Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Variant Rules

Not the most useful of articles for me... I won't use any of it. Nothing wrong with it, but I've tried all the ideas in prior editions and determined they were not my cup of tea. I see nothing in 5E that would make the player rolling, Vitality or their version of alignment an improvement for my games.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

The latest Unearthed Arcana article by Mike Mearls presents variant rules for your game, including players making all rolls, a vitality variant for hit points, and custom alignments. "You can think of the material presented in this series as similar to the first wave of the fifth edition playtest. These game mechanics are in draft form, usable in your campaign but not fully tempered by playtests and design iterations. They are highly volatile and might be unstable; if you use them, be ready to rule on any issues that come up. They’re written in pencil, not ink. For these reasons, material in this column is not legal in D&D Organized Play events."

Find it right here!

Promoted to news article and rewritten by Morrus.

It's up...

 

[S_Dalsgaard]

It is good to be reminded that 5e is a great game to try out variant rules and mechanics. I wont use any of these in the near future, but one or two of them might be worth a go when we want to try something different at our table.

 

[Mercule]

I won't be using any of these. The vitality points, especially, seems a bad idea. When using my own world, I pretty much do custom alignments (more like just adding "unaligned" to the list and making neutral a very intentional thing), but I'm currently running Eberron, which has its own way of dealing with it.

That said, I hope they do more of this sort of thing. I really like the sandbox with rules.

 

[Dragonhelm]

I liked the idea of variant rules articles like this, but I thought it could have been done better.

Vitality seemed a bit clunky to me. While it's not a system I would normally use, I could see it for some modern or scifi D&D games.

Alignment - I sure would have liked to have seen some examples. The 4e alignment system could have been an alternative, as well as the Oriental Adventures honor system. Maybe base one off of Faction affiliation. There's any number of ways to go with this one.

 

[Li Shenron]

Count me in with the "pass" crowd. I don't like the 'players roll all the dice' idea, Vitality would be interesting but this specific proposal seems to me neither the simplest nor the most accurate solution, and the alignment example is meh.

 

[Negflar2099]

While I won't be using the alignment variant or the idea of having players roll I am intrigued by the vitality rules. I'm planning to run a gritty game soon and this could help making things more grounded. The issue I have with this rule set is that they want you to recalculate HP on the fly (every time your vitality drops by 2 or more you have reduce your max HP total). That seems like an excessive amount of work to do at the table for very little return.

Instead I like the idea of tying it to exhaustion levels. So basically whenever your vitality drops (whenever you take more than 10 damage from a single source) you must roll a Constitution save (DC = 10 + the amount of vitality you've lost compared to your normal max). If you fail you gain an exhaustion level. Everything else would be the same (your HP drops to 0 when your vitality drops to 0 etc...).

I might also allow pcs/npcs to spend a round doing nothing, no movement or actions of any kind (and maybe spend a hit dice) to automatically recover one exhaustion level gained from vitality lost (but only those gained from vitality lost). A short rest also removes those exhaustion levels as well.

On paper it sounds okay, although I'm not sure how it would work at the table. I think I might give it a shot.

 

[phantomK9]

As a DM for over 20 years, I've always been a fan of "Players make all roles". It really helps put all the agency in the players hands. It is also a great option when doing things like changing the proficiency bonus to a proficiency die (per the option found in the DMG) and also when changing the d20 to something else (like 2d10 or 3d6, etc.).

However, the way they are presented in the UA article is just strange. Why bother with telling people

A defense roll has a bonus equal to the character’s AC − 10. The DC for the roll equals the attacker’s attack bonus + 11.

That seems awkward and clunky, wouldn't something like

Your defense is equal to 1d20 + your AC bonus

be a better statement?

Likewise the article states

The bonus to the d20 roll for a saving throw check equals the effect’s save DC − 8.

Wouldn't it be better to say it without the subtraction?

 

[Jester David]

"Here's some more stuff that didn't make it into the DMG.
These are some pretty basic alternate rules, that I was surprised not to see in the DMG.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I don't like the extent to which those Vitality rules make a high Constitution mandatory for every character.