Hurting Your Players but Making it Fun || D&D w/ Dael Kingsmill

could you leave me with a scar hello humans my name is dale kingsmill it's a d d video today remember way back when i made a video where i i talked for some of the time about my major injuries table i revamped the entire system let's start from the top what were my goals my goals when creating or recreating this system were ultimately at the very tippy top uh the whole reason that i you know devised this system in the first place is so that players who choose proficiency in the medicine skill can have something to do with it that fulfills their sort of field medic dreams i'm sure that not everybody who chooses the medicine skill expects to be able to to you know do field medicine and heal their friends with it but in my experience a lot of the players who i've run for who have chosen medicine have had this moment where they say oh i have medicine can i make a check to heal them and having to say no to that is the worst because the reaction is always exactly the same it's this oh right exactly that goal number two create a still fate driven um but dramatic and narratively memorable moment within combat so it's still a fluke of fate it still comes down to the dice but when fate deems that it will happen oh boy is it gonna is it gonna stick in your mind and feel like narratively weighty and goal number three was to allow the game world to exert aesthetic changes upon the the player characters and story driven changes but without enforcing permanent mechanical penalties on those characters because mechanical penalties aren't that fun it's just a visual narrative layer over the top of the character hello editingdale here with bad lighting bad sound and addressing gown on um something that i'm not sure that i made clear during any point of this video that i would like to make clear up top is that um to me there is a big difference between um sort of permanent or long-term lingering penalties uh versus penalties that are put on a character in the short term that are temporary and that are attached to a specific like story beat right and i find that typically um penalties like this that are attached to a specific moment and then don't kind of outlive that moment people are more likely to accept those because it feels like it's tied in with what's happening and with what the dice have laid out in front of them so let's go over how all of this is gonna work the starting place for me was finding a way in which um i don't undermine spells or magical healing and how they work and what they do so all of all of the spells and healing work exactly as they say as they always have instead what i've tried to do is create situations in which there is a more complex question at play the risk reward of do i heal with magic or do i use a medicine check giving the player that choice so in my setting i say that uh magical healing works by accelerating the healing process feels like a a pretty standard explanation i also like to say and we'll probably touch it up more as we go that um using magic to heal an injury makes that injury more likely to scar so the overarching mechanism of the whole system is basically if a player character takes the equivalent of half of their hit points total in one strike so from one source of damage like if it's multi-attack it has to be one of the attacks if your player has 20 hit points and they take 10 points of slashing damage from one attack for example then the player has to roll a dc-15 saving throw if they get a 15 or higher then they just they tank the damage they still they still take the damage but they uh they just like power through if they don't make the dc of 15 however they use the total of their saving throw roll to determine on a table specific to the damage type a short term ongoing effect from the wound these injuries require more attention and you know more layers of dealing with so they feel like a bigger deal but they also unless circumstances get really dire they don't hang around for very long also before i inevitably forget to mention it somewhere else anyone who has suffered a major injury it takes disadvantage on concentration checks until the the whole thing is resolved okay i think what i'll do is i'll go through sort of the anatomy of a table for you to show you how it works and then we'll just do i don't wanna i don't wanna go through every single thing because there's a lot there's like eight tables uh but then we'll go through and we'll do like one example of an injury from each table all right let me stand somewhere that hopefully means that there will be enough screen so here as an example uh we have the burns table now you'll notice that i've grouped damage types together some damage types end up on their own some end up in groups basically in general they are grouped by things that have um similar scarring similar effects uh similar sort of um effects on the body so in this case acid fire and lightning damage all kind of ultimately do similar things they are not different enough from one another to really justify having solo tables so i put them all into the category of burns which is the thing that they do to bodies so here you can see that i've written what type of saving throw it is in this case it's a dc-15 constitution saving throw down the left