D&D 5E House Rules That Make The Game Better

Ease of house ruling is a major strength of 5e. It can be easily tweaked to get the feel you want, and this is officially encouraged.

Two that I do:

1. Group init roll - single d20 roll by side, but *add individual init mods*. Gives the best of both worlds; fast PCs still have an advantage but it resolves very quickly and the PCs will usually be acting en masse as a team, not as dissociated individuals. This makes tactical coordination, including retreat, far far easier. Going forward I'm planning to use this in all future campaigns, it is possibly the best house rule I've ever come up with.

2. Negative hit points, not death saves - Your hp can go negative and you die at negative hp = your max hp. No healing from 0. Attacks vs helpless are auto-crit, but no death saves. In practice this MASSIVELY ENHANCES PC survivability, because (a) monsters chewing on helpless PCs will often take several rounds to kill them and (b) without pop-up PCs or fast kills, intelligent monsters have no incentive to target the fallen, so they focus on PCs still standing. And w/out death saves, in case of a lost battle PCs will often be captured, not killed. I do use a death save after 1 hour unconscious - pass and you have short rested & can spend hit dice to recover, fail & we roll again in 1 hour, you only die after 3 consecutive fails. Also if you were taken to 0 by a crit from a piercing or slashing weapon you are bleeding out & I'll use the RAW.

What do you do that you've found has worked really well?

We adopted the variant healing rules from the DMG so that a character may only spend hit dice during short rests if a healing kit is used, with no full HP recovery at the end of long rests. To be consistent with this grittier approach, we house-ruled the Fighter's Second Wind so that it provides temporary hit points that go away as soon a short rest is taken.

As we play on a battlemat and use the variant rule for flanking, we also house-ruled 3.x style rules for attacks of opportunity, reintroducing the concept of threatened squares to determine whether movement provokes AoO.

Heh. I have my own houserule initiative system, which I think is a vast improvement and that I'll be using in most campaigns moving forward--but it's almost the exact opposite of yours. It increases randomness and makes tactical coordination harder. I find it leads to more exciting and more dynamic combats.

But to each his/her own, as they say.

Beyond that? I don't think I have any major house rules as of yet. Though I have a few I'm contemplating...

1. Init is rolled each round
2. Slow healing
3. When reduced to zero hp, roll a death save, if fail roll on Injuries table
4. No raise dead, resurrection, revivify
5. No disengage
6. GWF and SS substitute -5/+10 mechanic for +1 str or dex
7. Lightfoot halfling and Wood elf hiding abilities are substituted for proficiency in stealth skill.

I do use the DMG Slow Healing option BTW, but I agree it's a good rule for most styles of play. Since I didn't come up with that myself I didn't mention it. I didn't mention my "Proficiency in All Saves" or "No Skills/PCs have Proficiency in all Class Skills" house rules, since while these work for my current game I think they are more a matter of taste than directly and obviously generally improving the game over the official alternatives.

Psikerlord# said:

5. No disengage

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What benefit do you find from this?

Crit = Max damage

We roll initiative at the start of combat, then continue in that order throughout the combat.

We regain HP up to half our max on a long rest - if you're super-hurt, then 2 days in town will get you back to full, if you're in a dungeon then you might have to spend some hit dice after your long rest to heal up fully.

Malovaan said:

We roll initiative at the start of combat, then continue in that order throughout the combat.

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That's RAW.

group initiative rolled each round
action points (ala eberron 3.5 /ua eberron article)
disengage and relative positioning ala 13th age (TotM - no grids or minis)