I will be launching a homebrew campaign soon, and I am considering the use of some of the optional combat rules found in the DMG. In particular, I am looking at the Gritty Realism natural healing rules. This variant uses a short rest of 8 hours and a long rest of 7 days. I am also considering the optional Injury rules, although I would apply them differently to the party than to NPCs, giving injuries to NPCs on crits and to PCs only when they make death saving throws. My goal is to greatly increase the stakes of combat, encouraging the characters to find alternatives, and to slow the pace of the game, creating more down time for events in the wider world to take place.
Has anyone any experience using these rules? Anything about applying them that you would like to share?
While I never used those rules I'd be careful with your encounters as using Hit Dice does not get you very far in health especially if are using you "get half your hit dice back after a long rest." So your encounters will need to be balanced for a party with fewer hit points otherwise I can see possible TPK occurring rather quickly.
I'd say the big thing those options create in your game is a very different sense of time, as the DMG indicates. Parties will be big on establishing a secure base camp if their working far afield from the sanctuary of a town or city. Of course, how secure can a base camp be that far from civilization. One big thing to think over is you're going to have characters long resting, and a lot of characters looking for something to do in downtime. That's fine back in a city or town, though downtime activities can lead to complications, and that's cool if you're games freeform, which I think the parameters of gritty realism sort of lend themselves to since you're seriously beholden to Murphy's Law. If downtime is kept in a basecamp environment, maybe you can have healthy characters engage in sorts of training or self study, language or skill tool practice with a mentor within party.
Time also means a greater need of provisions. You're doing gritty realism, so you're tracking food and water right? Basically if things go bad in the adventure, the backpack worth of rations isn't going to cut it. Maybe you can rely on goodberry, there's also foraging. If they're packing in a food, a pack animal (and its safety and security) is now literally in play,
As a third party plug, Survivalist Guide to Spelunking has some good thinking on foraging and butchering foodstuffs in the Underdark (neat tables where hunters might become hunted sort of stuff too), and at least on a casual read through down makes them seem adaptable to above ground surviving. Oddly the climbing rules are sort of "ok" though very 5e in spirit, but a lot of the stuff about designing environmental features as challenges over simply monster population encounters and what not are great and again not too hard to Inuit ways to adapt into situations on the world's surface.
Bottom line, make sure your players want this. Gritty realism moves the game away from the more "heroic fantasy" where fools characters can rush in and as long as they make it through the battle or get their HP 0 status stabilized, they'll make it and literally live to fight another the next day. Gritty realism moves things in a more simulationist direction where resource management (time being a key resource) are much more a factor in party deliberations when determining "what do we do now?"
I've always wanted to run something like Tomb of Anhiliation with Gritty Realism where the players have to make either a base camp or camp in the tomb, and the tomb and Chult respond accordingly as an ecosystem. You know, kinda like the old pulp stories of archaeological adventures over Tomb Raider.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
While I never used those rules I'd be careful with your encounters as using Hit Dice does not get you very far in health especially if are using you "get half your hit dice back after a long rest." So your encounters will need to be balanced for a party with fewer hit points otherwise I can see possible TPK occurring rather quickly.
Thanks for this. I am planning to make the 'other side' just as leery of combat, and also make combat encounters more like climactic moments rather than everyday events. I want the fights to be memorable, not routine. Progression will be milestone, and relatively slow, so there's no XP grind pressure.
I'd say the big thing those options create in your game is a very different sense of time, as the DMG indicates. Parties will be big on establishing a secure base camp if their working far afield from the sanctuary of a town or city. Of course, how secure can a base camp be that far from civilization. One big thing to think over is you're going to have characters long resting, and a lot of characters looking for something to do in downtime. That's fine back in a city or town, though downtime activities can lead to complications, and that's cool if you're games freeform, which I think the parameters of gritty realism sort of lend themselves to since you're seriously beholden to Murphy's Law. If downtime is kept in a basecamp environment, maybe you can have healthy characters engage in sorts of training or self study, language or skill tool practice with a mentor within party.
Time also means a greater need of provisions. You're doing gritty realism, so you're tracking food and water right? Basically if things go bad in the adventure, the backpack worth of rations isn't going to cut it. Maybe you can rely on goodberry, there's also foraging. If they're packing in a food, a pack animal (and its safety and security) is now literally in play,
As a third party plug, Survivalist Guide to Spelunking has some good thinking on foraging and butchering foodstuffs in the Underdark (neat tables where hunters might become hunted sort of stuff too), and at least on a casual read through down makes them seem adaptable to above ground surviving. Oddly the climbing rules are sort of "ok" though very 5e in spirit, but a lot of the stuff about designing environmental features as challenges over simply monster population encounters and what not are great and again not too hard to Inuit ways to adapt into situations on the world's surface.