hand side we have a column that is the total of the failed constitution save then we have a description of the type of injury that comes with that score it's very simple i didn't want to get into too many details about the type of injury because that leaves it up to whatever the specific situation happens to be so you can fill in the details of the description what it does cover is kind of a general description of the injury and the body parts that it might impact if the player rolls a number that um that corresponds to body parts that don't make sense i would say take the number that they rolled and move to the closest number that has a relevant body part so you know if they if they roll an eight but it doesn't make sense then move it down to the seven if they roll a ten move move it up to the eleven if they roll a nine then i don't know choose whatever color it please got then of course you have the mechanical consequences the vast majority of these allow the player three more rounds at least of of the combat because typically if this is happening you know mid combat they're probably going to make it to the end but then oh they might collapse down the bottom i have a description of how scars of that damage type tend to look just in case your group happened to be the kind who want to have battle scars to show off if that's their kind of jam then you can use the scar description down the bottom then underneath that i have the bit that is the most important for how this works with the medicine skill basically it describes why magical healing of this type of wound of this severity can become complicated so in the case of burns i've said here that if you heal burns magically the acceleration is more likely to cause contraction scarring which severely limits uh the the motion the range of motion that you have in that body part so you can choose to magically heal this person uh but if you do so then the effects that they had that were temporary become permanent by permanent i mean until they are medicinally treated so not actual permanence but you know with the vibe of permanence permanent ish that's where it becomes a choice of risk and reward right because someone might be you know on the battlefield occasionally attacking with disadvantage because they're very hurt and that's not good but if you heal them magically it'll become you know a constant thing so in that case you probably don't want to heal them magically but if someone is unconscious and making death saving throws then maybe it's worth the choice to heal them magically which keeps them alive in the meantime but then you have medical complications that come with it that you'll have to deal with later after the battle when you get a chance so that's the general overview of how it works now we're just going to go through one or two examples from each of the tables i asked people on twitter and discord to uh to roll a d20 for me and then i made up a bunch of like really standard just you know quick start guide characters uh to to roll checks so my apologies to everyone who participated and rolled really high lots of you were rolling like 20s and stuff um so i'm very happy for you uh good for you you're the people who um passed your your major injury check right you're the people who shrugged off the damage good for you i'm happy for you but you're not in this video i made all the characters level five just because i didn't i didn't want to do more maths alright so here we go bludgeoning bludgeoning is on a table all its own your party is doing battle with a cyclops wielding a great club deals 19 damage the party barbarian tanks that damage like a champ because the barbarian has so many hit points that their threshold for even rolling on the major injuries table is 28 so 19 damage doesn't do enough to the barbarian for them to have to roll i bring this up because uh with the old version a lot of people were worried that the dc was always 15 no matter the the character type they were like shouldn't barbarians have an easier time of of not getting major injuries and the answer is they already do because because they have more hit points so they have to take more damage and then even if they do take enough damage they have proficiency in constitution saving throws so it's kind of already baked in with the with the hit point system and with the saving throw system that classes that should be less likely to take major injuries are already less likely to take major injuries so those of you who are worried about that don't be worried about that all right but someone's got to get mutilated so uh the bird who has a threshold of 14 poor little bird they they do have to roll for a major injury and clement tyler who is playing the bard in this scenario rolled a uh nine plus one on their con save and a right arm on a body part die uh which i didn't know existed and which makes me feel like adding the body parts section to this um was was that that whole column feels kind of pointless now uh just buy that that dice instead maybe plummet the bird rolled a total of ten so that on this table is the equivalent to a dislocation or a bone break in the arm shoulder or chest as the great club comes smashing down on you from overhead you feel your body reeling as something in your collarbone snaps and searing pain spreads throughout