So he done got bit. 

I planned for this possibility for my PCs, and made it so turning into a lycan is a multi-day process with a check each day - giving the player and party ample opportunity to intervene if they wanted to. I agree with Jeremy Blum on not making it just a matter of remove curse but it's also not impossible to stop the process.

Here's the thing though: I know this player is at least 50/50 on letting it happen. Because, you know, chaos is fun, and he might be inspired by Travis Willingham from Critical Role C3's character. As it stands, if he goes full lycan in my game he's not in control of his faculties. I doubt he'd want that since it'll mean PvP and someone - him or others - getting killed, maybe. 

So, unless he gets cured, he's either going to turn into an NPC that is a threat to everyone around him, or he's going to need a process to control his lycanthropy. I prepared the cure, but I didn't really prepare for the "No no I want this!" scenario of becoming a lycan. In a way, I could see this as being a really interesting personal journey for his character.

Has anyone run lycans in their games with some good feedback and homebrewed mechanics? If he (or frankly, anyone else in the party - there're plenty more lycans in these woods) decides to not get cured, the route towards going feral is the easiest but the route towards taming the savage spirit might be a rewarding challenge. Especially if it becomes a thing throughout the campaign for him.

My general stance to lycanthropy-esque curses are that they are bad, first and foremost. They are a mystical disease that robs a person of their humanity and "giving in" to such would be akin to giving in to cancer; it ends poorly for the host. 

There are plenty of homebrew mechanics floating around the internet, but the easiest way to handle a player that wants to accept the curse would be to just swap their species to a Shifter or use that species as a good base for what you are looking for with an additional access to the barbarian ability to temporarily resist bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage (I'd allow it as a reaction a number of times a day equal to their proficiency bonus), and a vulnerability (so double damage) from silvered weapons.

Either way, it is important to set expectations with the player that they will not just get front-loaded with all the perks from the werewolf monster stat block. 

Seems reasonable. Easy enough to say too that if you go feral then sure, you get that stat block - but everyone's probably going to try to kill you. Because, you know, you've broken all the way bad. But if you want to control the hunger, it's going to be a process over time.

I have had experience with this, and made a rules-set for players to have Lycanthropy!

It's in my DTRPG thread in the Advertising section!

Essentially I realised that players wanting to become a werewolf are doing so to gain power, and that for a PC to gain power is usually done by gaining levels - thus I made controlling the werewolf work as a level progression. It takes sacrifice to control a curse - in this case, spending levels to gain control.

Hope this helps!

I was thinking about in the same way, though DnDBeyond makes it a bit less-than-easy to make a new "class" so that's where I've been tinkering the most. Especially since most classes require you to pick your subclass at level 3 vs level 1.

Thanks for the link! I'll peruse~

Exactly, it is a curse. So i has consequences. It changes the character and not exactly all good (there are perks, but losing control means everyone suffers).

3.5ed had a skill you could upgrade to control the transformation (losing control means going feral). You could adapt something like that with a save or skill. Even then, there were some disadvantages.

Also going the way of the Blood Hunter (order of the lycan) is a 3 level investment and a lot of flavorfull RP.

But I think the tried and true way of imprison, chain or trap itself in a way to not attack the party (or others) every fullmoon will be in his future (and people hating or chasing the pc away if they know what he is).

In my games, lycanthropy is bad because it means that for a period of time the GM takes over your character, and more, they use your character to do evil things.

GM: No, the barbarian is just missing. You have no idea where they are.

*some time later*

GM: <player>, your barbarian wakes up in a ditch. They are naked and stink of sweat and blood. They are covered in blood, but not their own. What do you do?

GM: <rest of party> You try to enter the town, but the guards stop you. They say the town gates and closed until the werewolf threat is taken care of. Sorry, no exception. What do you do?

I normally adjust it so they get some powers like a level progression thing with the looming threat of going on a full blown rampage. If they ingest a specific herb or have a specially enchanted item they may be able to gain control, but there is always the chance of going feral. Sometimes, depending on how bad they fail the save, they come under my control or they just blackout and I randomly determine when they return and how many people became corpses

Personally, I won't usually go there. A character that becomes a Lycan would be retired.

