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That's why I said permanent and unrecoverable. I'm ok if penalties are recoverable. Older editions had level or ability drain that could eventually be recovered. It can even be useful to propel the story, it's a major setback that can become a new focus. The main issues are about character...

IDK your players I but can ensure you that many players hate the idea of having permanent unrecoverable penalties. Also, both of the choices you mentioned are useful to prevent death on the short term and to make it much more likely on the long term. From what I gather based on the whole...

From my experience, many encounters in official 5e adventures suck, big time. In RoTFM for instance there's an encounter with an alleged CR6 Frost Giant Skeleton that can oneshot crit any character at the level when the encounter happens, and it can come with a hag. That's only the last one...

That's all we need to know. 4 CR 2 creatures vs 4 Level 3 characters is really deadly encounter.

I called it a "grapple attack" but maybe it should be called a "grapple check", which is more specific. This way unintended advantages or disadvantages do not get factored in. Also, the auto-fail chance in case of a nat 1 (or auto succeed in case of a 20) is a corner case that can be adjudicated...

On top of what already said, this only works up to Large creatures. Also remember that they're just grappled, so they still have their entire action economy available and can make any ranged attacks, cast spells, or anything else. Really they just lose the ability to move around, so it's a soft...

Swinginess is a major problem of 5E in particular IMO, and monster design, constrained to deal enough damage to end a fight in 3 rounds it the main culprit. That said, IMO telegraphing danger is one of the main responsibilities as a DM. Not easy to do, especially when some players are too...

No, you're DMing. Dice are there to provide some level of unpredictability, not to completely condition the game No, you're DMing. Most monsters are not tactical geniuses. Most monsters won't even fight to the death. Sure they'll use their abilities to their best judgement, but that can fail too.

Hated the idea of altering, how it's altered, or the final outcome? Because as much as one can work on point 2 to improve point 3, nothing can be done on point 1.

One way I found to make combats more engaging and less swingy (to the extent possible by D&D) is to use alternating initiative. This means that the initiative order is not the usual as rolled. Instead all groups roll for inititiative as an opposed contest, with the highest roll per group being...

On top of the other great suggestions, I think a Juggernaut Berserker (Dreadnought) would make for an excellent tanking multiclass. Besides the ever so useful rage, some furious crits can really be useful for battlefield control and inflicting conditions on the enemies, and Leveling Charge or...

Yes but that's a separate aspect. I agree with you, and wrote above, that you cannot recover those exertion points as you would with the ones coming from the standard exertion pool. What I wanted to focus on if the total number of exertion points can become unbounded via the conversion of spell...

This is the crux IMO. Temp HP do not increase your max hp but do stack with normal HP without limits, so your effective HP can increase without bounds. If we apply the same reasoning with exertion coming from the standard and temp pool, we have the abovementioned nova potential. If we cap the...

Probably I'm nitpicking, but the wording implies that there's an exertion pool and a temporary exertion pool, which, being different, would stack. But the wording regarding the limit amount of exertion does not refer to pools but just to exertion points. So one way to read this is that the sum...

Should be 28: 8 from fighter (2x4pb) + 20 from herald (burning all 4 level 1 slots and all 3 level 2 slots) Also should be 4x4d8, over 2 rounds I don't think this would work. IMO you should only be able to recover the "normal" exertion pool from the fighter, as the one coming from slots is...

Maybe I didn't understand the whole point of this thread, but I'm not sure herald's spell slots/exertion is unbalanced: Adepts are the class with the highest amount of exertion per rest at any level after 6 (and they are on par with all other "standard" martials before that) Fighters do get...

True, there's a fine line between having unified systems and class identity (I definitely prefer classless and levelless systems because of their freedom and modularity). I think the "trick", if at all possible, would be to have those underlying unified systems as a skeleton and then create...

I really like this idea. In 3.5 this was implemented in the Trailblazer spinoff. Spells were classified as "rote", "restricted" or "ritual". IIRC rote spells were self or single target spells and all slots used for casting such spells were recovered via short rest, restricted spells were mostly...

I was dabbling on this a while ago, but never posted it. If I have time I'll create a post for this, as it has always bothered me (I love unified progression). I think it can be done reasonably, with the caveat that classes will then have to have some bonus exertion or bonus maneuver at some...

Now that I think about it we haven't really used it much either, simply because many heritages get Darkvision and most characters end up having it. I agree that at this point it's mostly a nitpicky detail (although it makes hiding easier).