Mechanical Thinking is a series that presents new houserules that you can add to your home D&D games, and then interrogates the underlying mechanics, examines what problems the rule solves, and identifies what the rule can do to improve your game. Then, once all is said and done, join me and other readers in the comments for a discussion about the proposed rule. Just remember that all rules have their place, and while they might not fit your table, they might be perfect for another gaming group.
If you have a mind for mechanics or for the process of game design, or if you want hone the mechanical side of your RPG knowledge, this series is for you!
Exhaustion
Exhaustion is a six-step stamina counter unique to fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons that tracks a creature’s physical state from peak condition to death. Unlike hit points, which increase as a character gains levels, exhaustion always remains the same. Likewise, every point of exhaustion a creature gains imposes a cumulative and debilitating effect, ranging from unpleasant-but-minor disadvantage on ability checks at a single point of exhaustion, to complete immobility at five points, to instant death at six points.
Exhaustion’s “death spiral” effect sometimes feels at odds with D&D’s heroic nature, which is best exemplified by hit points—a health tracker that allows a character with only a single remaining hit point to fight just as effectively as a character at full hit points. For that reason, effects that impose exhaustion are mercifully rare in D&D’s rules and adventures—and this scarcity is merciful, as there are precious few ways of recovering from exhaustion. Nevertheless, if you want to add a bit of grit to your D&D game, consider expanding the role of exhaustion:
Exhaustion as Damage
If you want to make combat more ruthless and visceral, try removing the abstract concept of hit points from your D&D and replacing it with an exhaustion track. This method is similar to, but distinct from, a mechanic introduced in the Star Wars Saga Edition roleplaying game, published by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 and revised in 2002. This mechanic was known as the Condition Track. In addition to damage (which drained a creature’s D&D-style hit points), Star Wars Saga Edition included effects that pushed their target down the Condition Track. Every time a creature advanced down the Condition Track, it suffered mounting cumulative penalties, ultimately resulting in unconsciousness. As was typical of the third edition D&D and the d20 System, these condition penalties were granular penalties to rolls; a character would advance from a –1 penalty to attack rolls, ability checks, and skill checks to a –2, a –5, and so forth.
Exhaustion in fifth edition bears some similarities to Star Wars-style conditions, but by making the penalties of exhaustion less granular, fifth edition actually made exhaustion more debilitating. Being able to move only half speed is a huge deal for only two points of exhaustion, and disadvantage on attack rolls at three points is massive, but to have your hit point maximum halved at four points? Fifth edition exhaustion doesn’t play around. Notably, a creature’s condition could be much more easily restored than D&D exhaustion, which can only be recovered point-by-point by completing a long rest, being soothed by greater restoration, or by consuming a rare potion.
Replacing Hit Points with an Exhaustion Track
You can adapt this idea to D&D by removing hit points entirely, and giving each class their own exhaustion track. A character’s exhaustion track is determined by the size of your class’s hit die, plus your Constitution modifier. For instance, a wizard or a sorcerer has a 6-step exhaustion track, because the wizard and sorcerer classes have a d6 hit die. Likewise, a fighter, paladin, or ranger has a 10-step exhaustion track because those classes have a d10 hit die. Finally, your character’s exhaustion track is extended by a number equal to your Constitution modifier; if your character’s Constitution modifier is negative, your track is reduced by that number of steps.
Whenever you gain a level, your exhaustion track increases by one.
Also, since the fourth step of the exhaustion track in the core rules is "hit point maximum halved," this step will have to be replaced. Instead, creatures that have reached this step can only take an action or a bonus action on their turn, not both. Additionally, they can't take reactions.
Creatures with Exhaustion Tracks Longer or Shorter than Six Steps
Under this system, most creatures have an exhaustion track more than six-steps long. For instance, a wizard with a +1 Constitution modifier has a 7-step exhaustion track. However, since there are only six steps of exhaustion in D&D, every step of your track your character has above 6 is “safe.” Gaining a point of exhaustion has no effect until you enter the final six steps of your exhaustion track.
