D&D General What house-rules or techniques do you use to make 5e grittier?

[Xenolith234]

It’s been said that regardless of what variant rules WotC provides, DMs can make their game as gritty as they want. For all you DMs out there, what methods and variant rules are you using? What are you importing from older editions? One can always throw more monsters at the PCs, but that doesn’t particularly reinforce a grittier theme. I find that system matters, as rules reinforce theme, and I find grittiness to be lacking in 5e but don’t want to lose the large available player base, nor do I necessarily want to have 5000 pages of houserules unless it’s worth it.

 

[overgeeked]

Here's a thread from earlier this year about the same topic.

D&D 5E - [+] How do you make 5E more challenging?

The plus [+] is to prevent arguments about whether 5E is challenging enough RAW. This thread is about discussing ways to make 5E more challenging for the PCs. Arguing that it's challenging enough by default is off topic. Okay, so 5E isn't challenging enough and you want to make it more...

www.enworld.org

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

• Character only regain half their HD after a long rest.
• Require HD spending to regain HP for a long rest.
• Require 1 use of Healers kit to spend HDs
• Require a Con check at the end of a long rest to see if the characters benefit from it. DC depends on the environment or lifestyle.
• PC can't benefit from a rest when poisoned.
• Critical hits reduce your current and max hp.
• Being dropped to zero gives a PC 1 level of Stress + 1 per failed death save.
• Disadvantages or penalty to attack rolls also applies to all abilities DCs (-5 to spell DC) .

 

[bloodtide]

Well, the big thing is beyond the rules and is how you play the game.

I toss out all modern ideas, like balance, fairness, "the gentleman agreement" and "the way everyone else does things". Or, really, just play like it's 2E and or 80s/90s.

Anytime Random Meaningless Character Death is a big one to make a game gritty.

Very Low or No Information: The Players are very much in the dark about nearly everything in the game. Specifically the DM does not treat them like "readers/watchers" and tell them things about the game that the characters will never know.....but makes the players "feel better" to know.

Unreliable Information: Even the small trickle of information the players get is very often mostly untrue or worse. Nothing in the game is "page 11 says so, so it must be so".

Out Side the Box: This is another big one as most players like to put everything in little rule boxes and say "this is this, so say the rules". Go outside that box....and it's pure grit.

Resource management another big one.....it's very gritty. You can't be a super hero and just blast away with harsh limits.

Lingering effects: Things that effect the character very often can not be just 'fixed' by a low level spell. A lot of things take much more then that. Often a character will have to live with something, like a curse, for years.

Damaged and Lost Items: Lots of grit here.

Foes using tactics: More grit

 

[OB1]

• Character only regain half their HD after a long rest.
• Require HD spending to regain HP for a long rest.
• Require 1 use of Healers kit to spend HDs
• Require a Con check at the end of a long rest to see if the characters benefit from it. DC depends on the environment or lifestyle.
• PC can't benefit from a rest when poisoned.
• Critical hits reduce your current and max hp.
• Being dropped to zero gives a PC 1 level of Stress + 1 per failed death save.
• Disadvantages or penalty to attack rolls also applies to all abilities DCs (-5 to spell DC) .

I really like that Con check for a long rest concept! It's simple, fair and evocative, and feels like it would really add to the tension of a long rest. Mind sharing the DCs you've come up with for the enviornment/lifestyles?

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I really like that Con check for a long rest concept! It's simple, fair and evocative, and feels like it would really add to the tension of a long rest. Mind sharing the DCs you've come up with for the enviornment/lifestyles?

Starts at DC 20 for wretched, then 15 for squalid, 12 for poor, 7 modest, 5 comfortable, Aristocratic and rich are auto-sucesses.

 

[Yaarel]

Its not really "grittier" but it is more fair between classes, and more helpful for the flow any narrative.

There are only two Long Rests per level. Each player can decide when to take one for their own character. Otherwise all rests are Short Rests.

 

[Shiroiken]

Healer's Kits don't have charges or an associated action. To stabilize requires Wisdom/Medicine DC: 15, and the check is made at disadvantage if using a healer's kit with both hands. While magical healing is still common, if the healer goes down, it's a problem to get them back up.

Short rests replace the long rest time frame, and long rests are a downtime activity. If pressed for time, a character can long rest in 3 days of bed rest (no activity). This keeps all non-epic adventures to a single long rest worth of resources. Epic adventures are usually broken up into smaller segments to allow for long rests.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't think my game is particularly gritty, but I guess it is fair to say that it is grittier than the baseline.

Gritty rests (short 8h, long week) + "sanctuary requirement" for long rests.
Healer's kit dependency (this is more for just flavour and we stopped counting charges at some point.)
No death reversal besides revivify. If you die, you die.
Removal of rest short circuiting spells (Leomund's etc.)
Removal of several survival and travel negation spells.
And I run way harder encounters than suggested.

The first is the big one obviously. It makes damage and attrition to at least mean something, if everything is not just fine next morning and you have to deal with it until you're done with whatever "mission" you were on and return to a safe place to chill. It also allows describing damage as actual injury, as it is not so fleeting that doing so would be blatantly weird.

I don't think the end result is actually anything I would characterise as truly gritty. It is more like cheesy action flick stuff where damage is not big deal but at least there is some pretence that it hurts instead of video game feel I think the standard rules produce.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Oh, forgot one:
Spare the Dying or a DC 15 medicine check gives a successful death save, not automatic stabilization.