Recent content by Li Shenron

They will be in a dungeon for the last battle, if it really goes as bad as having to retreat, fleeing won't be a matter of simply comparing speed scores. And again, I am not married to the exact effects of exhaustion. I haven't decided yet, but I might use different penalties.

The CR boss is indeed going to be a solo to reduce the risk. The house rule I am considering is precisely to avoid character death. I am thinking that even double HP is not enough, if the monster rolls high damage a PC can still go unconscious and that might start a "group death spiral" by...

I am not thinking much about it because it's a one-night game. I don't expect them to drop to zero HP in the early battles because they are easy. Should any PC do drop and gain levels of exhaustion, they'll have an opportunity to rest long enough to recover them all before the final boss...

I prefer if they keep acting on their turn with a penalty. Doing the above means they'll have 45% chance of skipping a round and 55% chance of acting normally at no penalty. That would be ok to keep them longer above zero HP, but I still think that with the exhaustion levels they will be even...

Oh yes, I should have been clearer... what I mean with this house rule is that when dropping to zero HP they won't become unconscious, they will stay conscious but gain a level of exhaustion. Each time they get hit again while at zero HP, they'll get another level of exhaustion (or 2 on a crit)...

It's because as far as I remember nobody proposes this before death saving throws, but rather as a replacement for being unconscious. Here even a death spiral adds a buffer. In addition, the general discussions are pretty much always assuming the game continues. I will use these in a one-shot...

I agree completely. I was never a fan of the exact effects of exhaustion in 2014, but I am even less happy with the unimaginative 2024 version. I thought briefly about making my own exhaustion effects, and for the players it won't matter anyway, then I just decided to keep it simple here and...

Yeah grouping sounds like a good idea, as maybe 5 levels might be unnecessarily too big of a buffer. Also level 1 hardly matters before combat is over (and then it becomes the worst), and level 4 is practically irrelevant if I ignore death from massive damage.

You don't see it? Level 2 implies more abilities to choose from during gameplay, entirely in the player's hands. More choices means more complexity. Dying house rules, they don't even need to know they exist until one of them drop to zero hp. Even then, I will be there to tell them where to...

After elaborating the responses in my other thread about popular death & dying house rules, I am now brainstorming some house rule options for yet another one-shot game where I'll have several beginner players at the table. They'll be 1st level and won't have time to level up, so I don't care...

I think it's ok... there are few things in 5e which require minimum ability scores so most options are still open to player characters. Obviously lower success probabilities on any tasks. Less amount of times certain specific abilities can be used before resting (when based on ability...

Feat chains were in 5e before the start i.e. in the 2012-2014 playtest at some point. I don't remember if they were called "themes". And yes, they are a great concept. They don’t compete with subclasses though. Subclasses are class-specific augmentations of the base class concept, and feats are...

Higher level defaults would be useful. I am not usually interested in character generators because IMO the designers focus too much on the fancy look (good for selling, useless and distracting in practice). As a player I don't need defaults, I build my PCs a la carte. As a DM, I have often...

As already said, the more dice are used, the more the results tend to cluster around average, very quickly with the first added dice and then the effect is less pronounced with any additional die. So the highest and lowest scores become less probable, and outcomes are more predictable: more...

Someone with very high IQ who has a strong resentment against any form of authority other than themselves, and consciously refuses to care about the wellbeing of others.