Raw Review 2 - Feeling Exhausted
This is RAW Review, where I look at the Rules as Written in 5E, and explain them out, then provide my overall thoughts on them. Last time we looked at lighting, my overall thoughts and complaints, and some tweaks I would make with the system. This time I look at somewhat simple rules for exhaustion in 5E. While straight-forward, I have found they cause a lot of strife at any table and I have my thoughts why, as well as how I think I would fix it.
What is Exhaustion?
Per the 5.1 SRD, the 5E Exhaustion mechanic is the result “special abilities and environmental hazards, such as starvation and the long-term effects of freezing or scorching temperatures…”. Exhaustion is a way to show the dangers of the life of an adventurer. Marching through the sweltering desert, climbing frigid peaks, or being caught in the wilderness without a source of food will have the chance to give characters levels of exhaustion. These levels create lingering effects that last on until resolved, either with a Long Rest or other effect (such as a strong healing spell).
The current version of exhaustion exists in level 1 to 6, each granting an additional effect. It starts off simple, just causing disadvantage on ability checks, but quickly gains effects such as halving speed, reducing hit point maximum, with death finally at the 6th level. As I mentioned above, the only way to remove exhaustion per the rules as written is to take a long rest, or use strong healing magic. Both will reduce the level of exhaustion by 1 unless specified otherwise.
I have always liked the concept of exhaustion in theory and have always tried to bring it into my games in interesting ways. When players push themselves too hard, exhaustion is a potential problem. If the party wants to catch up to some bandits who have a head start on them, they can forgo a long rest and travel through the night. But it may end up draining their strength besides preventing them from recovering the resources provided by a long rest. It could also result from a character pushing themselves at the moment. A warlock cannot cast the spell scroll they are staring at, but they need to to bring the cleric back. Their patron agrees, but warns them it will tax their body, giving them a level or two of exhaustion. While I like this idea in theory, I find some problems arise with it in practice.
A Dangerous Tool
when exhaustion hits the table, the players react to it. Even a single point of exhaustion will make a party want to stop their adventuring and find a place to rest off the levels. Most times I have used it at the table, I only get the chance to use one or two points on a party. I don’t think I have ever seen over 2 points of exhaustion on a single character in a game before, outside of the exhaustion caused by the Sickening Radiance spell (more on this later). Why does this happen? I've thought about why this happens.
First, exhaustion will hamper a character’s ability to interact with the environment. 5E’s system runs on lower number system than previous generations, and disadvantage can make a tremendous impact. The disadvantage can be equivalent to a -5 penalty to a roll. Although this math varies based on the roll needed, we can make the assumption of -5. This can take a DC15 check, considered medium difficulty, and make it effectively a DC 20 task. While this might not be awful if it is a skill a character has proficiency in and a high ability score, average and below average skills will be even harder to pull off. On a day spent doing low risk activities, such as a day shopping in the town or a safe journey down a public road, it might be something a party would risk. But in the middle of a dungeon crawl, this could mean disaster. I have had party members barricade themselves in emptied rooms to get a full long rest done. If they cannot, they might be inclined to leave and return another day.
While the mechanical disadvantage might not be as bad as it looks, I find the psychological effect of gaining exhaustion has to be very potent. Most of my experiences with exhaustion end at one or two levels of it. The idea of persistent disadvantage can discourage for players. Especially if you have new players, this mechanic can feel like an unfair punishment. If a character gets more than a single point, they will fall behind. The slower pace will force the party to match it, or the player will be left behind.
The Cause
So what causes this problem to occur? From my experiences using exhaustion at my table, I have come up with a few ideas to why this happens. A lot of this comes down to the design of the exhaustion mechanic itself, which frankly feels like a poor fit for the 5E system.
The effects caused by exhaustion feel like it quickly goes from being a slight hindrance to something that inhibits a lot of what a character can accomplish. While disadvantage on ability checks is a significant effect, the levels that follow cut a character’s speed in half and give disadvantage to the other two types of rolls in 5E (attack rolls and saving throws). Over the course of 1 to 6 there is little room for fine tuning. While a lot of situations that arise will only give a single point of exhaustion, situations can arise that could lead to a spiral of failures. A party traversing the desert may have to make multiple checks during the day to avoid exhaustion. Poor luck could land a character with multiple levels, making the character feel unable to continue.
Once gained, a player has a limited amount of options available to remove exhaustion levels. The most common choice for characters will be to take a Long Rest, which will cause a complete stop of any sort of narrative or mechanical progress for your table. As Game Masters, we can offer reasons for your table to continue. If the party does not clear out the dungeon, maybe the cultists will complete their ritual and add some aberrant monsters to their lair, creating a tougher encounter. However, the limited range can make it hard to fine tune the option. The other way is strong healing magic, such as the Greater Restoration spell. At 5th level, the earliest your party will get access to this is at 7th level. This means that outside of paying a high level cleric or druid NPC for healing, the players will be out of luck.
The mechanic itself feels out of place in the rest of the game. One issue 5E runs into is a lack of Key-wording, or creating universal terms can simplify spells and abilities across the rest of the game. Looking through the SRD 5.1 again, exhaustion can be caused by traveling over 8 hours in a day, going without food and water for a time, through some of the sample diseases such as Cackle Fever, or as a potential side effect for a magic item (Ring of X Ray). Outside of that, the Sickening Radiance spell can cause exhaustion, but it goes away when the spell ends.
