Recently in my campaign my players have been starting to think more creatively in combat, specifically about how their attacks can do more than just deal damage.
I’m pretty sure there are no rules for this so I’m asking here. My players will say stuff like “I shoot the eyes of the creature so it can’t see”, “when I use my sword I chop at the hands so the creature might be injured and not able to use its weapon”, or even “I slice its throat with my dagger”. I know dnd combat is not realistic, but is there any solution to this? Obviously I can’t let every ranged attack hit the eyes and blind the opponent right off the bat. How does slitting the throat work? Realistically it would kill the creature, but in a game of DnD where everything is based on rolls, can be easy to abuse if enemies roll low to avoid it.
i know that’s a lot of questions but i have no idea how they all work. I guess the simple answer is to say that DnD is like a video game and you can’t do any of that, but I feel that combat could be more interesting if you could do these things in a non broken way.
Thanks for the help!
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When in doubt throw the naked, fingerless, thief that you’ve been keeping in a sack and feeding rotten squirrels to into the fireworks tent hoping that it causes an explosion.
The easy way to shut these things down is to ask if the players are ok with monsters doing the same things to them. That typically ends such discussions.
The bigger thing is to say D&D doesn’t have called shot mechanics. If they want to blind an enemy, they can cast blindness. If they want it to drop a weapon, they can disarm it, etc. But allowing called shots quickly turns everything into an attempt to decapitate every enemy.
The short answer is that D&D doesn't have hit locations and you can't do any of those without a special trait. Such abilities aren't all that accessible in 5e, though a level 14 rogue from UA 6 can use devious strikes to blind.
If you want to come up with house rules, you can, but it's going to be tricky to balance against the core assumptions of D&D.
It's easier to understand when you think of dnd combat as happening simultaneously, and is only being represented as turn-based so it isn't unmanageable to run. Also understand that Dexterity is a component to AC, representing how in addition to wearing armor, characters are always ducking and diving and generally trying their best not to get killed.
Understanding these two points, you can see how 1) the enemy is reacting to the players' movements at the same time they are acting (and might see that the players are going for a hand-slice), and 2) they are constantly trying to avoid that kind of thing happening. So a player can try to aim a shot at the enemy's eyes to blind them, but even if you hit, that doesn't *mean* you hit them in the eyes. The bad guy ducks to the side and gets grazed in the shoulder, or something more like that.
If you wanna get even more advanced, HP isn't even a measure of physical health the way it's often treated, so a "hit" in game isn't always a "hit" in the narrative. Think about it. An arrow hitting a target pretty much anywhere on their body is a serious injury here in the real world, but bows aren't overpowered in game. Your bow hit on a target might not represent the tip actually embedding itself in their flesh, but could represent the loss of footing an enemy gets when lurching out of the way, or sacrificing some other advantageous position to keep the shot from being lethal.
Basically, real combat is far too complex to stimulate on a tabletop in a way that is fun, so the rules rely on abstract interpretations of some more inflexible structures. Start allowing blind shots and limb chops and you're going to start to find combat very difficult to run, and if bad guys start trying to do it too it's going to become very swingy with characters basically becoming incapacitated every round, and the heroic fantasy vibes of the game will suffer.
Adding on, the best way to do these in a non broken way would be to homebrew some magic items that allow for like a Blinding Strike or Wounding Strike (or something that sounds like that) that allows players to do them in a limited capacity.
Maybe a Bow of Blinding will blind an enemy for 1 round if it hits their AC by more than 5. Maybe a Sword of Crippling has 3 charges per day and a player can expend a charge to make an enemy do a CON save or drop whatever their holding. That kind of thing.
The point is, if you wanna allow it, still limit and track the players' ability to do it so it doesn't bog down combat
My thoughts on it is that D&D combat already takes too long. I'd rather see complexity removed than added. But if the players want options for in-combat actions then they need to take the ingame features (battle master maneuvers, for example).
Also (as posted by Zalthu and others), players want these sort of abilities right up to the point where the GM uses them on characters.
As everyone's said, it really doesn't work with D&D's highly-abstracted combat.