There are a couple of reasons for this approach though it depends on the Lycan lore you are using in your game.

Lycanthropy is generally bad, it removes control of actions from the creature, they become an evil beast and wantonly kill innocent people.Lycanthropes are feared, hated and hunted for these reasons. D&D does include some less evil Lycanthropes which may not kill for sport or for the thrill but which still become beastial and will often kill people by accident or unintentionally the way a wild bear or tiger will eat their prey ... it may not be intentionally evil but it isn't safe and innocents may well suffer. In addition, many of the "better" Lycanthropes in D&D literature might have spent years learning the self-discipline to do things like transform at will or control some of their actions when transformed. However, keep in mind that these are likely the minority of creatures that are affected by Lycanthropy ... most probably turn into ravening beasts that go on killing sprees.

The above, however, is lore. It is game world building information. Perhaps, in your world, lycanthropes are all fluffy friendly bunnies that harm no one.

The problem is that D&D gives Lycanthropes a number of characteristics that make them hard to kill - this is so they fit into the lore as a threat to the local population which requires silvered weapons and significant effort to defeat. It makes them scary ... but from a player perspective (not character), these benefits look very appealing since it would make them a powerhouse in combat when added to their regular skills. So, players usually want to remain lycanthropes for meta gaming reasons rather than character reasons ... and since almost all the downsides to being a lycanthrope are role playing, many players will try to minimize it.

Very few if any characters should ever want to be a lycanthrope assuming a world using the standard lore/tropes/stereotypes for lycanthropes.

As a result, I usually just say that characters that become lycanthropes will be removed from the game as PCs ... which usually gets the players to think twice about the character becoming a lycanthrope and subsequently, the party takes the actions needed to cure the affected party member unless they really want to create an ending to a character arc.

IF and it is a big if, the character has some compelling role playing reason to become a lycanthrope then I might allow it for a role playing arc assuming the player was fully aware of the role playing elements and that the character would be likely to murder their friends if given a chance - but the character would need a good reason and "Wow! Cool combat abilities if I become a lycanthrope" is NOT a good reason.

----

The other approach was mentioned by some others in the thread - create a custom player character lycanthrope template for your game with very limited abilities and nothing particularly strong for combat. This helps ensure that the player is deciding to become a lycanthrope for role playing rather than mechanical reasons.

I personally don't have an issue with lycan pcs because curses are magic and that gives allot of leeway.  People historically who believed in these curses didn't see anything supernatural, people got sick, they saw shadows at the end of the road or had live stock attacked by animals. There is really no specific way it should work and if a curse is intended to be a challenge it probably should be a little unexpected and unexplained. You don't have to do stat changes for the pc you can handle it entirely as back end role play if you want by adjusting dcs without telling them or changing how you describe things for example a perception check becomes smell.  Mystery is half the fun of a puzzle or story, and if you are worried about power gaming then tell them it's narrative based and don't gamify it by giving it  interact-able rules. This might change their decision of if they want to be a lycanthrope or not and you  should respect that but  if they still do  and if you want ides of how lycanthropy can work narrative wise then I have a few below 

• A haunting aka the curse is an NPC. A spirit may haunt the cursed individual whether it be  a demon, wolf spirit or ghost is up to you. There may be times where it decides to use transformation but they can do everything a spirit normally could. Bad dreams, hallucinations, conspiring with werewolves to harass you, moving objects around them,  harming their body or possession
• A disease aka condition. Transformation doesn't need to be the main symptom that might be a very advanced stage that potentially takes months or years to manifest with some people not surviving that long.   Werewolves also come from before the germ theory of disease and don't take it into account so it doesn't need to spread or act like any real world disease .
• A fate. This is another common curse type in stories  even if it isn't immediately what you think of with werewolves. With werewolves this usually means being fated  to spill innocent blood or kill a loved one. It's often a consequences of transformation but transformation can also easily be the result of it.  As an example a god may see brutality in your future and mark you because of it.  The curse may be intended to push you towards or away from that fate, it may be seen as a reward or punishment by the god. 