Bottom line, make sure your players want this. Gritty realism moves the game away from the more "heroic fantasy" where fools characters can rush in and as long as they make it through the battle or get their HP 0 status stabilized, they'll make it and literally live to fight another the next day. Gritty realism moves things in a more simulationist direction where resource management (time being a key resource) are much more a factor in party deliberations when determining "what do we do now?"
I've always wanted to run something like Tomb of Anhiliation with Gritty Realism where the players have to make either a base camp or camp in the tomb, and the tomb and Chult respond accordingly as an ecosystem. You know, kinda like the old pulp stories of archaeological adventures over Tomb Raider.
This is the feel I am trying to achieve. Preparation and planning will be rewarded, carelessness punished, although I don't want to turn it into a book keeping exercise. One thing I am concerned about is ensuring that all party members will have useful things to do during the downtime. I don't want the Bard (if there is one) being the centre of attention all the time. I'm really stressing the importance of the player's background and what their life outside of adventuring, at their home base, consists of. The relationships that they cultivate will be important. I hope they will always have an answer to "what do we do now?" It's a super experienced group that favours role playing, with some of our campaigns having run for nearly a decade, so I think it will work.
If they got a lot of experience and are game for your game it sounds like you should go for it. Book keeping is just a sheet, and the resource management is really a collective exercise you can put on the group (and maybe keep a DMs sheet too to either keep them honest or maybe there's something about their resources or the environments effects on resources that they're not aware of). One thing to think of if they're recouping at base camp, if someone is convalescing, can they keep watch? I'd argue no as sentry duty is not rest. This may lead to sentries possibly suffering exhaustion if they're not granted time to rest as well.
I don't think the stuff I've outlined would be tedious record keeping for a party invested in a game embracing these aspects. Timekeeping IRL task minding is important but should be ancillary to the work.
Actually I'd say if you do develop foraging/hunting rules (including tables in hostile environments where hunters could become hunted) you're actually taking the day to day tasks that usual heroic fantasy play relegates to the time keeping sheets and resource box checks and turning those needs and considerations into an actual part of play.
I played in a game with gritty realism. The main effect was that we went back to the 5 minute working day. We'd have one encounter, then go somewhere and rest overnight. The come back, have the second encounter. Rinse, repeat.
It significantly affected some spells, so the GM had to adjust durations. In particular, goodberry and animate dead. It completely invalidated others, for example rope trick (a one-hour duration is pointless).
It also led to a lot of us taking short-rest or no-rest characters (warlocks, rogues, fighters).
One character was cursed by a night-hag. The GM had to adjust that, because with the RAW it would have killed the character during the first long rest.
I have to say, I don't like the Gritty Realism rules at all, because the main impact that they have is to slow the game down, in a way that damages gameplay. Instead of Gritty Realism, they should just be called Downtimes and Not Many Dragons. It could also be called: "I don't get to use my abilities much the RPG."
The main effect of Gritty Realism healing is that the PCs cannot do what they want to do for long periods of time, and this occurs consistently throughout the entire campaign. If the encounters are also usually difficult, they won't leave town until a week passes.
Increase the stakes of combat
The Gritty Realism rules don't do this. The characters are going to fight when they have to fight. During the fight, the stakes are the same as they always were (win, run, die); the only things these rules do is force long periods of downtime after the stakes have gone away.
slow the pace of the game
Slowing the pace is generally not desirable for the players. Unless your players are more interested in downtime activities than they are in adventuring and slaying monsters (in which case I'm not sure D&D is the best choice of RPG for them) then this isn't great for them. You want the PCs to find other solutions, like RP persuasion etc, but they aren't going to put themselves in situations to do this whilst tapped out. They'll fight when they're powerful, and hide out when weak. The Gritty Realism healing rules mean running a game in which one of three things happens:
The players get to roleplay a lot of downtime, spending a week between most combat encounters and they think that's more fun. In which case, you probably don't want combat in the game at all.
The players don't like roleplaying a week of downtime between every encounter, and are bored and just want to get on with the game.
The players say "let's just rest up for a week. I'll spend the time reading/training/learning a language" and you skip forward 7 days instead of 8 hours.
creating more down time for events in the wider world to take place.
