Common Houserules?

I have no idea what is generally used as house rules. I have a sense of what most people see at weaknesses. Below is just my view of what I think the consensus is.

The warlock's blade pact is a little weak compared to the other pacts. The Hexblade patron (using Charisma for pact weapon attacks, medium armor, shields) is seen as a back-door fix. I think the most common fix is "Just take Fighter at level 1, then multiclass into Warlock." My house rules adopt some Hexblade features as part of the Blade Pact boon. I also allow blade pact warlocks to create two items (any weapon or shield), so they can choose between any of the fighting styles.

The sorcerer is a little weak relative to the wizard. My House Rules solution is to allow Sorcery Points to regenerate on an SR, and be able to change a spell known with 24 hours of downtime.

The Four Elements monk is a little weak. Not sure what a good solution is there. A few more Ki is probably sufficient.

The Champion Fighter is a little weak compared to the other sub-classes. The Brute subclass published in Unearthed Arcana seems superior in every way, and should probably be considered a 1:1 substitute.

The PHB ranger is a little weak. I think most people use the Revised Ranger published in Unearthed Arcana.

Dexterity is over-powered compared to the other stats. I have no idea what consensus solutions there are for that. One thing I'm considering is adding proficiency bonus to Initiative instead of dexterity.

Sadras said:

What about enemies flanking PCs which might be more common? I mean when there are 5 on 1 do none of them get advantage?

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None. In general, advantage requires magic, inspiration, or a condition. The 5E design assumed that advantage was a boon, not the status quo, so certain mathematical elements of the game do not work as well when it is too common.

When I play in games where flanking allows advantage, it is rare that a PC melee attack doesn't have advantage and (smart) monster groups can become overwhelming fast as when monsters rarely hit and you're doubling the number of dice they roll, it adds up fast.

Further, it makes too many things where the main advantage should be granting advantage into useless options. The bless spell is great in games where there is no flank/advantage, but if you can just flank to get advantage, people find bless underwhelming.

Also, party size has an impact on combat capability when you have flanking grant advantage. The more melee PCs you can get into the game, the more trivial it becomes to gain advantage.

After playing in a lot of games that use flank/advantage and running a lot of games with flank/OA, I find my rule to be better for the game.

We use flanking and so far have used the Fighter action surge being one attack instead of many. we use the timelines for making magic items as the maximum time it will take and let players make things in some cases between adventures, We start with a point buy and allow feats which I wish there were more of (as an option). Anything WOTC published is allowed. I converted a Shugenja from 3e as a class for our game.

Oh! "No house rules" is also a common enough house rule.

bmfrosty said:

In most of my games - including where I play AL - a critical hit is the maximum of the dice plus the rolled value. A crit should mean something, and snake eyes on a crit sucks!

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I will likely add this to my next campaign. The reality of the wow-crit being immediately deflated by crap-ones plays poorly.