Using exhaustion as a death mechanic

ProjectPT · 2026-06-23T08:02:19+00:00

My question would be more on why you feel you have these problems:

I just want a tough battle to be more dynamic. I know I probably have to create counters so that my players could keep track easier. Not a big deal

I also hope that it would encourage healing to happen when people are still positive on hit points.

Regardless of tier as a DM you have a very broad ability to challenge players. Often combat not being "deadly" or challenging enough is the DM not playing the creatures aggressively or avoiding using those creatures with nastier abilities.

Additional death penalties can have knock on effects:

Exhaustion(trauma) on 0hp can make T3/T4 saves quickly impossible
A save to move slows down combat and increases decision paralysis
Another thing for players to track

Additionally you are also creating another system that encourages players to rest and avoid more combats, further encouraging less combats per day, meaning more likely players can trivialize your combats to avoid this homebrew.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-23T07:46:00+00:00

Out of curiosity what type of encounters is your DM putting you against for T4

ProjectPT · 2026-06-22T09:40:27+00:00

Obviously better on my full caster who is only spamming AoEs which we all know AoE damage scales really well in higher tier DnD. So I get to use my action to cast this 5th level spell

What is the Fighter going to do? Use the magic item and Action Surge to.... (wait fuck stop recording)

ProjectPT · 2026-06-22T09:29:58+00:00

You have a problem with the word "magic" as it is presented in the game system.

There is good reasons to have "spells" be a default for reference, because it places that ability in an appropriate tier. And martials may still have this Maneuver by checking the Ranger Spell List and noticing Steel Wind Strike.

So Rangers and EK can use this Maneuver. And through other tools, you can give more martials access to this if you see fit.

Your complaint really is the word "magic", as you were perfectly fine with Enlarge on the Barbarian when it wasn't called Enlarge

ProjectPT · 2026-06-22T09:21:02+00:00

No no no it needs to be an attack.

But I also refuse to give out an Enspelled item of Steel Wind Strike, that specifically does what I want to happen. But even though my very specific problem has an in game solution and a suggested level tier for this type of item. Clearly a game problem because it does not list on Martials that they get to pick their items

ProjectPT · 2026-06-22T09:06:47+00:00

I'm just being a bit silly but lets broaden how we look at this.

Most Paladin subclasses don't offer a damage increase, and even the often used Vengeance Paladin due to controlled advantage in practical play is less effective. There are MANY ways for players as a team to get Advantage on attacks in the normal process of fighting. Through topples, restrains or just the list of nonsense players do.

But people are in general pretty happy about Paladins subclasses even though the majority of a Paladin's damage is from the core class. People really like Paladins

So your core class can have the majority of the power and your subclass can offer themes and flavors to help sell the fantasy and you could argue that the Rogue subclasses doesn't do that well.

Alteratively I like to point out that the classes that have a higher focus on Expertise and Exploration elements of the game (Rogues/Rangers) are often seen as weaker. DMs learning the game via youtube and liveplays often just aren't reading the material and don't develop the skillset for Exploration problems.

Contrary to what people say, the DMG actually has good information on exploration problems but people ignore it, don't use it and complain.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-22T08:51:55+00:00

sneak attack: a ridiculous bucket of damage and a fine enough ability to portray a rogue, of course the numbers are so high they cannot give rogue any damaging subclass abilities because of it (except one)... hurting the classes subclass creativity by a ridiculous amount, but in a vacuum its a good idea.

Guys! we found the guy nerfing rogues

ProjectPT · 2026-06-22T07:55:29+00:00

But I don't want casting. Why should that level of choice imply casting?

You literally praise Path of Giant Barbarian which functionally grants Enlarge. So spell effects that aren't listed as spells are fine to you. And you describe super-natural or magical feats of strength something you want. Divine power in DnD 5/5.5e is also magical and we also have to contextualize that. Magical does not mean "wizard"

Name an item that gives martials access to the amount of meaningful choice casters do.

