How do I damage the PCs to add weight to combat so the players take it more seriously without being a dick and...

How do I damage the PCs to add weight to combat so the players take it more seriously without being a dick and penalizing them so much they will start cheesing it? They're beginners and the system is 5e but I'm thinking about something less mechanical and universal.

Perhaps a scar that aches ever so often or grabs the attention of the NPCs?

That pic makes me feel like you want to talk about anything but what you posted.

The duck are you talking about?
Roll fair, deal damage as written.
That's it.
If they can't handle the nerfiest edition of dnd yet, they can fuck off.

Chicks dig scars, if you make a girl that's interested in a PC scar you better make her a good one.

You can add emotional weight by staking something their invested in in the outcome of the combat. A horse, a child, a reoccurring npc, a princess, etc. This is why I'll do reoccurring npcs in my games, every 5-6 sessions I'd up the stakes by putting one of their favorite's lives on the line. Want them to really feel the pressure to stop the summoning of an avatar of Orcus? The sacrifice is the artificer that they did a small side-quest for and who gave them several "bad" magical items (hilariously wrong or cursed, they found use for either one) Suddenly, not only is someone who they've "met" once a month for a year is at stake, free magical items are at stake as well. You bet your sweet ass they would follow those cultists to the end of the earth for their wizard friend and all the joking at the table would stop.

There's no weight to 5E combat because there isn't supposed to be.

I mean, christ, the games have resurrection and true healing spells in them that can easily regenerate limbs and heal scars and damage if they want to.

If your players are being brazen, it's because they have every right to be. If you want them to respect your combat encounters more, then stop pulling punches.

Kill one of the little bastards off, and then if they're too low level or poor to afford Resurrection, then use it as a plot hook. The player you killed off will take over a generic mercenary character and the rest of the party is going to be hired by a church to do whatever. The reward is a Resurrection for the dead PC.

If you want lasted dismemberment or scarring, you should have

A) Not picked 5E
B) Told them up front that true healing/resurrection were not present in your 5E setting

Trying to spring it on them now is dickish.

You can't force the players to roleplay, OP.

You have to talk to them like a big boy and explain that their refusal to get engaged about their characters is sapping your fun.

By seriously I meant more immersive by having more impact beyond the combat itself, not that they're misbehaving or I need to be a dick and kill one of them as an example. They know that if I roll that way they will die already.

I'm considering options outside of combat that will remont their characters of the danger of combat. Immerse them as I wrote in the first post.

The trouble with that depends on how much your players give a shit.

I mean, if they kill a guy in combat, you can have his grieving widow throw tomatoes at them and wail, or his fatherless children grow hungry and starve.

Or have an older warlord brother come around looking for revenge, etc. It swings both ways, really. Maybe they killed a douchebag duke and the peasants he was overtaxing are overjoyed and start jamming out on lutes and singing their praises. There's lots of ways to do it.

But you can't force immersion. Some players will never give one insular fuck because they're playing for their own reasons. Some people just like rolling dice and bullying NPCs.

we had a system where we had permanent yet mechanically (they do not change how the character is played) unimportant injuries from "severe critfails" (when we critfailed, we roll 1d20 for severity, bottom 1-5 is a severe one, 11-20 means it's just an autofail)

my character lost a pinkie and got a few prominent scars, while most of them was on his chest, so no big deal so did he also have a fairly big one on his face, one.


i felt that even if he started to amass a lot of scars for a fairly short amount of sessions(i think this was how he looked at the last session, the 10th one) so did it help make it feel like he had some character progression, going from a welp to a hardened fighter

>pic
Abubu has gone to shit.
SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

His only redeeming trait is his coloring work, especially the skin texture, and now he started to release monochrome doujins?

SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

OK to clear up things up since this is going off topic again, my players are great, just new and a bit rough. I don't want to force them to do anything, I'm trying to come up with new ideas FOR them to improve the game and myself so that they can get more immersed etc - stuff I wrote in the opening post. You know, like when they go to the sewers and dive into shit with an open would I would describe how they free dirty, smell like shit and the wound is probably infected - stuff like that but for combat, like an ugly scar or a limp.

>again
What happened last time?

There is no last time, I'm refering to the other posty in the thread that are going off topic about the system or the players themselves.

You're being willfully obtuse.

This was covered already here Scars and limps can be healed, *easily* because of magic in the setting. You're asking for "nonmechanical", undesirable side-effects like limps and scars from combat that players will readily turn to magic to alleviate; magic which, in game mechanics, claims to resolve exactly those things (scarring, limping, etc).

There's no way to do it without penalizing them or "being a dick" by denying them the remedy for it.

I don't see how anyone has gone off topic, unless you just really suck ass at explaining what you want. You opened up the thread by talking about scars and aches, and now you're talking about infected wounds and smelling like shit.

They can just take a bath and use healing magic on the wound. This isn't WHFRP.

not at all. a scar can mean you were so bad at combat that you got hit! which in a warrior culture CAN be a sign of incompetence.

Maybe dandy duelist culture. In warrior culture in means you survived, since odds are you were fighting like fiddy men at the same time.

I'm too busy staring at her tiny T-Rex arms to help you out, OP.

