Asphyxiation
I have no doubt that Aquatopiapolis is lovely this time of year. But with food tourists as with GMs, it pays to plan around the harsh realities of aquatic environments. We talked about this way back in “Pool Rules,” but my point today slightly more specific than ‘underwater combat rules are complicated.’
When I imagine aquatic combat, the first place my brain goes is the tentacle monster fight in Fire & Ice. You’ve got a hero struggling desperately, a creepy creature trying to devour him, and the equal pressure of a dwindling air supply. But if your combats look anything like mine, then it’s usually 3-5 rounds before the monsters are dead. Perhaps this is a problem specific to d20 games, but I’m looking at two rule sets in particular:
5e Suffocation Rules: A creature can hold its breath for a number of minutes equal to 1 + its Constitution modifier (minimum of 30 seconds). When a creature runs out of breath or is choking, it can survive for a number of rounds equal to its Constitution modifier (minimum of 1 round).
3.5 Drowning Rules: A character who has no air to breathe can hold her breath for 2 rounds per point of Constitution. After this period of time, the character must make a DC 10 Constitution check in order to continue holding her breath.
That means even the most hydrophobic character in 5e has six rounds to break the surface and find fresh air. If you’re in 3.5, your typical better-not-dump-Con-below-10 caster has 20 rounds to play with (a full two minutes!). Granted that this drama-squelching feat of breath holding is fixed somewhat over in Pathfinder 1e, reducing your remaining rounds by 1 every time your take an action. But in all of these cases, it’s hard to take the threat of suffocation seriously when combat just doesn’t last that long.
One of the more interesting fixes I’ve seen for this problem was a saving throw to “get a good breath” before being dragged under. Characters that managed the check got to use the standard rules, while anyone who failed had to make do with rounds of breath holding equal to their Con modifier. After that, they’d have to start on saves vs. suffocation. That’s a pretty tenuous balance though, as the “oops you’re dead” of drowning is not a fun way to lose a beloved PC.
I’m curious whether you guys have stumbled across this problem in your own games. Have you ever been seriously threatened with suffocation, either underwater or through noxious environments? Tell us your tales of the vacuum of space, the crushing deeps, and small elevators with otyughs down in the comments!
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Now that is a bit of an unfair comparison. You are comparing the below 10 con in 5e with the average con 10 in 3e. In 5e +1 or +2 con mod is way more common, which gives you 21 to 32 rounds (and even a con of 10 would give you 11 rounds, not 6!) It’s way harder to die in 5e than it was in 3e…
I like the idea of reducing it whenever you do something strenuous though, if you want realism; however expecting gritty realism in 5e is akin to expecting fluffy pink pony adventures of friendship in a Call of Cthulhu game. (It’s doable, but you’ll need to add a couple more 3rd party rulebooks that replaces half the original rules…)
the six rounds was based off of a 3 in con I believe, the lowest possible to get with the 4d6 drop lowest and 3d6 systems
Correction: the 5e one is based off the minimum of 30 seconds it explicitly states, which would be about 5 rounds
Plus the one round of choking for 6 rounds total.
Yes, but to get the minimum, your CON score needs to be below 10, cause at CON 10 your bonus is 0, so you get 1 minute (1+0), which is 10 rounds plus the 1 for suffocating; so only CON scores of 3-9 give you the minimum amount of 6 rounds.
If you compare the “most hydrophobic character in 5e”, you should compare it to the “most hydrophobic character in 3e”, which would be 6 rounds followed by a DC check. If you take the “typical better-not-dump-Con-below-10 caster”, and consider that Concentration checks in 5e are based off on CON saves, then you realise that most “typical better-not-dump-Con-below-10 casters” in 5e will have at least a +1 or +2 CON modifier on an average (giving 21 or 32 rounds, respectively) cause they don’t like their spells go fizzle that much. (in 3.5e you were not inclined to raise your con above the “minimum” 10, as you could put skill points into Concentration, and you were not that affected by concentration checks anyway)
That was my point.
