I have not played the original Symbaroum, but it looks amazing. I am curious how you will implement the gritty feel of Symbaroum in 5e. I see that you will not get HP back on long rest, requiring an extended rest.
Are you sticking to Rules As Written for death, dying, and resurrection, or are there special rules for this as well?
Are you increasing hit dice count?
Hi, Jacob. I would kindly like to request again more information on how you see the gritty nature of Symbaroum translating into 5e, beyond not healing on a long rest. Are you planning to keep armor soak, for instance?
I would greatly appreciate your input. Thanks.
Sorry, I somehow missed your original questions. Some answers below:
For a variety of reasons, we're keeping the core combat engine of 5e pretty much as is (this makes swapping classes around or importing a monster from one setting to the other much easier, and also makes the learning curve much easier for existing 5e players). So death and death saving throws work as expected. What is different is that resurrection (for the most part*) is much, much harder in Symbaroum.
Increasing Hit Dice would cause the opposite effect, reducing the gritty nature. Instead we give you multiple things to spend Hit Dice on and force you to choose between them.
Armor soak won't appear, for the above given reasons. There are more types of damage and resistances/immunities are often more important (i.e. don't assume that just because your nonmagical sword couldn't hurt the creature that a nonmagical hammer has no chance either). Plus many more creatures have features that inflict or interact with conditions. Healing always comes with a price — sometimes that's just thaler, but more often it is Corruption, limited use features and the always-limited Hit Dice themselves. Lots of monsters have interesting reaction features that allow them to do things not on their turn, helping balance out the action economy if they're often encountered alone or in small groups.
* I consider
revivify a special case, and not as corrupting as other resurrection magic, as the soul and body are still intertwined. Basically think of it as a magical AED device.
But once you get out of that grace period, dead is dead (unless you want to really really do some bad stuff).