Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 215 - House Rules to Make Your Game Harder

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

Some players want a hard game.  They’ve been there, done that and got the scars to prove it.  They want something more difficult and more punishing.  In this episode I float some ideas on how you can give your game some teeth and make it a little or a lot more difficult for your PCs.   #dmtips #gmtips #dnd #5e #pf2e #GameDifficulty

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. People don't work free and they expect to be compensated for their time. If the PCs are pulling them away from their traditional job to do something for them, well, that might drive the cost up even higher. Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 215. Some tweaks and house rules I use to make games harder for the players. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Track and Field Sporting Events. The Olympics are this summer, and I'm looking forward to them.

I used to have a lot of fears while watching the hurdles, but I got over them. Do you have a topic idea that you'd like to suggest for me? Send it to me via direct message on Facebook or Instagram, or email it to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. It's been a while since I've gotten any suggestions, so please send any that you may have my way. As I mentioned last week in the partner episode, some players love difficult, gritty games

where survival is the exception rather than the rule. Last week was for DMs whose players don't like those games, but this week is for those GMs running adventures for those gritty, hard-game-loving players out there. Don't worry, this week is not going to go nearly as long as last week. I guess I have fewer ideas on making a game grimdark and a grindfest because I rarely run those types of games. Like last week, I would advise you to be cautious about making a game harder. Tabletop role-playing games are supposed to be fun, and just because you want to run a

game that's extremely difficult doesn't necessarily mean that's what your players want. You need to make sure your game mechanics and atmosphere match what the players want. So, before you crank up the meat grinder of your campaign, make sure the players are on board with that type of game. Most tabletop RPGs, especially and including 5e, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Worlds Without Number, etc. are never, ever, ever DM versus the players. You're all collaborating and working together. Games should only be punishing and difficult with lingering effects on characters and monsters if that's what all of the players in the GM agree to before the games ever get started.

Anyway, starting simply. If you listened to last week's episode, and I hope you did, some of last week's recommendations to make a game easier can be Uno reversed to make the game harder. Make DCs for checks higher, ACs higher, hit points higher, damage higher. I don't think you, my brilliant listeners, need that concept further explained. If you'd like more on that, listen to last week's episode and reverse everything that I say. You can obviously make healing and rests rarer. Track encumbrance and ammunition, food and water too while you're at it.

You can make gold rarer or items more expensive. Need that water skin filled at the desert? Oh yeah, that'll cost you at the local town. It's not free in areas where water's plentiful. Wands, when you discover them, may have fewer charges, etc. However, there are some things that I would not flip from last week because it can have a dramatic effect on the fun and fairness of the game. Last week I suggested giving free archetypes or feats, and you may be tempted to take some away from players, but

please don't do that. The game is balanced around a certain number of feats per level, depending on the game system, and taking that away could break 5e or Pathfinder 2e, for example, at your table. Starfinder, or nearly other game system and taking that away could break 5e or Pathfinder 2e, for example, at your table. Starfinder or nearly other game system with leveling mechanics gives feats or something equivalent at a certain steady pace. Even if the game somehow feels balanced after you pull feats away, the players probably aren't going to enjoy it. It's not fun to have fewer options in and out of combat, so steer clear of removing feats given to your PCs. The first new thing I'm going to mention, though,

is to consider how opponents in combat treat downed characters, that is, characters who have been dropped to zero hit points in battle. In easy games, the opponents will ignore PCs that fall because they're focusing on the ones that are still swinging axes, shooting bolts, and slinging spells. Letting downed characters be, effectively, out of the combat and ignored means it's much more likely that the character will survive to come back to the fight. More on that in a moment. However, if you really want to make your game harder, have the baddies give the downed characters an extra smack or two. It makes it harder for the characters to come back, and it makes it, honestly, more likely that they will die.

Again, I'm going to say this many times this episode, but make sure that's the type of game your players want. In thinking about this, it's about what kinds of creatures you're fighting. If the baddies are intelligent, they may use the downed character to their advantage, threatening them to get the others to stop fighting. They can even specifically target downed characters if they're truly malicious and bloodthirsty and want the kill. A baddie looking to seek revenge against a party that's thwarted them at every turn, it's possible that they will just kill them so they don't come back and cause problems. Also, think about animals that are only fighting the characters because they're hungry. The first downed character is a potential meal, and they may drag the

character off to eat it at their leisure when and where it's not so dangerous. Another thing you can do to make your game more difficult is to make your economy more dynamic. I'm not saying you set up some complex supply and demand spreadsheet that you keep track of, but adjust prices depending on big changes in quantity. Maybe if the players bring back a ruby from the crypts of the Midnight Sepulcher, then they get 100% of the value for it, rules as written. However, if this is the eighth time that they've returned, and each time they bring hands full of rubies with them, maybe next time they get 90%, or 80% or 60% of the value, maybe even

