D&D: Five Ways to Die Without Ever Rolling Initiative
Dungeons & Dragons can be surprisingly deadly if your characters actually have occasion to use the rules for it.
Characters in Dungeons & Dragons face down a lot of deadly things: wild monsters, evil spellcasters, undead, poisons. And yet, the unprepared adventurer can, in fact, be caught dead. At least according to some of the more fiddly rules of the game.
You never even have to be in a fight for the grim reaper to have their due. Here are five ways to die in D&D without ever rolling initiative.
Drowning
Most creatures in D&D need to breathe. Unless you’re playing an Autognome, a Reborn, or a Warforged, or something unusual like that, your character needs to breathe. And if they can’t, things start to turn deadly, though perhaps not necessarily as quickly as you’d think. A typical D&D creature can hold its breath for 1 minute, plus a number of additional minutes equal to its Constitution modifier.
Which, yes, means that Barbarian with a +3 Constitution can hold their breath for 4 minutes. I don’t know why you’re raising your eyebrows knowingly like that, but once you run out of breath (or if you’re prevented from holding your breath by certain effects) you immediately drop to 0 hit points and start dying. Moreover, you can’t regain hit points or stabilize until you can breathe again. Which makes it impossible to heal your way through drowning.
Hunger
Courtesy of D&D Hero’s Feast Cookbook
Did you know D&D has rules for needing to eat? You might be shocked to learn that it does. It’s one of the lesser-used rules, along with tracking how many arrows you have. And the specifics of the rule are just enough to make other people chime in proudly about how they actually did use these rules in one game and it was the best thing they’d ever played in.
Because it was a hard game. And they nearly died, but they didn’t. And all the other DMs out there are too soft. Etc. etc.
At any rate, the rules for hunger are as simple to use as they are to avoid: your character needs one pound of food per day and can eat half of that amount to stretch things out. Once you go without food for 3 days (plus your Constitution modifier in days, of course), you automatically gain a level of exhaustion. Hit six levels of exhaustion and you die, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Of course, all it takes is one Goodberry or Create Food & Water spell to reset you back to 0 days without food.
Thirst
The need for water, if indeed your character needs to drink, is even more dire. If your character can’t drink at least a gallon of water per day, that character has to make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or take a level of exhaustion. And that’s if they can drink at least half a gallon. Any less than that, and they automatically suffer a level of exhaustion at the end of the day.
And if they happen to already have a level of exhaustion, they take two levels of exhaustion just for playing.
Weather
Similarly, being exposed to extreme heat and extreme cold can kill you. And pretty quick. When you are exposed to the cold or the heat, you make a DC 10 Constitution save at the end of each hour. And if you’re immersed in Frigid Water, you make that save at the end of every minute past the first.
Fail a save and you’ll gain a level of exhaustion. Again, hit six of those and you die outright.
Being Too Tired
As you’ve seen, whatever the cause of Exhaustion, ultimately being too tired is what’ll kill you. That’s why everyone is always trying to get that Long Rest all the time. D&D is a fantasy, after all, and being able to regularly get a good night’s rest is a fantasy we all have in these boring dystopian days of hustling and grinding until there’s naught left of you but a corpse whose passive income streams are making the number go up, Capitalism’s favorite thing in the world.
And Exhaustion in D&D is a withering foe. It starts out innocuously enough. At a single level of Exhaustion, your character suffers disadvantage on Ability Checks and those only. They can still fight. They can still make saving throws just fine.
Get a second level of Exhaustion and your character starts to feel it. Their speed becomes halved. Everything is sluggish. At three levels of Exhaustion, they have disadvantage on attack rolls, and more importantly, saving throws (which often keep Exhaustion at bay). The fourth level of Exhaustion halves their hit point maximum. The fifth reduces their speed to 0, and the sixth and last level of Exhaustion renders the character dead.
And even if you don’t need to sleep your character can still suffer from Exhaustion. It’s one of the deadliest conditions, eventually, in the game.