Start giving them scars whenever they drop to 0 hit points. That's the system my group uses. My current character has:

- 2 locks of hair that are transparent, the result of two separate wraith attacks (the hair would be white instead, but my character's hair is already white)
- A big jagged scar in her stomach from where a half-dragon stabbed her with a spear
- A similar scar in one leg, from the same asshole half-dragon. Same incident too. Jerk stabbed me when I was already down.
- Numbness in both pinkie fingers, from having been frozen by a white dragon.

By the way, note that none of these "scars" (most of them aren't scars, but it's a convenient shorthand) have any mechanical impact. That's the baby step you're looking for, OP. Start giving them purely cosmetic scars and let them get used to the idea.

5e doesn't do much in the way of ability damage near as i've seen, but it would make for a good way to do things. Just have it be temporary damage, lasting only as long as the next short rest or long rest if you want it to be more serious, or perhaps X number of long rests.

You might also try looking into Exhaustion levels. Then it becomes less about physical damage and more about stress and wear-and-tear on the body, while still being something that gradually recovers.

Why does japan draw burn scars like that?

I don't understand what you're asking. Do you want to make combat more engaging or dissuade players from risking combat frequently? Because those are two opposite things you can't do simultaneously.

Have them get mugged for items out of their inventory

i would think japan of all countries would have a pretty good idea how burn scars look

>not at all. a scar can mean you were so bad at combat that you got hit! which in a warrior culture CAN be a sign of incompetence.

That's not the point, user.

Scars show the man has been in combat or a vicious hunt. The scars tell a story. The woman will want to know that story, and thus will start a conversation with the man. Given the subject matter of the conversation, the man's virility and toughness, and thus manliness, will be put in the spotlight. For many women, this combination of exposing their vulnerability (they got hit by a sword or claw) and strength (but they survived the day) is a huge turn-on.

That is why chicks dig scars.

>Why does japan draw burn scars like that?

Manga and anime lends itself towards a very specific style of art direction that makes everything pretty or macho.

Ever wonder why anime protagonists try to avoid the lustful advances of a much-older teacher, even though (to us) she's incredibly beautiful with a huge rack? It's because she might look hot to us, but if she was done up realistically she might turn out to be a frumpy looking hag.

I think this was done before, actually, where the artists drew one of their anime characters in a realistic style and they looked a lot more "plain" than they appear in the show.

Your picture is keloid scar, not all burn scars turn that way. My friend is part bacon (work accident in early childhood) and it doesn't look so bad.

Everything that isn't attribute loss doesn't matter in the long run.

Are you really having problemu with such a simple explanation of the subject? It's a thread for ideas, you could offer some. If scars won't work come up with something else.

deends on the warrioir. Culture. I#m thinkinghere of like you said duellists, a nation of duellists and they fight barbarians for example and beeing hit meansyou were bad a d combat becaue all you training was about not getting hit. So you failed. Not every warrior culture is 'muh barbarian, norse culture'

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>Stop playing D&D and go play GURPS.
FTFY

Just roll dice, deal damage. If they easily win fights make it harder and make challenges focused around their weak points to see how thye deal with it. Give them disadvantage if they break character, let them give you disadvantage if you call them by their real name instead of in game name. And don't railroad. That's what I did for my first few campaigns. Players decided they wanted to go fight vampires from the fighter's background and I gave them medium to hard level encounters and a few lethal encounters to see how they deal. Campaign went well, they were only murder hobos for a week before deciding they wanted to fight vamps.

Make the goal of combat encounters to be something other than kill all hostiles.

You are escorting a wagon full of valuablea and it is attacked by bandits. If you leave the cart to kill archers or the marshal they'll swarm the carriage and loot everything, work on breaking the line so you can make a getaway.

The evil wizard is powering up his kill all humans machine. You need to destroy it's power sources go off, you do not have enough time to do that and kill his 100 minions. Bonus points if the PCs need to pull switches or something in different locations simultaneously so they need to use tactics to split up and coordinate

Even some duelists like the Germans were big on scars.

>add weight to combat so the players take it more seriously

Have reasons why fights are happening and have stakes for them. That tends to help me care about what's happening.

Also, your playstyle and mindset are important.


I haven't tried it, but I like this mortal wounds table from ACKS. It could port over nicely into 5e. People are supposed to roll on it when they are healed up from 0hp, and modifiers at the bottom apply. A good injuries table can make getting downed a daunting proposition like it is in real life, instead of just losing a turn or two until the cleric gets you up again. Also lets players earn their battle-scars instead of just getting them for participation.

>and they looked a lot more "plain" than they appear in the show
>Well shit, they're still cute

>you will never be an anime
Didn't know about this feel.

Point here.

But here real-life is actually cuter.

Diving into the valley here.

The "extra-white" unblemished brand of skin editing in Photoshop never fails to fucking kill me.
For what purpose?
Like, yeah, I get it, people find imperfect skin gross etc., but this is literally the worst. If your skin looks like you uniformly applied white paste all over it, then you are missing the point.
Fucking Photoshop.
It's not enough that Photoshop killed the traditional photography, it's also killing the modeling industry.

Looking at media and news, asian women actually do tend to age better and less noticeable than other women even if you factor in good make up.

>For what purpose?
Asian socio-cultural reasons. White skin used to mean you didn't labour in the sun, which meant you were high-class and consequently more desirable. This carried over into societies where few people labour in the sun because of the speed of their industrialization.