Strenuous Combat

Combat is a stressful activity, both physically and mentally. If you want to add an additional layer to combat to help encourage your players to handle things in a more civilized manner, consider implementing this variant rule.

Concluding Combat

At the end of a combat encounter, you might consider having each surviving participant make a Constitution saving throw to avoid exhaustion. The DC for the saving throw is equal to 10 + the number of complete rounds that occurred during the encounter. On a failure, a creature suffers 1 level of exhaustion.

More Restful Rest

Exhaustion is a painful penalty to add to characters, especially if they end up encountering multiple levels of exhaustion over the course of a gaming day. When your players' characters complete a short rest with exhaustion from this variant, consider allowing them to spend a Hit Die at the end of that rest to remove one level of exhaustion.

If a character encounters multiple levels of exhaustion due to this variant, they can spend more Hit Dice to remove the additional levels, either during the same rest or separate ones. Each time they do so, however, the effect is cumulative for each additional level. Removing a second level of exhaustion would take two Hit Dice, while a third would take three, and so on. For instance, if a character completes a short rest with two levels of exhaustion from this variant, they could spend one Hit Die to remove one level of exhaustion, or three Hit Dice to remove both. Once a creature has completed a long rest, the number of Hit Dice to be spent to remove this exhaustion is reduced back to one.