Rules for Stranglers

Question

Does anyone have any play-tested house rules for dealing with attempts to strangle a (not helpless) creature to death?

Suffocating, per the rules

As far as I see, the only guidance in the rules would be the PH rules of Suffocating (Chapter 8, page 183) which determine how long a creature can survive without breathing. Unless there's a strong argument otherwise, I think the best answer would leverage these rules.

Maintaining a strangle?

The main part not covered in the rules would be mechanics on how an attacker achieves and maintains a strangle (with or without a garotting wire) long enough for the suffocation rules to take effect.

The Precipitating Event

I was playing a game where an ad hoc rule was:

(grapple) + (successful strength contest) == (death by strangulation)

I think this is way overpowered. And would plan on changing tactics so my halfling wizard became a mad strangler if it were allowed going forward.

(It won't be a problem discussing this with my DM, that's not what this question is about. I'm interested solutions people might already be using.)

Note on Question Focus

To keep the topic focused, I'm not asking about other breath-related scenarios ("choking out" a target to capture it, holding a victim underwater). A concise answer that incorporated these other cases might be appropriate, especially if it sheds light on this specific case.

Answer 1

Our party barbarian wanted to choke out another NPC half-orc that she had challenged to a fight. Our DM followed the following pattern:

1. On the strangler's turn, a regular grapple contest is made, with the strangler at disadvantage. This represents the difficulty in getting your hands/forearms/legs around the neck of the enemy. Since it's simple disadvantage, you might be able to negate it if you have the enemy prone or you are enraged (as was the case with the barbarian).
2. On the target's turn, a strength (athletics) or dexterity (acrobatics) contest is made. Now the target is trying to break the chokehold before they risk suffocating. If they break the hold, the grappling ends. If not, continue to step 3 immediately. They can choose to try something else besides making the contest, but if it doesn't break the grapple somehow, proceed to step 3.
3. The target makes a CON save versus 8 + proficiency + str mod of the grappler. If they succeed, they do not pass out, and you start over at step 2. If they fail, they fall unconscious until the end of their next turn. The save DC was a pretty arbitrary calculation chosen to match the save DC calculation for other spells and abilities.

The rationale for the short time to for the orc to become unconscious is that a proper chokehold in real life will cut off your blood supply to the brain and render you unconscious very quickly, and we also didn't care to sit there and roll repeatedly. One piece that is missing here is making such an action fatal, but I suspect that is where you would simply apply the suffocating condition to keep things simple, until the grapple is broken or target dies.

In our situation, the party barbarian choked the orc unconscious and then released him. We were in a drow prison camp, and a female drow showed up and instructed that the barbarian drag him off and feed him to this giant spider. So we didn't have to resolve the fatality ourselves.

We applied the same rules much later to a gnome we were capturing. I suspect that if the target was not a humanoid, different rules would be desired - past a certain point, attack by strangulation does not make sense and should probably be dismissed out of hand or reduced to an improvised weapon attack. It's also pretty limited in a big fight, since enemies can take the help action to give advantage to the grappler on their side, or grapple the grappler and drag them away.

Answer 2

Some things for the DM to take in to account (I’m a grappler as my hobby in real life and I think anyone else who is will concur on these observations):

1. Chokes are fast, but a DnD turn is 6 seconds. A choke should take 2 turns to put someone out (10-15 seconds on a good blood choke will put someone unconscious).

2. This time frame will change based on race, constitution, and strength. A strong neck will help you resist. Constitution for toughness, race because of size/blood and so on.

3. There is an element of improv to a choke. If you don’t quite sink it in or if you are not getting enough pressure, you may have to adjust. So there is an element of struggle. So it wouldn’t be unusual to see a real choke take 30 seconds or even a minute of struggle before it worked. So any time a choke is being applied it depends on the class/race of both parties. So if the barbarian/monk Goliath/dwarf is choking out a little gnome bard? That is going to be easier and take less time (maybe 1-2 turns) than if it were reversed.

4. Chokeouts are amazing but difficult. Just watch some UFC or grappling matches. On a choke it doesn’t matter if the opponent taps, if it is on correctly they will go out. Which leads to...

5. Once someone is out? 1-2 turn of the choke being applied and that person is deadsies. RP that as you will. Police are not allowed to choke anymore because it is easy to accidentally kill someone if it is held too long.

