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

[DaveDash]

Oh I forgot this one. Your familiar/animal companion dies, you gain one level of exhaustion.

 

[Flamestrike]

Oh I forgot this one. Your familiar/animal companion dies, you gain one level of exhaustion.

And other players can restore HP by licking your tears.

 

[DaveDash]

And other players can restore HP by licking your tears.

Not as bad as permanently losing a point of con... kids these days don't know what real Wizards has to go through back in the day.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Not as bad as permanently losing a point of con... kids these days don't know what real Wizards has to go through back in the day.

Yeah, typically never even getting the spell in the first place, and then deciding it was fairly terrible if you ever did pick it up.

 

[S_Dalsgaard]

That reminds me of another house rule, albeit character creation one - you can put your ability stat bonuses on any stat. So when you choose your race, you are choosing it based on matters other than "which race boosts my main stats".

I will probably do this for my next campaign.

I have also removed the subraces for most races (all dwarfs are mountain dwarves and all elves are high elves).

 

[ad_hoc]

Been playing since the red box, and 18 in a stat after racial mods (in rare cases) has never been too high.

5e is its own game. An 18 in another game is not the same as an 18 in 5e.

One high stat and a couple of dump stats is actually a pretty poor investment in 5th edition. Spreading your stat points out tends to make for a much more survivable character.

Some stats are just better than others. The idea of saves for all stats is great but in reality saves are just not spread out amongst all of the stats. Your character is much more survivable if you have good save stats.

Dump stats are a problem in 5e.

Also; for ever Half Orc barbarian tavern brawler or Mountain Dwarf heavy armor master gunning for Strength 18 at first level, there is a Strength 16 Half Orc or Dwarf with an extra 2 points to allocate to another ability score, and the Great weapon master, Polearm master or Shield master feats.

It still puts them an ASI ahead so they can pick up that feat later and be at the same spot the other character is at.

I toyed around with a Shadowrun style priority system.

You can either have 30 ability score points, or 27 and a feat (along those lines).

Why do you want even higher stats? Stats already start close to the cap in 5e. I recommend thinking of 5e as its own game. Don't think about how you had 18s in other D&D games and compare that to 5e. Especially if you play with feats. Feats become too good if you start with high stats.

Disagree here mate. If they run out of intresting feats, it lets them use those extra ASI's for... well.. ASI's! This improves saves and skills (survivability and utility).

Here's the thing, ASIs for secondary and tertiary stats just aren't as good.

In the regular game characters are starved of ASIs. One of the things fighters get are extras. It is something special they get. If everyone gets extra ASIs it simply makes fighters worse in comparison.

Think about it this way, regular characters get 5 ASIs and fighters get 7 (one of those extras is at 6th level which is huge that part of the game). If instead, everyone got 10 and fighters got 12, how important would that fighter ability be?

It gets worse the more everyone else gets.

Also, I do use a fair few homebrewed feats.

It doesn't matter.

One thing I thought of with this houserule is only allowing feats at 1st level. So give an extra feat but that is the only one you can take unless it is one of the bonus ASIs you get from fighter or rogue.

That would make it special again and make people think twice about taking one to boost their stat at the start.

 

[Flamestrike]

Some stats are just better than others. The idea of saves for all stats is great but in reality saves are just not spread out amongst all of the stats. Your character is much more survivable if you have good save stats.

I disagree. While the lions share of saves target Dex, Wisdom and Con (and everyone barring high level Monks) gets one good one of that three, the other saves get hit from time to time as well. Strength being almost as common as the 'big three'.

Dump stats are a problem in 5e.

I've found them more of a problem in 3e. Barring ability damage dumping strength, charisma and intelligence was pretty common in 3.x. I find players dump in 5e but then get a bit grumpy when a save comes along that targets one of those bad saves. Its about even really.

Why do you want even higher stats? Stats already start close to the cap in 5e. I recommend thinking of 5e as its own game. Don't think about how you had 18s in other D&D games and compare that to 5e. Especially if you play with feats. Feats become too good if you start with high stats.

Disagree. A 20th level character, human, Fighter all ASI increased, best possible stat spread:

20, 20, 20, 16, 14, 10. From experience, higher stats than that were common in 3.x at 20th level. A lot of that was due to stat increasing items (which were largely assumed in the maths).

In the regular game characters are starved of ASIs. One of the things fighters get are extras. It is something special they get. If everyone gets extra ASIs it simply makes fighters worse in comparison.

I agree to a point. I dont see how awarding a feat at 1st level dilutes the ASI leg up that fighters get. Feat chains arent really a thing anymore, with most concepts needing ony one or two feats to be realised.