I was just trying to show that the “minimum” time is still longer than the average combat. It’s not always a contest. Sometimes it’s an honest design discussion. 🙂
That I fully agree with. 3.5e was not very gritty, and 5e is straight up heroic with the healing factors; and I yet to partake in a combat taking so long that any spells lasting longer than one round would expire (not counting failed concentration checks).
Personally, I think that PF should just commit to being non-gritty and be high sci-fantasy.
I have experienced some underwater fights in pathfinder with some real threats of drowning, through I don’t think I have had anyone actually drown (which I’m OK with). I haven’t had an underwater fight in 5e yet, so I can’t speak to that.
I find that it helps that PC’s generally aren’t very good swimmers, most people haven’t put ranks in Swim and those with a good strength often wear armor with the armor check penalty from that (though not the double penalty of the 3.5 days).
This means that those few rounds to get up there aren’t quite as certain and the one Pc that’s actually good at swimming might have to go help their friends with their failed checks. People might even actively sink if they fail the check by 5 or more.
I find that it can also help if the monster deliberately draws the fight out a bit adopting a tiny bit of hit and run so that it won’t be a fight of full attacks can do a lot to slow procedures down. If the monster is the sort of creature that regularly attacks land dwellers and pull them down into the depths it probably knows that too. (plus odds are the monster has a swim-speed, and therefore can 5-ft-step while the PC’s don’t and therefore can’t).
I think this is the significant point. You’ve got to make combat last long enough for suffocation to matter. But if you do that, you risk turning your encounter into an overly-long slog. I think that’s part of the reason that players tend to get annoyed with aquatic combat: It just takes twice as long to do anything.
“In order to express her gratitude for the trip, Buckle invited Swash to her Vampire Dad’s next deathday party.”
Actually, new headcanon: Vampire Mom. Namely, Miss Gestalt. And noone can change my mind on this matter.
<_<
Last DnD I played was an adventure in Saltmarch, we scored two pieces of magical gear that allowed us to breathe under water, coupled with turtle and druid with ability to take form, we only had to leave the warlocs for surface duty, until finding cache of water brwathing potions. What I am saying here is “Accesorice”.
Did your warlocks ever run into trouble with holding their breath? Or did they just straight up avoid the water?
Not really, the one time we had no other option than to go under water was when both spellslingers couldn’t attend. then again having two warlocks on a high seas campaing make for nifty artillery (still want a ballista at the front) for reducing waterborn opposition before it becomes a deck party.
Underwater parts were mostly scouting, half sunken ships and forts and one negotiation with a kraken. our good druid promises to drop more food for it from a “abandoned” ship, meaning corpses of previously dead and those killed by us.
Back to my pathfinder game. The GM pulled out a nasty trick on us. I’ll put the main power below
Stygian Immersion (blot)
You may spend a spell point to create a blot that acts as if it were a pool of water. This volume of liquid is an extradimensional space 5 feet deep per caster level, and does not damage the surface the blot has been cast upon. Creatures underneath the blot when it is created can attempt a Reflex save to avoid falling in, and if a creature possesses the ability to breathe underwater, it can breathe within the blot. Light does not pass through the blot liquid, and those within have their senses limited in the same manner as the Pure Darkness talent. Creatures are deposited safely on the surface of the blot directly above their position when the duration expires.
Pure Darkness (darkness)
You may create a darkness effect that negates low-light vision. Darkvision is reduced to 5 feet. In addition, all other senses (blindsight, scent, etc.) are reduced by half. See in darkness is unaffected.
Basically it’s a a Create Pit filled with water. It will last probably around 5 minutes and once you are inside it you can’t see worth a damn.
The first caster made that, the second summoned an aquatic beast into the pit, something like an octopus I think. Grapple checks all around.
My paladin was outside of the carriage we were moving on and so wasn’t affected, but the rest of the party was inside struggling to deal with the attackers outside, the creature in the pit and the suffocation rules. Most of them did make their saves and so were able to avoid the pit, but our Fighter was dragged inside and was fighting blind for quite a while. I think our ranger also fell in but actually had put ranks in swim.