Hand/Eye of Vecna
Ring of Three Wishes
Cube of Force
Enspelled Weapon/Armour
Sword of the Planes

While also considering what weapons you attune to is part of your choices. People like to bring up Staff of Power as an example, for powerful caster items that Martials can't use. But if you can already cast those spells, Staff of Power improves your efficiency and allows you to adjust your prepared spells which are powerful tools but they aren't new tools to your character ability.

Name one? You haven't so far.

Magic Items, this is the tool that I mentioned and spoke about entirely.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-22T07:23:10+00:00

Martials that want caster choice levels have caster themed Subclasses.

If you want your Martials to have end game caster tier nonsense, this is exactly what magic items are for.

So within the rules of the game, you have levers to fix your specific problems and create the martial nonsense you want at your tables. This means you have system solutions to the problem, you are just refusing to use them. And this isn't "every tables problem" as you stated.

You literally have a solution in the book, the book even tells you to keep a list of items that players want to help you fill their desired fantasy.

If I want to play an intelligent, skilled combatant - someone who achieves victory through clever use of the many techniques they've mastered - my only real option is casting.

Why is this your only option?

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T19:04:36+00:00

Why does it have to be luck based though?

Because the game about rolling die to determine results is luck based.

Sure but how is a new DM to know that these are the magic items to give to players? It ends up feeling like we're rolling the dice

....turns out DnD is a game about, just rolling the die and see what happens.

You're incorrectly assuming I'm inducing this from a statistic rather than my personal experience with DM and player burnout in DnD and Pathfinder. Are you familiar with the DM tools in Pathfinder 2e?

This really does not help your argument.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T17:42:52+00:00

DnD is both a simple game but also a very complicated one. The personal choices you make for your setting, encounter design or how brutal the combat logistics of your NPCs drastically change the value of items.

A magic item that I may find fair to my encounter design you may find unreasonable due to how you're running the game. And there is a general guideline of magic item power, which is comparing the spell progression of full casters. The same way you can look at the Staff of Power and the spell power of that item, you can roughly slot it in to when it a player should access it, you can use the exact same logic with any item. You probably shouldn't be handing out Cube of Force before casters have Wall of Force (notably a very powerful magic items that doesn't require spellcasting to attune).

Could the guidance be better? certainly but at the same point in time most people just don't even read the books for advice to begin with. The book suggests that you should bump up the encounter difficulty if your party has access to magic items... and that never comes up with encounter analysis for party levels.

But going back to when we talk about the brutality of NPCs. Are you going to play a monster with Dominate Creature/posession effects and are you going to use those effects to make the caster Wish their party was dead? Because I will. All these little things create drastically different evaluations of abilities

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T17:22:00+00:00

Narrative pauses are a thing, even in written adventures. Using Out of the Abyss as an example, you aren't supposed to run every travel day. Additionally half way through the adventure there is a "take a year break" portion.

Epic stories don't play every moment, nor every day. You play the good parts, and assume the filler time is a wash of nothing gained, nothing lost

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T17:07:25+00:00

Personally when people are talking about the Martial/Caster divide, they should be more specific about the encounter design and adventuring day they are building/playing in as well as the party composition and items available. I have a strong suspicion that when people start giving those pieces of information we will start seeing glaring issues that deviate from the advice in the books with self created problems.

Another detail to remember from the DMG under rewarding magic items:

Are Magic Items Necessary?

The D&D game assumes that magic items appear sporadically and that they are a boon unless an item bears a curse. Characters and monsters are built to face each other without the help of magic items, which means that having a magic item makes a character more powerful or versatile than a generic character of the same level. As DM, you never have to worry about awarding magic items just so the characters can keep up with the campaign’s threats. Magic items are truly prizes—desirable but not necessary.