 

[Uller]

Surprise: we decided surprise is too powerful. Too often characters were getting two rounds of actions before surprised characters could act at all. So we determine surprise and roll init normally. Surprised creatures hae the "surprised" condition: a surprised creature cannot take reactions, attacks against it have advantage and it has disadvantage on saves and ability checks. On its turn it loses the surpirsed condition and is moved to the end of the init order.

The result is being surprised sucks a lot more (due to advantage/disadvantage) but there is no chance of someone being surprise locked for two rounds...everyone gets to act in the first round. If you are surprised but roll well on init you mitigate a lot of the bad.

We also have a rule for zone effects. They all do damage at the end of the turn of their "owner" and when a character first moves into it (not when it moves onto the character) an never more than once per round. Cloudkill, moonbeam, cloud of daggers, and even flaming sphere all work the same way to avoid abuse and confusion.

 

[steeldragons]

EDIT: I really like this one! Very flavorful! If I ever get around to running a homebrew world, I might do something like this too.

Glad you like it. Have fun with it.

For all of you who've said you use house rules for initiative: how are they working out for you? I'm not satisfied with the default method for initiative, as I find working out the initiative order grinds everything to a halt and can sometimes take the tension out of a pending combat. I imagine rerolling initiative - and thus have to reorder the list - every round would make that feeling even worse and thus slow the game down even more. And I'm not sure I like the idea of side initiative either, in which all of one side goes and then all of the other side (assuming they haven't been completely decimated before they even get a turn). I've tried just running freeform combats without rolling initiative but my players don't really like that. So yeah - I have yet to find a method of running turn-based combats that I actually like.

I've found it really isn't disruptive to the table or significant time consuming. There are only 3 possible outcomes. So once you've used them a few times, it's really very quick.

1. 50% of the time, I [the DM] will roll higher than the party.

[Oh, guess I should have noted that we use a d10 for initiative, also.]

But anyway, so when the DM is higher and no one with their modifiers beats my roll +modifiers, DM goes first, everyone else after. They can work out an order if they want or we just go around the table.

2. In the cases where the group rolls higher than the DM can get with mod's, they just go first...either in order that they basically know after a few combats (who has the highest dex? Who's the ranger/barbarian/elf/whatever with the keen senses? or whatever other mod's there might be) or I have never had a problem just going clockwise around the table.

Players' side won initiative. I don't care who goes when, because they're all going before any of their enemies.

3. Now, when you have those cases when a few modified rolls are better than the DM's roll and a few aren't...it is the players that beat it, then the DM, then whoever's left.

I mean, if you have piles and piles of modifiers that change a lot, it could be a real pain. But since these things basically stay the same: Player 1 knows they're always adding, say, +3 to the inish roll. Player 2 knows she gets +2 from some magic item. Player 3's halfling rogue is getting his +5. etc...

So, DM rolls 7. Player rolling for the group gets a 3. Everyone knows, in an instant, halfling rogue's going first, then DM, and player's 1 & 2 ("lost" initiative) go last.

It's really not as complicated as I'm making it sound. hahaha.

 

[ThirdWizard]

In the regular game characters are starved of ASIs.

This is exactly why I instituted the house rule of everyone getting a feat at 1st level. The problem being, that boosting your primary stat to 20 is going to be mechanically better than taking a feat in most circumstances, except in certain specific builds. This means a non-human who starts with a 16 main stat is not going to see a feat until 12th level at best if they decide that it isn't worth it to increase a secondary stat! It should be a choice between effective or fun until you're more than halfway through your adventuring career. At least, it isn't in my game.

And, as far as power goes, an extra feat isn't going to throw anything out of whack. You can ignore the small boost of power when building adventures. It's less powerful than a character who rolled stats and got lucky, which is already a possibility in the game.

As for fighters? "Don't give us all extra feats, DM! It will slightly disturb the delicate balance of my extra class feats!" said no player ever. The fighter is not diminished by everyone getting an extra feat, because the fighter is getting a feat too! He's more powerful, not less, and so what if the paladin doesn't have to wait until level 12 to get a feat vs. the fighter getting his first one at 8? Is the game so delicately balanced that this matters? My answer is a resounding no, especially since there is already the human variant that allows a feat at 1st level.

In play, it simply doesn't matter for balance. What it does is:

• Give a bit more breathing room for players to be able to take a neat, fun, option in the form of a feat at character creation
• Not feel so drowned in having to boost their primary attribute to 20 ASAP that they feel they are skipping a fun aspect of the game
• Let the player feel that if he wants to boost CON after maxing their main ability, they can do so and still have some customability behind their character