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My 2014 PHB has simple shortbow and light crossbow with 80/320 ranges for each. Heavy Crossbow is 100/400 and longbow is 150/600, but in my 20 years of D&D I've only ever had 2 fights that started past 100 ft.

But right now, shortbow and light crossbow are simple and longbow, hand crossbow, and heavy crossbow are martial. If they were the same damage, crossbow had loading, and crossbows were simple and bows were martial, then things would be fine.

You know, that's a nice solution.

Weapon damage die is a good idea for weapons, makes it variable and benefits small weapons. Great idea!

That's an interesting way to do it. I've been wanting to try out this version, though: 1) At start of round, everyone declares action intent in order of lowest to highest initiative bonus 2) Everyone rolls initiative, applying the initiative adjustment for their action (+2 for light weapons, -2...

Thank you for pointing this out. It makes me consider how durations could be adjusted. Environmental effects could be changed to last until the end of the round, not particular turns, making it part of the round phase. Buffs and Debuffs would instead end at the end of the target's turn, so it...

Hi everybody, I got curious and was unable to find statistics for group skill checks, so I made a table to help me understand the probabilities. I've never taken statistics, so I'm sure there was a mathematical way to do it, but I just put it together using AnyDice (brute force using the...

Hi everybody! I've been reading some OSR stuff, really enamored by the turn structure for exploration and gearing up to do a hexcrawl and dungeon crawl game. But it's got me thinking about other old rules. Who has played with rerolling Initiative each round and weapon speeds? It seems like it...

Better... as in from levels 1-4, crossbows deal more damage than bows for no trade off. Bows become better if you get Extra Attack, from then on bows are entirely better than crossbows. I'd be fine with bows being better than crossbows for martials if bows were all martial and crossbows were...

Yeah, I wish there were dials in there.

Since there's a basic metric for making money by working during downtime, I'd look at those to help figure out things. If the character has a bastion, that could be their lab and shop, and most low level bastion rooms can make some gp every week. More and more tempted to make Bookkeeping and...

Other game systems reward high skill ranks with the ability to take penalties to gain benefits. What if a lot of skills had a -5 penalty to do something faster? If picking a lock normally takes a minute, then someone who is an expert can take a -5 penalty and do it as an action.

Why would it need to be so big? I can see jumping up to 40 ft radius so it's bigger than a typical character's single move action, but even just requiring movement to get behind cover limits their options on the next round. I don't think I'd go for distributable unless there were a lot more...

Hi everybody! I've been thinking about D&D boss fights and how to make them more exciting. 5E has Mythic monsters. I know there's Kaiju rules out there too. But I had a thought that I was wondering how you think it would play out. What if abilities like Breath Weapons took a full round to come...

I used it to make sure the PCs were getting a fair distribution of magic items. I was running a 3E adventure converted to 5E, but I didn't want to cut all the gear because I like magic items. But you are right about the XP adjustment.

That's the beauty of it at lower levels. It takes 2 rare items to get to the +2 attack/+2 AC that adjusts the PC's effective level by +1 (4 points). Low level characters generally don't have enough magic items for it to be an issue. If they do, though, you have an idea of when to push them a...

So which game has the best exploration rules I can pilfer for my upcoming Hexcrawl game? I've been liking what I'm hearing about exploration turns and really want to read more and dive in.

I'm aware, and this is my metric to assess how much to compensate.

But every word elsewhere in the DMG implies that magic items are not part of the expected math, that magic items are always a benefit. Yes, the book now spells out how many magic items characters should have, but they're not baked into the math like they were in 4E.

Same. I teased a lot about the whole "it's not a new edition", but it really is just a 5.5 revision with great presentation and some adjustments learned over the last 10 years. Considering the amount of houserules I make, it's something normal to me. The DMG is less crunchy than I'd like, though.