I’ll be DMing some more 5e soon and I want to take the opportunity to try some different ways of playing (I’ll post my own suggestions as comments so they can start their own discussion threads). What alternate rules have you tried that you thought worked well? They can be larger changes to the game or little QoL tweaks (though if you can respond to the suggestion with “at this point just play [different game] instead” then that’s probably more than what I’m looking for!)

  • Shiroa@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    This one’s short and sweet. At level 4 PCs get the Score Improvement AND to pick a Feat. This has propagated throughout my whole group, but the original DM that started it reasoned "I think a lot of Feats are really cool, but a lot of people aren’t comfortable passing on their first Score Improvement to pick up something situational. So they get a freebie, because I want to see what uses they come up with.

    • jake_eric@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This reminds me, I do something kinda similar. At ASI levels I give out a +1 and a feat, instead of the usual +2 or a feat. I agree that it’s more fun to let people take feats instead of feeling obligated to pick the ASI!

    • smeg@feddit.ukOP
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      1 year ago

      I’ve seen a variant of this where everyone gets a free feat at level 1

  • type_1@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    This might be in the 5e DMG and I’m just forgetting, but I’m a big fan of the 10 minute exploration turn while the party goes through dungeons. I find that it helps things move faster and helps players feel like they’re getting enough time in the spotlight during the exploration phase. Rather than figuring out how far they can move in 10 minutes, I just allow characters either to move into an adjacent room (provided there is an unblocked passage to do so) or an action inside of the room. Actions in the room take the whole 10 minutes, but I usually let it slide if a player wants to perform a short sequence of actions to achieve a single result, the whole sequence getting represented by one roll if necessary.

    To streamline combat, I have ported over minions from 4e (Matt Colville and I actually converged on this, I had been doing it since I switched to 5e and didn’t find his video on it for years) and a modified version of the coup de grace rules. Minions are monsters with full stats and attacks but they die in a single hit, no matter how much damage they were dealt. For the modified coup de grace, if a player character deals half or more of a monsters HP in a single hit, even during normal combat, that monster dies immediately. Anything that gets the monsters off the field before they get boring really, since it allows me to throw out large waves of enemies that only take a few minutes to fight since many of them go down in one hit. I run a fairly heroic game of d&d so letting the players plow through enemies helps create the vibe I want during the game.

    • smeg@feddit.ukOP
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      1 year ago

      Do you use CR calculations to build your encounters, and if so how much is a minion worth?

      • type_1@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        I do not use CR to build encounters, and I use milestone experience, but in 4e, a minion was usually worth 1/4 to 1/2 the experience of a monster with equivalent stats.

        • smeg@feddit.ukOP
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          1 year ago

          Cheers, the actual XP is less of a concern, I’m more concerned that I throw the right number of them at the players to be challenging without being fatal!

          • Urnchos@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            I found long ago that trying to balance my 5E encounters in any way, shape, or form is just a hopeless endeavor.

            I just throw things at my party and kind of let 'er rip. Some end up hard, some end up easy, after a while you get a general gist for what they tend to be able to handle.

  • klenow@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    As PC’s progress, falling to 0HP in combat gets less and less meaningful. So I have used a rule that whenever a PC is at 0HP at the end of their turn, OR fail a death save, they take a level of exhaustion. It makes the 0HP yo-yo more dangerous, and makes it so “death” has some longer term consequences.

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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      1 year ago

      I tried this for a bit and everyone hated it. We were only like 6th level though.

      A variant I considered but didn’t try was to track how far into the negative you go. So if you get slammed by a dragon for 40 damage and you had 10/60 HP, now you’re at -30. A basic healing word isn’t going to wake you up.

    • Grenade Salad@ttrpg.network
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      1 year ago

      My group uses this, but with a separate temporary exhaustion (we call it Trauma) that goes away on a short rest. Still handily serves the purpose of discouraging yoyoing without being too punitive.