A different time, my poor sorcerer was lost at sea. All my power was useless against the inability to make a concentration check to cast a spell that would allow me to Summon something aquatic to help, gain a swim speed, fly, teleport, ext. I eventually got rescued after the fight and bought a floatier.
For my last story, my sorcerer’s entire strat could be summed up as “stay at range and have miss chances.” When the enemy in this battle managed to close on me in the first round, I was grappled and being strangled. Concentration was never my thing but I tried spell after spell, escape artist checks after escape artist check. Finally, I decided to rely on my most powerful skill set; Bluff. I pretended to go unconscious due to suffocation. He loosened his grip enough to not make it worse and then threatened his hostage at the rest of my team.
Reminds me of the old corner case question that came up in my game: What happens if you put a wall of stone over a pit spell? Are creatures inside smushed when it ends?
I borrowed the old “if insufficient room is available” from enlarge person…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/e/enlarge-person/
…But a water spell would still auto-KO trapped monsters. Super gross.
I had a low level character (level 1 or 2 I think) that foolishly followed a @$#*&! halfling gunslinger that we all hate now, across a river. You see, he was a reoccurring NPC that represented a terrible new concept for us to face as a party… foreplanning! He let go of the zip line on the other side of the lower end of the waterfall and didn’t move and I didn’t think twice about following him, even when the DM said that it was only a move action to use the zip line… so the readied action of turning to shoot at me was a bigger surprise than it should have been.
I took a hit (can’t recall if it crit or not) and dropped below 0 half way across…
In the water I go! I start looking at the rules for drowning more carefully and OH IT IS SOOO MUCH WORSE THAN I REMEMBER!
Me: “This is bad… my CON isn’t good.”
Everyone else above isn’t doing anything because nobody can swim and we’re all low level, so they’re just waiting to see if I manage… something?
Me reading a bit more… “Oh… so I am also unconscious, and therefore cannot hold my breath… I need to start rolling immediately vs death.”
One person jumps in to save me and BARELY managed to pull me ashore.
I made it, but dang was that a sobering moment in and out of character…
Afterwards we remembered that the log drive we were guarding for the lumber company should have also complicated things too…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_driving
The DM just chalked it up to a jam at the top of the waterfall as I recall…
Being unconscious in the water is way scarier than normal underwater combat. Death comes for you in a hurry. Not a bad note for a GM looking to ramp the tension to 11.
I don’t think I have ever in my life played an underwater campaign. I guess most of the groups I’ve hung with have never wanted to deal with that setting.
The closest I’ve ever come underwater campaign may be whenever someone falls out of the boat while fighting various aquatic fauna.
^ I’d wager that’s the vast majority of gamers. Because aquatic combat tends to be finicky, the idea of making an entire campaign with the premise tends to quash it before it gets started.
My party has long since had Water Breathing every time an underwater fight has taken place, so it gets tricky. I’ve had one encounter where the person they were fighting would dispel them, and then had abilities to reduce the number of rounds of breath they’ve had, and that is the only time I ever have had an instance of someone suffocating underwater that I can recall.
The person they were fighting was also very much a runner, and primarily fought by trying to drown people too though, so if she hadn’t dropped at least one person via suffocation, she would’ve been doing her job pretty terribly.
Neat. Sounds like you created a scenario specifically to take advantage of these rules. That may be a smarter way to go than simply setting up a dragon turtle fight and hoping it becomes relevant somehow.
I’ve always wanted to do an underwater campaign, but I don’t think anyone else in my groups particularly interested. It’s really kind of a shame to, since I love playing aquatic races (Water Genasi/Undines, Gillmen/Azarkati, Tritons and Merfolk (less so the Merfolk do to the whole poor move thingy).
I think part of it is, beyond the rules for aquatic combat being somewhat wonky and the inability for most races to function, people aren’t interested in making a cool Aquatic Society do to how few people will actually care about it compared to how much work you need to consider.
Well I mean, all it takes is one dedicated GM, right?