That said, I'm going to make a couple of suggestions on how to make it work in play if you really want to:
Steal an idea from Baldur's Gate 3, where weapons give you the option of a special attack, usable once per short rest, that lets you inflict some kind of status condition.
Use an idea I saw in the commentary of the webcomic Darths and Droids, where you can attempt to inflict a status condition, and the target chooses whether to take the condition or the damage.
I think there has never been an official "Called Shot" rule in D&D. (Although there are mechanics such as Reckless Attack, Sharpshooter, Great Weapon Master, and Cunning Action: Aim which could be argued to be the equivalent.)
If you want to homebrew Called Shots, then implement a penalty.
A higher Armor Class to beat, or Penalty to the Attack.
Disadvantage on the Attack Roll.
Giving up the Bonus Action, Reaction or Movement.
Providing an Opportunity Attack to an enemy.
Limit the number of times the character can attempt this, such as the Battle Master's Superiority dice.
You can also use a Lingering Injuries table, such as the one found in the Dungeon Master's Guide or the many homebrews on the internet. (These are generally triggered by a Massive Damage such as from being Critically Hit.)
But remember to point out to the players that anything they can do, the NPCs they're fighting against can do as well.
You could explain to them that the concept of hit points and damage is abstract on purpose and that combat rules have no Called Shots per se, which leave attacks to impose condition only when an effect specifically say so otherwise the player characters would rapidly be crippled too.
What i do is leave these severe results for when a monster is reduced to 0 hit points, often asking players to describe their finishing move,
5e already assumes that when you make an attack roll, you are trying your very hardest merely to make contact with the enemy. You can't just decide on a hit that you've sliced the enemy's throat, because the enemy's AC is intended to represent a difficulty threshold for hitting them *somewhere*, and the weapon's damage die is intended to represent the severity of a glancing blow.
I think 3.5 might've had a table of AC modifiers to represent targetting specific body parts; you could try using something like that if you want to allow called shots, but be advised that 5e isn't designed for every attack roll to include that kind of choice, and it will slow down combat significantly.
There are other systems that include called shot mechanics natively, but they tend to keep combat short by making it very, very deadly. In Legend of the Five Rings, for example, you can target body parts as small as fingers; the other side of that is that most characters can only survive one (1) hit anyway, so you use these kinds of maneuvers more for intimidation than for damage.
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Hi,
Recently in my campaign my players have been starting to think more creatively in combat, specifically about how their attacks can do more than just deal damage.
I’m pretty sure there are no rules for this so I’m asking here. My players will say stuff like “I shoot the eyes of the creature so it can’t see”, “when I use my sword I chop at the hands so the creature might be injured and not able to use its weapon”, or even “I slice its throat with my dagger”. I know dnd combat is not realistic, but is there any solution to this? Obviously I can’t let every ranged attack hit the eyes and blind the opponent right off the bat. How does slitting the throat work? Realistically it would kill the creature, but in a game of DnD where everything is based on rolls, can be easy to abuse if enemies roll low to avoid it.
i know that’s a lot of questions but i have no idea how they all work. I guess the simple answer is to say that DnD is like a video game and you can’t do any of that, but I feel that combat could be more interesting if you could do these things in a non broken way.
Thanks for the help!
When in doubt throw the naked, fingerless, thief that you’ve been keeping in a sack and feeding rotten squirrels to into the fireworks tent hoping that it causes an explosion.
The easy way to shut these things down is to ask if the players are ok with monsters doing the same things to them. That typically ends such discussions.
The bigger thing is to say D&D doesn’t have called shot mechanics. If they want to blind an enemy, they can cast blindness. If they want it to drop a weapon, they can disarm it, etc. But allowing called shots quickly turns everything into an attempt to decapitate every enemy.
The short answer is that D&D doesn't have hit locations and you can't do any of those without a special trait. Such abilities aren't all that accessible in 5e, though a level 14 rogue from UA 6 can use devious strikes to blind.
If you want to come up with house rules, you can, but it's going to be tricky to balance against the core assumptions of D&D.