  • Lazerbeams2@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    I try to keep house rules to a minimum. My biggest one is a change to inspiration. Inspiration is a reroll and you need to keep the new result. You can have multiple inspirations (max 3) and you start each session with one for free. If you end the session with more than one, then you can take one extra inspiration with you to the next session

  • Syncrossus@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    I have a bunch of houserules in my game, but here are some of my favorite and least complex:

    Sprint: If you do not do anything else on your turn and you are not in difficult terrain, you can move up to 5x your speed (150ft typically). Attacks of opportunity against you are made at advantage. This is mainly to allow characters to catch up to combat without waiting 10 rounds.

    Fight or Flight: Replaces the frightened condition. You can choose to flee or fight. Fleeing is unambiguous, fighting entails doing everything you can to kill the source of your fear – no healing, no hiding, no stabilizing, no keeping your smite slots for later. Failing a save by 5 or more forces you to flee. (Taken from an XP to Level 3 video.)

    Death saves are rolled in secret.

    Light weapon property: we use the OneD&D version.

    Critical hits: If you kill a target with one, the damage spills over to an enemy of your choice if I deem it to be within range of that attack. The damage keeps spilling over as long as you kill enemies. For instance, a critical hit with a bow worth 35 points of damage could kill up to five 7HP goblins if they are conga-lining in your direction.

    • smeg@feddit.ukOP
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      1 year ago

      I really like the idea of secret death saves, definitely feels like it would up the tension a lot when someone drops

      • Syncrossus@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        It really gets everyone scrambling to help, and it makes more sense for PCs not to know. It’s one of my favorite changes, and it’s so simple, it’s really good.

        • smeg@feddit.ukOP
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          1 year ago

          Maybe let them know the results if they use their action to make a medicine check to try and stabilise, though tbh the only time I’ve seen anyone actually do that is at level 1 when nobody’s got magical healing yet!

  • dumples@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I have been using the bonus action to drink a potion optional rule. As a bonus action you get to roll but as an action you get the maximum from the potion. Its been pretty easy to implement and is only rarely used in my campaign.

  • tidy_frog@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The only reason this is a “house rule/variant” is because everybody allows the optional rules by default and doesn’t understand what “optional” or “check with your DM first” means.

    I don’t allow multi-classing. Subclasses do it better and are actually balanced. When I don’t disallows multi-classing I get 1-3 hexblade dips every group because of how OP the dip is.

    I’ve had a ton of Paladin/hexblades, more than a few Wizard (Bladesinger)/hexblades, and even a rogue/hexblade with a fucking double-scimitar.

    I’m sick to death of hexblades.

    Fuck hexblades. No more multiclassing in my games. Assholes abused it so much it’s no longer an option because I like my hair where it is, and the alternative is for me to quit DMing altogether.

    …and nobody else seems willing to run the fucking game…

    • smeg@feddit.ukOP
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      1 year ago

      Seems a bit overkill to ban all multiclassing when all you really want to ban is hexblade dips! I think you really just need to ban munchkins from your table ;)

  • foyrkopp@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve adopted the “you get Inspiration whenever you roll a nat 1” idea that the playtest floated for a while and it’s turned out well.

    I think that the “official” way of granting inspiration (grant when players play well into their PC’s character traits) is a horrible design that both fails to achieve what it sets out to do and is both highly subjective & continuously forgotten.

    The nat 1 approach doesn’t break any other system, reliably hands out a small trickle of Inspiration just the way the original was supposed to do and requires little to no work.

    I’m somewhat tempted to introduce QoL features like “you can hold two” or “you can use them to reroll”, but part of me likes how it’s a limited tactical resource rather than a safety net.

    • smeg@feddit.ukOP
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      1 year ago

      My concern with that UA was that powergamers would try to keep doing mundane actions to generate more inspiration, though to be fair I don’t think anyone I play with would try that!

      • foyrkopp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        As a DM, I decide when an action warrants a roll.

        Actions that don’t actually carry a risk when failing don’t fall into this category.

        So no, trying to pick your training padlock won’t net you a roll. Trying to pickpocket in the marketplace will, but there’s some definitive consequences attached to failure.

        Fortunately, I’ve got a table of rather mature players, so this isn’t a problem to begin with.