For example, a rogue (d8 hit die) and a +2 Constitution modifier has an exhaustion track that looks like this:
Level of Exhaustion |
Effect |
1 |
— |
2 |
— |
3 |
— |
4 |
— |
5 |
Disadvantage on ability checks |
6 |
Speed halved |
7 |
Disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws |
8 |
Can only take an action or a bonus action on a turn, and can't take reactions |
9 |
Speed Reduced to 0 |
10 |
Death |
Similarly, if your exhaustion track is shorter than six steps, you suffer the effects of exhaustion in order (starting with disadvantage on ability checks at one point of exhaustion) but die when you reach the end of your exhaustion track. For example, a character with a 5-step exhaustion track dies after gaining five points of exhaustion, rather than having its speed reduced to 0 first.
Gaining Exhaustion when Taking Damage
In addition to the usual ways a creature become exhausted (such as through strenuous travel and dangerous environments), a creature gains a point of exhaustion whenever it takes damage. This damage could come from any source, such as an attack, a spell, or an environmental effect. Especially powerful attacks, environmental effects, and spells could cause more than 1 point of exhaustion, at the DM’s discretion. If a single attack or effect deals multiple types of damage, such as a flying snake's bite dealing both piercing and poison damage, this attack still only inflicts 1 point of exhaustion.
Healing
Whenever an effect would cause a creature to regain any number of hit points, it instead loses 1 point of exhaustion. If the healing effect is a spell that only targets a single creature, the spell causes its target to lose a point of exhaustion per level of the spell. Healing spells that target multiple creatures and restore large amounts of hit points, like mass cure wounds and mass heal are left to the DM’s discretion.
Also, lesser restoration now causes its target to lose 1 point of exhaustion in addition to its other effects. Lastly, greater restoration now causes the target to lose 2 points of exhaustion in addition to its other effects. A potion of healing causes the creature who drinks it to lose 1 point of exhaustion, a potion of greater healing restores 2 points of exhaustion, and so forth.
Finally, a creature can lose 1 point of exhaustion by spending a hit die when it completes a short rest. Restoring exhaustion further in the same short rest costs one additional hit die per point cured; for instance, curing three points of exhaustion in a single rest costs six hit dice, one hit die for the first, two for the second, and three for the third.
Monsters
Instead of having hit points, a monster has a number of exhaustion steps equal to its number of hit dice. Monsters exhaustion tracks work similarly to characters’ exhaustion tracks; if this number is less than six, the monster suffers the effects of exhaustion as normal, but dies after it gains points of exhaustion equal to its number of hit dice.
Dying
When a creature reaches the end of its exhaustion track, it dies. Unlike in the core fifth edition rules, no creatures make death saving throws. If you want your game to be more forgiving, consider allowing player characters and important NPCs to start dying when they reach the end of their exhaustion track instead of perishing outright. Dying creatures make death saves as normal.
Points of Stress in this House Rule
This house rule isn’t perfect. Fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons was designed with hit points in mind, and simplifying hit points into an exhaustion track has some serious drawbacks, in exchange for making your games less lethal in earlier levels and potentially more lethal at higher levels. It makes hordes of weak creatures incredibly dangerous, and creatures with many attacks (such as a marilith or a carrion crawler disproportionately powerful, since all attacks have the same effective power under this system, regardless of whether they would have dealt 10 damage or 100 in a hit point-based system.
Because of the way the power of certain spells and features fluctuate with this rule in place, Dungeon Masters may have to make ad hoc adjudications when translating the power of area-of-effect spells from hit point damage to exhaustion damage. As a simple house rule, these sort of adjudications are fine. If this system were translated into a full and exhaustive D&D-like spinoff game, a full rework of many monsters, spells, and features would be in order to suit this new mechanical framework.
Also, no exhaustion-as-damage houserule would be complete without addressing the “death spiral” effect, in which characters become less effect and less likely to succeed in a fight as the fight goes on. This effect is cushioned somewhat by allowing hardy characters to take multiple hits before suffering from exhaustion effects, but it is nevertheless still present. The death spiral effect on monsters also adds to the Dungeon Master’s mental load, as the DM now has to keep track of all the effects clinging onto their monsters throughout the course of an encounter and beyond.
What do you think of this new house rule? Would you use it in your game? What would you change? Let us know in the comments below!
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, the DM of Worlds Apart, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
Thanks James, I always enjoy your articles.
I use the spell point system from DMG, relaxed the rule for spell preparation, balanced against a CON DC when casting, a failure adds 1 point to exhaustion level. The DC is based on spell level.
