D&D 5E Let's Talk About Chapter 9 of the DMG

[Oofta]

Yeah. If you always push yourself to complete exhaustion, don't be surprised when you can't rise to an unexpected challenge. leave some in the tank.

I've even done it (on extremely rare occasions) where they were already beaten, battered and bruised with nothing left. Forces them to think of different strategies and avoid combat if at all possible. Even then they still had a choice - they could have just run away, surrendered, paid ransom and so on.

Depends on the group of course, I wouldn't do it with some groups and I wouldn't do it if I felt it would lead to an adversarial relationship with my players.

 

[Oofta]

Just one other thought on downtime living expenses. There are basically two options.

1. PCs have downtime between adventures and you have to decide what to do about it. That can be anything from living off the land to the bard literally singing for their supper. XGTE has some ideas as well as what is in the PHB.
2. PCs never have downtime and go from level 1 to 20 in a little over a month. If you're following standard rules it's less than 40 "days" of adventuring on average.

Basically, I don't see why living expenses would be an issue one way or another.

 

[Hriston]

Basically, any reference to time that isn't already measured in terms of short rests or long rests. If you don'tupdate those values to account for adventure pacing, then you've changed the game, by changing the relevance of those things to the adventure. If you do update those values, then you've also changed the game, by changing their relevance to the rest of the world.

As previously mentioned, an adventurer who's only active for three days out of every ten is a distinct thing from one who's active every day. Either you need to change your assumption regarding the number of short rests per long rest, or you need to change the place of adventurers within the world.

If adventures take longer to finish (and recover from), then you need to spend more money on lifestyle maintenance. If it takes ten days to complete both the adventure and the long rest recovery, as compared to one day before, then either: 1) adventures need to be ten times as profitable, or 2) lifestyle is going to take a severe drop. You're also going to run through more torches, and other expendables. Magic potions certainly become less useful, when you're unlikely to have more than one encounter in an hour.

And that's without getting into spell durations, the sorts of activities which will disrupt a long rest, or the fact that Divine Intervention essentially becomes a long rest ability.

I think the desired changes are all accomplished by simply changing the duration of the rests. Longer rest times are intended to change the place of the adventurers within the world from one of being able to "go toe-to-toe with deadly foes, take damage within an inch of their lives, yet still be ready to fight again the next day" to one of not being able to "afford to engage in too many battles in a row," which serves the stated goal of "realism". Having to spend more money and use more resources to accomplish the same goals also makes the characters and their relationship to the world more realistic and also makes the game more "gritty" as the players struggle to get by with what they have. Changing the duration of spells is also not required. In fact, many of the changes which you suggest are required would undo the "gritty realism" that the rule is intended to accomplish, which only requires that the rests be extended. That's the rule; extend the rests and leave everything else alone.

 

[Reynard]

Just one other thought on downtime living expenses. There are basically two options.

1. PCs have downtime between adventures and you have to decide what to do about it. That can be anything from living off the land to the bard literally singing for their supper. XGTE has some ideas as well as what is in the PHB.
2. PCs never have downtime and go from level 1 to 20 in a little over a month. If you're following standard rules it's less than 40 "days" of adventuring on average.

Basically, I don't see why living expenses would be an issue one way or another.

Your #2 is my biggest peeve with how 5e mechanics completely upend the fiction and why the "gritty realism" rests are attractive: at least this we it is closer to a year of game world time, assuming some travel.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If the goal was gritty realism, then they have utterly and irredeemably failed. There's nothing gritty or realistic about recovering all of your HP overnight; whether that's a short rest or a long rest; whether or not you had to spend Hit Dice for it.

The question, then, is whether or not the rule can be repurposed toward some other goal. That requires a bit more consideration.

 

[Oofta]

If the goal was gritty realism, then they have utterly and irredeemably failed. There's nothing gritty or realistic about recovering all of your HP overnight; whether that's a short rest or a long rest; whether or not you had to spend Hit Dice for it.