As a rule, if I’m explicitly planning underwater encounters, these rules pretty much don’t come up because everyone has water breathing rolling. FWIW, I think 5e has the most accurate drowning policy unless you’re some sort of amazing swimmer. Think IRL-a lot of people struggle to hold their breath longer than 15 seconds.
Where these rules DO come up in my games is where someone gets knocked into a river, or sometimes more specifically a terrifying trap. And the rule is basically yes, you can use those extensive, long times laid out in the PHB… provided you took a deep breath.
Name me the person with the presence of mind to take a deep breath as they get punched off a bridge. I’ll wait.
So more commonly, we immediately will go to drowning in the situations it comes up.
Sound like you’re adding my “save to take a deep breath” example as a universal rule. That certainly falls with GM purview, but I’d hesitate to make it automatic. For example, you probably have more chance to take a breath falling off a 50′ bridge than a dock.
Well, I run GURPS, so it’s both better and worse than your description above…
Better in that, in a fight, PCs lose air fast!
GURPS Breath Holding Rules (useful for underwater, smoke/poison gas, etc):
No Exertion (e.g., sitting quietly): HTx10 seconds.
Mild Exertion (e.g., walking): HTx4 seconds.
Heavy Exertion (e.g., combat, running, or swimming): HT seconds.
GURPS’ HT (Health) is almost fully exchangeable with D&D’s Con… For GURPS 10 is average, but “above average” scales slightly faster with 14 being roughly equal to D&D’s 16, GURPS’ 16 being about D&D’s 18 and GURPS 17+ being D&D’s 20+.
So while your average delver has only 14 seconds before they start Drowning (and GURPS Drowning rules are on the “realistically harsh” side), a GURPS Round is one second! But the average fight is over in 6-10 seconds leaving PCs a whole luxurious four or more seconds to solve their “out of air” issues.
I make things slightly more “realistically difficult” by having hits that deal damage require a Will roll to avoid exhaling (with body blows giving penalties), they lose seconds equal to the Margin of Failure, or all their breath on a Critical Failure!
One of the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy blogs I read had a near complete TPK to drowning! The party was randomly teleported over a body of water and over half the party failed to shed armor fast enough and drowned (it takes about a minute to remove armor properly, much faster, but still not fast enough, if cutting straps, etc).
GURPS also has PCs take Fatigue Damage† for failing Swimming checks, and no on in the party started that adventure with the Swimming skill…
† FP, Fatigue Points, are similar to HP, they are lost to exertion, losing too many causes the Character to be Tired or Exhausted (so Movement is reduced, defenses are reduced, Attributes and Skill take penalties) and lose enough FP (below zero) and the Character take HP damage and risks passing out… and PCs lose FP to not only exertion, but suffocation and drowning. So the PCs in the water were losing FP to failed Swimming checks before they even ran out of time and started drowning, which meant the few PCs that did shed armor and Swim, had no time to save their drowning buddies… oh and I think there were cave piranha and sharks in the underground lake making it doubly worse!
That reminds me, making a mental note, “randomly teleport Party into underground cavern filled with acid and acid sharks”… no, “acid piranha”, no wait, “both”, yeah that’s the ticket.
Nice to get some perspective from another system. Do rounds typically take a shorter time IRL as compared to d20 games?
Hell yeah: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/habeas-corpus
we‘ve had a Hangman Tree recently and a few characters got as far as passing out. The swallow whole situations never got near dangerous from either suffocating or acid.
As a DM I think for „non violent“ death through suffocation/drowning I‘d allow re-animation with a Heal check within 1/2 minute without brain damage (in cold water).
After that I‘d go with 1 permanent Int and Wis damage per round.
You reminded me… I have seen asphyxiation become relevant. It was on the players’ side though:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/kraken-throttle-combat-style
a choke done properly is actually not a choke (inducing asphyxiation) but cuts the blood supply to the brain (think tourniquet around the neck) and the recipient passes out within a few seconds.
I once had a grapple character with a swimspeed and quickly proved that it wasn’t the water that kills you but the disadvantage on basically everything while getting stabbed that does the trick.
