You Got Your Dinosaurs in my Medieval Fantasy!

Jurassic World is out, so I’m exploiting that. Deal with it.

The greatest sin of Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition is that there is no Velociraptor or Deinonychus in the Monster Manual. Whether you care or not about the actual necessity of differentiating the two, the fact that what is likely the second-most well known dinosaur in the WORLD didn’t make it into the book is a black mark on ALL of the D&D design team. That said, the You have to change nothing to re-skin the lion as a raptor. It’s fast, and it has a bite, claws, and pounce attack.

So, how do you use Dinosaurs in your games? It’s an issue I’ve run into in the past when trying to figure out how to fit what are undoubtedly and irrefutably the MOST AWESOME animals in the history of the world into a traditionally-medieval fantasy game with swords and wizards and shit.

  

Seriously, guys. This is the essence of imagination.

The answer is, of course, that this is Dungeons & Freaking Dragons, yo! You want dinosaurs in your game, then put some dinosaurs in your game, man! There’s wizards and shit! Don’t leave my tyranno-bro out of the game!

So the real salient question is not whether or not you should include dragons, but rather HOW you should include them. I came up with 3.

Remodeling Hit Points, and Reconciling Healing

It's been a while.

So...

Hit Points! They suck, right? I'm trying to be relevant, here.

I mean, really. This is truly commentary ahead of its time.

This is an attempt to reconcile two types of gameplay in D&D: Fast Healing, and Slow Healing. In the standard D&D 5e ruleset, characters heal all of their hit points after a long rest, including damage that reduces the character’s hit point total. With the standard Slow Healing method presented in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, characters can only recover hit points using Hit Dice (rolling them to heal). The hit dice can recover damage that reduces the hit point total during a long rest (you can also spend them during a short rest, but it doesn’t restore this kind of damage).

Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of either of these methods. The “fast healing” is supposed to represent fatigue recovery. Pulled muscles and worn endurance. But It unfortunately doesn’t really represent actual wounds very well. Either you state that they take wounds, in which case they seem to heal overnight. Or you state that they don’t, in which case the only wound they take is the final blow that drops them to 0. And while that’s a fine way to do things, it doesn’t really represent normal cuts, bruises, and punctures that characters suffer along the way. A gash across the leg might not be life-threatening (unless it festers), but it definitely affects how you move and fight.

The “slow healing” method CAN suffer the same issue. I use it in my home games, and characters are constantly able to heal all their hit points overnight. However, it’s intended to force HP to represent wounds more than vitality. It takes longer, and therefore represents wounds closing, burns healing, etc. Unfortunately, tracking hit dice for every rest can be annoying, especially when the players are in the middle of a dungeon and they’re missing HD from the last Long Rest where they had to spend like all of them because of a nasty fight with some invisible stalkers and they’re standing outside the dragon’s FREAKING LAIR but they don’t have any hit dice to spend and they’re in a time crunch because the dragon is going to eat the prince if they don’t act NOW and their last THREE characters died from this exact same problem and UGH CAN’T I JUST HEAL YOU BASTARD DM!?

I know there’s an OSR/grodnardy argument about “back in our day, we only healed ONE HIT POINT a night!” I don’t care. I understand that some games need you to really focus on the grim’n’grit of old-school AD&D, but most games don’t tend to follow that model these days. They seek to extend the adventuring day and allow characters to recover from fatigue in a somewhat-timely manner so they can keep fighting without going back to town or camp, where they might run the chance of wandering monsters, inclement weather, or any number of other evil doo-dads that the DM keeps stored in his Scary Folder of Doom™.

I think I’ve rambled enough, though, and you’ve probably skipped over all of this anyway. So, without further ado, HIT POINTS and Wounds!

NOT! I do want to pay special mention to the newest Unearthed Arcana, which offers a “vitality” system. Essentially, you have a separate amount of “vitality” points that deplete if you take 10 damage or more, slowly lowering your maximum hit point total, and if they hit 0, you start taking directly from Vitality. I actually like these, but they are WAY more complicated than I want to deal with. Therefore…