your chest every time you try to lift your arm from now on at the start of every one of his turns clement the bad has to make a dc 10 constitution saving throw and if he makes it he's fine everything's fine he pushes through the pain for now but every time that they don't succeed every time they fail this check for the rest of the round they have disadvantage on attack roles it's starting to affect them in combat if they fail three times they fall unconscious because the pain just becomes too much for them burns your party is doing battle with a chimera it blasts its fire breath at the fighter the fight has a threshold of 22 which is pretty good but the chimera deals 31 fire damage and so the fighter has to roll their constitution saving throw bear who's one of our moderators over on discord just trust me that that their name is bear i know it doesn't look like that right now but it is bear rolled a three oh that's pretty bad right but the fighter has a proficiency bonus to their constitution saving throw so they get three plus five which brings them way back up to eight that is a significant difference to go from the two to four section of this table up to the eight to ten so proficiency in the relevant save is a big deal it makes a big difference bear the fighter takes the jetta flame directly to the chest the the metal heating up and searing into their skin underneath which uh incidentally actually has the same mechanical effect as the the last one that we read out concussive blasts unique to thunder damage this was kind of fun to research um i did a lot of researching of actual like medical stuff had to look at a lot of icky pictures i'm telling you that much but concussive blasts was kind of fun because it's it's really um it's quite unique to explosives it's it's a it's sort of a shock wave that comes out from explosives so there are sort of these layers of uh types of injuries that come from explosions but most of them are not caused by the concussive blast the way that thunder damage would deal damage so it was it's a very specific narrow range of injuries anyway i think it's interesting an evildoer enemy caster casts thunder wave at level 4 dealing 22 thunder damage and our poor ranger has a threshold of 20 hit points finn from twitter rolled an 11 plus one so they have a 12 total and they receive oh classic concussive injury uh middle and inner ear damage so the pressure from the shock wave is enough that it blasts out the eardrum and even breaks through into the into the inner ear so of course the character is deafened for the time being and at the start of each of their turns they have to make a dc 10 con save if they fail they basically have vertigo and their their movement is halved for the rest of the round because they're stumbling around dizzy so you'll note that that entry on this table is it is unique to thunder damage there's no other table that has that injury on it a lot of the tables have have unique entries like that cuts and stab wounds now aha vroc talons do 14 damage on average so a character like our party rogue ordinarily would have to roll right because their threshold is exactly 14 but because the rogue has their uncanny dodge ability they have that damage and they avoid having to deal with the major injuries table altogether i'm throwing that in there because i just want you to remember because me reading out a bunch of failed saving throws for the major injuries table remember all the people who didn't fail their role they're out there they exist so let's target someone else um let's imagine that the rock dealed a little bit above average uh the sorcerer with a threshold of 16 take 17 damage slashing damage from the rock talons it's a good thing they have a plus five to their con save huh yes although in this case unfortunately uh ganymede over on the discord uh true to his history of weakness to talons uh little mythology humor for you there ganymede rolled a gnat one which on this table is equivalent to lacerations or punctures to the eye or neck with major bleeding and so that character immediately falls unconscious it's just so much trauma directly to the face that they like just drop i think this is a valuable thing for you to stop and really consider whether you use nat ones or not i typically am not the biggest fan of like ones are automatic failures i usually let my players like still add their bonuses and see what happens from there i don't like like fumble tables and stuff however i do think that in this specific scenario i would use netfunds because um when you're in this situation you've taken so much damage the dm says you're you're gonna have to roll to see whether you take a massive injury and then you roll a nap one the automatic gut reaction to that right is is to go oh no something terrible has happened and so i think um i think half of the fun of it almost is leaning into that and saying yes something terrible has happened but maybe that's not for you maybe maybe you would like it to to not just be that ones maybe that plus five would bring it up to a six you know all right freezing injuries oh lordy the strangeness of cold damage this this was a real butt to try and put together narratively uh when ice based damage if you if you think of like batman or robin or if you think of i don't know frozone from