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@JohnSnow That's exactly the kind of stuff I'm super interested to hear about! Looking forward to your thread. ;)

I'm glad to hear that - I downloaded the free basic rules last week and am way too excited about it... it really seems to capture that gritty/low-magic version of D&D that I've always wanted but could never find. Speaking of which, there was a Kickstarter a while back called Iskloft that I...

Not really a house rule, per se, but a clarification: Guidance can only be used for skills that can be started and completed in their entirety within the one minute duration. This means that typically only ability checks called for as part of an action benefit from Guidance and severely cuts...

I'd be interested in hearing some of your house rules (in another thread, perhaps) if you wouldn't mind sharing. For myself, I've been running and playing D&D 5e exclusively the last few years, but recently stumbled on HackMaster and find the combat/initiative system intriguing enough that I...

A little late to the party so I'll just echo some points others have already mentioned: More granular skill progression / choices; I don't want to go back to the 3e/d20 system, but I'd like something somewhere in between More meaningful / varied weapon and armor choices, whether that is done...

Been pretty lucky with my core books. On the other hand, my copies of MToF, XGtE, VGtM, GotSM etc... while they didn't exactly fall apart, the binding definitely isn't attached as firmly to the book cover as I'd like, and I went so far as to get some special bookbinding glue in a...

Yeah, 3.5 went pretty overboard with resistance types, but it did provide a nice exploration reward for players that took the effort to gather information about what types of creatures they would be facing and what their weaknesses might be. Maybe not so fun if you're often facing off against...

I've toyed with the idea of changing all the monster resistances and immunities to exclude magical weapons (unless that is the only requirement), e.g. werewolves can only be damaged by silvered weapons, period. That'd be a quick way to make them scary to an unprepared party, as well as making...

In one of my games, I changed made shadows a lot scarier simply by changing ability damage to recover on a long rest instead of a short rest. We also played it for a bit where you had to use HD to recover it, and that was pretty terrifying for the players. The poor wizard would position...

A little late to the party perhaps, but wanted to point out that the barbarian would not be threatening any attacks of opportunity until their next turn as they have already spent their reaction on the 15ft of movement. Still somewhat useful, but not very threatening with no more reaction.

While I dislike (critical) hit charts in general because they slow the game down, using them opens up some design space for implementing individual armor pieces. The critical hit chart for blunt head wounds might have 6 levels of severity with a 6+ being instant death (crushed skull); wearing a...

Well... that's certainly one way to go about it! I wouldn't play in that game as a full caster of any kind, but there's definitely potential for a lower magic adventure in there.

The trick is figuring out what to do with abilities that aren't so easily divisible - all those high level spell slots or 1/long rest abilities suddenly become either unusable or much more powerful than they once were.

Oh absolutely. It would definitely be a fair amount of work to get right. I typically use the standard resting rules when in high-encounter density areas such as dungeons and the longer rest variant when doing overland travel.

How dare you?! Combat is the one and only true pillar of D&D! :P

Not too many people seem to have a problem with warlocks encouraging maximum numbers of short rests. Hopefully no one is advocating that a Wizard would both maintain their current spell slot progression AND recover all of them during a short rest - I suspect no one is, but I haven't read the...

Mostly agreed, but the ability to nova could easily be limited by having some abilities such as spell slots replenish only partially on a short rest, much like the wizard's Arcane Recovery feature. It could even stipulate the same "only spell slots of 5th and lower can be recovered" limitation...

Whether it's a weak save or not, the point is that the caster is expending a limited resource that has a chance of failure - but it really applies to every class' primary stat(s). When feats are competing against increasing the reliability of your primary function, it's a tough sell to a lot of...

I'd choose just the classic four: cleric, figher, rogue, wizard. Every other archetype can be built from these - Paladin is just the holy Eldritch Knight subclass of Fighter, Druid is a nature cleric that gets wildshape, Ranger is an easy subclass of either Fighter or Rogue (Scout is awesome)...

Oh it would definitely be a Herculean task - at that point, you may as well just craft your own game system from scratch since that's basically what you'd be doing anyway. At least then you could sell it. ;)