The question, then, is whether or not the rule can be repurposed toward some other goal. That requires a bit more consideration.

Huh? The "gritty rest rules" are a week or more. There are also rules for lingering injuries, recovering HP more slowly and so on.

Don't get me wrong, D&D has never been particularly realistic. It's the wrong game for a fantasy combat simulator.

 

[Reynard]

If the goal was gritty realism, then they have utterly and irredeemably failed. There's nothing gritty or realistic about recovering all of your HP overnight; whether that's a short rest or a long rest; whether or not you had to spend Hit Dice for it.

The question, then, is whether or not the rule can be repurposed toward some other goal. That requires a bit more consideration.

The gritty realism rule is not well named. They should have just called it Extended Rest. It's not any more realistic than the 8 hour long rest, but it has a significant impact on aspects of the fiction I find important.

 

[tetrasodium]

Collectively I've looked at all of them, and mostly disregarded them as the equivalent of internet forum spitballing.

Most of them have pretty obvious issues. The only one I would really consider using as is is "ability score proficiency" but that's one's probably only workable because it's basically the primes system nicked from Castles and Crusades.

I'm jumping into this thread a bit late, this is both spot on & missing the mark. Most of the rules in that section do read & play out much like a poorly spitballed forum post. The analogy misses the mark though because those spitball posts will often include discussion on why it's a poor & incomplete spitball along with ways to improve it. All of the criticisms about interclass balance, durations, & ability over/undervaluing are spot on... One not mentioned is that gritty realism turns magic items that mostly recover 1d6+1 charges per day into what are basically at will cantrips & whomever wrote the rule couldn't even be bothered to footnote it with a suggestion like changing them to per long rest or something. If spells, class abilities, monster powers/abilities, etc were written with time periods based on short or long rests rather than rounds minutes hours days & specific times (ie dawn/dusk/midnight/etc) then it would mitigate some of those problems while simultaneously still not achieving gritty anything.

@Reynard is spot on with his post about cascading effects to removing various systems & subsystems present in prior editions, sadly 5e ignored those cascading effects & whoever wrote many of the rules in dmg ch9 does not appear to be aware of how those missing systems & subsystems impact the rules being poffered or wrote them before they were removed. As an example... it does no good to implement things like facing & flanking for tactical play if you strip out all of the other tactical rules like AoOs for things other than ranged attacks in melee & running away without disengage Sure you can add those things, but the foundation required for them to result in tactical play is missing & you wind up with something that is very much not tactical gameplay


Personally i've used a lot of the variant rules across several campaigns so can give notes on many of them. Starting at dmg pg 263