the incredibles you know when you when you witness ice attacks in stories most typically they um they freeze the action boring i ended up having to like fully flip the structure compared to the previous tables i'd made but uh but i ended up getting to a place where i'm pretty happy with it oh we're fighting a white dragon wormling and it uses its breath weapon dealing 22 cold damage to our wizard with a threshold of 11 and a con save of plus zero oh our wizard is in trouble not only that but daniel hills a good friend of mine and good friend of the channel rolled a five so in this specific scenario uh he's got hypothermia the wizard done got hypothermia you have disadvantage on strength and dexterity ability checks attack roles and saving throws cause you're just so shivery and weak and all of your body's energy is going towards trying to keep your organs warm after three rounds you fall prone and become stunned at the start of your next turn so you don't fall unconscious but this is to reflect that it is the creeping cold is getting worse and worse and worse and over time your body's gonna stop being able to move gonna stop even shivering oh magical afflictions this is a fun one so what i was thinking with this is the idea that maybe every person has you know a certain amount of of manner magical energy running through their body at all times like like the electricity that we have in our body little synapses firing and all those sorts of things little electrical signals little mana signals running around our body but just like a surge of too much electricity at one time can can be bad having part of your body overloaded with mana can also be bad and that kind of ties into why the saving throw for magical damage is charisma i wanted to tie it in with that idea of like sorcerers having you know all this extra charisma and that's kind of where their magic comes from probably would have an easier time absorbing that excess manner and not being harmed by it it was a little bit of a journey to figuring out which um of the sort of more spell associated damage types i wanted to include in magical effects i ended up with uh force damage necrotic damage and radiant damage a beholder's innovation ray rolled a little high and dealt 40 damage the monk makes the save but their threshold is 19 so even though they only took 20 damage they still have to roll for a major injury eric who dented his dining room table for this rolled a 12 plus 2 charisma he's a high charisma monk so that's a total of 14 14's are fun for most of these tables 14 equates to an adrenaline rush but in the case of magical damage you get a mana rush any character gets this benefit not to spell casters for three rounds you have advantage on all saving throws to resist spells or magical effects and spell attack roles made against you have disadvantage after three rounds you gain three levels of exhaustion at the start of your next turn and you cannot cast spells for one round in the case of an adrenaline rush or a mana rush you get this sort of surge of power for a little bit and then after that you just wiped it's like your body was like okay i think that's enough the other thing that i think is kind of cool about the magical damage is i was like what kind of scarring does it leave if you're hit by force damage it's like something that impacts your soul but not your body what does that look like and i decided that mana scarring typically takes the form of contrasting albinistic or melanistic discoloration of the skin hair or eyes but it can also appear in metallic tones like gold and silver the pattern can sometimes take on unusual shapes that reflect the magical nature of the injury suffered mental trauma psychic damage got to be on its own table because unlike the other sort of explicitly magical damages uh psychic damage only hits you in your brain so the different body parts and the concept of scarring that was applicable to the other magic types that we just talked about don't really apply to psychic so i moved it to its own table and i took inspiration from migraines you're fighting a femorian it turns its evil eye on you it deals 28 damage so the barbarian is gonna have to roll this time and whoa oh it's on the psychic table so the injury saved this time is a dc-15 intelligence saving throw the barbarian has a negative one eric schreyer rolled a two that's rough that's going to be reduced to a psychic nosebleed as the femorian locks its eyes with you you feel this incessant high-pitched stinging in the center of your brain that spreads out to reach across the whole thing you drop to your knees and feel blood coming from your nose you barely get a moment to consider it before your eyes roll back in your head and you collapse to the ground unconscious okay fair call i do not get psychic nosebleeds when i have migraines but i thought it was only appropriate that the psychic noise bleed uh you know trope of all tropes make an appearance on this table finally the toxicity table poison damage was another tricky one this table ended up being the uh the most deadly i would say of the tables or the most dangerous i do think it is partly evened out by the existence of lots of things within the game that are deliberately designed to cure poisons but i kind of liked the drama and the urgency of how dangerous