It's easier to understand when you think of dnd combat as happening simultaneously, and is only being represented as turn-based so it isn't unmanageable to run. Also understand that Dexterity is a component to AC, representing how in addition to wearing armor, characters are always ducking and diving and generally trying their best not to get killed.
Understanding these two points, you can see how 1) the enemy is reacting to the players' movements at the same time they are acting (and might see that the players are going for a hand-slice), and 2) they are constantly trying to avoid that kind of thing happening. So a player can try to aim a shot at the enemy's eyes to blind them, but even if you hit, that doesn't *mean* you hit them in the eyes. The bad guy ducks to the side and gets grazed in the shoulder, or something more like that.
If you wanna get even more advanced, HP isn't even a measure of physical health the way it's often treated, so a "hit" in game isn't always a "hit" in the narrative. Think about it. An arrow hitting a target pretty much anywhere on their body is a serious injury here in the real world, but bows aren't overpowered in game. Your bow hit on a target might not represent the tip actually embedding itself in their flesh, but could represent the loss of footing an enemy gets when lurching out of the way, or sacrificing some other advantageous position to keep the shot from being lethal.
Basically, real combat is far too complex to stimulate on a tabletop in a way that is fun, so the rules rely on abstract interpretations of some more inflexible structures. Start allowing blind shots and limb chops and you're going to start to find combat very difficult to run, and if bad guys start trying to do it too it's going to become very swingy with characters basically becoming incapacitated every round, and the heroic fantasy vibes of the game will suffer.
Adding on, the best way to do these in a non broken way would be to homebrew some magic items that allow for like a Blinding Strike or Wounding Strike (or something that sounds like that) that allows players to do them in a limited capacity.
Maybe a Bow of Blinding will blind an enemy for 1 round if it hits their AC by more than 5. Maybe a Sword of Crippling has 3 charges per day and a player can expend a charge to make an enemy do a CON save or drop whatever their holding. That kind of thing.
The point is, if you wanna allow it, still limit and track the players' ability to do it so it doesn't bog down combat
My thoughts on it is that D&D combat already takes too long. I'd rather see complexity removed than added. But if the players want options for in-combat actions then they need to take the ingame features (battle master maneuvers, for example).
Also (as posted by Zalthu and others), players want these sort of abilities right up to the point where the GM uses them on characters.
As everyone's said, it really doesn't work with D&D's highly-abstracted combat.
That said, I'm going to make a couple of suggestions on how to make it work in play if you really want to:
I think there has never been an official "Called Shot" rule in D&D. (Although there are mechanics such as Reckless Attack, Sharpshooter, Great Weapon Master, and Cunning Action: Aim which could be argued to be the equivalent.)
If you want to homebrew Called Shots, then implement a penalty.
You can also use a Lingering Injuries table, such as the one found in the Dungeon Master's Guide or the many homebrews on the internet. (These are generally triggered by a Massive Damage such as from being Critically Hit.)
But remember to point out to the players that anything they can do, the NPCs they're fighting against can do as well.
You could explain to them that the concept of hit points and damage is abstract on purpose and that combat rules have no Called Shots per se, which leave attacks to impose condition only when an effect specifically say so otherwise the player characters would rapidly be crippled too.
What i do is leave these severe results for when a monster is reduced to 0 hit points, often asking players to describe their finishing move,
5e already assumes that when you make an attack roll, you are trying your very hardest merely to make contact with the enemy. You can't just decide on a hit that you've sliced the enemy's throat, because the enemy's AC is intended to represent a difficulty threshold for hitting them *somewhere*, and the weapon's damage die is intended to represent the severity of a glancing blow.
I think 3.5 might've had a table of AC modifiers to represent targetting specific body parts; you could try using something like that if you want to allow called shots, but be advised that 5e isn't designed for every attack roll to include that kind of choice, and it will slow down combat significantly.
There are other systems that include called shot mechanics natively, but they tend to keep combat short by making it very, very deadly. In Legend of the Five Rings, for example, you can target body parts as small as fingers; the other side of that is that most characters can only survive one (1) hit anyway, so you use these kinds of maneuvers more for intimidation than for damage.