what I have in mind is a significant enough overhaul of 5e that that would probably be necessary anyway.

[Yakk]

So, I'm a few standard deviations above the average good at math. Doing it still takes time. And I don't see the point of doing that math; I want math to matter.

It is the damage per second problem, not damage per round issue.

Like, you roll 6,3,5,3,6,4 with a +8 static modifier on 3 attacks. I can do that in my head in realtime with 99% accuracy. I cannot do +25% in realtime with 99% accuracy. Maybe I could with practice.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, I'm a few standard deviations above the average good at math. Doing it still takes time. And I don't see the point of doing that math; I want math to matter.

It is the damage per second problem, not damage per round issue.

Like, you roll 6,3,5,3,6,4 with a +8 static modifier on 3 attacks. I can do that in my head in realtime with 99% accuracy. I cannot do +25% in realtime with 99% accuracy. Maybe I could with practice.

And doing it with multiple damage types is ugly. It's one reason I'm not fond of type-based resistances/vulnerability--it massively slows things down because you have to keep the dice separate, you can't accumulate damage for multiple attacks easily, etc. And that's with very simple multipliers.

[Hytheter]

And doing it with multiple damage types is ugly. It's one reason I'm not fond of type-based resistances/vulnerability--it massively slows things down because you have to keep the dice separate, you can't accumulate damage for multiple attacks easily, etc. And that's with very simple multipliers.

Yeah, multiple damage type attacks are a huge pain. It's not hard but it's tedious and annoying.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Exactly. And tedious and annoying are much worse than hard, all else equal.

I'm leaning toward saying that a creature that has resistance takes 50% damage from any effect that does not include a non-resistant damage type (and similarly for vulnerability and immunity). So resist fire? If you only do fire damage, it's halved. Do fire and bludgeoning? Full damage across the board. Makes mixed damage types better and is a slight nerf to resistance/immunity. But mainly for simplicity sake.

[Arcturus]

Honestly the 4e method worked quite well. You had vulnerability and resistance followed by a number (eg. Vulnerable Fire 5). Any time you took fire damage you took extra damage equal to your vulnerability value.

Similarly resistance was just a static damage reduction number.

Made the math trivial and made it easy to scale vulnerabilities and resistance (typically in the 5-20 range).

[Hytheter]

Exactly. And tedious and annoying are much worse than hard, all else equal.

I'm leaning toward saying that a creature that has resistance takes 50% damage from any effect that does not include a non-resistant damage type (and similarly for vulnerability and immunity). So resist fire? If you only do fire damage, it's halved. Do fire and bludgeoning? Full damage across the board. Makes mixed damage types better and is a slight nerf to resistance/immunity. But mainly for simplicity sake.

I like this. Definitely simpler.

[stoutstien]

I've just tend to replace vulnerability with something more engaging and resistance to a flat DR for NPCs.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Honestly the 4e method worked quite well. You had vulnerability and resistance followed by a number (eg. Vulnerable Fire 5). Any time you took fire damage you took extra damage equal to your vulnerability value.

Similarly resistance was just a static damage reduction number.

Made the math trivial and made it easy to scale vulnerabilities and resistance (typically in the 5-20 range).
Hell, going back to the 3e model for players would be perfectly solid too-- Fire Resistance 10 means you ignore the first 10 points of fire damage you take from an attack. Gives you plenty of room for small resistances.

[stoutstien]

Hell, going back to the 3e model for players would be perfectly solid too-- Fire Resistance 10 means you ignore the first 10 points of fire damage you take from an attack. Gives you plenty of room for small resistances.

Yep. Can even replace immunity to non magical attacks with highish DR/DT to make a gritter world that still has neigh unkillable foes.

[Eldariel]

Hell, going back to the 3e model for players would be perfectly solid too-- Fire Resistance 10 means you ignore the first 10 points of fire damage you take from an attack. Gives you plenty of room for small resistances.

I do this. That said, PBS resistance like that is a bit problematic because it favours GWM/SS and sneak attack so heavily; there are few other ways to boost your on-hit damage, but largely multi-attackers kinda get shafted by on-hit DR while especially Rogues profit (then again, Rogues could certainly use the love). It does make for better verisimilitude though (explains why the Townsguard can't handle the Dragon), and nerfs minionmancy both of which feel quite desirable though.

[Ionathus]

I'm with Yakk on this. Resistances and Vulnerabilities are already some of the most complicated rolls for me, and that extra pause to roll dice types separately and do some quick halving/doubling already risks a stutter/pause in the flow of combat. Introducing 25% or 75% sounds like a headache I don't need for a barely different outcome.

