[RPG] Rules for Stranglers

combatdnd-5ehouse-rules

Does anyone have any play-tested house rules for dealing with attempts to strangle a (not helpless) creature to death?

Suffocating, per the rules

As far as I see, the only guidance in the rules would be the PH rules of Suffocating (Chapter 8, page 183) which determine how long a creature can survive without breathing. Unless there's a strong argument otherwise, I think the best answer would leverage these rules.

Maintaining a strangle?

The main part not covered in the rules would be mechanics on how an attacker achieves and maintains a strangle (with or without a garotting wire) long enough for the suffocation rules to take effect.

The Precipitating Event

I was playing a game where an ad hoc rule was:

(grapple) + (successful strength contest) == (death by strangulation)

I think this is way overpowered. And would plan on changing tactics so my halfling wizard became a mad strangler if it were allowed going forward.

(It won't be a problem discussing this with my DM, that's not what this question is about. I'm interested solutions people might already be using.)

Note on Question Focus

To keep the topic focused, I'm not asking about other breath-related scenarios ("choking out" a target to capture it, holding a victim underwater). A concise answer that incorporated these other cases might be appropriate, especially if it sheds light on this specific case.

Best Answer

Our party barbarian wanted to choke out another NPC half-orc that she had challenged to a fight. Our DM followed the following pattern:

  1. On the strangler's turn, a regular grapple contest is made, with the strangler at disadvantage. This represents the difficulty in getting your hands/forearms/legs around the neck of the enemy. Since it's simple disadvantage, you might be able to negate it if you have the enemy prone or you are enraged (as was the case with the barbarian).
  2. On the target's turn, a strength (athletics) or dexterity (acrobatics) contest is made. Now the target is trying to break the chokehold before they risk suffocating. If they break the hold, the grappling ends. If not, continue to step 3 immediately. They can choose to try something else besides making the contest, but if it doesn't break the grapple somehow, proceed to step 3.
  3. The target makes a CON save versus 8 + proficiency + str mod of the grappler. If they succeed, they do not pass out, and you start over at step 2. If they fail, they fall unconscious until the end of their next turn. The save DC was a pretty arbitrary calculation chosen to match the save DC calculation for other spells and abilities.

The rationale for the short time to for the orc to become unconscious is that a proper chokehold in real life will cut off your blood supply to the brain and render you unconscious very quickly, and we also didn't care to sit there and roll repeatedly. One piece that is missing here is making such an action fatal, but I suspect that is where you would simply apply the suffocating condition to keep things simple, until the grapple is broken or target dies.

In our situation, the party barbarian choked the orc unconscious and then released him. We were in a drow prison camp, and a female drow showed up and instructed that the barbarian drag him off and feed him to this giant spider. So we didn't have to resolve the fatality ourselves.

We applied the same rules much later to a gnome we were capturing. I suspect that if the target was not a humanoid, different rules would be desired - past a certain point, attack by strangulation does not make sense and should probably be dismissed out of hand or reduced to an improvised weapon attack. It's also pretty limited in a big fight, since enemies can take the help action to give advantage to the grappler on their side, or grapple the grappler and drag them away.

Related Topic