The only events that are typically of interest to the players are the events that they are directly involved in: everything else is just you explaining what's happening far away. This is their adventure; their actions should be the most important. You can tell them in a couple of sentences that "the war has been ongoing. Watercress Castle has fallen and the orc army has moved into the valley states territory." But if you want these periods of downtime, then you can simply design it to happen between adventures. It can happen during long periods of travel (separate key locations by 1 week or more of travel). I really just think your players won't care about the big events of the world that they are not directly party to as they'll just be spectators.
The worst thing about it:
The major problem with Gritty Realism healing is that it totally alters what type of adventure you can send the PCs on. Often PCs can scrape a short rest through Rope Trick, or by finding a hiding place, or even retiring to the back line in the midst of a siege. These types of game are no longer available to your PCs. If you want a very low combat game then that's fine, but expect to go multiple sessions in a row without combats. You may even find that the PCs become so combat averse that you're effectively playing a life sim, and when you want them to fight, you'll have to force it. And if you have PCs who simply want to get on with playing the story and the adventure then they'll just go fighting anyway and build characters that don't rely on long rests.
I would suggest instead that you can achieve better Gritty Realism effects by something like the following:
Homebrew a system that requires players to take a week of downtime after a certain number of long rests. So after 3x 8 Hour long rests, the next long rest will take a week. This lets players avoid having to take a week between every encounter, or series of encounters.
Provide travel times, or adventures that require the PCs to wait for events like a festival, in order to build downtime
Give armour and weapons durability, and don't give any magical items until at least level 7. Limit the players on ammunition, make durability checks for their weapons and armour, build in an upkeep.
Use a custom Permanent Injury table and roll every time they get reduced to 0 hit points to show the true danger of getting knocked down. 1-5 are serious injuries (broken hand, broken leg etc), 6-10 are minor injuries, 11-17 are scars and 18-20 just cuts and bruises. Never foist a totally debilitating head injury on a PC, it ruins their gameplay.
Gritty realism will make the game play more like it did back in the AD&D days. If that’s your goal then Yahtzee, however I would recommend having each player create 2-3 characters so their PCs can work in “shifts” to progress things while their others are recuperating. For four players you’ll be looking at a party of eight to twelve instead of a party of four.
Back then we expected most (70%-80%) PCs to be dead by third level, and most of the rest to be dead by 5th level. It was the one PC each that survived past that that folks fell in love with.
I will be launching a homebrew campaign soon, and I am considering the use of some of the optional combat rules found in the DMG. In particular, I am looking at the Gritty Realism natural healing rules. This variant uses a short rest of 8 hours and a long rest of 7 days.
If you haven't already, run this through with your players during a session 0, or at least playtest it once or twice with your party to get a feel for it, before you get fully stuck in with it. Some people enjoy the difference in mechanics, others not-so-much.
I am also considering the optional Injury rules, although I would apply them differently to the party than to NPCs, giving injuries to NPCs on crits and to PCs only when they make death saving throws. My goal is to greatly increase the stakes of combat, encouraging the characters to find alternatives, and to slow the pace of the game, creating more down time for events in the wider world to take place.
Same thing applies here as above. Portraying the life and struggle of someone with a prosthesis, major disfigurement or a missing limb can be challenging enough. This, coupled with the previous ruleset may make the characters unplayable after a rough encounter or two.
I'm not sure that this will give you the feeling of gritty or realistic without tracking all of the individual pieces of ammo, rations, food, spell components... the list goes on, it's gonna be plenty for everyone to track. This will almost require a very granular approach to inventory management and time tracking. This is just not fun for many people. Some folks will enjoy this type of game very much. I'm all for increasing challenge and causing hard decisions to be made, but again - talk to the group if you haven't already. Your primary function is to provide a fun experience, maybe not a realistic one.
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Thanks to all for their very thoughtful responses. There is a lot for me to chew on there. I am becoming persuaded that I can achieve what I am hoping to achieve without having to resort to the optional rules, so long as my players are happy with the approach. And if they aren't, there's not much fun in trying to railroad them.
First thing to do is to make sure that this is something that the players want to do. While I enjoy a grittier lower magic setting I know that this is not always appealing to players. If they are willing then by all means proceed.
Our group uses a simple modification to the healing rules to make the game a bit grittier. We changed the long rest to only grant the recovery of spent hit dice. (the party can of course spend hit dice to heal) We did not like the concept of fully healing from a long rest so we did away with it. When in a safe (and comfortable place) such as an inn, home, or safe refuge we add one hit die plus con to healing per night.
For the campaigns I run I have added a level of exhaustion each time a player falls to 0 hit points or below plus a level for each failed death save. Both the players and I wanted meaningful consequences to being that close to death.