• Proficiency dice This is actually a pretty good rule that works well to put value on the ability mod portion of a skill check while bringing back the ability to use magic items that add+N to a skill, we settled on working them akin to how the brutal weapon property worked in 4e Personally we found the best way to handle expertise with these is to allow the proficiency die(not the d20) to be rolled with advantage rather than doubling it. The usual (dis)advantage on a d20 falls outside this rule & is unmodified in how it applies to the d20.
• Ability check proficiency: While I've not used it in d&d, it's effectively a less developed version of the same as the skill system used in fate freeport & similar to the overly stripped down fate accelerated(FAE is designed more for storyboarding than fate type ttrpg). I did use that for one or two games before the group asked to go back to fate's normal skills. It's a disaster & results in everyone acting in bizzare MrBean/inspector Clouseau-like ways trying to to weirdly apply skills in situations they have no place in. In short, it's a mess & huge headache for the GM.
• Background Proficiency: This is one that could be a great rule, but in some ways suffers from the fact that backgrounds are all over the map ranging from orphan to noble or various types of mercenaries/soldiers & more. It's a rule that I've considered using, but 5e's skill system is too lacking to support it IMO.
• Personality trait proficiency: Ugh, this reeks of the old school trait/flaw tables where you pick some defects that will never nder any circumstances affect your character & gain cool stuff except without the possability of the gm ever using it against you.
• Hero Points: I've used these in multiple games & find that they work much better than inspiration or lucky. The biggest hurdle with them is thatdndbeyond does not support them so players using that abomination lose track & massively overspend their allotment of hero points. These are one of the many reasons why I mercilessly ban dndbeond at my table even for new players or players who forget their sheet but have it on ddb (sorry guys, bob got lost back there between sessions>but we were in the middle of this fight?>hard no).
• Honor & Sanity: I wanted to use honor as a standin for charisma with social skills that ould take a hit or be improved by player actions/who they are dealing with. Sanity I wanted to repurpose as sort of a hail mary "You can succeed at cost on that or for X points of sanity you could succeed with ptsd(or whatever)" type thing, but once again dndbeyond caused all of the same problems it caused for hero points & I've not tried it again since banning ddb at all of my tables and have not tried it since because 5e really works poorly with the fate style consequences I wanted to use with that sanity
• Fear "ok guys you are scared of the bbeg & run away" I'm a skilled enough GM & storyteller to impart upon the party that they are crunchy & taste good with ketchup when facing things like tuckers kobolds, The Dragons of eberron, or whatever without needing to mechanically represent it. For a gm who needs that tool in their toolbox the results are just absurd though because "and half/the party bravely ran away" is a special type of boring that such an inexperienced gm will have trouble recovering from. If the old shaken condition were not carelessly removed from 5e entirely then it could be used to spruce this up into something capable of making any monster that should be scary into something a bit more scary similar to how trogs used to do the same. The 4e dazed condition could probably have been reworked for this too but the action economy is too different & 5e has nothing similar to either in conditions.
• Horror In general the madness tables are a mess. players who are going to ignore it are going to continue treating their character like a mechanical set if numbers while players who are going use it & to be hurt by it are going to cause severe problems in the game. Few if any of the things on the madness table have any mechanical bearing on play. When used to any significant degree, all this does is annoy & frustrate the table in my experience with it as both player & gm
• Healer's kit dependency & low natural healing Back with prepared vancian spell casting/slots this would be pretty significant... in 5e though it means that I've literally seen one player scold a second player for "wasting healers kit charges & hit dice" rather than letting her burn some of the spell slots her & the paladin are about to recover. This is an attempt to bring back some thought & gravity to recovering hp & hp attrition , but at 3 pounds for 10 charges & the simultaneously overly gracious/overly tightencumberance limits it's just kinda pointless once you factor in the impact of spontaneous casting heal spells/slot recovery ease.
• Healing Surges: I've never used it & it could work, but it's already so absurdly easy to shrug off attrition by hp damage that it would need additional rules like bleeding out or death at zero/-N to counterbalance it unless you massively reduce player hp. Once again the spitball of a rule does not mention anything of the sort & I've not been willing to dive into fixing it for wotc by completing the rule.
• Epic Heroism People didn't like 5 minute rests in 4e & 5e recovery is already too easy. WThis munchkin fantasy should have been left on the cutting room floor where it blongs.
• Gritty Realism: I talked about this earlier as did many others through this thread. Not only is it a spitball of a rule, It was never developed beyond the wet cocktail napkin happy hour scribbles. It certainly doesn't help that they called it gritty realism seemingly without understanding what that is when they made this variant rule to mimic the power scale of the upper tier greek gods.
• Firearms & alien tech: Well meaning rules that might work for some gamesm but as usual they try to make gunpowder into modern day weapons (or close to) or just like magic but better. Unfortnately they painted themselves into a corner with that one by removing all the subjective weapon properties that were present back in prior editions like crit range/threat/brutal# & many more. The failure here is an example of the cascading ripples that were ignored when things were torn out of 5e.
• Plot points: These are a poorly developed analog to fate's compels & declaration/invoke rules but 5e is very much not designed to support that kind of play. I've seen players try to treat fate like d&d where it's a disaster that often results in hurt feelings when the gm uses those same tools to push back at the world & the very characters themselves... but d&d lacks those tools so even a group who wants to use them like fate will run into huge trouble
• Initiative score: Really? You need a variant rule to say that you could have passive initiatives too but despite having a feat that gives a bonus to passive investigate they couldn't mention either in that section instead of this waste of pagespace?
• Side Initiative: I'd wager that a lot of GMs use this for monsters without the players ever noticing by just throwing monsters somewhere interesting in the initiative order but it doesn't really change anything about or add anything to the combat like with
• Spoiler: Dynamic Rounds& active initiative

