this is mage

Time for my yearly self indulgent birthday drawing

I really like Monster of the Week’s “unstable” condition where once you’re a certain level of injured, you get worse without treatment of some kind. A mechanic for bleeding out is good, to reflect that ignoring a massive sword wound is gonna have consequences. You could take it further by having players roll for complications for things like infection, etc. 

I also like the idea of various levels of “injured” conditions where certain actions have a greater level of difficulty to accomplish, or can only be accomplished at the expense of worsening your condition. You could do something like ‘mildly injured’, where you can still do most of your actions but aren’t as fast and have a -1 to some rolls, ‘moderately injured’, where you’re rolling at a disadvantage with some actions because of the physical strain, ‘severely injured’ where actions are highly challenging and physically taxing even if you succeed, and ‘incapacitated’, where you’re not necessarily unconscious but can’t act unless you roll a 20, can’t move beyond a crawl, and can’t speak louder than a murmur.

More complicated healing and medicine mechanics would be at play here too, with potential side effects, of course. A player could treat an injury with various levels of efficacy – lightly staunching the bleeding with a makeshift bandage could have them rolling a die and below a certain threshhold, they lose HP that turn from continued bleeding; properly bandaging or field treating an injury stabilizes it, but they have to roll when undertaking a physically strenuous action to see if they make it worse/reopen the wound. Hell, later you could have players roll to see if it scarred or had otherwise lasting effects (magical healing would, of course, minimize those odds compared to traditional medical treatment).

Sacrifice Play

Can be taken as a reaction once per day

If an enemy rolls a successful hit against an allied creature or party member, Sacrifice Play can be used as a reaction prior to the rolling of damage if a player is:

within melee range of either being for melee attacks, or

within melee range of the line of sight between them for ranged attacks

If during combat a player sustains damage equivalent to 50% or more of their max HP via Piercing and/or Slashing type damage, they are now bleeding and must succeed on a constitution check each round or take 1d4 Blood Loss damage until they either:

receive magical healing or 

The Sunlit Empire D&D crew!

@cathedral-spires

He's MY monster