As a DM the other thing I found I had to do was to increase the pacing of encounters and create some time crunch to make decisions meaningful. Putting a time constraint that forces the party to make choices makes them treat their abilities/spells/feats/time as resources and their choices are much more meaningful and make a difference. Time as a resource is something we often forget as a DM.
There are plenty of things you can do, I suggest you start slow and keep the changes simple. Have fun with it!
I'm about to run these gritty rules in a campaign with my personal friends. They know it, are bought in and excited, and I've built a world that fits it.
Everyone (including the NPC's) will treat combat as a messy meat grinder that's better avoided. Any creature sentient enough to have a sense of self-preservation is going to strongly consider a combat and ensuring they have whatever they perceive to be a tactical advantage before they get into it.
Meaning swords are drawn when the needs/risks outweigh the danger.
I'm also using Xanathar's downtime rules as well as the Kingdoms & Warfare rules from MCDM to add a layer of things to do other than direct adventure into combat.
I also grant just as much experience for exploration and roleplay as I do combat. Characters can level up over time without needing to go fight things. The fighting will have reasons. Usually :D
One thing to keep in mind with Gritty Realism is that certain types of adventuring days become very challenging or you need to reduce the difficulty substantially.
For example, exploring a dungeon, which might normally take a day or two in game with 0 or 1 long rests and a few short rests becomes an event that has to be completed with 0 or 1 short rests. The characters have far fewer resources to spend on several encounters that are likely when exploring a dungeon. You mention trying to make combat be more dangerous and represent a climax in the adventure but this strongly depends on the type of adventure. Rescuing villagers from the orc tribe encampment or from the gnoll fortress becomes much more challenging without the option to rest to regain resources (the DM needs to scale the encounters). This can be partially offset if, as in 1e, the DM supplied the party with enough healing potions to get them through.
Games I have run ranged from one encounter/day or less up to 6-8 encounters in a dungeon or other setting with content packed together. Gritty Realism works ok for the one and done type approach to encounters/day but doesn't work as well when there are multiple interactions that require resources.
P.S. If you do actually consider some of the combat options in the DMG (rather than Gritty Realism which is actually a healing option) ... I'd strongly discourage the use of the flanking option. Easy access to advantage for both PCs and NPCs tends to make combat even more random than it currently is and allow triggering some abilities for various classes with very little work.
I'm struggling with this issue as well for my upcoming homebrew.
If my players do something unwise and get stabbed in the chest by some maniac wielding a 3-foot-long razor blade, then they go home and sleep it off and are fine the next day, it feels like we have progressed outside of the realm of what I would consider "Heroic Fantasy" and landed pretty solidly in the realm of "Saturday morning cartoons". But then, I guess the balance we are seeking is one between realism and fun. When it comes to fighting and monsters and time management, the two are pretty much directly opposed. The 5e rules come down pretty heavily on the "fun" side here. And as DM's, part of our job is encouraging said fun. If my campaign consists largely of talking, and running, and managing time and equipment, the fun level can drop off pretty dramatically. If playing D&D starts to feel like a chore, it will be tough to keep the players engaged.
"What are you going to do for the next week while your impulsive teammate recovers from taking an arrow to the kidney?" "I don't know... copy some spells and, like, learn a new language or something, I guess?"
The cold hard fact is that shooting lightning bolts at ghosts is fun, while recovering from falling down a flight of stairs because you failed your dex save is decidedly not fun. If you have a group who wants to play a medieval survival simulator with occasional, devastating fight scenes then I say GO FOR IT. If, however, you are in the much more likely scenario of having a group that wants to walk into the castle of an ancient, aristocratic vampire, and burn the whole place to the ground while making "suck" jokes, then you have some tough choices to make.
As a DM, I have a vision of an epic story of globetrotting adventurers attempting to save the world from a mysterious impending doom. But D&D is, in the end, a co-operative storytelling game. And co-op means two things: 1: You're not the only one who has input and 2: If the game stops being fun, players will probably find something else to do. So, yes, you should consider the story you want to tell - but don't forget to engage your players in the process of determining the boundaries of that story.
My question is what about "gritty realism" - specifically - appeals to you?
Often gritty realism type campaigns fail completely because people equate them with no, or little healing. This means you have exactly the same campaign but everything takes longer. You don't have an overnight long rest, you have a 7 day long rest. It's exactly the same but with a whole lot of nothing bits added in. It's not gritty - it's boring.
I think what people really want when they think about gritty realism is *consequences*. You want to make PCs scared about getting into fights - make the bad guys stronger than them. Make it hard for them to get a long rest because it is hard to find anywhere that is safe for 8 hours. Make the fights have real consequences to people in the world that the PCs care about. Make every combat have stakes. You beat up these goblins? Cool. Good for you. What is this village going to do now when the rest of their tribe come looking for them?