poison damage can be because of the way it spreads because of the way it inhibits body functions this table basically is applicable only really to like contact poisons and and poisons that get stabbed into you so it doesn't so much cover inhaled poison damage or ingested poison damage mostly that's because fire and away the the most common sources of poison damage are injury and because ingested poisons within the game when they do come up often have their own mechanics attached to them so i just kind of let it be a wyvern sting deals 11 piercing damage plus 24 poison damage so it is from the one source it's from the one attack but uh there are two damage types there now okay it's time that we brought the rogue back they need to they need to get hurt too come back rogue so the rogue halves the piercing damage to five but the poison damage even if they make their saving throw they still take 12 poison damage so a total of 17 most of it poisoned versus a massive injury threshold of 14 so they're rolling on that table baby all right thank you magpie on twitter for providing me with a natural one so that we can talk about tissue death now this is something that uh that i've only really included on the poison damage chart and on the freeze damage chart so in this case uh and that one is severe poisoning and tissue death in the arm or leg your proficiency bonus and ability modifiers are reduced to zero for all strength and dexterity ability checks attack rolls and saving throws so the concept here is and don't look this up because it's very gross i did that for you so that you don't have to some venoms and uh and particularly deep frost damage necrotize the tissue they kill the tissue it's dead it can't come back you can't heal that because it's dead in the real world what you do is you you get to it quickly you you know remove the dead stuff in extreme cases it can lead to amputation but often it takes a very long time but this is d and d and the timeline is contracted so in the case of dnd if you roll a net one on these tables i think that it feels right that it's like well you're gonna have to do a field amputation this is this is the medics thing right now is you're gonna have to surgically amputate this limb in order to to save the person now that sounds quite comparatively bad to everything else i've done so we have to keep in mind keeping it fun let this be a huge dramatic impactful moment but let's let's find fun parts to go from here so first of all uh regeneration still exists it still exists it's still out there if your player doesn't like scars or anything they can just straight up grow back the arm it's fine if they do like scars but they do want their arm back they can grow the yarn back but have a scar where it was where it was amputated right to mark off that thing that happened that's pretty cool too but keeping in mind that this is a fantasy game we can go into some very cool places from here that i think are really worth considering i like the idea of taking the the magical prosthesis route you could go with enchanted armor sort of full metal alchemist style you could rock a classic piratical peg leg the druid could grow themselves a new arm out of maple wood maybe you can hire a team of necromantic clerics to like concentrate the essence of your phantom limb into something solid like they're raising it from the dead and now you just have like a spectral hand or a ghostly eye this could also be a good place to slot in the combat wheelchair by sarah thompson any one of these examples it's important to communicate with your player what they want in terms of scarring and like ultimate outcome but i think more than anything really heck and communicate if the player loses a limb i'm gonna throw these tables up on the blog where i posted the original injuries table so you know they can exist side by side i was gonna i was gonna do a gm binder whole thing but the coding of the tables was was fighting me and i had flashbacks to when i made the foraging tables and all the drama that entailed so i might do that at some point but i'm i'm very tired there's a link in the description if you are into coding and programming and stuff my uncle has been trying to teach me programming and we're actually getting to the point where we're cutting code now so that's very exciting i'm trying to work out how to uh make a fairly simple game and trying to learn about programming in the process so there's a link to those videos also if you've heard word on the street about this colville uh 4e d and d game that i've been playing in but you weren't super keen on watching the the really long live stream sort of vods excellent news uh they're now being uploaded edited versions on youtube over on matt's channel so you can go and check them out i do believe that that's it i'm done email this to your grandma and i'll see you some other time [Music] i gotta switch hands it's too heavy it hurts

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 27,309

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek and Sundry, Geek, nerd, australian, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeons, dragons, pathfinder, 5e, rpg, ttrpg, fairytales, grimm, dungeon master, dm, homebrew, injuries, lingering

Id: thl54TR5Nb4

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021