All of these allow you as dm to take allot of control over how it works. If you don't want a party of werewolves then maybe their haunting demon is choosy or maybe they don't all share the same dark fate.  If you don't want them to be an invulnerable tank then maybe the demon doesn't feel like protecting them at the moment, maybe they aren't used to the pain and still pas out from damage even if it doesn't kill them.  The players prepare for a full moon but the moon god is actually nice and uses their powers to prevent transformation making it so they transform on a new moon, or the demon just does it when ever they want and uses the moon to trick people. Be creative. 

I had a campaign where two of my players became werebats, and one resisted the curse while the other embraced it. For the resist one, I simply ran it by tracking the days gone by and every 28 in-game days they would have an uncontrollable transformation unless they could remove the curse before then. 

For the embrace player I did things a little differently. First, looking at the werebat statblock, I essentially have a number to all the unique abilities it had (fly speed, shape changer, echolocation, hybrid form, etc), and for each day the player consumed at least a pint of humanoid blood, I would allow the player to roll a die and the number they rolled determined the new werebat ability they gained. If they ever missed a day, then I would give them the poisoned condition and a level of exhaustion for the next day until they either drank blood or had the curse removed. If the player ever gained all the traits, then I would give them the immunity to non-magic, non-silvered bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage (having not assigned that one a number to ensure it's gained last) trait.

I imagine with a werewolf instead of a werebat, instead of consuming blood, you might say they have to consume meat-- though I might not necessarily insist it has to be humanoid and maybe only preferably humanoid, but on a day where the party doesn't kill any bandits maybe a large elk will do-- that way any good-aligned party members you have don't have to worry about wondering why their character would tolerate adventuring with a serial killer cannibal.

I'd recommend the Blood Hunter - Order of the Lycan, allowing a Lycan that the PC can control. 

5/6 members of the party in my WDH game contracted lycanthropy, one way or another. The DM is quite permissive about it. Characters adopt the critter’s Str or Dex in all forms, cannot cast spells in hybrid form if the critter has a bite attack and have all the critter abilities in critter form (AC increase, additional senses and movement types, all attack types etc). As well, we are resistant to attacks from non-magical and non-silvered weapons in hybrid and critter forms rather than fully immune. He ruled that full moon time is actually three nights, during which we are not in control of our were-characters. The rest of the time, we can shift freely between forms but will face all kinds of social consequences if observed doing so. Two of the players didn’t want to have anything to do with being were-creatures, despite the fairly lenient treatment of it by the DM. And because we sit out three in-game nights of play, which can easily take more than three sessions, another of the players who originally thought being a werebear was good deal has since changed his mind.

Lycanthropy is a curse. Remove curse is a level 3 spell. We have a contact who casts those at a cost of  90gp so those three had it removed. That leaves us with a wereshark fathomless warlock who jumps in the harbour for full moon nights and a weretiger bard who gets locked in a cage. It’s mostly a thematic thing for the wereshark who has not yet transformed outside of the three nights she can’t control. The weretiger, OTOH, shifts to hybrid form to save himself thanks to the DR in that form, using Disguise Self to hide the fact he’s a bipdedal big cat. He has done it sparingly enough and has been lucky at avoiding closer inspection go so far. Whether they hang onto their were-nature for the long run will likely depend on if they ever get caught shifting and how much game time they can’t participate in due to full moon nights. Additionally, the wereshark is fine in Waterdeep but may have no choice if the party ever plans to travel away from the water unless she devises some method to prevent her suffocation as a shark. 

Wow. Mabey the character could fill a portable hole with water, or some other ways that can help with the wereshark, such as a Bottled Breath, which negates the need to breathe for an hour, or a Necklace of Adaptation, which allows the creature - once attuned - to breathe in air and water and gives the advantage on saving throws against harmful gasses.