#sunbear games

One solution I saw recently and have been thinking about a lot is this: All healing is doubled if the target has at least 1 Hit Point.

One caveat to this is that it only works on sources of healing that would not be able to heal a downed target. This mostly affects sources of self-healing, like the Vampiric Touch spell or the Champion fighter's Survivor capstone.

This gives more incentive to use healing spells before allies go down. As an optional add-on to this rule, healing could instead be tripled for targets with more than half their maximum HP remaining. This further incentivizes keeping the party topped up.

I also like the narrative implications of these rules. A healing spell is less effective on a dying target because the spell is spending a lot of energy just to keep the target alive, whereas a creature with only superficial wounds can be restored to almost perfect health a lot easier.

How does that shape your character's outlook during play? Maybe they believe suffering will make them stronger, that they should seek out dangerous situations to push their own limits and become more powerful.

I think this is the kind of thing I want to focus on when talking about how mechanics inform narrative in games. In my experience in the modern TTRPG scene, lots of people are REALLY interested in exploring stories like this, using the medium as a way to confront parts of their own lived experience or trauma, or to understand a perspective they've never held themselves.

Because D&D 5e doesn't really support that. It's a combat simulator, basically, and you can certainly play this character and tell this story with it, but it doesn't SUPPORT the telling of that story with the mechanics. If you were reading about this character in a book, you could probably expect their power to fluctuate as they progress in their journey, or for their power to not grow the way they expected. In 5e, you get stronger when you level up, and that's it.

In my current campaign, the main antagonists are a necromancy cult called the Order of Renewal (or the Cult of the Risen, depending on who you ask). I've got a number of different kinds of cultists that fill different roles in combat, but most of them have some version of this feature:

In most encounters, I populate the battlefield with at least 2-3 low level cultists, fairly weak on their own and easy to knock down. BUT, each time a cultist goes down, their allies pounce. A lot of the higher level statblocks can do more with their version of Final Rite, like cast spells or use other special abilities.

If the party coordinates, they can take out these low-level mooks in rapid succession, reducing the impact of Final Rite since the other cultists can only take one reaction each round.

Then comes the second trick! Some of the cultists have the ability to raise nearby corpses as Undead. If the players don't take out these targets quickly, those mooks are on the field again as zombies.

This is the modified zombie statblock I use. They aren't as durable, with less HP and no Undead Fortitude, but they are a bigger threat as a swarm if they can properly mob a target.

So now there are a bunch of zombies to slow down the party, holding them in place while the remaining cultists try to make their escape. Each time a zombie goes down, Final Rite can come into play again.

Jumping as a bonus action and having a flat movement cost does wonders for mobility, and provides a lot more value to Strength, which is one of the less valuable stats in 5e.

The fact that most characters will always be knocked prone by falling more than 10 feet always bothered me. It discourages vertical battlemaps and vertical movement in general, since coming down can be so dangerous. Having a check with a DC determined by the damage seems much more natural, and this again benefits classes like the barbarian that can lessen the fall damage.

Still tinkering with parts of these rules, like maybe the Acrobatics check should be a regular Dex check or a Dex save. It's Acrobatics for now because that's what 5e uses when you jump into an area of difficult terrain. Also, 5e makes vertical jumps much shorter than horizontal ones, but these rules don't, its just movement in any direction that can propel you upward. Obviously that isn't very close to how actual jumping works, but I'd be curious to see how this works out. Could definitely say that jump distance is halved or whatever when jumping upwards.