So my group has a house rule with exhaustion so if you get to 6 levels it doesn't just flat out kill you. Instead, once you reach 6 levels of exhaustion you immediately drop to 1 HP and fall unconscious until you've completed a long rest, whatever that may be for your race, or until someone casts a greater restoration or a higher healing spell like power word heal.
Also, instead of each long rest reducing your exhaustion by 1, we have it so every short rest removes 1 level of exhaustion and a long rest resets it to zero.
What do you all think? Did we nerf exhaustion too much or is it a fun way to make it more entertaining for the players?
Eh... I suppose this frees up the DM to actually use Exhaustion more frequently, since it's a substantially lesser problem than it currently is, but I feel like this still doesn't address the main problem with Exhaustion at many tables.
The problem most tables have with exhaustion isn't that 6 levels of exhaustion kills you... I've honestly never seen a character die of exhaustion or heard any stories about a character dying from exhaustion. The problem is that, once you have 2 levels of exhaustion, your speed is halved and you have disadvantage on all ability checks, so nobody wants to keep playing in that state and immediately will put the adventure on pause to rest. Just one level of exhaustion is enough of a handicap that nobody is going to willingly keep adventuring if they get any kind of potentially safe option to rest.
So if you're going to change the rules of exhaustion to make it easier to get levels of exhaustion and also to treat them, you also need to make Exhaustion less of a problem in the first place. I think your system would work well with the change that they proposed for One D&D, where Exhaustion has 10 levels and instead of giving different handicaps at each level, it just gives a -1 to your attack rolls and saving throws for each level.
Thats actually pretty good, but that might also overly buff the players gimmick. I let my players hire mercenaries and such and one time with the exhaustion rule in place my parties fighter-rouge hired 6 wizards for buffing spells, which seemed cool, until he had all of them cast longstrider on one round and then all 6 cast haste on the next. Each haste adds 2 to AC, adds an action, and doubles your movement speed for a minute before giving you a level of exhaustion. Imaging doing this with 10 Wizard mercs. with the normal 6 (and he played a wood elf by the way so his base speed was 35) add the 6 longstriders and his base speed is now 95 multiply by 2 for each of those hastes and it sets his new base speed up to 6,080, every round being 6 seconds means he can now run 1013.33 feet per second, or 690.91 MPH. if there are then 10 of them... he can then move 15709.091 MPH in other words, for a full minute, he can move at Mach 20 without dash actions. He has the fun cunning action from rogue, so he can use his action and bonus action to dash, as well as all 10 actions from the hastes. This allows him to move 1,797,120 feet in a matter of 6 seconds, thats 299,520 feet per second or 204218.182 MPH, also known as Mach 266. For a full minute, this player can move 266 times the speed of sound, he becomes a god among men for a minute destroying everything and everyone in his path, and then blacks out for 4 hours.
Okay, but at that point then this only makes sense because of homebrewing Haste to be able to stack multiple uses, and also homebrewing it to inflict exhaustion. RAW, a character cannot benefit from multiple instances of the same spell or feature simultaneously... if one wizard casts Haste on a character, and then another wizard casts Haste on the same character, nothing happens. Haste also doesn't inflict exhaustion... when Haste ends there is a "Wave of Lethargy", which forces the player to skip their next turn, but is not exhaustion.
I think you're running into a problem with homebrewing things like that... in order to balance it out, you need to start homebrewing other things. So your change to exhaustion makes sense to accommodate that specific homebrew change you made to Haste, but it's also very clear that allowing Haste to function that way in the first place breaks the game in pretty obvious ways.
So my group has a house rule with exhaustion so if you get to 6 levels it doesn't just flat out kill you. Instead, once you reach 6 levels of exhaustion you immediately drop to 1 HP and fall unconscious until you've completed a long rest, whatever that may be for your race, or until someone casts a greater restoration or a higher healing spell like power word heal.
Also, instead of each long rest reducing your exhaustion by 1, we have it so every short rest removes 1 level of exhaustion and a long rest resets it to zero.
What do you all think? Did we nerf exhaustion too much or is it a fun way to make it more entertaining for the players?
Eh... I suppose this frees up the DM to actually use Exhaustion more frequently, since it's a substantially lesser problem than it currently is, but I feel like this still doesn't address the main problem with Exhaustion at many tables.
The problem most tables have with exhaustion isn't that 6 levels of exhaustion kills you... I've honestly never seen a character die of exhaustion or heard any stories about a character dying from exhaustion. The problem is that, once you have 2 levels of exhaustion, your speed is halved and you have disadvantage on all ability checks, so nobody wants to keep playing in that state and immediately will put the adventure on pause to rest. Just one level of exhaustion is enough of a handicap that nobody is going to willingly keep adventuring if they get any kind of potentially safe option to rest.
So if you're going to change the rules of exhaustion to make it easier to get levels of exhaustion and also to treat them, you also need to make Exhaustion less of a problem in the first place. I think your system would work well with the change that they proposed for One D&D, where Exhaustion has 10 levels and instead of giving different handicaps at each level, it just gives a -1 to your attack rolls and saving throws for each level.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
Thats actually pretty good, but that might also overly buff the players gimmick. I let my players hire mercenaries and such and one time with the exhaustion rule in place my parties fighter-rouge hired 6 wizards for buffing spells, which seemed cool, until he had all of them cast longstrider on one round and then all 6 cast haste on the next. Each haste adds 2 to AC, adds an action, and doubles your movement speed for a minute before giving you a level of exhaustion. Imaging doing this with 10 Wizard mercs. with the normal 6 (and he played a wood elf by the way so his base speed was 35) add the 6 longstriders and his base speed is now 95 multiply by 2 for each of those hastes and it sets his new base speed up to 6,080, every round being 6 seconds means he can now run 1013.33 feet per second, or 690.91 MPH. if there are then 10 of them... he can then move 15709.091 MPH in other words, for a full minute, he can move at Mach 20 without dash actions. He has the fun cunning action from rogue, so he can use his action and bonus action to dash, as well as all 10 actions from the hastes. This allows him to move 1,797,120 feet in a matter of 6 seconds, thats 299,520 feet per second or 204218.182 MPH, also known as Mach 266. For a full minute, this player can move 266 times the speed of sound, he becomes a god among men for a minute destroying everything and everyone in his path, and then blacks out for 4 hours.
Okay, but at that point then this only makes sense because of homebrewing Haste to be able to stack multiple uses, and also homebrewing it to inflict exhaustion. RAW, a character cannot benefit from multiple instances of the same spell or feature simultaneously... if one wizard casts Haste on a character, and then another wizard casts Haste on the same character, nothing happens. Haste also doesn't inflict exhaustion... when Haste ends there is a "Wave of Lethargy", which forces the player to skip their next turn, but is not exhaustion.
I think you're running into a problem with homebrewing things like that... in order to balance it out, you need to start homebrewing other things. So your change to exhaustion makes sense to accommodate that specific homebrew change you made to Haste, but it's also very clear that allowing Haste to function that way in the first place breaks the game in pretty obvious ways.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium