Bort's Life or Death Variants The threat of losing your character is one of the most import fears a player faces. In a world of magic its often lost exactly how impactful and threatening a situation should be. Easy access to healing, resurrection and quick recovery of your resources means a marathon adventure is rarely the tiresome, troubling and grueling undertaking it was designed to be. The following rule changes are certainly imperfect but the design goal I set out for myself was one where players can think hard on a choice to continue, rest or retreat and treat the threat of falling unconscious and dying with the gravity it should warrant. I will present change to the following three areas of the game, that work together to hopefully drive a grittier story without being overly unfair to the players: Hit Points

Rest and Recovery

Resurrection Hit Points Level 1 At first level, characters are extremely frail. The game has devised a series of fractional Challenge Ratings for these characters to face but most of them are capable with a single roll bringing a character down. This is by design I believe to drive the feeling of fragility of low level characters and a feeling of dread. My umbrage with this situation is that randomness is often the most important factor in an outcome instead of player ingenuity and careful decision making. It also creates a dichotomy of how the game works between early levels and the rest of the game. I believe a little padding is better, to allow the randomness to regress to the mean - while sometimes good and bad luck swing the situation, every roll isn't a potential death knell. Level 1 Hit Points When you generate your characters, instead of receiving your Level 1 hit points as your maximum Hit Die value + Your Constitution Modifier, your starting Hit Points are your maximum Hit Die + Constitution Score. This is functionally going to raise most hit point totals from between 10 and 12 points. Your level 1 Wizard with a 12 Constitution will have 18 Hit Points and your level 1 Barbarian with 16 Constitution will have 28 Hit Points. By level 3, with average hit points, they will have 28 and 48 hit points respectively. Falling Unconscious Dropping to zero hitpoints is a big deal. Concussive blows, a loss of blood, and other injuries render you in capable of remaining concious. It should be a dire moment for characters, but often its immediacy is lost. Players are going to fall unconscious and normally no one really worries until death saving throws start going the wrong way. I love the death saving throw, it's a great mechanic that if left unattended gives you a 60/40 chance to survive or die. While it is often lessened by the availability of bonus action healing from a distance, it does a good job of providing a buffer to death. DMs can threaten to kill a player while they are down, but I find that doesn't end well for your game if used regularly, it's easy to wait and only worry when you actually fear the final failure if healing isn't available but I instead prefer the tension and consequence to exist on every roll. Failing Death Saving Throws When you fail a Death Saving Throw you character takes a level of exhaustion. Denote this level as coming from a Death Saving Throw. The effects are the same as normal exhaustion including eventual death, but for every 1 hour of rest a level of temporary exhaustion is removed and a Lesser Restoration Spell can remove 1 level of temporary exhaustion. It's not death when you fail your first Death Saving Throw, but it has a consequence and if you are brought back up to a handful of hit points and go down again you are back at risk of gaining more exhaustion. Enough levels and your party is faced with the conundrum of finding a place to rest up or continuing forward with a weakened member. It's equally important though that this complication is recoverable in a reasonable period of time. Furthermore allowing lesser restoration provides a way similar to healing spells for players to expend their resources to keep pushing forward. The greatest design risk here is that you put those able to cast restoration into a position where they are further expected to lose their resources because their allies were too reckless in combat. Rest and Recovery Today the game breaks rests into 2 parts, Short Rest for an hour or Long Rest for 8 hours, once per day. Players fall back on rests to recover their resources some and push forward. A Long rest is basically a hard reset for most situations restoring almost everything and a short rest is a chance to recover hit points and recharge many abilities. Shorter Than Short Rests Recovering hit points after encounters with Hit Dice is one of the better rules of this edition. It is less taxing for classes with healing spells and allows a recovery resource regardless of your party mix. Sometimes combats go really well, other times they go sideways and being able to spend Hit Dice after a bad combat is major boon to being able to complete dungeons or other series of encounters. 1