And I certainly wouldn't do THREE versions of each: 25%/50%/75% is too many "tiers" for a single resistance or vulnerability. I'm already picturing a PC with multiple tiers of resistance/vulnerability taking multiple damage types in a single attack (25% resistance to slashing, 75% resistance to fire, 50% resistance to radiant) and it does not sound worth the hassle.


Honestly the 4e method worked quite well. You had vulnerability and resistance followed by a number (eg. Vulnerable Fire 5). Any time you took fire damage you took extra damage equal to your vulnerability value.

Similarly resistance was just a static damage reduction number.

Made the math trivial and made it easy to scale vulnerabilities and resistance (typically in the 5-20 range).

I really like this option. If I had to change RAW vulnerabilities and resistance (which I haven't needed to do, because it's worked fine for my table), I would change it to something like this and just adjust the numbers for different tiers, rather than trying to do quartering-math on the fly.


Hell, going back to the 3e model for players would be perfectly solid too-- Fire Resistance 10 means you ignore the first 10 points of fire damage you take from an attack. Gives you plenty of room for small resistances.

I've used flat DR for several monsters and even given it to a player as a special "X per day" ability, and agree it can work well to really sell, say, an eldritch monster's inability to be whittled down by chip damage. But I wouldn't apply it wholecloth to the framework of 5e -- I think it breaks the design philosophy of the game even more drastically than OP's tiered resistances do.

Speaking as someone who used to do BG2 runs with immunity to normal weapons, it's incredibly fun to watch a sea of faceless mooks completely fail to scratch you, and it gives you a real sense of being a demi-god. I loved that feeling, but I don't think it belongs in 5e.

[loki_ragnarock]

5e is a bit too streamlined in some areas, and while this makes it easier to play, the game loses a bit of depth as a result. When you have or don't have resistance, the game has to be more reticent to hand out resistance given how strong it is. I've determined that if I wanted to implement a minor and major resistance, keeping moderate resistance as the default 50%, then minor should offer 25% reduction and major 75% reduction. (Keep in mind that immunity is 100% reduction, so resistance should never hit 100%.)

Then there's vulnerability. It's a pretty hefty penalty, so much so that you rarely see it used for monsters. And it's almost never inflicted on PCs because of how debilitating it is. What this leads me to believe is that the default 100% increased damage should actually become major vulnerability, rather than moderate. So the question then is what minor and moderate vulnerability should be.

My initial thought is that minor should inflict 33% (1/3) more damage, and moderate should inflict 67% (2/3) more damage, but those could be awkward values to compute without using a computer. Perhaps 25% and 50% would work better, but then there's a pretty hefty jump from moderate to major. Or perhaps should 100% be moderate and major be even higher?


This would be akin to throwing on percentile based magic resistance of 2e or calculating how much damage is real on shadow summons from 3e. Backwards facing mechanic that slows down table time and adds a significant barrier of entry for people looking to play the game. Anything that is proposed that is best solved by putting a wheel chart on the table is an added layer of complication that can be relegated to pure wargaming or retro gaming, in my humble.


Thematically, the current system works; if something is able to shrug off some fire damage, it shrugs off an easy math amount of it. If it's more fire immune than that, it shrugs off all of it. Less, it just takes it like you'd expect. If it takes more damage, it takes much more damage.
It's simple. It's effective. It conveys the idea; fire useless, fire bad, fire neutral, fire good.
Extra nuance beyond that is fiddly.


What do you think? Also, are there some other methods of handling damage resistance and vulnerability? Flat damage reduction is fine, but is only meaningful with either low damage or high reduction. And the reverse, damage addition for vulnerability, can turn a series of weak attacks into deadly blows since each hit would add the bonus damage. I suppose something to do with dice rolls could also work. For example, vulnerability 1 would reroll any die that shows a 1, taking the second result (even another 1), vulnerability 2 would reroll 1s and 2s, vulnerability 3 would reroll 1s, 2s, and 3s, etc., while resistance 1 would reroll any dice that roll the highest amount (e.g. an 8 on a d8), resistance 2 would reroll highest and second highest (7 and 8 on a d8), etc.

I suppose there are maybe a few other methods of handling resistance and vulnerability that I should perhaps explore.
Rerolling mechanics likewise put alot of table time towards something that should be relatively simple. Extra time spent resolving a damage mechanic doesn't lead to enhanced story telling.

An alternative that's almost as bad in that regard:
Creature with Resistance as base could make con saves against specific damage; success negates the damage entire, failure is normal (half) damage. Averages out to somewhere between 50% and 100% damage resistance over time without having to do the specific 75% calculation or meticulously rereolling many damage dice. If they are more resistant to fire, they get a better save. If they are less resistant to fire, they get a lesser save, allowing for a range of greater than 50% values.
A creature without resistance could make a con save against a specific damage type; success provides resistance. Averages somewhere between 100% and 50% damage taken over time, tune the save for your target value.
Imparts the idea to players that maybe you aren't going to get your full mileage out of your energy type spell/attack, maintains the handful of people who took the "I ignore resistance" thing as pretty special without having to tweak specific values of how much resistance they ignore. Prevents multi-step math at the table. Adds a roll, but doesn't add a random number of rolls.

