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Dungeons & Dragonsis a game that has gone through a lot of changes over editions. Sometimes language is carried over by players that doesn’t appear in any of the rulebooks. A lot of Dungeon Masters might describe a character as being bloodied, but not all players will know what they mean.
Thankfully, the bloodied condition is as recent as Fourth Edition and is less complex than terms like THAC0, touch AC or Negative Levels. Even without having a precise mechanical meaning in Fifth Edition, there are good ways to use it to expand your toolkit for describing combat and designing encounters.
What Is The Bloodied Condition?
The specific terminology of being bloodied was introduced in the fourth edition of D&D. A character has been Bloodied if at any point in the fight, they lost more than half their hitpoints. The concept was that enemies close to death would fight harder and even have special abilities that required them to be wounded. There are a few different design goals this can serve:
Explanation
Describe A Fight’s Progression
Descriptively, the bloodied condition is a good way of signalling to your players the progress of a fight without explicitly saying how much punishment an enemy can take. Theplayers will know they’ve dealt roughly half an enemy’s health in damagebut not know which attacks it was vulnerable to or how much total HP it has.
Make Hitpoints Less Abstract
A bear totem barbarian with a high constitution can be stabbed in the kidney with a rusty knife a hundred times over before they even fall unconscious. Having a specific point at which attacks ‘draw blood’ means that attacks before that point are insteadwearing down health in other ways, such as by tiring them, forcing them to dodgeand wearing down any luck or magic that is helping them defend themselves.
Keep Long Fights Engaging
Without abilities that activate on low health, a fight can start strong and then become stagnant after players have used all their limited-use powers and the dragon’s breath attack is on cooldown.A bloodied creature might start hitting harderor recharge an ability it used at the start of the fight.
The goal is to keep the fight interesting while not slowing the overall pace of the combat.Most bloodied effects are aggressiveas a result: There is no ‘second health bar’ and most enemies don’t gain extra AC when injured.
Separate Casual And Serious Fights
A Bloodied enemy is liable to take a fight more seriously.
A tipsy bar brawler is unlikely to attempt killing blows or make attacks that risk injuring themselves, butonce bloodied they’re liable to either back off and end the fight or double down and pull out a weapon.
Special Abilities That Activate When Injured
Some Fifth Edition creatures already have abilities that activate when below half health but that do not use the term bloodied.The Clay Golem can activate its berserk mode when below 60HP, slightly below half its average HP of 133.Similar to the legacy ability in fourth edition, this state remains even if is healed.
If you’re homebrewing a xenomorph encounter, its acid blood will damage attackers only once they’ve dealt a serious enough injury for that blood to start spraying.
Adaptations of the Fifth Edition formula, such as Solasta: Crown of the Magister andBaldur’s Gate 3 make frequent use of similar health thresholds. Expect most boss fights in a D&D-themed video game to change their fighting style and become stronger once they are below half health.
How To Use The Bloodied Condition
The Bloodied Condition doesn’t appear as explicitly in Fifth Edition but can still be a useful tool for balancing encounters, enhancing roleplay and more. Next time you’re DMing an encounter that has been injured below half health, take a moment todescribe how the various smaller injuries of the fightso far have stacked up to have a visible impact on the powerful enemy the party is facing.
Have bloodied enemies look or act more serious,even if you don’t plan to change the mechanics of the fight. Now when they roll a critical on the next attack, it can become a narrative moment as the near-defeated villain begins thrashing with new vigour.
Example
Magical Triggers
Multiple spells allow the user to program in specific triggers.Contingency and glyph of warding both activate when a preset condition occurs.
Have a villain the party aren’t supposed to kill yet have acontingency spell that teleports them to safety when bloodied.A Contingency spell cannot be counter-spelled.
Surrender And Retreat
Enemies might choose to retreat or even surrender when badly injured.
If the party are looking to capture a person alive,convincing them to surrender once injuredmight be better roleplay than having them fight to the death and then make the final attack with a non-lethal weapon.
Bossfights With Phases
The bloodied condition is a good threshold for changing the tempo of a boss fight. This also allows you touse a higher CR creature than an encounter would normally allowbut not express the full strength of its recharge abilities and legendary actions until your players have given it a bloody nose.
Whenthe antagonist changes fighting style, channels the power of a forbidden artifact or takes off their weighted training bracers.
Rebalancing A Fight
Sometimes DMs will make a mistake when balancing a fight. In cases like these,weakening or strengthening an encounter during combat can undermine the agency of the players, unless done with an appropriate explanation.
An injured dragon starts attacking more aggressively and frantically,making it easier to hit but still dangerous.
Duels And Show Fights
The bloodied condition can be repurposed torepresent “first blood”, a common endpoint for duelling. This also makes it harder for dueling NPCs or PCs to accidentally kill each other, andensures they’ll still have hitpoints for any future combats.
A tournament can use the bloodied condition tomark an endpoint with a clear winner but no risk of death.