Is this gritty realism? Or is it just good storytelling?
Ironically, I think people want to play gritty realism because they think it will make them feel like a *real hero*. When actually playing a game like this just makes you feel powerless most of the time.
I agree that the gritty realism rules make for a campaign where time passes a lot slower.
I've never played with the Injury rules, but they read like a good reason for a party to try and avoid combat. I'd definitely let the players see the possible results from the table so that they know what might happen if they ever suffer the triggering conditions.
In fact, I'd go with "drops to 0 hit points" as another condition, not just failing death rolls by 5 or more - it will encourage them to drink healing potions or cast healing spells more to keep fellow party members on their feet - and the effect would explain why the PC went from being fully combat active (on 1HP) to unconscious (on 0 HP) in a single hit.
Everyone (including the NPC's) will treat combat as a messy meat grinder that's better avoided. Any creature sentient enough to have a sense of self-preservation is going to strongly consider a combat and ensuring they have whatever they perceive to be a tactical advantage before they get into it.
Given that almost everything in the D&D rules relates to combat, I just have to wonder why you are playing D&D if you want combat to be avoided. Players love to shout "Ohhhh noooo" when you tell them to roll initiative, but you know that really they're excited and can't wait to take their turn.
It's a bit like playing football and then covering the ball in nails so that you'll only kick it if you absolutely have no other choice.
I have to say, I don't like the Gritty Realism rules at all, because the main impact that they have is to slow the game down
I just want to point out that according to my understanding the point of Gritty Realism is to use it for slow campaigns.
I agree that is causes slow campaigns: I don't agree that those that try to use it want slow campaigns. The slow down is the effect of the poorly designed optional rules - it doesn't make anything grittier, or more realistic: it just slows the game down. It just causes more downtime. How is that fun for the players? They can optionally take downtime if they want to at any point: these optional rules just force it at times they don't want it.
Enforced additional downtime inhibits the ability of the characters to get to things that they want to do, while achieving exactly the same thing that a shorter rest period enables. Sounds ok for a couple of sessions. By session 22 of the campaign, when the PCs are having to state what they're doing in yet another downtime period, having taken at least one every session since the campaign began, they'll all just be doing their go to downtime activity because it becomes so dreary to explain how you spend yet another pointless week of downtime, just to satisfy an optional ruling.
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Good morning all,
I will be launching a homebrew campaign soon, and I am considering the use of some of the optional combat rules found in the DMG. In particular, I am looking at the Gritty Realism natural healing rules. This variant uses a short rest of 8 hours and a long rest of 7 days. I am also considering the optional Injury rules, although I would apply them differently to the party than to NPCs, giving injuries to NPCs on crits and to PCs only when they make death saving throws. My goal is to greatly increase the stakes of combat, encouraging the characters to find alternatives, and to slow the pace of the game, creating more down time for events in the wider world to take place.
Has anyone any experience using these rules? Anything about applying them that you would like to share?
Many thanks in advance.
While I never used those rules I'd be careful with your encounters as using Hit Dice does not get you very far in health especially if are using you "get half your hit dice back after a long rest." So your encounters will need to be balanced for a party with fewer hit points otherwise I can see possible TPK occurring rather quickly.
I'd say the big thing those options create in your game is a very different sense of time, as the DMG indicates. Parties will be big on establishing a secure base camp if their working far afield from the sanctuary of a town or city. Of course, how secure can a base camp be that far from civilization. One big thing to think over is you're going to have characters long resting, and a lot of characters looking for something to do in downtime. That's fine back in a city or town, though downtime activities can lead to complications, and that's cool if you're games freeform, which I think the parameters of gritty realism sort of lend themselves to since you're seriously beholden to Murphy's Law. If downtime is kept in a basecamp environment, maybe you can have healthy characters engage in sorts of training or self study, language or skill tool practice with a mentor within party.
Time also means a greater need of provisions. You're doing gritty realism, so you're tracking food and water right? Basically if things go bad in the adventure, the backpack worth of rations isn't going to cut it. Maybe you can rely on goodberry, there's also foraging. If they're packing in a food, a pack animal (and its safety and security) is now literally in play,
As a third party plug, Survivalist Guide to Spelunking has some good thinking on foraging and butchering foodstuffs in the Underdark (neat tables where hunters might become hunted sort of stuff too), and at least on a casual read through down makes them seem adaptable to above ground surviving. Oddly the climbing rules are sort of "ok" though very 5e in spirit, but a lot of the stuff about designing environmental features as challenges over simply monster population encounters and what not are great and again not too hard to Inuit ways to adapt into situations on the world's surface.