lower if they keep bringing the same thing to sell in town over and over and over again. Now the party has to decide, do they want to take less gold now for their loot or try to hold on to it to get to a different town where it's more expensive? Same would also be true for any loot that's coin equivalent, art, jewelry, rare coins, precious metals, that type of thing. This could also be true for things you normally get a lesser return on. In some games, for example, you can sell mundane items or trade goods for, depending on the generosity of the DM, 25-50% of the listed cost. Imagine your PCs are traveling from town to town and they recover a wagon full of canvas

from the monsters who had stolen it from the weavers they killed. And probably ate. What the heck use do PCs have for canvas? The wagon doesn't have horses anymore. They were eaten too. The PCs now have 500 pounds of canvas that they could take the time to lug back to town and get, oh, 250 silver pieces, if you're being generous. Or maybe there's a traveling merchant on the way who will buy the entire cart for 100 silver. Saves the PCs some effort. They don't get quite as much gold as they would taking it all the way to town, but it's realistic. Don't be afraid also to adjust the prices for items depending on supply

and demand. And if the town is familiar with adventurers, they'll know that most adventurers are relatively richer when they come back from adventuring. They'll probably look to raise some prices to try to separate the PCs from their hard-earned coins. That goes for experts, too, by the way. Last week, I talked about giving the PCs a chance to know a guy, if you know what I'm saying. To make your game harder, unless they have an in-game reason to know someone who can help with a particular service, they will have to pay for that service. People don't work free, and they expect to be compensated for their time. If the PCs are pulling them away from their traditional job to do something for

them, well, that might drive the cost up even higher. If you want to make the game harder, or potentially easier, more in a moment, the DM can make all recovery rolls and death saving throws in secret behind the screen. For those of you who aren't familiar with 5e, whenever your character takes less than your maximum hit points in damage and is knocked to zero hit points, you have to start making death saving throws. They fall unconscious and go prone, and they have to meet or beat a DC 10 check with no modifiers. Oh, okay, generally no modifiers, but let's not dive into the weeds of that. If you fail three saving throws before you succeed three saving throws, then your character dies. If you roll a one on one of

these saves, it counts as two failures. And if you roll a 20, you wake up on the floor with one hit point. Simple, right? One check per round, pass three, or roll a natural 20 and another success before you fail three saving throws. And good news is, they don't have to be in a row. Rules as written, the player makes this check for their character, and they always know how many successes and failures they have. But what if they didn't? All they know is that the DM's rolling checks for them, and they don't know how well or poorly they're doing. This is the third roll coming up. Do they have two successes already? Two failures? Is it a one-one split? This adds a lot of dramatic tension to death saves and can be very exciting. However, the caution I would give

you is that the players may feel like the fate of their character is out of their hands because they're not rolling the dice. I don't have time to get into the psychological ramifications of believing you have some sort of control over the outcome of what should, theoretically, be the result of a random number generator when you toss that die. Assuming you're using a fairly weighted die, but even a perceived feeling of unfairness that has no basis in reality can cause hurt feelings around the table. So, use that with caution. Besides making healing magic harder to come by, the DM could also make resurrection magic rarer and more expensive. There's a cost listed in the book, but that cost

is a suggestion. You can always drive that cost up if there aren't many people who can bring someone back from the dead. Think about this practically. If resurrection magic is common, then death becomes a nuisance at best. By limiting the availability of resurrection magic, death has more of an impact and will be a more important moment in your game. One trick I pull out in games where it's difficult to resurrect characters, I usually set up a quest where the characters can adventure to possibly bring the dearly departed character back to life.

They need to find this powerful cleric and solve a problem that they're having, or retrieve an item that the cleric would need. Sometimes the items they need are components for the resurrection spell itself. In the interim, the player can play an NPC who's joining the characters on an adventure for money or prestige, or sometimes just for gets and jiggles. That way, the player isn't stuck not playing until their character can be brought back from the dead. However, even if resurrection is possible, something that could be implemented to make the game tougher is to give resurrection more of a penalty than the current game rules state. Rules as written, a common criticism of the 5e game system is what's called

the yo-yo effect during combat. A character gets dropped to zero hit points, the cleric revives them, they go back to fighting only to get knocked down, but I get up again like it's a Chumbawamba song. Fuck you're old. Yes, yes I am. But in my defense, I listen to music from the 1940s to current. From the Andrews Sisters to ZZ Top and from James Taylor to Taylor Swift. You know what? I've got my phone here and I'm looking at my last played songs. They were by ACDC, David Guetta, and Fleetwood Mac. I like me some music variety, what can I say? How the hell did I get to music from making games harder? Oh, you should listen to Judas Priest and Quiet Riot when you're making your game harder. That's it. That's where I was going. Yep. Okay, back to 5e yo-yoing. It's not uncommon for characters to get knocked down to zero,