Ultimately, we do not see it used a lot, especially where it would make sense. Take, for example, some of the more powerful spells for returning a creature to life, such as Raise Dead. The spell states that “Coming back from the dead is an ordeal”. It feels like this would be a great place for exhaustion. But the spell instead uses its own rules, giving the target a penalty that reduces every long rest until going away entirely. Why create a condition such as exhaustion, then use it? This needlessly complicates the rules, although I understand why. A flat penalty which reduces on a long rest feels much more manageable than giving a player disadvantage on dice rolls and halving speed. The effects of Raise Dead go away after 4 in game days. To create something similar with exhaustion, you would have to hinder a character’s abilities, which might make a player more inclined to swap out characters for the time being.
My Fix
The current exhaustion system feels too limited to fine tune, and difficult for players to do anything about. What is the solution? We should look at a few different places if we want to create an alternative rule-set.
In my recent post on [trying other systems], I mentioned how much I liked the conditions system used in Pathfinder 2E. If you have not, I highly recommend checking out the post and seeing all the mechanics other systems offer. For those not familiar with PF 2E, conditions have a number following them. A character with Frightened 2 would have the frightened condition for 2 rounds of combat. This system provides a simple framework for tracking the effects of on a character. I think we can use this for exhaustion.
In this version of exhaustion, we now refer to it in Pathfinder terms. Exhaustion levels are now exhaustion X, and cause a -X penalty to all rolls. So, for example, exhaustion 4 would cause a -4 penalty to attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks. Every long rest or use of Greater Restoration will cause this modifier to go down. The range of exhaustion goes from 6 to 10. Exhaustion 10, like Level 6 exhaustion, results in death. This system provides a few noticeable benefits from the old system.
The additional effects are much simpler and easy to remember. Instead of having to refer to a chart, the level of exhaustion equals the penalty given to all rolls. The effects feel less arbitrary, and more cumulative. We now have a much larger range to give to targets afflicted with exhaustion. Having this larger range means we can more often give out exhaustion more often, and maybe work it into regular encounters. This means we might create travel and exploration encounters that could give levels of exhaustion. Imagine, for example, the party comes across a damaged bridge. The players can either attempt to cross this bridge, hoping it does not collapse, or have to take the long way, full of steep and treacherous travel. Taking the long way might give 1d4 points of exhaustion, providing complications for both options.
Now, this new system creates a few additional problems. The first is that having a larger range could make expunging exhaustion impossible outside of having a week of downtime. If a player gets Exhaustion 6, for example, they might feel like they never can rid themselves of it. This gets compounded because the new penalty system could hinder players more by accident. The original system would cap at creating disadvantage on all rolls, which we can estimate as a -5 penalty. This new system goes all the way to -10, so anything after -5 will be worse than the old system. We can fix this by broadening the options for reducing exhaustion. Since we have more to work with, we might provide more ways to reduce it, and allow those ways to reduce exhaustion more than a single level. Instead of just Greater Restoration removing exhaustion, we could allow Lesser Restoration to remove a single point as well. To balance this out, Greater Restoration now reduces exhaustion by 1d4 levels, preserving its use. We could also make it so all rests reduce exhaustion, not just long rests. That means that on average, a player should be able to reduce exhaustion levels by 2 a day if not more. It's possible to raise exhaustion levels high so players are more careful.
Another issue is that while the penalty system is simpler and less punishing, it can feel less interesting than the previous version. While the limited range made these effects punishing, our system that uses a 10 point range has more room to spread these effects out. So we can look at the original system, and spread out the effects that do not affect dice rolls, the speed and hit point reductions. Since we have more space, we could also add more of a range to these effects, reducing by a quarter at a time. This gives us something like the table below.
Bjarke’s Exhaustion Levels
This potential option puts the additional effects on even levels of exhaustion. While we lose a complete reduction of speed, we now have a broader range in which speed and HP drain happen. While not the perfect solution, any of these options make for a system that feels more cohesive with 5E as a whole.
Final Thoughts
You might think this exhaustion mechanic looks familiar. The most recent OneDnD UA presented an alternative to exhaustion that went in this general direction. I mentioned in [my review on conditions] that I really liked the direction it was heading. I think that this system provides a lot of potential benefits over the current system. We can learn a lot from these UAs. The developers see what 5E has grown into and want to facilitate that in the next iteration. So we will see this more often in the coming months.
Conclusion
Exhaustion is a powerful mechanic that, as it stands, can be hard to fit into a standard game. 6 levels of exhaustion will make it very easy to go from a slight effect to a debilitating effect for a player. The cumulative effects of exhaustion can also have a psychological effect on players, making them want to remove it as soon as possible, robbing a session of its momentum. But we can easily look at this system and craft a new one. Changing the range to a 10 level system means that we have a broader range to give effects and provide more potential ways to reduce accumulated levels of exhaustion. Instead of just long rests, all rests can remove a level of exhaustion, allowing for the numbers to feel a bit more manageable. We can also switch to a static increasing penalty over the collection of effects, making the system simpler and easier to use in larger amounts. Using this altogether means we will have a system that can get more use at the table, which can allow for exhaustion to play a more regular roll at the table.
Do you like the exhaustion mechanics as they stand, or do you find them hard to use as well? If you use your own rules, what do you do? I would love to hear in the comments below.
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