House-ruling 5e: Alternatives to Ability Increases and Healing

[Horwath]

I've had a variant that I used only feats instead of ASI's.

Also removed all racial bonuses to abilities and all had a same array of scores.

18,16,14,14,12,10.

or high powered campaign:
20,18,16,14,12,10.

or low end campaign:
16,14,12,12,10,10.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

That looks nice. Is it still based on 5e or did you eventually step away from it enough to be something else entirely?

Also, is there some sort of free preview/quickstart guide for your rules that one could take a peek at on that site?

I would classify it as an extreme variant of 5E. I intentionally changed a lot of the names and numbers, so players who were familiar with 5E wouldn't get confused between the games, but most of the underlying mechanics are still similar. Like, I have stats that go from 1-10 (instead of modifiers between -4 and +5), and you have a Training bonus that goes from 6-10 (instead of a Proficiency bonus that goes from 2-6), but the standard check is still D20 + stat + training bonus against a fixed Target Number. You still have classes, and sub-classes, with a new feat every three levels or so.

There should be an excerpt from the book, available on the product page, but it's just some of the race and class stuff. I don't have a quickstart or anything, because I honestly didn't write it with the intent of selling or promoting it. I wrote it for my own use, and as practice for the non-derivative game that I actually want to write. The few that I've sold so far have paid for my own print copy of the book.

Ps: I think I vaguely remember you advocating for -2/+2 on advantage/disadvantage back then, instead of the extra dice.

That sound about right. As it turns out, though, I was wrong about that. Rolling an extra die is way more efficient, and it's actually pretty rare to have more than one instance of advantage or disadvantage in effect at once.

 

[S'mon]

You are right that ability score increases (ASIs) are an assumed part of progression, and by default the scores don't say very much about the character in-world (eg there's a female wizard in my Thule game with rolled STR 17 - we just take it she's very athletic, not an East German weightlifter). But you can simply say that attributes do reflect the in-world reality (so a STR 20 PC looks like The Mountain in GoT), disallow ASIs, and require PCs to take Feats instead. If you do this I suggest either use rolled stats (I like best 3 of 5d6 in order for my Thule game) or increase point buy & points limit so PCs can start with a 19 or 20 if they really want (eg roll an 18, get human +1 STR bonus, choose a starting feat that gives +1 STR).

Healing - this bugged me, I completely solved it to my satisfaction by going to:
Short Rest unchanged, max 3/day, so hit dice stay the same
Overnight rest restores 1 hp/level as in 3e
Long Rest takes a week and fully refreshes the PC.

This keeps spell recovery and hit point recovery on the same schedule, a major part of 5e's superior game balance compared to 3e.

 

[Li Shenron]

1) Ability Score Increases

I agree with many others here...

If I wanted to reduce (1) I would just require that you can only take a feat but not an ASI at those levels.

And if I wanted to completely remove them, then I would also disallow feats that have a +1 ability bonus.

If you only allow PHB feats, here are the max ASI you can get from feats:

Str +8
Dex +5
Con +3
Int +4
Wis +2
Cha +2

But this is theoretical... for example to really get that +8 Strength from feats, you need to be a Human Fighter (the only character who can get 8 feats), you need to blow 3 of those feats in Lightly/Moderately/Heavily Armors solely to get the ASI (you already have all those proficiencies), and you need to start with Strength 12 in order to end at 20 after 8 feats.

2) Excessive Healing

In general we have the option of changing the required lengths of short and long rests. However this does not only affect healing, but every ability that recharges by resting.

So you could instead leave the resting rules as-is, and either ask the players to purposefully avoid making characters with lots of healing abilities, ban certain options such as Life Clerics, or prohibit learning healing spells in other ways than through your class spells list (e.g. bonus Bard/Warlock spells, Magic Initiate, multiclassing etc). An extreme approach might be to completely remove Cure Wounds and Healing Word from the game, but I don't think anyone has the guts to try that

Then obviously the game becomes more deadly. You can dial back the difficulty by lowering the encounters per day (or their difficulty), but this once again will make other non-at-will resources become effectively more abundant.

