5th Edition D&D House Rules and Variants


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Sovereign Court

Haha, quite true.

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Which isn't a problem if it is easy to buy and sell magical equipment, but when it is hard to sell and buy stuff, unwanted magical equipment isn't really treasure, it's just a big shiny anchor taking up space in the bag of holding.

Sovereign Court

I think I may have to play up the "if you flash around nice stuff, you're going to attract unwanted attention" angle. hehehe...

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So you get extra XP instead of gp?

;-)


Do you get many limited use items?

Potions scrolls wands etc?

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We learned how to make scrolls in our down time.

Potions of healing are actually in the PH equipment list, but everything else is a lot more rare.

Wands are very different than PF ones. Fewer charges, but usually recharge daily. Like 7 charges, regain 1d6 after a long rest.

So far, no wands of clw. :-P But Short Rests do what they did. In combat healing can be a bit hairy with large parties, but there are more AoE healing effects (Preserve Life, Mass Healing Word, Mass Cure Wounds), so that's good.


SmiloDan wrote:
Yeah, like, Col. Mustard almost never collects $200 for passing Go whenever I play Clue. ;-)

In my games, if you land on him, he goes back to that players pool that still needs to make a circuit, but they can take shortcuts if they manage to connect 4 in a row, but only if they have enough country cards to buy spaces equal to the armies they would normally get.

Sovereign Court

Irontruth wrote:
SmiloDan wrote:
Yeah, like, Col. Mustard almost never collects $200 for passing Go whenever I play Clue. ;-)
In my games, if you land on him, he goes back to that players pool that still needs to make a circuit, but they can take shortcuts if they manage to connect 4 in a row, but only if they have enough country cards to buy spaces equal to the armies they would normally get.

What happens if you roll a yahtzee?


So, I am currently looking at level progression for my campaign. Having just put together the outline of the first adventure I want to run for the campaign I can see that one adventure day has taken the PCs from first to second level, without any exp rewards for quest or non-combat encounters.

So I checked out the charts and it turns out that even by 20th level, levelling happens in the space of about one and a bit adventure days.

This is not a state of affairs I am especially happy with.

At the same time, I am not that keen on the idea of my PCs being stuck at level 1 or 2 for very long.

So here is the idea I am going to try out. Every time a PC levels up, their EXP drops to zero.

At the same time as significantly slowing advancement into high levels, it, I'll be adding in lots of things to allow other areas of advancement and character development, such as encouraging the training of tool proficiency and languages, and the development of social rank.


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Lorathorn wrote:
Irontruth wrote:
SmiloDan wrote:
Yeah, like, Col. Mustard almost never collects $200 for passing Go whenever I play Clue. ;-)
In my games, if you land on him, he goes back to that players pool that still needs to make a circuit, but they can take shortcuts if they manage to connect 4 in a row, but only if they have enough country cards to buy spaces equal to the armies they would normally get.
What happens if you roll a yahtzee?

You lose a factory.

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Zombieneighbours wrote:

So, I am currently looking at level progression for my campaign. Having just put together the outline of the first adventure I want to run for the campaign I can see that one adventure day has taken the PCs from first to second level, without any exp rewards for quest or non-combat encounters.

So I checked out the charts and it turns out that even by 20th level, levelling happens in the space of about one and a bit adventure days.

This is not a state of affairs I am especially happy with.

At the same time, I am not that keen on the idea of my PCs being stuck at level 1 or 2 for very long.

So here is the idea I am going to try out. Every time a PC levels up, their EXP drops to zero.

At the same time as significantly slowing advancement into high levels, it, I'll be adding in lots of things to allow other areas of advancement and character development, such as encouraging the training of tool proficiency and languages, and the development of social rank.

Hi!

Levels 1-3, especially 1 & 2, are supposed to go by fairly quickly. They're apprentice levels, and basically exist to "teach" you how to play your class.

Look at kobolds--they have 2 hit dice! And are CR 1/8 (I think).

So, the very early levels are supposed to fly by, and then it slows for levels 4-11 (the sweet spot), and then accelerates again.


Even at heading into level 10, your talking about two adventure days worth of exp

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And regarding character growth, granting a bonus tool or skill proficiency, or a new language, whenever a character's proficiency bonus increases.


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Why would I go with that? It simply re-inforces level up as the only way in which a character develops and grows?

Nope, there is a perfectly adequate system for it already under the downtime section of the PHB, pg. 187.

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Zombieneighbours wrote:
Even at heading into level 10, your talking about two adventure days worth of exp

Really? How many encounters per day are you running? What's the ballpark XP for typical encounters at any given level?


Pg. 84 of DMG says six to eight medium to hard encounters a day, and list a daily exp budget of 9000 exp per character.

That works out at around 4 medium (4800exp/character) and 2 hard(3800/character), with maybe a quest reward thrown in to push it up to 9000 exp for the day.

The difference between the exp for 10th and 11th level is 2100 exp.

I.E. A 10th level character makes 11th level in 2.3(ish) adventure days.

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Huh. That feels like a lot of encounters to me.

