Rotting Effects in D&D

As I re-acquaint myself with the rules of Basic/Advanced D&D, I'm remembering some of the odd bits and pieces of the game that we had to figure out for ourselves back in the day. One of these bits is the effect of "rotting" as a result of a select few monsters found in the game, most notably the mummy and the violet fungus.

5e uses a system of damage types to reconcile many of these incongruities from earlier editions, so for these monsters (and others like them), the game applies a set amount of damage and classifies it as "necrotic." In the case of mummies, the victim continues losing hit points from necrotic damage over time and can't heal until a Remove Curse spell is applied, whereas violet fungi get 1d4 attacks that do straight necrotic damage (up to 4d8 in a single round, which is nasty but not that dangerous to mid-level and higher characters), with no other lingering effect. It's a simple system that makes clear exactly what happens to the victim (one of the things 5e tends to do pretty well), but doesn't carry the same degree of threat as their AD&D counterparts.

For the AD&D versions, both creatures' rotting effects are extremely deadly at any level, but the actual physical results are not entirely clear. I started running a campaign for my tabletop group using a hybrid of the "Advanced" versions of Old School Essentials and Labyrinth Lord rulesets, but I lean heavily on AD&D to help with some of the behind-the-scenes granularity, and to adapt some of the monsters and magic items that aren't in OSE or LL.

"Why not just run AD&D?" you may ask. Ease of entry, mostly. The girls have only ever played 5e and were getting overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of the game as they leveled up, so I wanted to give them an easier set of rules to manage that still provides a fair range of flavor to play with. I also need to re-acclimate myself to the "old ways" of running the game, so it seemed like a good way to go. My plan is to ease them into AD&D as they get more familiar with how the older system works.

In any case, I dropped a single violet fungus into the dungeon I'm running, but as I read the Monster Manual entry, I found it to be fairly vague on what happens when the fungus touches someone. They get 4 attacks as a 3HD monster, and if one of their branches makes contact with a target: 

The excretion from these branches rots flesh in but one melee round unless a saving throw versus poison is made or a cure disease is used.

This immediately brings up several questions in my mind:

1. No damage is listed, so what effect does "...rots flesh..." have?

2. Does it matter where you are hit? AD&D doesn't have a hit location rule, so do we make one up or does the rot simply kill you outright?

3. Obviously, if you fail the saving throw vs. Poison (also categorized as a save vs. Death), you have one round to apply a Cure Disease or the rot takes effect, but why is it not Neutralize Poison instead to match the save category (as far as I know, avoiding disease does not involve a saving throw)?

4. It's not an issue in OSE/LL, but in AD&D, Cure Disease has a casting time of 1 turn (10 rounds). Does this mean you need to start applying it within one round (minute), but you then need 9 more rounds of uninterrupted casting to avoid the rotting effect? Neutralize Poison has a casting time of 7 segments, which seems more usable under these circumstances, but you would still need to cast it within 3 segments of the victim being touched or, presumably, the rot would kill the victim before the spell was complete (unless, again, you simply need to start casting it within 1 round to prevent the effect).
   

The online consensus seems to be that if a violet fungus hits you, then you will die in one round if you fail the save and have no Cure Disease spell available. That's pretty rough, especially since the text does not say explicitly that the victim dies. 

Spell Saves and Magic Resistance in 5e

My gaming roots lie firmly in Basic D&D and First Edition AD&D, but my gaming sensibilities have changed over the years. The OSR edict: "Rulings, not rules" makes perfect sense to me in theory, and I'm quite certain there are lots of players out there who can work with a DM to make this practical around the table. My longtime Tuesday night players, on the other hand, are...curmudgeonly(?)...to say the least, and any free-form decision I make at the table is likely to provoke a spirited debate from at least one of them. 

We all came out of a local gaming community in the early 80s where the DM was definitely the opponent and the players had to scrape for any possible advantage. The local DMs weren't so much "killers" as they were "sadists"—cunning, cruel, and merciless—so we learned to be confrontational as a strategy. Sometimes it worked (but usually didn't.) Post-session player chatter usually amounted to how bad the latest screw-job was versus how much fun the adventure had been. I mean, surviving to complain about it was its own kind of fun, so I guess that made us masochists.

In any case, one of the things I enjoy about 5e is the reliably-simple core game engine. The mechanics are easy to understand, they provide a good flow through the action economy, and there are just a few sub-systems to learn rather than dozens. My curmudgeonly players get it and, more importantly, they abide by it. It's right there in black and white, where I can point to it and say, "Welp, that's the rule..."

It gives them structure within which to behave, and that takes almost all the pressure off me. I appreciate that and it makes me a more confident DM because in most cases, my players' innate skepticism about everything is soothed by an easy rule reference (even if they still don't necessarily agree).

That said, the official game is barreling off in a direction I don't appreciate: a pablum of high-fantasy nonsense and performative virtue. Much of the inherent "threat" of the game has been outright neutralized as a result because the current designers don't seem to believe characters should ever lose (or even be mildly inconvenienced). This is especially evident in the monster designs, where much of what made the creatures unique, interesting, and/or deadly have been dramatically altered or dropped altogether.

I mentioned the owlbear losing its Hug special attack in a previous post, but some other examples include rust monsters no longer eating magic items, carrion crawlers having a single tentacle attack (and a superfluous bite) instead of eight (!) tentacles, and displacer beasts whose primary defensive ability (displacement) is automatically nullified if they are hit by a single attack during a round. Silliness like that abounds, turning many 5e monsters into the much-maligned "boring bag of hit points."

Broadly, one of the most awesome monster abilities in 1e was magic resistance. Back in the day, it was a simple "percentage chance of any spell absolutely failing in the monster's presence." The base percentage indicated the monster's resistance against an 11th-level spellcaster, with a commensurate 5% increase or decrease in the net difference between 11th level and the level of the PC spellcaster. "Thus, a magic resistance of 95% means that a 10th level magic-user has no possibility of affecting the monster with a spell..." That's bad-ass. It certainly made creatures like demons, devils, and powerful undead absolutely terrifying in combat (especially if you are the now-nearly useless magic-user).

On top of that, "(e)ven if a spell does take effect on a magic-resistant creature, the creature is entitled to normal saving throws." So 1e magic resistance provides a potent additional layer of defense, scaled by the percentage listed under the monster's description. Finally, it's "always-on," meaning that your BBEG will be completely ignoring many/most spells. 

One of my favorite D&D images from my absolute favorite artist, the great Erol Otus. In your face, wizard!

This was a huge component of 1e boss fights that has been trivialized to the point where 5e sort of warns DMs against using a single enemy opponent because they won't survive long. But the concept of fantasy heroes uniting to defeat a singular powerful entity in a final, all-or-nothing battle is a staple of heroic fiction. A staple which 5e struggles to support.

D&D 5e House Rules

When my first D&D 5e campaign kicked off in 2015, I committed myself to running the rules as written (RAW) because I intended to publish content I developed over my four decades of playing and running the game. I wanted to ensure that I understood the game as intended and that any house rules or incorrect interpretations didn't bleed their way into my material. I also wanted my players to be confident that what they read in the PHB was what they experienced over Roll20.

This worked well except, over time, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the game's default "easy" mode. So many elements are rendered trivial by the designers' desire to make the game "safe" and survivable, that much of the risk (and fun) is removed. That might be fine for brand-new players, but my veteran players were used to the difficulties of earlier editions, and became frustrated when they would, for instance, finally land a spell effect on the BBEG, only to have the target shrug off the effect on its next turn.

Now that we all have a few years under our belts and know the RAW version, I've begun incorporating a few house rules to address some of the things I don't like.