  

  
• Speed Factor: Someone at wotc realized that after taking out virutally all of the tactical elements from combat that it left a big hole so they tried to add tactical elements somewhere else... Unfortunately like with their second bite at that apple known as greyhawk initiative it puts a huge load on the GM unless they change how they run initiative to the very slow jarring & disruptive method of calling out numbers/number ranges one by one until players metaphorically raise their hand. A proper solution to this problem aiming to be a replacement would have been to just not remove the tactical combat elements to begin with. It's probably fine if you run initiative like that & your group likes that, but greyhawk initiative's lead balloon-like reaction shows that those groups are just as much of a minority as I've seen them to be.
• Climb onto a larger creature... This is a massive number of words to reprint the first table here.
• Disarm: That's great & all... but once again they forgot they removed provoking an AoO for picking up the disarmed weapon
• Mark: It doesn't use your reaction but you can only do one. Ok sure whatever. Someone was hurt that too much of the tacticalgameplay was removed I seemingly rescued this from the PHB's cutting room floor to include, unfortunately on its own it only serves to show how glaring the loss is.
• Overrun shove aside & tumble: Much like mark, disarm, & climb onto a larger creature these really just draw attention to the black hole left in 5e were they cut tactical combat rules.
• Hitting Cover: This is a bad spitball of an idea that tries to reproduce things like firing into melee in past editions, but whoever wrote it didn't notice or got forced to accept that it was written so that it only matters if the attacker rolls too low to hit the target but high enough to hit someone there in melee that is probably in melee because they have good ac.
• Cleaving through creatures: It;'s not a bad rule & can be useful, but there is no reason for intelligent creatures to cluster up like that without tactical combat rules so it too highlights the loss despite being functional.
• Injuries: meh Unlike the insanity tables this at least imposes mechanical penalties. Plus crit tables tend to not work too well n practice & more importantly there is really only 1-2
• settings (eberron & sigil) with the technology to replace those things. If you wanted to call something gritty anything it would be this
• Massive damage: This is pretty much a more in depth & fleshed out version of phb197's instant death, but it's hampered by not having the needed status effects so needs to make up unique penalties with no names.
• Morale: as GM advice it's not bad
• The rest of chaper 9 is about creating/modifying monsters, races, classes, spells, & items so really falls into some other category as all this

 

[Don Durito]

• Proficiency dice This is actually a pretty good rule that works well to put value on the ability mod portion of a skill check while bringing back the ability to use magic items that add+N to a skill, we settled on working them akin to how the brutal weapon property worked in 4e Personally we found the best way to handle expertise with these is to allow the proficiency die(not the d20) to be rolled with advantage rather than doubling it. The usual (dis)advantage on a d20 falls outside this rule & is unmodified in how it applies to the d20.

• I'd considered this, but it's a pretty strong nerf to expertise. This is another one of those cascading effects (the need to rebalance the rogue).

• Ability check proficiency: While I've not used it in d&d, it's effectively a less developed version of the same as the skill system used in fate freeport & similar to the overly stripped down fate accelerated(FAE is designed more for storyboarding than fate type ttrpg). I did use that for one or two games before the group asked to go back to fate's normal skills. It's a disaster & results in everyone acting in bizzare MrBean/inspector Clouseau-like ways trying to to weirdly apply skills in situations they have no place in. In short, it's a mess & huge headache for the GM.