get back up after receiving healing or making their saves, sometimes multiple times in the same combat. One thing you can do to make it harder to reduce the yo-yoing effect is start with one failed death save for every time you've been knocked to zero hit points since your last long rest. It's similar to the wounded condition in Pathfinder 2e. And as an aside, the way Pathfinder 2e does this is it has two conditions, dying and wounded. Everyone starts out at dying

zero and wounded zero. It means you're completely capable, you're not unconscious, everything's going great. But as soon as you're knocked to zero hit points, you are now unconscious and you now have the dying one condition. Every time you fail a recovery check or take damage while you're going to have a dying condition, your dying condition goes up by one. You're at dying one, you fail your DC11 recovery check, you're now at dying two. If you hit dying four, you're dead. But suppose you have a dying condition and either recover or receive healing to get positive hit points. Congratulations, you have lost the dying condition and are back to dying zero. Yay! But if it's the first time you've been dying today, you now carry a condition called wounded one. If you already had the wounded condition when you regain consciousness,

your wounded condition value increases by one. So if you're carrying around a wounded condition and gain the dying condition again, you increase your dying condition value by your wounded value. I know there's a lot going on here, but here's an example. You're wounded one, so you've been knocked down once today. You get knocked to zero points again, you'll start at dying two, not dying one, because you were carrying around wounded one. The only way to get rid of the wounded condition is for someone to treat wounds on you outside of combat, which takes 10 minutes, or you're restored to full hit points and rest for 10 minutes. There are additional rules involving critical hits, but let's not worry about that right now.

It's not germane to my point. My point is that there's only so many times in Pathfinder 2E that you can drop to zero hit points without healing. No yo-yo effect because the fourth time you're down without being healed, you're dead. Period. End of story. In that way, Pathfinder 2E is a little bit of a harder game. Plus, low-level characters are fragile. Crits, striking runes, etc. can really ramp up the damage. Don't mistake this for criticism, by the way. It's not. It's just a way it's different than 5E. And if you wanted, you could implement something similar to Wounded for 5E and make unconsciousness more painful. Reduce the yo-yoing effect.

consciousness more painful. Reduce the yo-yoing effect. Another thing you could implement to make dying more painful, if you will, is some sort of negative conditions for a character when they're dropped to zero hit points and recover. The strength of the negative condition would help determine how difficult your game is. For example, if you wanted to implement a fairly mild penalty, you could have the character be stunned for the rest of the round when they recover. mild penalty, you could have the character be stunned for the rest of the round when they recover. On their initiative next round, they're ready to fight and possibly die again. Stunned hurts in 5e because it gives opponents advantage on attacks against them. They can't really take actions or reactions. I don't think it's beyond the pale to think it would take six seconds to get your wits about you after seeing the other side of the veil. If you wanted it to be even

more punishing, you could give the character a of the veil. If you wanted it to be even more punishing, you could give the character a point of exhaustion every time they come back from zero hit points. At first, one point of exhaustion, yeah, disadvantage on skill checks, not that big of a deal. But if they keep yo-yoing up and down, the penalty becomes much more severe as the points of exhaustion stack. At exhaustion three, you have disadvantage on saving throws and attack rolls. Ouch. The penalties just get worse from there, with exhaustion 3, you have disadvantage on saving throws and attack rolls. Ouch. The penalties just get worse from there, with exhaustion 6 meaning you are literally exhausted to death. And if you wanted to really, really punish characters who drop to zero hit points and get back up, consider using something like the Lingering Injuries rule that's described on page 272 of the

5e Dungeon Master's Guide. Plus, there's all sorts of rules and tables out there that you can find with a Google search that expands that table considerably. This adds a touch of realism, but it is very punishing over time. But so again, I would only do this to players if they wanted it and would think it was fun. Some players want a hard game.

They've been there, done that, and got the hauberk to prove it. They want something more difficult, more punishing. You can always crank up done that, and got the halberd to prove it. They want something more difficult, more punishing. You can always crank up the DCs and ACs and hit points if you'd like. You can make healing and rests harder to come by. You can introduce supply and demand in your game world and make goods and services more expensive when they're in high demand. Harder games may not have resurrection magic freely available, and they may introduce penalties for being knocked unconscious during combat. If you're interested in running a game like this, discuss it with your players beforehand,

and if they're interested, I bet you and your players would have fun doing it. We have a coffee! ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, please consider donating just a little to help offset the production and hosting costs of keeping this podcast going. Tune in next week when I'm going to talk about a philosophical topic for DMs that's surprisingly divisive. Should you allow your players and their characters to freely talk around the table during combat? But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Track and Field Events. Before you criticize any of the track and field athletes, you should walk a mile in their shoes. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Track and Field Events.

Before you criticize any of the track and field athletes, you should walk a mile in their shoes. Because if you do, I bet you finish last in their event. This has been episode 215, discussing some rules changes to make your game harder. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2024. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.