Dnd 5e – Drowning rules and mechanics

Some creatures possess the ability to cause the drowning of the characters.

In other cases some creatures can create the conditions to cause the drowning of the characters.

Sometimes a character will simply fall into water while wearing an armor too heavy to swim and doesn’t have time get rid of it.

You can apply these simple rules to determine how long the character is going to hold its breath before drowning.

  • A character doing nothing in a round – no attack or move action – can hold its breath for 1 round for each point of constitution.
  • For each attack action and move action the character takes, further reduce the number of rounds by one.
  • After all the rounds available are consumed, the character will increase by one the death saves and will also get one level of exhaustion.

And that is all!