Merry Christmas, have some injury rules for 5e!

Whatever today is for you - a celebration of the birth of the Messiah, a cultural holiday centered around family/food/gift-giving, or just a day off work - I wish you a Merry Christmas.

Here's a stocking stuffer for ya... an alternate set of rules for adjudicating death, dying, and permanent injuries in 5e D&D. These are often called "death and dismemberment" rules by dint of the fact that they add some gray area to the binary alive/dead dichotomy of D&D's default system of hit points. Do you want the characters in your game to end up as old, grizzled adventurers with eye patches, hook hands, old head wounds leading them to occasional fits of berserker rage, or premature retirement after one too many arrows to the knee?* Try these out and let me know how it goes! 

Click on picture for PDF link

There are many versions of these types of rules floating around the internet; this is my take on the concept. In this ruleset, instead of making death saving throws upon dropping to 0 hit points a character rolls 1d20 for wound severity and 1d4 for location. Possible results range from instant death, to loss of limb, to temporary wounds, to an adrenaline surge restoring the character's hit points and bolstering their spirit. I also include rules for healing from temporary injuries, with or without the aid of curative magic. They're fully compatible with (and written for) 5e, but many of the concepts could be easily lifted into your system of choice (probably vastly simplified if you're running a lighter system like B/X).

My wife's Paladin, the first player character to die during my career as a GM (yep, she was a Dwarf), went out in a blaze of glory thanks to this ruleset, and she wasn't even (all that) mad. The probabilities in the wound table are tuned to give relatively equal weight to death/permanent damage, temporary wounds, or no lasting damage when reaching 0 hit points - but it would be fairly easy to tune them to adjust lethality to your taste.

As the PDF says, my rules (particularly the table layout) are heavily inspired by Lloyd Neill's One Death & Dismemberment Table to Rule them All. He also has an entire series of blog posts gathering and discussing many versions of these rules from around the internet; highly recommended if you enjoy reading alternative versions of house rules and the like.

Quick warning/disclaimer, these rules do involve some talk of, well - dismemberment and head wounds and such. I think it's all relatively PG-13 (and there are no illustrations), but do be aware, dear reader. 

Coming up this weekend... a discussion on the nature of house rules, and why we can sometimes benefit from taking a little time to ponder the wherefore of fences.

*I know, I'm sorry...