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Why do you need "real combat healing" or what it has to do with things here? In-combat healing is completely irrelevant to using gritty-style rests or not in my opinion. I like that healing is difficult in combat in 5e. It makes how many HP you have matter. (and if you are talking about...

Chapter Scene Turn You have per-turn resources. Your action, your attack, your reaction, etc. Usually called "at-will". Scene is your encounter, but named differently - because I want to include more than "meeting monsters". For recovery, instead of it being 5 minutes or an hour, make it a...

The value of damage in a fight is how much damage it prevents. Damage done early in a fight prevents at least as much damage as damage later, and often more. Ie, take 5 monsters that the party takes 10 turns to kill, killing 1 monster per 2 rounds. The party takes 5+5+4+4+3+3+2+2+1+1 or 30...

A level 5 fighter in full gear can fight and beat a dozen trained soldiers at point blank range. Battlemaster, duelist, 18 str 14 con, plate, shield, PAM. 20 AC, +6 to hit, 2d6+1d4+18 (27.5) dpr plus maneuvers, 44 hp+10.5 second wind. Against guards, 16 AC 11 hp 5.5 dpr at +3 to hit. Guard...

Power Word Kill If target creature has 100 or fewer HP it dies. If not, target creature loses 100 HP. Then if it has more HP remaining than you do, it loses HP equal to your HP and you die. If it has fewer HP than you do, you lose HP equal to its HP and it dies. Nothing can stop the loss of...

So, to a large degree, power in 5e is linear. A level 5 PC is roughly half as powerful as a level 10, who is half as powerful as a level 20. This is just ballpark. And here, "half as" means "if you took a challenging encounter for the level 5 PC and doubled the number of foes, it remains...

Extended (Gritty) rests (1 week in a safe spot). Slightly boosted short rests that require a night's sleep in a safe space. Require a long rest to level up. Now hitting level 15 requires 140+ days, probably longer. Have bad guys get stronger as part of their plans. Have some bad guys be...

One of the youtubers I follow talks about in a war, you want to present your foes with dilemmas not problems. A problem is something you can overcome. A dilemma, on the other hand, is a situation where you are forcing a choice on your foe, and both options suck. I just realized this same...

I said why I did it -- so that any PC who takes the officers job of commanding the cannons has use -- but it is just an option. In my case, the officers check/10 gave a bonus to the crew check. You'd roll (skill check) + (character level), divide by 10, and apply that to the crew check. Crew...

The book is not casting the spell. The book is not a creature. The book does not occupy a space. The wizard is casting the spell. The wizard is casting the spell as if it was in the Tiny Book's space. The caster of the spell remains the wizard. But any questions about "within 5'" or the...

When I tried to make ship rules, one thing I ended up doing was adding the character level of the officer to a lot of checks. This ensures that high-level PCs are useless just because they lack skills. And a level 10 barbarian can help a lot as a gunnery officer, even if they don't know guns...

Does the Wizard have to squeeze in order to cast from the spectral Mind's space? The wizard isn't moving into that space, and isn't actually there. So no, the wizard isn't squeezing when casting through the spectral mind where the mind is in a space too small for the wizard to fit. The wizard...

This is good advice. When two game mechanics disagree with each other, roll dice. Here, "banished for 1 minute or concentration" vs "plane shift" disagrees which plane the creature is on. A new save vs banished, an arcana check by the plane shifter, an opposed arcana vs concentration check --...

Knowing the exact location and distance to someone doesn't let you Plane Shift to that location. For example, you could be scrying a location. If you Plane Shift to the plane, you can't guarantee you end up where you are scrying.

As a DM, have monsters provoke OAs. A lot. Like, imagine there are no OAs. How would they move? Provoke about half as often as that. You'll get much more fluid combat. If this makes combat easier, well as the DM you control how many bad guys there are. So just tweak that dial.

I didn't say nothing but combat? Lets build a level 5 party of 4. A GWF barbarian (16 strength), a hexblade warlock (18 charisma), a moon druid (18 wis) and a TWF double-dagger rogue (18 dex). The barbarian has a +1 greataxe and the warlock a +1 tome. The rogue and wizard have items that...

Huh? What is that 22 minute thing? Do you want a long rest after every session? That seems like a strange requirement. And easy combats are encounters. When you have 6-8 encounters between long rests, even easy encounters can have impact. I'm used to having many sessions between long rests...

I mean, almost every action movie has a half-dozen encounters in it. And not every action movie is "engaged in slaughtering a village or similar". The only trick then is to avoid a long rest in the middle of the action movie plot. Which is hard under the default "any night's rest will do" rules.

Can Indy defeat 50 soldiers? Depending on assumptions, 50 typical soldiers could be a reasonable strait up fight, an environmental hazard, a guaranteed tpk, or somethibg that requires careful tactics and planning to deal with. If the players are picking how they interact with the world, and...

Oh I know this one! You solve the hobgoblin/kobold dispute, bringing peace, then you wipe out the kobolds. The trick is to complete the hobgoblin peace quest without claiming reward, then wipe the kobolds, then claim both rewards with both dialog boxes open.