Thoughts on Level Drain

As a player, I’ve never had a run in with level drain. I didn’t play any incarnation of DnD enough to come across it, and the games I traditionally ran didn’t have level drain. So, it’s actually relatively new to me.

I’ve known of level drain for a very long time, though. From an outside perspective, I felt that while it was suitably scary and a nifty alternative to the typical “get hit, lose hit points,” dynamic, it also seems like a nightmare of book keeping. Are players (or worse, the GM) supposed to keep track of how many hit points they received every time they leveled up? And in more modern games, you must keep track of new abilities, spells, improved ability scores, and what happens to say, a familiar you got if you get level drained to a level before you were able to get a familiar?

Just a lot of bullshit that doesn’t seem very fun to me.

I’ve run only one adventure where a monster had level drain, and I changed it to a super-paralysis thing because I simply didn’t want to deal with it. Looking back, I regret doing that, but you live and you learn.

So, in the future if level drain comes up, I think I will do something along the following lines;

  • The player loses however many levels they are supposed to.
  • Hit Points are either re-rolled with the new hit die amount, OR the number of hit die lost are rolled and that number is subtracted from the character’s hit point total. 
  • The character retains any special abilities, spells, whatever.
  • New abilities, hit points, spells, what have you are not gained until the character gets back to their pre-level drained level. 

As an example, Pat the 7th level Fighter gets hit by some creepy crawly and gets drained for 3 levels. Pat can either re-roll 4 HD to determine their new hit point total, or roll 3 HD and subtract the sum from their current hit point total. Pat will not get any more hit points or cool abilities until they gain enough experience to get to 8th level.

For spell casters, they will know their higher level spells, but won’t be able to cast them until they return to their previous levels of power.

Author: everloss

I'm a dude that writes about stuff on the internet.

130 thoughts on “Thoughts on Level Drain”

Comments are closed.