Not really getting this issue at all. I've used the same system with Casles and Crusades (and to some extent with 13th Age) and never had any issues at all. D&D is, at this point pretty clear about what can and can't be done with ability scores. (With the biggest issue being Int vs Wis). FAE is deliberately vauge and I wouldn't want to touch it.

• Background Proficiency: This is one that could be a great rule, but in some ways suffers from the fact that backgrounds are all over the map ranging from orphan to noble or various types of mercenaries/soldiers & more. It's a rule that I've considered using, but 5e's skill system is too lacking to support it IMO.

The idea is fine. It works just fine in 13th Age. The reason it's a poor spitball is that you need more than one background. There's also the fact that some consideration needs to be given to how these apply to classes which heavily imply certain backgrounds (such as the Thief or Assassin subclasses). And a clearer examination of how expertise effects these things is needed.

• Personality trait proficiency: Ugh, this reeks of the old school trait/flaw tables where you pick some defects that will never nder any circumstances affect your character & gain cool stuff except without the possability of the gm ever using it against you.

This one is just awful, I agree. I would have said that the main benefit of these subsystems is that they make clear that proficiency is just a hack and it's easy to chop and change the skills and tools in a multitude of ways...except I guess they don't achieve that, because noone anywhere seems to have taken up the opportunity and run with it.

Healing Surges: I've never used it & it could work, but it's already so absurdly easy to shrug off attrition by hp damage that it would need additional rules like bleeding out or death at zero/-N to counterbalance it unless you massively reduce player hp. Once again the spitball of a rule does not mention anything of the sort & I've not been willing to dive into fixing it for wotc by completing the rule.

I've never understood the hate for 4E's healing surges/13th Age's recoveries. If anything they put limits on characters' capabilities, more than the standard D&D system does. However this only works if the system interacts with magical healing. As this system does not, and leaves all the real work to the GM, it is uselss as written.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is the kind of thing that happens when groups decide that things like resource management and encumbrance are too big of a hassle. Healers kits are 3 lbs. They take up space. You presumably need them when you are not in a place where you can replace them. But you also need food. And clean water. And ammunition. You can only carry so much. Now you have to make choices. What do you need most?

I find you are only sort of right. We don't track it because in realistic terms, it really doesn't matter.

Let us take a Rogue, with 10 str and 10 con (important for food). They can carry 150 lbs with no problem.

Studded Leather Armor, Rapier, 3 daggers, Shortbow, Quiver and 40 arrows = 23 lbs
Thieves Tools, 10 days of rations, waterskin= 27 lbs
3 healer's kits, lantern, 5 flasks of oil = 16 lbs

That is 66 lbs right there, and lasts for 4 weeks of travel (you only need to eat once every 3 days) assuming you can find water every day.

The roll to forage for food and water is a DC 10 in most settings. A successful roll gives you 1d6+wis lbs of food and 1d6+wis gallons of water. So, a single character foraging can likely feed and water the entire party for at least a day.

The big, actual, problem with encumbrance? It is just irritating to track, and prevents you from carrying mundane tools and being clever. Mostly because the weights are insane for somethings. Trail rations weigh 1 lb? 20 caltrops weigh 2 lbs? Your clothing weighs 3 lbs?

But, if you actually track it or track ammuntion, you will quickly find that it is just bookkeeping for the sake of bookkeeping. 5 gold buys you 100 arrows, that is 100 attack rolls and only wieghs 5 lbs. If we assume 2 attacks a round, 3 rounds of combat, that is 16 combats before you need to spend another 5 gp. And, that actually leaves you an excess, and you could have looted other archers at some point for those 16 combats. Same with rations, same with water, same with healing kit charges.

So it quickly stops mattering enough to pay attention to, because other than running low on water, you can't really get overencumbered easily, or run out food with even a minor amount of attention paid to the rules.