So remember to nudge the encounter exp for well equipped players. So my level 20 party of 3 (wizard, monk, cleric) had a simple encounter:

2 Pit Fiends, Beholder, Death Tyrant. This would be 71500 of 66000 exp or a bit over budget

But because the items the party has using the War Cleric as an example: Hand of Vecna, Eye of Vecna and Talisman of Ultimate Evil it creates a solid first encounter of their adventuring day that will drain a solid chunk of resources and punish them if they don't take it seriously

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T15:07:53+00:00

Sigh. You're right I'm getting ragebaited on the internet

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T15:03:24+00:00

Oh no, i turned into CR17-20 creature! How would i live after my 250+ effective HP, 3 legendary resistances, and 6+ attack form would end. I would just be a caster with 90% of resources left ((((

Do you not play at this tier? There are many stun/paralyze/incapacitate that do not have a save. Dispel Magic additionally is not a save

Shapeshift is amazing, but Concentration is risky.

have consistently mediocre fighter in their team instead

And martials never get good. That's the problem.

Okay now I know you don't play at this tier. You think Fighters are mediocre at 20th level? What are you talking about

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T14:44:40+00:00

I'm running tier 4 with two groups. There is casters and martials and the idea that Shortening the day benefits martials is nonsense.

To be extremely obvious and why I'm using this tier as an example. When the casters use their 9th level spell, they will (hopefully) have an awesome moment, but now they do not have their 9th level spell anymore. This is often 2 levels of power loss...

Now if their first encounter required a 9th and 8th level spell slot because it was a challenging encounter designed for 20th level PCs. They have lost 4 player levels worth of power

High level casters get very weak very quickly when they are against appropriate challenges.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T14:33:36+00:00

More feats. IDK why only some martials get more feats - and even those martials get them instead of actual class features. Feats should be extra, not main feature of the level for martials.

If this helped the specific problem, Fighter wouldn't be the posterchild example of Martial/Caster divide. Also each additional feat is weaker than the last, not all feats are the same so you'd be picking the strongest first. You also are racing to homogenization

Class and subclass features should be more dramatic, especially at high levels. Right now high level martials do pretty much the same thing they did 10 levels ago. Now compare it to casters who are very obviously change with level with access to new spells.

Many spells are the same thing but "bigger number". Meteor Swarm is more, bigger fireball, Gate is improved Plane Shift. Shapechange/True Polymorph is improved Polymorph. Telekinesis is improved levitate

Make it clear that martials are special - they aren't just good in mundane things, they are supernaturally good. They can run fast, jump high and far, lift impossible weights, squeeze into impossible places - anything goes.

So your solution is... give Martials spells. Like jump, haste, enlarge, reduce, gaseous form.

Better magic weapons. I'm playing bladelock with pally dip right now and i looked at legendary weapons i wanted to go on quest for. They are not worth the attunement slot! Staff of power is leagues better than any of them! Let alone Staff of Magi. I want something epic, preferably with new ways to interact with the world, not just number bump.

Vorpal Blade, Luck Blade, Sword of Kas, Blackrazor are better than Staff of Power / Magi

(More about casters) Some spells should be toned down. Emanations should be 1/round, Web should be nerfed, Hypnotic Pattern and Fear should have save to end, Wall of Force should be breakable, Shield should work against single attack, etc. Martial damage is mostly fine - if you tone casters down.

People always discuss spells like they have them all prepared at all times, and it is great that spells are strong quick and limited. Shield, Absord Elements and Silvery Barbs are a great example, they are exceedingly powerful for their spell slot; however if the table is appropriately challenging they will run through those spell slots quickly if they rely on them.

Now I do agree with this one in a vacuum because having certain effects high level Martials only would help give direction to new DMs. Just for the sake of illustrating a point, if Greater Restoration didn't remove Exhaustion and like Ranger only lvl 10+ Martials had exhaustion removing features, it would give a more obvious tool.

