An unintended rules change in D&D's new Dungeon Master's Guide can cause your heroic adventurer to drop dead after chasing bad guys for 1 minute—and if they survive, they'll be knackered for days
The D&D 2024 ruleset's Dungeon Master's Guide is releasing November 12—though there's an early access period on D&D Beyond, meaning many players (including myself) have gotten our mitts on it early.
I'm still chewing over this thing, since rulebooks tend to be weighty, and I'll likely be unravelling my full thoughts on this website quite soon. However, I just wanted to step aside for one moment and alert you to the fact that, as this Reddit user Cranyx has identified, it's possible for your new heroic adventurer to get into a chase, get winded in an embarrassingly short amount of time, and then drop dead (thanks, Wargamer).
As per the chase rules laid out in the otherwise quite solid-looking «DM toolbox» chapter explain, players engaging in a chase will be typically spending their action to Dash—unless they're using it to, say, cast a Hold Person spell or something to cut the spell short. As the book reads:
«A chase participant can take the Dash action a number of times equal to 3 plus its Constitution modifier (minimum of once). Each additional Dash action it takes during the chase requires the creature to succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw at the end of its turn or gain 1 Exhaustion level. A participant drops out of the chase if its Speed is 0.»
In the new 2024 ruleset, exhaustion does a few key things—all rolls are reduced by twice your exhaustion level, your speed is reduced by five times your exhaustion level (in feet) and, as was the case back in 2014, maxing out your exhaustion at six points kills you dead. Do not collect 100 gold, do not pass GO.
This intersects bizarrely with the chase rules. If you have particularly bad luck, or a terrible con modifier, it's entirely possible to fail a DC 10 constitution save—a 45% chance if you aren't proficient, and your con mod is zero. This means that, if you have six instances of bad luck in a row, running too hard can just straight-up kill you.
The timescale here is also hilarious—as Cranyx rightly points
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