Tavern Brawl Rules

Everyone loves a good tavern brawl, they are entertaining and fun but they don’t really work using regular D&D combat rules. So here’s a set of ad-hoc rules you can use to simulate a good mass punch-up. Obviously the brawl doesn’t have to take place in the tavern but for the purposes of these rules the following must apply:

• The fight is between two sides. This is usually the player characters against everyone else but they might have some allies.
• It isn’t to the death.
• Nobody uses lethal weapons, damaging spells or abilities.

General rules

The fight is conducted in rounds but they aren’t necessarily the same as combat rounds, they can be anywhere between 10 seconds to a minute in length, as dictated by the narrative.

The goal for the player characters is to win 3 rounds before they lose 3 rounds (similarly to how death saves work in D&D)

Brawl order

At the start of the brawl all the players roll initiative to determine the order in which they act. The “opposition” doesn’t need to roll.

The brawl round

In each round the player can choose a skill and make a skill check as their “attack roll”. They can choose any skill so long as they can justify it. The more creative the justification the better. They can also use their spells or abilities to give themselves or fellow fighters an edge. These can also be creatively adapted to be non-damaging. (For example a monk can decide to use their Deflect Missiles ability to catch and throw back any beer kegs thrown at them, a Barbarian can enter and sustain a rage, a Bard can use their Bardic Inspiration, etc.)

The player’s roll will be contested by a d20 roll modified by the following factors:

• Outnumbering: the number of combatants their side is outnumbered by (up to a maximum of +5 and a minimum of -5 if the players' side outnumbers the opposition)
• Hardness: +1 to +10 depending on the hardness of the opposition (the clientele of an upmarket city tavern is not going to put up as much of a fight as a shipping port speakeasy full of half-orc dockers)
• Creativity: 0 to -10 depending on the creativity of the move (note: repeating the same move reduces its effectiveness by 1 point every time)

If the player wins the contested roll, they win the round, if it’s a tie, nothing of consequence happens, otherwise they lose the round.

Conclusion

If a player has lost 3 rounds, they’re knocked down for good. Of course no serious damage is done, they come round after the fight with nothing worse than a badly bruised ego and maybe a purse made a few coins lighter by a spot of opportunistic pickpocketing.

If a player has won 3 rounds, they get to boast about it and maybe they’ve even managed to earn the grudging respect of some.

General notes

If the brawl is started suddenly by one of the player characters, they (and they alone) get an extra “surprise” round in which the outnumbering modifier is zero.

Although these rules have been devised for D&D ruleset, they should be fairly easy to adapt to most systems.