Sometimes the idea of taking an entire hour is a bit much; an hour is a long time and greatly increases the chances of danger wandering past you or delays you in a hurried attempt to reach your goal. It serves its duty in recovering class abilities but sometimes you just need a few hit points more to continue and for that in my games I've implemented an alternative. Take A Breather After an encounter your characters can take a "Breather". You spend 5 minutes or so straitening your armor, catching your breath and refocusing. You can spend up to half your hit dice, minimum one, during this time to recover hit points as normal. This additional "Rest" option is less crucial to the feel of these alternative rules, but its an example of something I think gives back to the players. At times these rules will make some parts of the game harder so at times I hope they can make some parts of the game easier as well. Returning to the Inn The long rest is the coveted full recovery save point of 5th Edition. You get back all your hit points, all your abilities. Exhaustion, Resurrection Penalties and spent Hit Dice are the only thing your party doesn't get back. Why not ? These are all things in the game designed to portray the physical rigor your characters are undergoing that a night's rest cannot remove. I've always found it weird you can recover 99% of your hit points but only 50% of your Hit Dice. A Long Rest should be refreshing but anyone who has ever had a grueling day of physical activity can tell you, one night is rarely all it takes to recover. Characters need their abilities to feel like they contribute so I would not touch those but higher Hit Point totals is often the reward for good decisions so they should be a bit more scarce. Recovering Hit Points When you finish a Long Rest you recover a number of hit points equal to your Constitution Score, additionally if you spend hit dice at the end of the long rest the minimum number of hit points you regain from the roll equlas twice your Constitution modidier(minimum 2) [As The Durable Feat]. This replaces the existing rule that you recover all your Hit Points when you finish a Long Rest. You still recover Hit Dice at the end of a long rest, but instead of recovering half round down, instead recover half rounded up. You can benefit from above rule on expending hit dice on a long rest before and after you regain hit dice for the rest. It's important that recovery is still happening when you take a long rest so we give you Constitution Score in hit points. Rounding up Hit Dice recover helps players at 3rd and 5th level when your pools are fairly small. The rule about minimum average hit points basically allows you to ensure a better hit point recovery on a Long Rest and expending all your Hit Dice should heal you to full. In all it might take up to 3 days for you to actually full recover from a grueling day of adventuring but then you should be back to full strength. If you could only muster a night in the woods then you are more vulnerable by not having the depth of hit points and recovery available to you, but you additional class resources will certainly help your forge your path forward still. Resurrection Life's a bitch, then you die. Or is it ? After making it more dangerous to let your friends bleed out and more difficult to come back from the brink of death with a night's sleep - what purpose would it really serve if death itself is an afterthought? Resurrection spells are easier than ever and in a world with little use for gold are surprisingly cheaper than ever. Revivify The revivify spell is probably one of most game changing spells in 5th edition. It is an exaggeration of how magic can strip the fear of death from the game. Sure at 5th level you only have 2 3rd level spells and it costs 300 gold, which is often a decent amount of money at that level but soon both of those become trivial. It allows you to address the death up to 1 minute later which is longer than many entire combats and comes with no side effects. So you died and you are back, spend some of those hit dice and then pretend it never happened. The history of resurrection spells is that they are difficult to obtain and costly. Revivify, which premiered in 3.5 in the popular but often bizarre Miniatures Handbook, used to take the same 5th level spell slot as Raise Dead and require you cast it within 1 action of that person dying and you had to touch them. This meant someone had to give up their turn, be in reach and they stayed unconscious, if someone wanted to heal them it was another action. Its my belief resurrection needs a steeper cost - financially and mechanically. Revivify is on the top of the list. Rather than publish all new spell descriptions I am just going to describe the differences. Revivify Revivify now requires concentration up to 1 round [similar to True Strike] and allows you as an action to resurrect someone, restoring them to 1 hitpoint. The material cost (consumable) is being raised to 500gp of diamonds. The target takes a -1 Penalty to all attack rolls, saving throws and ability checks; a weakened version of the penalty of Raise Dead removed upon finishing a long rest. These changes don't make access to Revivify that much harder, but it does three important things. First its a bit more expensive and a party would likely have had to invest more into its reagents, particularly to have multiple uses. Second by requiring an additional action and giving a concentration hold over similar to True Strike, its made the commitment to resurrecting someone in the midst of combat more demanding and harder. There are still edgecases where a multiclass fighter with action surge or a sorcerer with quicken could resurrect in 1 round and I like that. Lastly the minor Resurrection penalty isn't awful but its a consequence. 2