For contrast, I'm running a 5E PbP, but don't own any books other than the PHB, so I'm pulling monster stats and encounters per day and XP and so forth out of my arse.

At 1st level, I gave them one encounter on the first day (to calibrate my expectations of what enemy stats are appropriate), then on the second day they had three encounters plus some quest XP to get them to 2nd.

Then, they had a day with three encounters, one of which was a village-versus-goblins clash that they were a part of and granted a lot of XP. A couple days later, I gave them a noncombat challenge that granted enough XP to get them the rest of the way to 3rd.

From there, they had a day that included three encounters, which was enough to make them want to take a long rest before continuing. In the current day, they're in their first encounter, and it won't be enough to get them to 4th level yet (even after two instances of investigation-based bonus XP). I don't know yet whether the rest of the day will get them there.

Sounds like I'm including far fewer encounters per day, but perhaps giving out a lot more XP? Interestingly, if you don't count days spent traveling (the campaign is on Day 9 in total), it looks like I've ended up in a similar place as what you found: only a day or two of activity to go up a level.

...I wasn't really going anywhere with that, just found it interesting to look. :)


My players handily roflstomped the goblin camp in the beginners box. They took a couple of short rest, but they managed it in a single adventure day. I am fairly certain that most parties are capable of similar, especially if I am not building encounters specifically to be "OH MY GOD, THE HORROR, THE HORROR".

Bare in mind that long encounter days is one of the ways that martials and casters are balanced.

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Zombieneighbours wrote:
My players handily roflstomped the goblin camp in the beginners box. They took a couple of short rest, but they managed it in a single adventure day.

Oh, is that the Lost Mines of Phandelver thing? I've played the first part of that. Very different from the goblin situation I put my players in.

First encounter was seeing a couple of goblins chasing a little girl, with smoke rising somewhere in the background. Second encounter was on the way to the attacked village, getting ambushed by goblin archers up on some rocks. Then they arrived at the village just as the villagers had driven off the first wave, they took a short rest, then prepared some fortifications against a larger attack that night.

The entire goblin tribe came, which consisted of a chief, three bodyguards, a group of archers, and a large group of "runners" (melee fighters whose first job was to dash toward the fortified building and chuck alchemist's fire at it in an attempt to kill all the villagers fortified inside, including noncombatants). Among the villagers were a small handful of bowmen and a few shortsword-wielders.

The ensuing battle felt pretty epic, if I do say so myself. :) Well worth the big chunk of XP they got.

Quote:
Bare in mind that long encounter days is one of the ways that martials and casters are balanced.

Hasn't seemed like an issue yet, but the casters still only have a few slots per day, so maybe I'll have to adjust the paradigm later on. Time will tell, I suppose.


To the OP's point of the thread, I'm just going to shamelessly plug this here:

My Blog, which has a lot of stuff I'm homebrewing for 5e.

There's even a tab at the top to click.


Hey Jiggy, did you know Wizards has a free pdf with monster stats in it available on line?

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Yeah, but then I can't update combats on my lunch break. ;)


Zombieneighbours wrote:

Pg. 84 of DMG says six to eight medium to hard encounters a day, and list a daily exp budget of 9000 exp per character.

That works out at around 4 medium (4800exp/character) and 2 hard(3800/character), with maybe a quest reward thrown in to push it up to 9000 exp for the day.

The difference between the exp for 10th and 11th level is 2100 exp.

I.E. A 10th level character makes 11th level in 2.3(ish) adventure days.

I have multiplied the amount of exp earned for defeating a monster by 0.4 which means you have to defeat 2.5 times as many creatures to level up. I do give some quest exp

Other house rules:
1. You have to undertake some training to level up at odd levels - this doesn't have to be after getting the exp (ie after becoming level 3 the player knows before they can become level 5 they have to at some stage get some training)
2. Lingering injuries - but I have my own rules on how you get them, what they are and how to remove them.
3. Peak condition benefits - if a PC is rested and has done some training or gained some morale type benefit (ie trained with Master Bob, or listened to a great song) they gain a small edge (one example is "powerful - you may re roll a single damage dice on 3 occasions, another is hardy - you can automatically succeed at a single death save)
4. Limited use items (ie potions, scrolls, some wands) when you use them you roll a d4 on a 1 it's the last use. On any other number there is still some magic left (the players love this, it stresses the unpredictability of magic). Sometimes it's a d6 - if you roll a 1 it drops to a d4 next time (same with d8,d10 etc) (I charge double for PHB healing potions as a result)

Rules 1-3 above and the slow exp is partially to stretch out the time taken in game.


I am planning on using quite a number of optional rules from the DMG, straight out of the box

-foraging (DMG pg.111)
-ecoming lost (DMG pg.111)
-Training to gain levels (DMG pg.131)
-Healer's Kit Dependancy (DMG pg.266)
-Slow Natural Healing (DMG pg.267)
-Rest Variant: Gritty Realism (DMG pg.267)

If I may, I would like to borrow and expand on your idea for limited use items Werecorpse. Also, I like your approach to changing EXP. if I find my players find the increasing time between levels to much, I will consider using that approach instead.

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