I made a custom rulebook for my d&d game that's a mashup of AD&D 1e and Worlds Without Number, but I wasn't too excited about the death rules for either so I wrote my own. Here they are! As yet untested.
Character Death
So there are a few things that are being held in tension by character death. The first is that it’s important that the player be allowed to fail, otherwise the challenges you face have no meaning. A bad decision should be able to lead to failure just as much as an unlucky roll of the dice. In that sense, it’s also important that I have permission to cause you to fail, either through clever tricks and traps, smart tactics, or my own lucky rolls of the dice. However it’s also important that the consequences of failure aren’t too annoying, severe, time consuming, or harsh. Getting booted out of the game, even temporarily, kind of sucks.
There’s also this idea that we’re playing a game. On the one hand, I’d like to invite you to play a game with me that is, in many ways, directly about injury and death. By roleplaying, we’re entering a world together that is playing with the idea of danger and risk, and I’d like to be able to hold that lightly, and have fun, even and especially when things go south. Death however is a heavy subject, and as the real world gets more and more dangerous, and our individual safeties more in jeopardy, I know that sometimes the death of a character we closely identify with can be painful, unpleasant, and threatening outside of the scope of what’s happening in the game. At the same time, being that Dungeons and Dragons seems to be about death, it seems that entirely ruling out death as an explicit consequence would defeat the point of the game.
So this is my attempt to resolve those tensions. The risk of combat will be primarily injury, which runs the risk of being long-term. Death is still a possibility, but one that’s explicitly reversible. And secondary characters are given more explicit rules for you to fall back on.
System Strain
System strain represents your physical system’s capacity to prevent injury. When your system strain is high, your character is highly stressed out, over-taxed, and at their limit, mentally and physically. They’ll injure more easily, and have less ability to recover from damage. Low system strain represents the opposite: your character is rested and recovered, and able to absorb a lot of stress.
Your character has a maximum system strain equal to their Constitution score. Most forms of free and easy healing, such as Healer’s Touch and First Aid, will cost one point of system strain to receive. If a character is at maximum system strain, they cannot benefit from this type of healing. Some powerful items may cost a point of system strain to use. A character’s natural healing will also not function when system strain is at maximum.
Many divine spells do not increase system strain, being a boon from the gods.
Injury, Death, and Dying
Before 0 hit points, your character is strained, bruised, scratched, tired, or even badly physically injured, just not in a way that impedes them. When your character is reduced to 0 hit points, they suffer a terrible blow and begin to die. The character must immediately either receive 1d6 system strain or a temporary injury, by rolling on the injury table. If your system strain roll puts you over your maximum, you cap out at your maximum and receive an injury anyway.
Temporary injuries are serious physical or emotional setbacks that can only be healed by rest. The only way to heal a temporary injury is overnight with a good night’s rest. However, if a character dies while injured, or if they roll the exact same injury again while already injured, the injury becomes permanent, and can only be healed with significant downtime, or a level up.
You can decide what the nature of the injury is, based on the harm that caused it. Mechanically speaking, each injury should represent approximately a 10% deficiency in that particular area, except attacking, which everyone is already bad enough at already. Some injuries are a little worse and some are a little better, and at least one gets a little better after a night of rest, even if it’s permanent.
When dying, a character will die at the end of their tenth turn. Another character may attempt to stabilize them with a Heal check as a Main action against difficulty 8, though if they have no healing tools on hand, the difficulty will be 10. Only one ally can attempt to stabilize a character per round. On their turn, the character can only speak feebly and move up to 5’. Similar to 5e, they may also attempt to stabilize themselves with a special Death saving throw: roll a d20, with a 10+ being success. This roll cannot be modified in any way. After three successes they stabilize at 0 hp, but after three failures they die. On a 20, they gain 1hp, stand up, and may immediately act. If a character takes damage while dying, they suffer an automatic failed death save.
A character that gains hit points while dying may stand up and immediately act.
Rest
At the end of a good night’s sleep, recover 1 hitpoint per level. You also heal 1 system strain, and all temporary injuries.
You cannot sleep in armor. If you do so, you recover no system strain, injury, or effort, and can only recover 1 spell slot per level of spell available.
When resting in the wilderness or a dungeon, it’s always assumed that someone is keeping watch overnight. If an encounter occurs, I’ll generally determine randomly who is keeping watch at the time. Additional safety measures should be specified through play.
If an encounter attempts to sneak up on your watch, an opposed Notice vs. Sneak check is allowed to prevent ambush. Generally however we will roll for surprise as normal (2 in 6 chance for either side to be surprised–see the Surprise and Ambush section), and the encounter will initiate at a fair distance from your camp.
