Poisoned vs. Nauseated

I had a discussion over at a few of the Google+ groups this weekend. It concerned the lack of Nauseated in the 5e conditions rules. Presently, if you have a character that might be nauseated you do a CON save. If they fail, they get the Poisoned condition.

I have a couple issues with using Poisoned.

•  It’s not very fun to play. All Poisoned does is apply a Disadvantage to the character. That’s it? You roll twice while puking your guts out. We can do better than that, right?

•  A character becoming nauseated is not clearly explained in the rules. The only RAW concerning nauseated is a round-about mention in the Troglodyte’s Stench ability or the Stinking Cloud spell. Stench doesn't come out and say nausea, it’s just implied that you smell something bad and roll for Poisoned. Stinking Cloud does say nauseated, but the results are different than Poisoned.

• I simply don’t like using Poisoned for Nausea. Prior editions didn’t use it. They used Nausea.  For some reason they changed it for 5e. You can be nauseated due to poisoning, but you can’t be poisoned because of nausea. It doesn’t make sense to me.

I think nausea should be in a lot more adventures. There’s a lot of reasons heroes and adventurers might become nauseated, from dropping into a fetid sewer, seeing rotted corpses or eating bad food just to name a few. It should be a condition that creates a significant enough obstacle that the player needs to deal with before moving on, not just an increase to failure chances.

Here’s an idea for a house rule to deal with the Nauseated condition, I think it’s a little closer to the how a player would react if she was overcome with nausea.

Nauseated:
-  Apply three levels of exhaustion while being affected or around the cause of the nausea

-  Unable to consume enough food and drink to complete a long rest

-  a level of exhaustion per day+CON mod is obtained while nauseated

Tell me what you think!