Monday, May 18, 2015

Possible 5e House Rules to Consider

This is just an ongoing list where I can keep track of a few house-rules I've seen online and want to consider further.

Exhausting Injuries. The lingering injury rules from the DMG are interesting, but fairly harsh at low levels. But a level of exhaustion each time a PC is reduced to 0 or fewer HP seems reasonable and easy. Maybe allow Barbarians or anyone else who has class features that can grant exhaustion a difficult Con save (DC 15?) to resist this exhaustion from being knocked out.

Shorter short rests. From the DMG, basically make short rests about 10 minutes to coincide with rituals. Nicely gives the PCs a time constraint on rituals: you rest or do a ritual, but maybe not both.

Hidden death saves. The results of a death saving throw aren't public, so they party won't necessarily know if they have another round to save their friend.

Firing into melee. I generally dislike fumble rules, but firing into melee sort of demands a chance to hit your allies. Doing it on a natural 1 seems reasonable, though halflings will be strangely immune to it because of their lucky trait.

Group initiative. From the DMG. It can be super quick/easy to just sit people in initiative order and roll once for the group, then everyone adds their individual modifiers. A little complex because a barbarian, for example, might get his own die roll and jump ahead but that's probably not a big deal. Would let the players coordinate things better.

Individual initiative with weapon speeds. From the DMG. Alternately, to make combats a bit less clear, characters declare their actions first and roll each round. It could be fairly easily done with cards that say "attack" "spell", or little white boards. But you declare first and when it gets to you all you can do is your action or maybe abort for a dodge? Rolling each round would keep it a huge mystery.

Crits = max damage. Doubling the dice is effectively max damage anyway, this would just speed things up.

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