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Homebrew Mechanic: Battles of Attrition

I think we can all agree that there’s something a little wonky with how d&d’s combat system changes between the early and mid/late game. Heroes go from being rightfully cautious about danger to being outright banal about it, confident that their accumulated power will be enough to dispatch all but the most outstanding foes. The traditional solution is to put them up against stronger enemies but in my experience these mismatched encounters are a failing proposition: combat just gets more swingy and there’s only so many high level threats I can throw at them in a short period of time before it begins to strain credulity.

While a lot of folks (Especially the OSR crowd) have taken the stance that 5e is broken because of how much it empowers players, I think the real fault lays with the lack of systems that exist to provide challenge outside of anything related to the damage based tug-of-war that is combat. I think a lot of those systems were part of the non existent “exploration” pillar of the game before Hasbro realized they could make easy money selling the game in its unfinished state and gutted it along with the development team.

Thankfully, I and other homebrewers are around to do what the megacorporations cant, namely have some original thoughts and try and figure out a way to add challenge back to the game without resenting those playing it for having fun.

TLDR: Trying to make our games challenging by upping damage numbers in combat is a losing proposition, in no small part because that part of the game is DESIGNED around the heroes winning. Instead, we up the overall difficulty by making them temporarily weaker with systems like sickness, stress, exhaustion, & item degradation. All of which I have details and guidelines on below the cut.

First and foremost let me state some of my goals for these “attrition systems”, so we can all be on the same page. Whenever I make homebrew rules I try for something that’s going to require little to no paperwork on behalf of the players and can be seamlessly implemented into my DMing style. It’s not about realism, it’s not about punishing players, this is a way for me to add mechanical depth without bogging down the machine entirely.

Attrition should be largely non-permanent. The 5e audience invests a lot in their characters both emotionally and mechanically, so it won’t do to pile on debilitating debuff after debuff to the point of making a character useless.

There should be an inverse relationship between the severity of the affliction and how long it lasts. Think in term of encounters, days, or weeks, (with the understanding that an attrition that goes on for long enough becomes a questhook in itself)

The exception to this rule is if someone hits 0 hitpoints. I’m outspoken in my stance that characters should only die when it’s alternatively appropriate, but the dm is at liberty to inflict thematically devastating setbacks in the unlikely event that the party DOES suffer losses in the damage tug of war.

We want to be sparing with how much attrition we throw at the party at once, so as to not create a “death spiral” where failures compound upon one another and make getting through the adventure impossible.

In most cases suffering Attrition should be something the party is able to avoid by being fast/lucky/cautious/clever or whatever else the encounter requires. It’s there to add weight and consequence to their actions, and as a factor for DMs to build scenarios around.

Exhaustion: Unlike a lot of the other changes made in Oned&d, I actually quite like the overhaul of “each point of exhaustion is a cumulative -1 to all d20 rolls and spell dc, beyond 10 is death” as it allows us to play with exhaustion far more readily as an attrition.

Every night you don’t rest in a haven (a safe comfortable place) you need to make a con save or take a point of exhaustion, with the ruggedness of the environment determining the DC. Characters with the survival skill or natural explorer feat don’t have to make this roll. Only rest in a haven removes exhaustion at the rate of one point per night (though spaces like a luxury inn or a peaceful glade watched over by friendly fey may restore more)

Hitting 0 hp and then being healed gives you a point of exhaustion. Nothing’s going to tire you out like getting magically defibulated so now everyone can stop complaining about healing word spam.

Poison: For our purposes, the “poisoned” condition as written is too severe. Disadvantage on all attacks and ability checks is downright punishing for anything other than a single battle. Instead we’re going to make it work like charmed, where there’s a baseline effect for the purposes of resistance, but the status of each poison is dependant on the source.

Poison falls in the “ short term big effect” side of attrition, specifically undermining a player’s ability to do most things since most effects end on a successful save or at the end of an encounter. Long lasting poisons should have more minor effects than the default poisoned condition, only applying to a few types of rolls or having a bane-like effect that makes judging the odds just a little bit more difficult.

This makes poison great to use for dungeons and short-ranging exploration where the party is likely to face multiple encounters in one day.

Diseases: 4e aced the design of these maladies by treating them as a contained skill challenge with their own CR with various stages: stage 0: you were cured, stage 1: you suffered the initial effect, stage 2 or 3: you suffered a severe effect, with the final stage (3-4) being some effect that made the disease permanent. When you got a disease it was usually stage 1, and you (usually) saved for it at the start of each day. Beating the DC by 5 or more meant you went down a stage (closer to 0), where as simply succeeding meant it stayed as bad as it was. Failing meant you got sicker, meaning a character could bounce up and down in wellness as an adventure went on.

Diseases are best for longterm adventures, and often undermine one particular aspect of a character ( healing, actions assosiated with a particular stat). Counterpoint to poisons, diseases should start out fairly gentle and then get worse the longer they’re left alone, leading to eventually devastating effects.

Curses: While borrowing the mechanics of diseases, I’d have curses be specifically weirder in their effects. The sort of thing that can make up the central hook or b-plot of a whole adventure. This should also mean that curses are the hardest for the party to stumble into, but also the hardest to shake.

Item Degradation: Detailed in a previous post HERE, the long and short of it is that item degradation is a form of player driven attrition that gently curbs their overall power level. If they go too hard, use their best items recklessly, get involved in needless fights, then they’re going to be in worse shape by the time they reach the final challenge. This was supposed be the idea behind HP/limited class abilities per day, but attrition systems cover that better IMO.

Stress: The psychological counterpoint to exhaustion, I’ve already talked about Stress HERE. I tend to only use stress in horror themed adventures and campaigns, as it builds upon 5e’s optional “madness” system which fits the theme when gothic terrors and eldritch abominations but less so with the game’s usual heroic fare.

Hunger & Supply: I made a super lightweight system based off this idea of “depletion die” for potions and other consumables, check it out, it’s lightweight and fantastic. Using this kind of system gives us another avenue to challenge our party, lengthening or shortening their lifeline as they lose supplies and seek out new caches.

Thinking environmentally: Part of the fantasy of being an adventurer is travelling to dangerous places and living to tell the tale. We’re denying our party that fantasy if we don’t follow through on the threat the idea of these places imply. You should risk sickness if you go into a swamp, sewer, or jungle, thirst should be a factor in desert exploration, just like freezing is for mountain and winter expeditions. That’s to say nothing of magical hazards; cursed landscapes that drain your will to live dead marshes style, alchemical smog in a steampunk industrial zone, fading into nothingness as you approach the edge of existence.

Figure out the natural hazards, make your party aware of the danger, and then build your adventure around the fact that they’ll need to save against the hazard each time they take a long rest.. Do they take a detour if it means having a safe place to camp? Is there a resource they need to manage along the way? Could encounters expose them to further dangers or make their current exposure worse? Keeping these ideas in mind especially when you’re planning a wilderness exploration adventure should give you lots of ideas to fill up those encounter tables.

Adding insult to injury: Giving enemies the ability to inflict attrition in various forms makes otherwise trivial enemies a credible threat even to a seasoned adventuring party. As an example, A party might breeze through a fight with some monstrous spiders ( or even ONE regular sized spider, if you can imagine) , but that spider encounter doesn’t need to be the most dangerous thing ever if their next encounter is a navigation challenge fording a river and a few of the heroes are still groggy thanks to the slow acting poison in their systems.

In this way you can use attrition based battles to soften your party up for greater challenges, long after their HP totals and healing ability have outpaced the damage a single trap/encounter can do.

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