Characters who are resting may be woken with a shout as an On-turn action, as long as they are within ear shot. Regardless of their manner of being woken, they can’t act until the next round, during which period they’ll be waking up, taking stock of their surroundings, gathering their readied items, and so on. At that point however they’ll be standing and ready to act. Remember though that characters cannot sleep in their armor, so only the character on watch will be armored.
If your sleep is interrupted, your hit points will still be at the level you fell asleep at, but you can borrow forward spells if you need to. If you suffer an injury while rest is interrupted, you’ll need another full 8 hours of rest to clear it.
Resurrection
Resurrection is not too hard to come by. Clerics and priests imbued with the power of life beyond death are glad to share the miracles of their gods with the world, generally for a price. However, any character that is brought back to life suffers a permanent -1 to Constitution. This cannot be restored, though your Constitution may be able to increase again from powerful magical effects or leveling up. This represents the powerful toll that dying has on a person’s spirit. Some theorize that some part of the soul is left in the afterlife, while others suppose that the Resurrection magic draws on a person’s life-force to bring them back. Either way, there’s a hard limit to how many times a person can come back from the dead, and some people may prefer not to.
Healing Permanent Injuries
Permanent injuries can stack. So eventually you might decide that your character is too injured to go on.
You’ve got a couple choices and both of them are pretty prohibitive. A permanent injury represents the kind of injury that takes a lot of time and rest to reverse, certainly more time than the pressure of the adventure would ever allow. It’s possible your character has simply suffered an injury that can’t be healed. If your character takes a month of downtime, they may attempt to roll under their Constitution. On a success, one injury is healed.
If you’d prefer, you can retire your character for a period and play a new one. They’ll start with 50% of the experience points of your old character. After you play four sessions, your old character can start making a single Constitution check at the end of each session to attempt to heal an injury. You can resume playing your old character whenever you want.
Finally, if your character levels up with a permanent injury, they heal one permanent injury.
When we get to higher levels there might be powerful spells that can heal permanent injury, such as Regenerate, but we’ll handle that when we get there. Otherwise, healing a permanent injury either means that your character completely recovered, or adjusted to their injury in such a way that it no longer impedes them. You can decide what it means.
Retired Characters
When you retire your character, choose somewhere safe they can rest. They’ll be pursuing a normal life, maybe working a trade of some sort, far from the dangers of adventuring life. You can decide what they’re doing with their life, whatever makes sense to you and feels like it contributes to your character’s recovery. If you have enemies, they won’t target this character, though they might need to go under-cover or something if your enemies are really crazy. If it makes sense in the game world, your characters can visit them for advice or just to hang out, but they’ll have sworn off using their powers.
You can distribute as much treasure and gold as you want to the party, though your retired character will need to keep their most treasured possessions. I’m thinking maybe half their Strength score in items and a modest sum of money. Consider leaving them a keepsake as well.
Your new character will start at 50% of the experience points of the your old character, with starting equipment.
You can resume play with your old character at any time, we’ll just need to come up with a good reason for them to rejoin the adventure.
Injuries (roll d12)
-1 to attack (coordination harmed)
-2 to weapon damage (strength harmed)
-2 to AC (wounded in such a way that your armor doesn’t fit right)
-2 to one save (roll 1d6 to determine which kind)
Paralysis/Poison/Death
Petrification/Polymorph
Rod/Staff/Wand
Breath Weapon
Spell
All
+2 to saves against YOUR spells (ability to concentrate harmed, reroll if you can’t cast spells)
-2 to skill checks (roll 1d6 to determine which kind)
Feebled (strength)
Off-balance (dexterity)
Sapped (constitution)
Concussed (wisdom)
Concussed (intelligence)
Feared (charisma)
-1 to max effort
-½ hitdice lost to max hit points (So if your hitdice is d8, lose 4 max hit points)
-15% to reaction rolls (your character is physically scarred, depressed, pessimistic, doom-pilled, traumatized, and so on in a way that other people find off-putting or frightening)
-15% to morale checks that you cause (is character is physically scarred, depressed, pessimistic, doom-pilled, traumatized, and so on in a way that your enemies perceive as a sign of weakness)
-10’ to movement (leg or foot mangled, hurt, twisted, crushed, burned)
When this particular injury becomes permanent, reduce the penalty to 5’ after you get a good night’s rest– 10’ is a really severe penalty for long-term use, but seems like an appropriate model for a temporary broken bone or chopped foot
One arm temporarily unusable (roll for left/right). If you try to use the unusable arm anyway, suffer a -6 to attacks and -4 to skill checks involving that arm. Don’t worry about whether the arm is dominant, your character is well-trained enough that switching arms is no big deal, though you can decide whether it matters in a roleplaying kind of way.