Cantrips and Level 1 have no CON check,
Level 2 & 3 DC 8,
Level 4 & 5 DC 10,
level 6 & 7 DC 12,
level 8 & 9 DC 14.
I also have used Epic level casting allowing casters to increase damage die
level 10 & 11 DC 16,
level 12 & 13 DC 18,
Level 14 & 15 DC 20
Level 16 & 17 DC 22,
Level 18 & 19 DC 24
Level 20 DC 26.
IF the dc rolled is Natural 1 gain 2 levels, Natural 20 gain no exhaustion.
So far in play have had 2 PC reach Level 2 exhaustion, and 1 reached Level 3, Natural 1 got them. PC advanced from Level 1 to Level 14 has seemed to work well. I did not make lesser restoration change, so they have been using Greater Restoration or Long Rest with NO interruption for standing watch plus Full Food and Water to recover 1 level of exhaustion. They had to recover for 3 days once. And if hit all night with interruptions, both trivial and real attacks NO recover of Exhaustion occurred. Tied with Forced March exhaustion has hit spell casters hard. Party size 6, 5 are casters.
I like the 0 hit point / unconscious option, would also add gain a level exhaustion when receiving a Critical Hit
I give my players a point of exhaustion whenever they are brought to 0 hit points, all points of which gained in this way are removed when they take a short rest or are brought to full hit points. It's a great way to make unconsciousness in battle more frightening, and discourages "Okay fighter, run into the middle of those 15 bugbears and I'll just healing word you right before your turn each round!"
I use exhaustion as death saves in my games, and a slightly softer curve for the six steps: -5 feet of movement, -1 to all checks per level. I think it's a nice middle ground between exhaustion as wounds and base game's usage of exhaustion.
One I actually really like this, it makes it so that I can hit a lot harder at low levels, makes low tier monsters in large groups much more scary at higher level. I think for spells I would need to work out a simple rule for how many points of exhaustion they deal and similarly bonus points for sneak attack and smite to increase the threat level of these spells and abilities. It also makes the little extra damage from two weapon fighting nice, but does devalue certain fighting styles. I could make it so that I set damage thresholds for gaining bonus exhaust damage to reward creatures that do lots of damage or players similarly but I feel like at that point it loses a lot of its charm. This is going to take some playing around but I like this concept.
When I read this headline, I imagined that I'd see rules and guidelines for introducing new ways to gain levels of exhaustion (prolonged fights in heavy armor, I'm looking at you), not a system for replacing hit points entirely.
The ideas presented can still be useful, but I think this would be too much of a headache to implement as-written.
This sounds like a really cool idea. However, in my games, we've struggled before with low-granularity systems like this. Case in point: our paladin was fighting a giant skeleton and was knocked unconscious. The bard polymorphed the skeleton into a rat, thinking this would protect him. Unfortunately, the rat still had an attack (1d4-1 damage), which counted as two death saving throw failures under the 5E system.
I think if I used a system like this it would be something like:
- roll damage
- divide the damage by 10 and round up
- inflict that many exhaustion levels
I like toying with exhaustion.
I would love to mix your rule with my own: Exhaustion track, and taking more than a quarter of your health in one blow is +1 exhaustion. Going down is also one exhaustion.
With your exhaustion track idea suddenly Berserkers are viable.
hmm might start tweaking a system of hitpoints along with exhaustion tracks in my one shots. It would be interesting to have a sort of balance act between players trying to avoid taking to much damage but also not exhaust themselves.
Personally I like the idea of using exhaustion, as well as other things, in tandem with hit points. Currently, theres no real problem that cant be fixed with a healing word. Being brought to 0 hp and getting bonus action, healing word means a character can be brought to the brink of death, get healed, and get hack into the fight before their next turn order. It's a common scenario that literally adds no weight to getting dropped. Getting a level of exhaustion every time your beaten unconcious sounds like a fair fix. I'm not really trying to kill players, but getting them to react to nearly dying feels a little better.
Personally I love the concept of using exhaustion in this way. But if you look at the UA subreddit or the Homebrew subreddit, nearly EVERY time someone tries to do this they are ripped apart.