 

[BluejayJunior]

Really? That's odd... I thought the whole purpose of Bounded Accuracy was to keep AC relevant even at high levels. Yet what you described feels pretty much like what happens in 3e after a certain level, hit rolls being so high that player AC becomes practically pointless.

I thought the purpose of the lower Proficiency Bonus in combat was precisely to keep AC meaningful. Just by glancing at the rules it seems that a level ~10 character would have around +10 to-hit, which means he would still miss an AC 20 almost 50% of time.

Am I missing something important here? What else contributes to a higher enough hit roll so as to make you almost never miss?

AC 20 is very rare. Most enemies that you encounter around lvl 10 will be below that, probably in the 15-18 range. Bounded accuracy helps to make weaker enemies, like goblins, still able to hit the party at higher levels, because the party's AC is never too high for it. The system is somewhat based around most attacks hitting. Being able to get your AC above 20 is pretty powerful.

I am also a proponent of playing the game as is for a bit before changing it. My thought is that it gives you a better feel of the system as a whole. If there is something you don't like, you have a little more understanding of why you don't like it and how to change it to something that you do like. Maybe play through the Starter Set adventure completely RAW first. That should get you to level 5-6. Then decide what you guys didn't like and find out how best to change it.

There's been a few good ideas for changing that I think would work. Personally, I liked the idea of changing the bonus as you level up, but not the score. Healing can definitely be a trickier one. Because of the way the classes are designed, it can have big shifts on how different classes perform if you change short and long rests, so that is something you need to be aware of when changing. But I think there are some solutions out there.

Good luck with whatever you decided to do.

 

[Kupursk]

In general we have the option of changing the required lengths of short and long rests. However this does not only affect healing, but every ability that recharges by resting.

Well, I could always change the healing abilities to a long rest, but leave everything else in short rests, as is. As I said I think tuning the amount of healing itself to my taste shouldn't be too hard. My only concern is if damage won't be too high, meaning almost every encounter ending up with players near zero HP, without the expected healing to recover from that a lot more easily.

 

[Kupursk]

That sound about right. As it turns out, though, I was wrong about that. Rolling an extra die is way more efficient, and it's actually pretty rare to have more than one instance of advantage or disadvantage in effect at once.

I use a variant of that myself, in my own 2e-3e hybrid frankenstein.

Advantage being +4, Disadvantage -4.

I do let them stack just because I never bothered making a rule to say it can't. But as you said, it's very rare that there's a situation where you get more than one of the same. Especially since I left adv/disadv mostly for circumstantial factors only, and not hardcoded in class abilities like 5e does sometimes.

Curiously, I already had that house-rule, with the same name even, before the 5e playtest came out. It surprised me to see they put the same overall idea into 5e. My general idea when I started using it was the same: combine all the small pluses and minuses here and there into a standardized rule.

 

[aco175]

One thing I think needs looking at is the power of feats in 5e vs. 3e. 5e wants to do away with the feat tax before you get what you want and seem more powerful than the feats in 3e. 3e gave you more it seems, but they were weaker. It also looks like some of the 5e feats are ok, but also give you +1 to a stat to make it more powerful.

I would look at giving more feats with less power as a possible change. This way PCs can branch out more and maybe separate more from others in the same class.

 

[Kupursk]

I would look at giving more feats with less power as a possible change. This way PCs can branch out more and maybe separate more from others in the same class.

That's something else I considered indeed.

As for feat taxes, I removed those a long time ago and still don't use them whenever I play 3e (or some 2e-3e variant that uses the feats). Most of the feat prerequisites were nonsensical anyway, like Expertise for Improved Trip or Dodge for Whirlwind Attack. The only prerequisites I kept were the sensible ones, such as having a minimum Base Attack for said feat, or whenever a feat was directly a "better" version of a previous one I would of course keep the previous one as a requisite.

Doing that never "broke" the game or anything. However I mostly always stuck to Core books content only, and maybe a handful of handpicked stuff from the splats, along with some house rule content. Most of the 3e "broken" combos and also most heavy "feat chains" came from mixing splat books indiscriminately.