Bottom line, make sure your players want this. Gritty realism moves the game away from the more "heroic fantasy" where
foolscharacters can rush in and as long as they make it through the battle or get their HP 0 status stabilized, they'll make it and literally live to fightanotherthe next day. Gritty realism moves things in a more simulationist direction where resource management (time being a key resource) are much more a factor in party deliberations when determining "what do we do now?"I've always wanted to run something like Tomb of Anhiliation with Gritty Realism where the players have to make either a base camp or camp in the tomb, and the tomb and Chult respond accordingly as an ecosystem. You know, kinda like the old pulp stories of archaeological adventures over Tomb Raider.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Thanks for this. I am planning to make the 'other side' just as leery of combat, and also make combat encounters more like climactic moments rather than everyday events. I want the fights to be memorable, not routine. Progression will be milestone, and relatively slow, so there's no XP grind pressure.
This is the feel I am trying to achieve. Preparation and planning will be rewarded, carelessness punished, although I don't want to turn it into a book keeping exercise. One thing I am concerned about is ensuring that all party members will have useful things to do during the downtime. I don't want the Bard (if there is one) being the centre of attention all the time. I'm really stressing the importance of the player's background and what their life outside of adventuring, at their home base, consists of. The relationships that they cultivate will be important. I hope they will always have an answer to "what do we do now?" It's a super experienced group that favours role playing, with some of our campaigns having run for nearly a decade, so I think it will work.
If they got a lot of experience and are game for your game it sounds like you should go for it. Book keeping is just a sheet, and the resource management is really a collective exercise you can put on the group (and maybe keep a DMs sheet too to either keep them honest or maybe there's something about their resources or the environments effects on resources that they're not aware of). One thing to think of if they're recouping at base camp, if someone is convalescing, can they keep watch? I'd argue no as sentry duty is not rest. This may lead to sentries possibly suffering exhaustion if they're not granted time to rest as well.
I don't think the stuff I've outlined would be tedious record keeping for a party invested in a game embracing these aspects. Timekeeping IRL task minding is important but should be ancillary to the work.
Actually I'd say if you do develop foraging/hunting rules (including tables in hostile environments where hunters could become hunted) you're actually taking the day to day tasks that usual heroic fantasy play relegates to the time keeping sheets and resource box checks and turning those needs and considerations into an actual part of play.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I played in a game with gritty realism. The main effect was that we went back to the 5 minute working day. We'd have one encounter, then go somewhere and rest overnight. The come back, have the second encounter. Rinse, repeat.
It significantly affected some spells, so the GM had to adjust durations. In particular, goodberry and animate dead. It completely invalidated others, for example rope trick (a one-hour duration is pointless).
It also led to a lot of us taking short-rest or no-rest characters (warlocks, rogues, fighters).
One character was cursed by a night-hag. The GM had to adjust that, because with the RAW it would have killed the character during the first long rest.
I have to say, I don't like the Gritty Realism rules at all, because the main impact that they have is to slow the game down, in a way that damages gameplay. Instead of Gritty Realism, they should just be called Downtimes and Not Many Dragons. It could also be called: "I don't get to use my abilities much the RPG."
The main effect of Gritty Realism healing is that the PCs cannot do what they want to do for long periods of time, and this occurs consistently throughout the entire campaign. If the encounters are also usually difficult, they won't leave town until a week passes.
Increase the stakes of combat
The Gritty Realism rules don't do this. The characters are going to fight when they have to fight. During the fight, the stakes are the same as they always were (win, run, die); the only things these rules do is force long periods of downtime after the stakes have gone away.
slow the pace of the game
Slowing the pace is generally not desirable for the players. Unless your players are more interested in downtime activities than they are in adventuring and slaying monsters (in which case I'm not sure D&D is the best choice of RPG for them) then this isn't great for them. You want the PCs to find other solutions, like RP persuasion etc, but they aren't going to put themselves in situations to do this whilst tapped out. They'll fight when they're powerful, and hide out when weak. The Gritty Realism healing rules mean running a game in which one of three things happens:
creating more down time for events in the wider world to take place.
The only events that are typically of interest to the players are the events that they are directly involved in: everything else is just you explaining what's happening far away. This is their adventure; their actions should be the most important. You can tell them in a couple of sentences that "the war has been ongoing. Watercress Castle has fallen and the orc army has moved into the valley states territory." But if you want these periods of downtime, then you can simply design it to happen between adventures. It can happen during long periods of travel (separate key locations by 1 week or more of travel). I really just think your players won't care about the big events of the world that they are not directly party to as they'll just be spectators.
