Imo, I feel it would skip the first part of the suffocation rule or just less time than normal before the second part. Since if you are walking down the street and someone runs up and starts choking you you wouldn't have a huge surplus of breath as you would if you were deliberately going underwater.
That is both a misunderstanding of how "holding breath" works, as well as how sharks breathe.
The specific type of sharks that need continuous movement are called "obligate ram ventilators", and include Mako, Great White, and Whale sharks, which are perfectly viable encounters. However, for the purpose of game mechanics, this is not taken into account, since there are lots of sharks that do not operate this way.
I would personally rule "suffocation" as equivalent to "taking damage", thus immediately ending the effect of Hypnotic Pattern at the start of the target's next turn.
If a shark has it's speed reduced to 0, would it start suffocating since most sharks need to keep moving to breathe?
It isn't mentioned in the stat block or description, so no.
You can totally house rule it if you want, though suffocation takes some time by d&d rules, so it be hard to keep the shark immobile that long.
Imo, I feel it would skip the first part of the suffocation rule or just less time than normal before the second part. Since if you are walking down the street and someone runs up and starts choking you you wouldn't have a huge surplus of breath as you would if you were deliberately going underwater.
And i was mainly thinking of something like hypnotic pattern which brings a creature's speed to 0
That is both a misunderstanding of how "holding breath" works, as well as how sharks breathe.
The specific type of sharks that need continuous movement are called "obligate ram ventilators", and include Mako, Great White, and Whale sharks, which are perfectly viable encounters. However, for the purpose of game mechanics, this is not taken into account, since there are lots of sharks that do not operate this way.
I would personally rule "suffocation" as equivalent to "taking damage", thus immediately ending the effect of Hypnotic Pattern at the start of the target's next turn.