WELL, YOU DON’T WHAT TO DIE, DO YOU?
Welcome to part 2 of a series looking at the D&D stats and how they affect player experience. If you missed part 1 on Strength and Dexterity, you can find it here.
Constitution stands alone amongst the stats in the way it works and applies to every class. It has no skill areas associated with it to which you can add proficiency and governs no melee attacks or spell attacks. It’s likely the only Constitution check a PC will make is a Con save.
Constitution saves are one of the three major saves along with Dex and Wisdom and can be against terrible effects – the ‘save or suck’ situation. It also affects spell casters’ ability to maintain concentration on spells. It’s probably the best save to have a strong mod in. Dex saves usually just reduce damage, Wisdom saves prevent nasty effects but Con saves are used to resist both damage and status effects as well as controlling spell concentration.
CON GOVERNS HIT POINTS
Every level gained increases a character’s max HP and their Constitution mod is applied to their dice roll or average. Every Hit Dice rolled on a short rest also adds a character’s con mod to the HP restored. In a game with such a weight of rules dealing with combat and HP loss, Constitution is important to everyone. Dump stat it at your peril.
Characters who take on a front-line damage absorbing role (Tanks) need a healthy Constitution mod to endure the big hits they take but a +2 or +3 mod doesn’t make as much difference when you roll d10 or d12 for your Hit Points as it does if you are rolling a d6, and no-one wants to burn a spell slot on a concentration spell for it to fizzle out after one round.
I have some gripe with how universally applicable it is to characters. When using Point Buy for character generation, in games like mine which are tactical and death is realistic, no-one would sensibly run a Con 8 character or even Con 10. I’ve seen high charisma fighters, low dex bards, high strength rogues and low charisma paladins. Players are willing and keen to sometimes run a sub-optimal character and that is interesting and fun but in a ‘point-buy game’, everyone seems to sit down with Constitution in the 12 – 16 range because at the end of the day, no-one wants to die.
I think Constitution is well placed within the stats though. It’s not very exciting or flashy but it is useful. If a player has boosted their Constitution through their choices, I don’t think it’s for me to undermine those choices by using kid gloves on a low Constitution character who has benefitted in other ways by taking that hit; or failing to take a hit as the case may be.
I think it’s worth mentioning that tanky fighters and barbarians really draw a player to boosting Constitution as they need lots of HP and it’s one of their save proficiencies. These classes also draw players towards strength given their weapon proficiencies (all of them), armour proficiencies and the barbarian’s rage feature only attracts the damage bonus when making a strength based attack. I’ve gone through Strength at length elsewhere in this series so I won’t rehash that here.
Pumping up Constitution and Strength to the expense of other stats doesn’t give a character very impressive skill mods in the first few levels of the game. There is only one skill attached to the primary stats of these classes and the player might feel their numbers don’t look very exciting. As I keep stressing, this isn’t necessarily a problem and most players won’t worry about it as long as their character looks cool at the table. It also makes these classes easier to run for new players and so I suspect this is for very carefully considered design reasons.
However, if you need to address this it’s easy to throw in a few Constitution saves that affect the whole party with status conditions or just hit the big con mod characters with a few solo saves. The ‘opt in’ saves can be fun and also increase the sense of player agency. A drinking competition or mystery bottle of booze is always a fun moment, (is it a potion? Will I get +1 to my rage damage? Will I just get drunk? They’re all wins to a barbarian!)
Constitution saves can be required against cold or heat, toxic spores and fatigue. If the player running Conmod the Barbarian is feeling left out by all the Dexterity and Wisdom saves that fill the lower level spell lists, then you might design your sessions to include some more of these environmental hazards. A problem with this is the consequences of failure can be punishing. Often these types of saves can result in Exhaustion or the Poisoned condition which can be quite brutal. One the one hand, tough – suck it up, buttercup! On the other, if your intent was to make the barbarian player feel validated in their character creation choices then you might not want to cause yourself the problem of an exhausted and useless rogue. Easy to solve with a bit of creative DMing though;
- Extreme heat might result in no more than minus 5 ft. of speed;
- Cold affects fine motor skills may result in disadvantage upon Thieves’ Tools, Sleight of Hand and fired weapons;
- Toxins can have specific effects. A character may be unable to expend hit dice upon a short rest.
Of course these undeniably suck but far less so than a level of Exhaustion or the Poisoned condition which puts a character at disadvantage on all ability checks. Also, I find a character being unable to replenish Hit Points through a short rest is often an issue for the whole party to sort out rather than just a beat down on one particular character; some potions or spells might have to go their way.
You can also call for Constitution based skill checks but this is perhaps a bit trickier to manage. Saving throws can be included in your session planning but you won’t be able to predict the unusual actions that might require a Constitution (Religion) check. I used that once when a paladin maintained an all night vigil at an altar of his god but there’s no way I could have seen that coming or forced it into the session. I wouldn’t want to start looking for situations that I can shoe-horn into a Constitution based skill check. It would make my adjudications more difficult for the players to predict, and “better the law be certain, than the law be just”.
Boring but Good?
But in the end, if Constitution is boring but good then maybe it’s doing it’s job on the character sheet just fine. Once again, this is an analysis and not an agenda. Unless your players have a problem, you don’t need to do anything.
Thanks for reading!
In part 3 we take a look at Intelligence and why it’s not just for wizards.