Methinks you soon discovered that freedom of movement rings had become a popular commodity in that campaign. 😛
Monday the Aquatics DLC for Stellaris came out, Friday Colin is making a comic about suffocation rules. Coincidence? 😀
What’s a stellaris? That’s a kind of flower native to Guam, isn’t it?
It’s a good RPG setting maker actually 😀
Early levels of Skull and Shackles in Pathfinder featured some underwater action before the water breathing stuff became common, but it was typically in short bursts.
Where my players really had difficulty was when they had to go into the sunken ruins of a ship and deal with darkness when none had darkvision.
“We’ll just light a tor– Oh wait…”
After frantic digging through character sheets, they remembered their +1 short sword (their first magic item), and somebody asked “Hey, my sword is magic, right? Does it glow?”
“We’ll, uh… The rules say that something like 30% of magic weapons glow, so roll a d10. On a 1, 2, or 3, it glows.”
It came up 3, and there was much rejoicing about their underwater light source.
Sting for MVP!
Most of my suffocation rules issues come from rocket tag levels, where baddies and PCs have access to a spell that does exactly that – suffocates you. You either make the save and are nauseated a round, or you fail and end up dropping to 0 hp then dying in the span of three rounds. Doesn’t matter if you had 10 hp or 600 hp, drowning/suffocation clears out all that hp in literal seconds.
It’s one of the harsher save-or-die spells in that there’s only one counter to it – not needing to breathe. Which you either start with, or buy for a very expensive sum from an Ioun Stone.
Although being unconscious in water tends to have the same effect at all levels….
I think most players have issues not with lack of stuff to breathe, but having bad stuff to breathe – poison clouds and gas-based breath attacks.
Which reminds me of a pet peeve I have with Starfinder – there are numerous spells and creatures that have inhaled/gas based attacks and poisons which blatantly state that they go through the PCs environmental protection on their armor (a feature every PC has so they can do space stuff).
Well, to be fair, you can assume that since everybody has it, an intentionally harmful effect would be designed to circumvent it, right? There’s no use in creating a poison that’s going to be filtered out by everybody’s suit.
Pretty much how I conceptualize it. Still hard to figure out how a suit keeps in a breathable atmosphere but is also permeable enough to allow for gas attacks. I guess there are special “ultra-fine” gases that get through solid materials? Bleh. Sci-fi shenanigans.
Issue with this is that a good chunk of these poisons/gasses come from non-sentient, feral creatures, like alien jungle monkeys, or alien plants. I doubt their evolution involved prey that was decked in environmental armor and had to develop poisons that bypass it.
A similar thing happens with the ‘archaic’ keyword. A medieval sword or spear is archaic and practically a toothpick against most of the Starfinder armor… But a random aliens cats claw attack isn’t. The Starfinder armor is simultaneously overpowered and underpowered, as it protects from a lot, but there’s a massive amount of exceptions that go around it.
I’m now imagining the opposite side of this comic – where Swash (or is it Buckle?) is introduced to the Dhampiric side of his partners bloodline (with an emphasis on blood).
Of course, Buckle (or is it Swash?) could have had it much worse, were their partner elementally aligned to air, earth or fire, instead of the sea. There’s probably an ash pile worth of tourists coming to the Fire Plane without proper planar protection.
Laurel tells me that it’s easy to remember who is who because Buckle (being the girl) has the cuter name.
Should we expect the Triton to have a ‘surfer dude’ tone of voice, given their generous use of the word ‘bro’? A Bill and Ted kind of partnership? Or is there pronoun/gender identity stuff at play here with the Dhampir?
Warlock has a “surfer dude” voice. We haven’t had much opportunity to show show off his himbo side outside of HoEF though.
Swash and Buckle are voiced by Jesse and James from Pokemon.
Who’s their Meowth then? Was it Thief, pre-pirate breakup?
Is it time to share untested homebrew? I think it’s time to share untested homebrew!