[Segev]

If you're not worried about keeping resistances and vulnerabilities secret, a perhaps easier way than trying to keep dice separate would be to double the dice rolled when dealing vulnerability damage. I'd say halve the dice rolled when dealing resisted damage, but that's harder to work with due to the number of times something adds +1dX of an energy type. You could reduce d12s and d8s to d6s and d4s, but what do you reduce a d10, d6, or d4 to? Even reducing them to d5s, d3s, and d2s means generally still having to separate the dice to track them and count them differently, so we're back to the same issue as just counting halved damage.

[Eldariel]

I've used flat DR for several monsters and even given it to a player as a special "X per day" ability, and agree it can work well to really sell, say, an eldritch monster's inability to be whittled down by chip damage. But I wouldn't apply it wholecloth to the framework of 5e -- I think it breaks the design philosophy of the game even more drastically than OP's tiered resistances do.

Speaking as someone who used to do BG2 runs with immunity to normal weapons, it's incredibly fun to watch a sea of faceless mooks completely fail to scratch you, and it gives you a real sense of being a demi-god. I loved that feeling, but I don't think it belongs in 5e.

By Tier 4, it's already in 5e. There are plenty of Shapechange/True Polymorph forms with immunity to nonmagical weapons (of which True Polymorph can be permanent and Concentration-free), and there's a spell called Invulnerability to boot. You can get pretty close with Magic Jar too. And then there's stuff like permanently raging Zealot or permachanging Moon Druid or similars. Further, sufficiently low DR-values don't do this. Indeed, one form of this does exist in the game already specifically as a PC tool: Heavy Armor Master. But DR 3/- doesn't make you immune. DR 5/- would basically never do it either and even DR 7/- wouldn't be a problem. It's just a matter of keeping the numbers modest at least until a point where you do get to the demigod point (Tier 4/magic items). They make mooks way less dangerous but a sufficient number can still punch through.

[Ionathus]

By Tier 4, it's already in 5e. There are plenty of Shapechange/True Polymorph forms with immunity to nonmagical weapons (of which True Polymorph can be permanent and Concentration-free), and there's a spell called Invulnerability to boot. You can get pretty close with Magic Jar too. And then there's stuff like permanently raging Zealot or permachanging Moon Druid or similars. Further, sufficiently low DR-values don't do this. Indeed, one form of this does exist in the game already specifically as a PC tool: Heavy Armor Master. But DR 3/- doesn't make you immune. DR 5/- would basically never do it either and even DR 7/- wouldn't be a problem. It's just a matter of keeping the numbers modest at least until a point where you do get to the demigod point (Tier 4/magic items). They make mooks way less dangerous but a sufficient number can still punch through.

That's true, but at Tier 4 you're supposed to feel like a demigod and the system starts to break in interesting ways with a little bit of optimization anyway, so that makes sense to me.

I'm more thinking about a level 10 paladin wading through a sea of goblins who are all clinging on to her armor, stabbing with daggers that just bounce off. With DR 7/- (I'm not 100% sure on the terminology here so please correct me if I'm off), only 1 in 6 normal hits would do any damage, and it'd be 1. And this is a paladin we're talking about, so the goblins are probably only going to hit on an 18+. Even on a critical hit, they'd do an average of 9 damage reduced down to 2. So we're looking at every 18th-20th attack doing 1-2 damage. I like my heroes to be heroic and badass, but that extreme scenario doesn't compute with my idea of 5e.

Maybe that's not a feasible scenario or DR 7/- is way more than a level 10 PC could ever believably have. But my opinion stays the same even if the math gets less intense: I do like mooks to be capable of lucky shots that actually endanger the hero in 5e. Short of a limited-use ability, I think DR as a standard mechanic would put its finger on the scale too much.

[Eldariel]

Maybe that's not a feasible scenario or DR 7/- is way more than a level 10 PC could ever believably have. But my opinion stays the same even if the math gets less intense: I do like mooks to be capable of lucky shots that actually endanger the hero in 5e. Short of a limited-use ability, I think DR as a standard mechanic would put its finger on the scale too much.

Well, like I said, DR 3/- is already available. Also, I don't really see DR as a PC mechanic beyond that anyways. Do PCs get Resistance to damage in 5e as it stands? Really only Barbarian does aside from spells, and that could remain as is; double EHP is certainly fine. Thus I don't really think this is necessarily much of a problem. It would more be a matter of monsters vs. PCs and NPCs, where it can be impactful and interesting.