The worst thing about it:
The major problem with Gritty Realism healing is that it totally alters what type of adventure you can send the PCs on. Often PCs can scrape a short rest through Rope Trick, or by finding a hiding place, or even retiring to the back line in the midst of a siege. These types of game are no longer available to your PCs. If you want a very low combat game then that's fine, but expect to go multiple sessions in a row without combats. You may even find that the PCs become so combat averse that you're effectively playing a life sim, and when you want them to fight, you'll have to force it. And if you have PCs who simply want to get on with playing the story and the adventure then they'll just go fighting anyway and build characters that don't rely on long rests.
I would suggest instead that you can achieve better Gritty Realism effects by something like the following:
Gritty realism will make the game play more like it did back in the AD&D days. If that’s your goal then Yahtzee, however I would recommend having each player create 2-3 characters so their PCs can work in “shifts” to progress things while their others are recuperating. For four players you’ll be looking at a party of eight to twelve instead of a party of four.
Back then we expected most (70%-80%) PCs to be dead by third level, and most of the rest to be dead by 5th level. It was the one PC each that survived past that that folks fell in love with.
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If you haven't already, run this through with your players during a session 0, or at least playtest it once or twice with your party to get a feel for it, before you get fully stuck in with it. Some people enjoy the difference in mechanics, others not-so-much.
Same thing applies here as above. Portraying the life and struggle of someone with a prosthesis, major disfigurement or a missing limb can be challenging enough. This, coupled with the previous ruleset may make the characters unplayable after a rough encounter or two.
I'm not sure that this will give you the feeling of gritty or realistic without tracking all of the individual pieces of ammo, rations, food, spell components... the list goes on, it's gonna be plenty for everyone to track. This will almost require a very granular approach to inventory management and time tracking. This is just not fun for many people. Some folks will enjoy this type of game very much. I'm all for increasing challenge and causing hard decisions to be made, but again - talk to the group if you haven't already. Your primary function is to provide a fun experience, maybe not a realistic one.
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Thanks to all for their very thoughtful responses. There is a lot for me to chew on there. I am becoming persuaded that I can achieve what I am hoping to achieve without having to resort to the optional rules, so long as my players are happy with the approach. And if they aren't, there's not much fun in trying to railroad them.
First thing to do is to make sure that this is something that the players want to do. While I enjoy a grittier lower magic setting I know that this is not always appealing to players. If they are willing then by all means proceed.
There are plenty of things you can do, I suggest you start slow and keep the changes simple. Have fun with it!
I'm about to run these gritty rules in a campaign with my personal friends. They know it, are bought in and excited, and I've built a world that fits it.
Everyone (including the NPC's) will treat combat as a messy meat grinder that's better avoided. Any creature sentient enough to have a sense of self-preservation is going to strongly consider a combat and ensuring they have whatever they perceive to be a tactical advantage before they get into it.
Meaning swords are drawn when the needs/risks outweigh the danger.
I'm also using Xanathar's downtime rules as well as the Kingdoms & Warfare rules from MCDM to add a layer of things to do other than direct adventure into combat.
I also grant just as much experience for exploration and roleplay as I do combat. Characters can level up over time without needing to go fight things. The fighting will have reasons. Usually :D
One thing to keep in mind with Gritty Realism is that certain types of adventuring days become very challenging or you need to reduce the difficulty substantially.
For example, exploring a dungeon, which might normally take a day or two in game with 0 or 1 long rests and a few short rests becomes an event that has to be completed with 0 or 1 short rests. The characters have far fewer resources to spend on several encounters that are likely when exploring a dungeon. You mention trying to make combat be more dangerous and represent a climax in the adventure but this strongly depends on the type of adventure. Rescuing villagers from the orc tribe encampment or from the gnoll fortress becomes much more challenging without the option to rest to regain resources (the DM needs to scale the encounters). This can be partially offset if, as in 1e, the DM supplied the party with enough healing potions to get them through.
Games I have run ranged from one encounter/day or less up to 6-8 encounters in a dungeon or other setting with content packed together. Gritty Realism works ok for the one and done type approach to encounters/day but doesn't work as well when there are multiple interactions that require resources.
P.S. If you do actually consider some of the combat options in the DMG (rather than Gritty Realism which is actually a healing option) ... I'd strongly discourage the use of the flanking option. Easy access to advantage for both PCs and NPCs tends to make combat even more random than it currently is and allow triggering some abilities for various classes with very little work.