After my last go at a little underwater fighting, I came to the same realization – breath just lasts too long to matter. They were swimming through an underground tunnel, partially caved in, when some extra from a Pirates movie jumped out from behind a crumbling pillar to attack them. I had carefully dotted the map with air pockets – where the cracked ceiling of the tunnel let a little air accumulate – envisioning a fight where they would have to scramble over and around cover, duck their head up and take a deep breath, and dive back down to fight the thing, all while its grapple attack tried to drag them away from their precious air. Maybe one of them would even go unconscious, and there would be some dramatic mid-combat mouth-to-mouth! Instead, they struggled with their incredibly slow swim speeds, and all the other annoyances of underwater combat, but as you’ve pointed out, breathing just never came into play. So I did what I always do after something in the rules doesn’t give me the right dramatic outcome: I came up with an unnecessarily complicated homebrew subsystem that will likely never see actual play.
It starts with the usual 5e breath-holding rules, but then you split your air supply into 1-round units (10 units per minute). At the end of each turn, if you have done nothing other than move up to your swim speed, you lose one round of breath. If you do certain other activities, you lose additional breath:
– Making a weapon attack: 1 round per attack.
– Moving farther than your normal swim speed: 1 round. If you move farther than twice your normal swim speed, you lose 1 additional round, and so on.
– Casting a spell with verbal components: 5 rounds (30 seconds of air!)
– Being pushed or moved against your will: 1 round per 5 feet moved.
– Taking damage: Make a Constitution saving throw, with a DC of 10 or half the damage taken, whichever is higher. On a success, you lose one round. On a failure, you lose 5 rounds. If you fail the saving throw by 10 or more, you lose all remaining air.
– Going unconscious: all remaining air.
And then when you run out of air, you take bludgeoning damage at the end of each turn: 1d10 for the first round, then 2d10, then 3d10, and so on. And then my favorite part: you can still do all the same things, but instead of costing you rounds of breath, it costs you damage directly. So if you’re suffocating, but want to choke out a verbal spell, you can, but it’ll cost you 5d10 damage – better make it count!
Hypothetically, this would turn an underwater fight into a strategic and dramatic minigame, where you’re rationing out your big attacks in order to conserve your breath. And then when the beast is slain, you still have to make a mad dash for the surface and dramatically gasp for breath. I love me some crunchy resource-management systems; anytime I get a new number to keep track of, I’m a happy player. Especially if it contributes to the right kind of storytelling!
Another underwater encounter I ran was against a Chuul, some kind of clawed and tentacled horror. I had been reading The Monsters Know What They’re doing, and was looking forward to the possibility of dragging one of the party down into the depths and drowning them there. Instead, they stood on the shore while the druid summoned two giant octopuses, then left the Discord call. (He just had to leave early, but it really felt like a mic drop.)
I’ve also run a fun encounter with sharks chasing the party ashore through sharp coral after their boat crashed, but it was for only two low-level players and I didn’t feel like pulling out all the stops that day. One day I’ll run it again as a proper set-piece encounter, for PCs with more hit points to spare – with waves at the top of every round pushing them into the coral, where they take slashing damage and get stuck, while the sharks are drawn to their blood.
I like me some crunch, but this seems like the kind of rule that’s better suited to a specific encounter than a generalized system. I think that’s where you can get away with playtesting these sorts of good-but-granular concepts.
My current party doesn’t consider aquatic combat particularly unusual… but then, three of us possess swim speeds, and of those, two are fully amphibious and the third can hold his breath pretty well. The two remaining party members aren’t quite so comfortable in the water, but we do have a few magic items to help keep them alive.
Fair cop. But then, you’re solving the “drowning problem” by ignoring it. If you run aquatic races, then this subsystem might as well not exist.
Well, sort of. Even for aquatic races, there are still bits of the subsystem that are still relevant… e.g. limitations to ranged weapons, and certain popular spells (i.e. fire evocations) that lose much of their effectiveness. And in this case, not everyone is fully amphibious, and magic that allows characters to breathe underwater don’t always enable them to fight effectively.
Amusingly though, two of our party have recently acquired a second (and entirely-redundant) swim-speed, since both Barbarian and Ranger do so at level 6. Though in neither case does it bestow the ability to breathe underwater, so the lizardfolk is still required to hold his breath.