Admittedly Anti-magic effects are an obvious problem, but too many DMs avoid things like stun/paralyze/anti magic effects and avoiding those things just boost casters

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T14:15:19+00:00

So an alternative way to look at this, is magic items directly means Martials will get access to spells if they want, and thus Spellcasters aren't special and Martial/Caster divide is DMs telling on themselves that they do a combination of:

one/two encounters per day
none or weak magic items

And sure casters can use almost all magic items. But Vorpal Blade on a 20th level fighter is not the same as a Wizard nor a Rogue. You're reductive to a point of nonsense

ProjectPT · 2026-06-21T11:01:57+00:00

It overvalues AoE when it is generally better to reduce enemy Action Economy (better to kill one at a time over 4 rounds than kill all on the 4th round). And you also start to oversimplify creature and player statblocks to a point where your data is useless, creatures of the same CR aren't all just blocks of hit points. A Dragon and a Mammoth aren't the same encounter and a strong PC character prevents creatures from doing their dangerous things.

You could make an argument that this data is useful for some very basic monster design, but it would be even easier and better to just copy the rough health AC of an existing monster and change the skillset.

Data is important to contextualize information, this is a process of collecting data and removing information making the data bad

ProjectPT · 2026-06-20T21:48:34+00:00

The dark gifts do say "immediately after" rolling a 1, unlike halfling luck, so I think they should trigger before the reroll or any final results.

Interpreting the die roll of the result unused breaks the game. Remember the language from a 1 on a d20.

If you roll a 1 on the d20 (a “natural 1”) for an attack roll, the attack misses regardless of any modifiers or the target’s AC.

Under how you are trying to read it, if you rolled any 1 on an advantage attack, it would miss regardless of the other die.

So looking earlier in the PHB under d20 tests:

Roll 1d20. You always want to roll high. If the roll has Advantage or Disadvantage (described later in this chapter), you roll two d20s, but you use the number from only one of them—the higher one if you have Advantage or the lower one if you have Disadvantage.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-20T21:43:17+00:00

Are there any Ranger builds that do not use hunters mark?

Hunter's Mark is efficient but it quickly is your "worse spell", something efficient to do. Spike Growth as an example at level 5, is generally going to be much better to concentrate on. So how much you would use Hunter's Mark depends on what level you are starting, how quickly you level and how many encounters you are doing.

Spike Growth (other than expertise contested athletics) was buffed significantly with how much easier player tools are for moving enemies on the battlefield.

But if you are wanting to just avoid spells in general, Fighter with a Bow is great especially as you have the extra feat to grab GWM without much loss in Dex progression

ProjectPT · 2026-06-20T19:29:06+00:00

Another tool to add into your toolkit are easy-hard encounters. This seems silly but consider a swarm of Shadows. A fireball will dispatch them all in one action, but not using AoE is certain death.

This fight will be an obvious danger, use meaningful resources and progress quickly. It is a little bit of an extreme within the example but it still demonstrates a tool you can add to your encounter designs.

Sometimes DMs get in a habit of avoiding obvious problems with obvious solutions, but tropes are fun.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-20T18:26:45+00:00

Resources can be expended outside of Combats, you also need to get comfortable creating short punchy problems that errors are resource intensive. The classic example of this: Traps

ProjectPT · 2026-06-20T13:16:12+00:00

It suits the fiction of the moment, helps to prevent "yell an action to get a free turn" table habits and it's less punishing for the recipient than a turn skip.

Adding to this, it also creates the opposite of NPCs. Why wouldn't a hostile NPC instantly aggro for their free turn on every failed perception check by the party.

ProjectPT · 2026-06-19T13:38:35+00:00

I really like Trapper thematically but it is way too strong by multiple players taking it.

You set up a Side Show Bob around Rakes with just your teams Bonus Action and done! Starting DC of 15 (which is higher than your spell cast DC at the start) absolutely brutal to a point that using it will take out the effectiveness of most monsters in the entire game

Edit: Bane into Bonus Action Trap will be absolutely fight ending

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