Gritty Realism tend to encourage the use of 5MWD
I'm struggling with this issue as well for my upcoming homebrew.
If my players do something unwise and get stabbed in the chest by some maniac wielding a 3-foot-long razor blade, then they go home and sleep it off and are fine the next day, it feels like we have progressed outside of the realm of what I would consider "Heroic Fantasy" and landed pretty solidly in the realm of "Saturday morning cartoons". But then, I guess the balance we are seeking is one between realism and fun. When it comes to fighting and monsters and time management, the two are pretty much directly opposed. The 5e rules come down pretty heavily on the "fun" side here. And as DM's, part of our job is encouraging said fun. If my campaign consists largely of talking, and running, and managing time and equipment, the fun level can drop off pretty dramatically. If playing D&D starts to feel like a chore, it will be tough to keep the players engaged.
"What are you going to do for the next week while your impulsive teammate recovers from taking an arrow to the kidney?" "I don't know... copy some spells and, like, learn a new language or something, I guess?"
The cold hard fact is that shooting lightning bolts at ghosts is fun, while recovering from falling down a flight of stairs because you failed your dex save is decidedly not fun. If you have a group who wants to play a medieval survival simulator with occasional, devastating fight scenes then I say GO FOR IT. If, however, you are in the much more likely scenario of having a group that wants to walk into the castle of an ancient, aristocratic vampire, and burn the whole place to the ground while making "suck" jokes, then you have some tough choices to make.
As a DM, I have a vision of an epic story of globetrotting adventurers attempting to save the world from a mysterious impending doom. But D&D is, in the end, a co-operative storytelling game. And co-op means two things: 1: You're not the only one who has input and 2: If the game stops being fun, players will probably find something else to do. So, yes, you should consider the story you want to tell - but don't forget to engage your players in the process of determining the boundaries of that story.
My question is what about "gritty realism" - specifically - appeals to you?
Often gritty realism type campaigns fail completely because people equate them with no, or little healing. This means you have exactly the same campaign but everything takes longer. You don't have an overnight long rest, you have a 7 day long rest. It's exactly the same but with a whole lot of nothing bits added in. It's not gritty - it's boring.
I think what people really want when they think about gritty realism is *consequences*. You want to make PCs scared about getting into fights - make the bad guys stronger than them. Make it hard for them to get a long rest because it is hard to find anywhere that is safe for 8 hours. Make the fights have real consequences to people in the world that the PCs care about. Make every combat have stakes. You beat up these goblins? Cool. Good for you. What is this village going to do now when the rest of their tribe come looking for them?
Is this gritty realism? Or is it just good storytelling?
Ironically, I think people want to play gritty realism because they think it will make them feel like a *real hero*. When actually playing a game like this just makes you feel powerless most of the time.
I agree that the gritty realism rules make for a campaign where time passes a lot slower.
I've never played with the Injury rules, but they read like a good reason for a party to try and avoid combat. I'd definitely let the players see the possible results from the table so that they know what might happen if they ever suffer the triggering conditions.
In fact, I'd go with "drops to 0 hit points" as another condition, not just failing death rolls by 5 or more - it will encourage them to drink healing potions or cast healing spells more to keep fellow party members on their feet - and the effect would explain why the PC went from being fully combat active (on 1HP) to unconscious (on 0 HP) in a single hit.
Given that almost everything in the D&D rules relates to combat, I just have to wonder why you are playing D&D if you want combat to be avoided. Players love to shout "Ohhhh noooo" when you tell them to roll initiative, but you know that really they're excited and can't wait to take their turn.
It's a bit like playing football and then covering the ball in nails so that you'll only kick it if you absolutely have no other choice.
I just want to point out that according to my understanding the point of Gritty Realism is to use it for slow campaigns.
I agree that is causes slow campaigns: I don't agree that those that try to use it want slow campaigns. The slow down is the effect of the poorly designed optional rules - it doesn't make anything grittier, or more realistic: it just slows the game down. It just causes more downtime. How is that fun for the players? They can optionally take downtime if they want to at any point: these optional rules just force it at times they don't want it.
Enforced additional downtime inhibits the ability of the characters to get to things that they want to do, while achieving exactly the same thing that a shorter rest period enables. Sounds ok for a couple of sessions. By session 22 of the campaign, when the PCs are having to state what they're doing in yet another downtime period, having taken at least one every session since the campaign began, they'll all just be doing their go to downtime activity because it becomes so dreary to explain how you spend yet another pointless week of downtime, just to satisfy an optional ruling.