Quick math correction: The 20+ rounds a typical 3.5 character has to avoid drowning equates to two minutes (or more, though not three minutes unless the character’s Constitution is 15+—hardly unachievable, especially late-game, but not certain, probably not even late-game). I assume this was just a typo?
Anyways, while D&Ds’ drowning rules work alright enough for holding your breath when diving for pearls or slipping through a submerged grotto or whatever, most adventurers aren’t going to be swimming underwater for extended periods of time unless there’s a fight down there or they have some kind of water breathing option.
Pathfinder’s system is a bit better; engaging in combat reduces your oxygen supply, and it’s simple to boot. But ~halving the generous D&Derived breath-holding timer only does so much.
If we were optimizing specifically for representing the drama and tension of underwater combat, hostile actions should have a chance of reducing your remaining air. E.g, “The dire porpoise headbutts you in the gut. Roll a Fort save to avoid losing some breath.” By the same token, if the PCs were fighting air-breathers underwater, they’d be able to strike their opponents to knock more air out of their lungs at the cost of dealing less damage—but how often is that going to happen?
More to the point, though, this kind of thing adds another number the players need to keep an eye on as it goes down. At best, it’s a second set of hit points—and if you can make saves to avoid/reduce the air loss, it’s an extra die roll for every attack. I’m not sure the payoff is enough to justify the bookkeeping.
Nope. Just that bad at math.
I don’t think the solution lies at the system level, but at the encounter level. The “save to get a good breath” thing works for that. So would a spell or special ability that hastens drowning.
You’re right though: I don’t think the solution lies in a more granular system. More likely it’s in the opposite direction.
I was recently in a 5e one-shot where suffocation was a serious issue… For everyone else. We were fighting an aquatic undead thing that looked kind of like the Ring girl and was using its animated hair to drag people underwater and then force the air out of their lungs. She was really creepy, and a major threat to most of the party. But, without knowing what the encounter was going to be like at all, I had made a Warforged Warlock who just walked around the bottom of the oasis firing spells up at her through the water.
Before you die, you see the pew pew.
I once designed a dungeon that had a “hold your breath” challenge built in, but I failed to predict how my players would a) split the party and b) break the dungeon in such a way that two PCs were trapped in a water-filled corridor with a riverswell spirit, only one ring of waterbreathing, and no way for either side to open the exit door.
In a similar vein, my halfling rogue was notoriously bad at disarming traps. I once examined a chest in such a way that a) a secret panel slammed shut, cutting the party off from me and the way forward and b) released a poison gas. My rogue had an iridescent spindle IOUN stone, and so could hold his breath indefinitely, but the DM (rightly) ruled that talking was no longer possible for me, unless I wanted to make a saving throw vs. the poison.
The rest of the party had no idea what was happening on the other side of the door and began pounding, shouting questions, and making plans to bash down the door (which would have exposed them to the gas). The DM explained that I could hear them and they could hear me.
What followed was a desperate and very silly series of “tap once for yes, twice for no” Q&A sessions, as the rest of the table yelled questions at me and I was limited to knocking on the table–BUT ABSOLUTLEY NO TALKING OR PANTOMIME.
My players are already furious that “I just hold my breath” isn’t a permitted solution to stinking cloud. I don’t wanna imply that holding your breath works! 😛
I can totally picture your players passing that water breathing ring back and forth and waiting for rescue though. Sounds like a hoot. Ditto scene with the gas. Good emergent storytelling in both spots.
Curse of the Crimson Throne. Very first book and close to the first fight of the campaign. We got down into the basement (?) of Gaedren Lamm’s hideout and my dwarf warpriest got knocked into the water. This normally wouldn’t be an issue, but 1) I had pretty much no skill points to invest in swim or climb 2) I was in heavy armor and 3) my allies were a bit busy with combat. I still ended up fine, but due to armor check penalties and my lack of skill points to mitigate them, my character couldn’t climb out or swim to stay alive on their own even with a natural 20.
Laurel’s Crimson Throne PC has an overwhelming fear of water. Dude is not gonna be happy about exploring that sunken boat in Book 2….