I could see combining this with hitpoint loss to be quite interesting and effective
For example using the six step exhaustion instead of it being the damage taken make it depending on the percentage of health points left at 80%hp you gain your first point of exhaustion at 60 %you gain the second and skip the health halving step altogether and at 0%hp you die
Personally as a DM I would rule that crits cause two points, as would sneak attack since they are especially deadly.
I've been using a house rule that every time someone drops to zero HP they gain a level of exhaustion. It represents the seriousness of having to make death saves. This makes using healing word on a character still in melee with an enemy dangerous to do as they can quickly gain quite a few levels of exhaustion.
I will point out a few issues with this rule. 1: Toughness becomes nerfed. 2: All damage dealing spells need to be reworked and all monsters damages changed, an 8d6 fireball will straight up kill even a 20th level character on a regular roll of it's damage if you only have 36 hp max. Barbarian (12), Com mod +5, 19 levels. nd 3: Healing of all types, will need to also be reworked as well. For example what does a short rest do for healing? and if you drop short rests then what about all of those classes that depend upon them for their abilities and spells, Fighters, warlocks, etc...
Frankly this rule seems like way to much work to do just to make one thing work better.
I really like this piece of article. It is interesting, well thought and addresses a problem that I find often in D&D. Thanks James! :)
Exhaustion as damage = no thanks.
Exhaustion as poison = yes please.
That was addressed in the article. Multiple damage types in a single attack, are still a single attack, and would only cause one point of exhaustion.
Thereby nerfing those spells, abilities and items, etc...
I use a slightly more complex method to mix the two. I still use "Hero" points which represents a characters ability to not take permanent wounds from attacks, however when they do need to take more then their remaining HP, they take it as a wound. Every character has a light, moderate and severe wound which can contain 20%, 40% and 60% of their hp respectively. The wounds impart 1, 2 or 3 levels of exhaustion. This naturally kills any player who accumulate all three wounds so death saving throws are no longer needed. And the "death spiral" is appropriate.
Monsters still have hit points and only notable bosses and NPCs get to use this system.
This explains how a Bard or Cleric can bolster their party with words and faith as it restores their "heroic" reserves and explains how a short rest lets them catch their breath.
It is a bit heavy on the paperwork and a bit fiddly though...
I have a few optional Exhaustion rules to throw into the hat that I've seen around or used myself.
Exhaustion As Death Saving Throws
Whenever you are reduced to 0 Hit Points or start Your Turn with 0 Hit Points, you must make a death saving throw. Stabilization requires three nonconsecutive saves. Each failure adds a level of Exhaustion. You do not automatically die after 3 failed saves as per normal rules. Rolling a 1 on the d20 causes 2 levels of exhaustion. If you suffer damage while dying, you take a level of exhaustion. Criticals against you while dying give an extra level of exhaustion. You die as normal if your rach 6 levels of exhaustion.
This change makes the effects of dropping to zero more severe, especially if not medically attended for a while. But on the flipside, you'll probably survive dying so long as no one attempts to finish you off. But it'll take a while to fully recover.
Dying is Exhausting
Whenever you are reduced to 0 Hit Points you gain a level of exhaustion.
This is a common quick-fix for the whack-a-mole issues that crop up in some games, especially those that see Healing Word abused to achieve zero effectiveness lost due to KOs.
Give it Everything
You may voluntarily give yourself a level of Exhaustion in place of having Inspiration to gain advantage on an attack roll, saving throw, or ability check.
This fits into some types of games where you can heroically sacrifice or give it all you got. I'm not a fan but some people like this kind of thing.
Mental Fatigue
Whenever you lose concentration on a spell you may take a level of exhaustion to maintain concentration on that spell for 1 round.
This one allows spellcasters to keep their concentration on a spell that would otherwise be broken. It can be powerful, but exhaustion keeps it from getting abused too heavily.
Cumulative Disability
Each time you take Stunned, Petrified, Poisoned, Paralyzed or Frightened conditions you also take a level of Exhaustion.
This one can be pretty harsh and brutal but getting poisoned and then turned to stone after being magically terrified and paralyzed might actually make sense to have some lasting effects. Be prepared for this to make some abilities more powerful.
I like this a lot. It's also just popped into my mind to change death rolls. When getting to zero, you come back at a level 4 exhaustion instead. Death the next time you hit zero. I'll need to flesh this out more