Level Up (A5E) What are your common house rules?

[Micah Sweet]

Two of my favorites:

• Healing potions always heal the maximum amount (no roll required), but cost twice as much.
• Always roll for hit points, but reroll 1s (characters with d10 or d12 hit dice can reroll 1s and 2s).

Do you find the PCs are too fragile for your tastes without these houserules (clearly designed to make PC harder to put down)?

 

[CleverNickName]

Do you find the PCs are too fragile for your tastes without these houserules (clearly designed to make PC harder to put down)?

Nah, both of these house rules came from player requests.

We are fans of Critical Role at my table, and the "roll hit points but reroll 1s" is a house rule that Matt Mercer uses. One time during character creation, a players asked if we could adopt that rule and I said "sure." I've not noticed a difference.

The "healing potions heal maximum" rule was born out of frustration. One of my players became famous for always rolling 1s on healing potions, and loudly declared "I would gladly pay double for these potions if they would always heal the maximum!" To which I said, "Done." We tested it for a couple of gaming sessions, and it worked fine.

 

[Timespike]

I don't even know where to begin with this weird take. ENP was not given a "broken" version. That was the only version at the time. Many people, including myself, expressed frustration with the class. The author gathered feedback, improved it, and put out an improved version, over a year later. There is nothing wrong with that. This is not WotC, there is no need for being so oppressively litigious here. The entire point of having an open SRD is to allow people to improve on the concepts.

I actually want to build on this in a couple of ways because not only are you correct, you're possibly more correct than you even realize.

First of all: everything you say is correct. However, some additional context:

EN Publishing really means it when they say that creators can do what they want with their GPG/EN5ider content after the year has passed. Andrew is far and away not the only designer to release a "designer's cut" of something they did for an EN Publishing periodical. My Utility Spells Redux product is a redo of some utility spells I originally published in the GPG, some of the spells in MoAR were originally from a couple of EN5ider articles I did, and at one point, I even reached out to EN Publishing to make sure I still could use the name "Chokewater" for a swamp in a future release of my own (having used it in my very first EN5ider article) and was told in no uncertain terms that I was in the clear. Andrew has also done a re-release of the wielder, which he originally published in MoAR Complete - and was licensed under the OGL. And frankly, my reaction to that was to enthusiastically buy it within minutes of seeing that it was up for sale. I appreciate him keeping the class updated and as good as it can be, and I still can make money off of supporting it with archetypes and synergy feat chains.

A5E, including GPG 0 where the artificer originally appears, is released under three different open licenses, including the OGL, ORC, and CC. You or I could also do a remixed artificer and we'd be perfectly within our legal rights to do so - that's how open licenses work.

Finally, the idea that Andrew Engelbrite, of all people, somehow had a nefarious plan to release a broken class just so he could clean it up for somewhere between $656.50 and $1750 in total royalties (depending on whether he's got an exclusive publishing agreement with DTRPG or not and depending on where between 101 and 250 sales he is - which you can tell from the fact that he has a silver bestseller badge on Drivethru) that he has to split with his artist since the release in November of 2023 is probably the most stunning take I've seen in ages. Andrew is an extremely professional designer and does a ton of work for EN Publishing - he's not going to jeopardize that relationship, especially not for such a meager payout.

 

[Selganor]

Coming back to the original topic:

We usually use the standard spread and usually the attribute bonuses from background fit but in rare cases where the "fixed" stat isn't the one you would use your 15 or 13 for I'd allow it to apply to another attribute if the rest of the background would fir the concept.