My experience with this: It only came up once successfully and it played out fine.

1. Monk wood elf choked out gnome bard who failed 2 grapple checks. RP was gnome went unconscious.
2. Tried it again another time on a stronger character (Dwarf) who failed the first and won the second. The monk got curb stomped afterwards.
   Bad idea to choke someone with other enemies around

Answer 3

I use improvised weapon mechanics to simulate this.

I'm going to assume they already have the target grappled since trying to choke something you don't have a hold of is a bad episode of the Three Stooges and not a combat tactic.

So when somebody grapples something and wants to strangle it they have two options:

• Bare hands = 1 + STR for damage

Tavern Brawler and Monk change base value of the damage due to the specific override on unarmed damage.

• Weapon / Feature of the Environment = 1d4 + STR for damage

For example: Pressing a quarterstaff across their throat, using a whip around the throat, tying the rope holding a chandelier up around it, etc. I basically treat it any item/feature used to choke as an improvised weapon.

It takes a long time to choke somebody out. Six seconds isn't going to cut it. Even if you critical rolled and crushed their windpipe with your Barbarian arms, they'd still be rolling around for about a minute while their body used up the remaining oxygen in their blood and they asphyxiate. So I find the improvised weapon damage rules work best, because it accurately reflects the duration required to literally choke somebody to death.

Oh, and incidentally, part of my house rule is that somebody engaged in a successful choke (so grappled and they land their attack roll) becomes both restrained and pinned, similar to the functionality of the Grappler feat, but without the benefit of not suffering the disadvantages.

Getting out of this is still your Athletics/Acrobatics check.

Answer 4

As you are fishing for house rules, I feel okay bringing in something from an earlier edition: D&D3.5 had the Choker; a monster for whom strangling opponents to death was their whole schtick. It came with a well written out mechanical ability that allowed it to do so. On more than one occassion I've succesfully applied this same ability to other characters, with reasonable penalties for not being literally built for the purpose. I can certainly suggest this as a source to base any such ability/maneuver on.

Answer 5

I personally would just use the rules listed for the Ettercaps optional web garrotte for strangling and say if you're doing it empty handed you don't gain the advantage from the garrotte. Pretty straight forward, no extra random rules it becomes a grapple contest. A lot of this simply comes down to DMs call. Web garrotte states that as long as the grapple is maintained you switch to suffocation rules.

Then it's just a matter of how long does it take to drop X creature/humanoid to 0 HP based on Con modifier. Note this doesn't strictly kill them, but it does make a coupe de grace much more manageable.

As Eidolon(?) Points out, a properly applied chokehold takes about on average six or so seconds to knock someone out, 1 round, which is reasonable given the average humanoid has a Con of +0 or +1 given the 10-13 stats.

Answer 6

I know this is rather an older thread, yet I have been looking for an answer how to handle choking out a creature in combat. As per rules for suffocating, this is rather lengthy and typically doesn't come up in combat rounds.

So I have found some inspiration here and back over at GiantIP and came to this ruling, which our DM likes. I try to keep things as easy and streamlined as possible.

Choking out a foe.

When you are in a Grapple as the controller you can attempt to put your grappled target in a choke hold. You make an opposed Athletics or Acrobatics test (each creature can choose to use to rely on their strength or dexterity for the choke hold). The controller has disadvantage on this roll. When successful, the target is muted, so it can't speak or cast spells with a verbal component and both creatures are still considered locked in a grapple.

To choke your target out, you need two successive rounds of holding the choke hold and each of these two rounds, you need to have made a successful Choke Test. A choke test can be made instead of an attack and is an opposed Athletics check with disadvantage for the choker. when a creature becomes choked out, it drops unconscious (0 HP) and if the choker continues to hold the choke hold, the creatures fails a death saving throw per round the choke is hold uninterrupted. So you allies can try to help you and grapple your choker, to force him to release the choke. A Creature that is choking someone else, can be grappled with advantage of course, as it's kinda busy. To break the choke hold, you need to win an opposed Athletics check. You are now in a three way grapple, on which normal grapple rules apply.

To escape from a choke hold, you apply the same rules to escape a grapple. When successful, you are no longer muted but still grappled by the controller.