“I am not an *illusionist*! I am a Verisimilimancer. I bring forth Truths, manifestations of reality that lies not within the tangible realm, but the realm of identity, perception, and belief. I reshape The world more firmly than any transmuter, for belief defines reality and I define belief” “So, you make illusions?” “Sigh”
My home rule is I don't like that mundane medicine seems so unimportant since there is magical healing. So if you have proficiency in medicine, during short rests you can use med kit charges and each use grants another player to automatically have the max result of rolling a hit dice. Basically they are being a field medic.
Two language house rules: At character creation, I allow people to leave languages un picked, then during the game I allow them to announce that they know a language if they can give a good reason for how their character acquired it. This solves the problem of people picking languages that never come into play. I use language proficiencies as proficiency in the history/lore/culture of the people who speak that language. i.e., if you speak dwarfish then you know "dwarf" stuff. So I'll allow you make a INT (dwarven) check if you aren't proficient in history or a INT (dwarven) check to know how to behave before dwarven nobility.
I tie culture to the History Skill, with language proficiency granting advantage. If they are asking about a culture their background does not justify, disadvantage.
I usually do this with skill points as well (not necessarily DnD), I let people keep (or keep for them) say 5-10% of their skill points to invest in "obvious stuff my character should know but I forgot about" when it comes up. There's always a knight who forgot to learn heraldry, or that hunter who mysteriously doesn't know how to repair their own gear, or a druid who doesn't know which plants are edible. This saves that embarrassment and "but my character should obviously know this!"-arguments :)
Couple of thoughts I've had of my own that I felt like sharing: Morale: This one is more of something to tease RP moments out of characters. Essentially it's rewarding players for having characters do things they like and avoid things that are obviously uncomfortable. We've all had those moments in game where you describe how cold and unpleasant it is outside or how hard it's raining and the PCs just kinda shrug it off like it's no big deal, even though the paladin grew up in a lavish castle, the wizard came from a wealthy family and bounced from expensive inn to expensive inn up until this point and the thief spent 90% of their formative years in the desert. Basically whenever a character tends to their creature comforts, they add a 1d6 to their "morale pool" that they can spend, one per check, on any ability check, saving throw or attack roll... and whenever a character has to deal with a highly uncomfortable situation (wading through sewers, keeping watch outside the tent in a downpour, etc) they lose a morale die. They can accumulate negative morale dice that I as a GM can apply in the same way if I'm feeling particularly punishing. Some things will have a pretty universal morale effect, like nice food, a good quality inn stay, etc, but some characters/backgrounds might be unbothered by bad weather and uncomfortable in a classy inn. Pushed Rolls: This is something I hijacked wholesale from Call of Cthulhu, but basically whenever a character attempts a skill and fails they can opt to push the roll on a higher DC with bigger consequences if they fail. The fighter climbing a rough stone cliff fails their athletics check, so they make it up a short distance before hitting a dangerous or uncertain handhold. They can push their roll and try to proceed, but if they fail they fall and take a ton of damage. The rogue is trying to pick a lock, but they fail their check. They hear a guard coming from down the hall, and they've got enough time to make a break for it... but they're very close, they think they've almost go the lock open. Would they like to push their roll?
very interesting. so a push roll raises the DC and consequence but you get to reroll and moral Dice are added or subtracted based on background and circumstance? I love the push idea but am a little iffy on the moral dice. I do like the idea of punishing or rewarding them for treating their characters well. So with the moral dice pool. you spend a day in a nice inn you get +1 moral die but the next day you go out in the rain you subtract one moral die? also is the die used up after the skill check or is it reusable?
@@Taven03 There's some noodly bits for the morale rolls that I'd have to iron out before I were to treat it like a real, legitimate mechanic, but essentially you can spend one morale die at a time, and it's lost when you use it. I think it would have to be up to game master adjudication to determine when they're distributed though, as I could see ways people could metagame to exploit it. (If there's a hard cap on morale, I could see characters sleeping in a nice inn until it's full up and then switching to a cheaper inn, for example... but without a cap a character could theoretically spend a month in a nice inn and come out with 30 morale dice.) I'd suggest maybe no more than 5 morale dice in either direction, which will encourage the characters to spend them since they aren't difficult to get in mass if you're not out in the wilderness, but also so they won't build up such a massive morale debt that they're just sad for life and don't care anymore if they don't get any personal time for a while.
@@kevingriffith6011 The 5 dice cap sounds good. Also I don't think it's a problem for them to stay in a nice Inn till it caps out then switch. That's kind of how a lot of people behave, treating themselves when they're feeling depleted, then being more cost effective when they're feeling up.
Timestamps: 1:05 Player-create “rumors” related to their backstory, shuffled and handed to the other players 2:41 Double STR mod on 2-handed weapon damage (PCs and monsters alike) 4:02 Shields can be splintered (sacrifice shield to avoid damage) 4:58 HP “loan” for low-level characters 5:52 Percentile comprehension for languages (instead of just “fluent or not”) 10:08 Give players 3 mins at the start of combat to discuss strategy so each turn is quicker
Thank you for this! It's like the Table of Contents for videos, and makes it super easy to scan when trying to find that video I was looking for that I saw sometime.
I've got a fun little one to give the party a bit of a fighting chance when they're getting owned. Whenever a PC drops to 0 and falls unconcsious, they can choose one party member to grant a d6 of Bardic Inspiration to. This is an easy way to show the whole "I'll avenge my friend" moment while allowing them to have a better chance of bouncing back. In the same vein, if a PC actually dies in combat, EVERYONE gains a d12 of inspiration. Inspiration won't totally derail an encounter, and it only comes up when they're already on the backfoot. I'm not sure what to call it, though...
:D I got picked! Here's some more for Round 3! 1. "You Gotta Fight It!" If you're being charmed or mind-controlled, your allies can use an action to plead with you to snap out of it, and you get to make a Wisdom save (or whatever you need to make to resist). 2. Machine Gun Spellcasting! Cast as many spells per turn as you want-bonus action, action, who cares. You’re the one spending the spell slots chief! 3. Radial Ass Kicking! Allies within 5ft can choose to fight back-to-back. While doing this, they can't be flanked.
I almost entirely agree. The only exception is when my players stop combat to discuss elaborate strategies that they could not have come up with beforehand. If the strategizing is in relation to things they would have known beforehand it's easy enough to retcon it as a flashback, but some strategizing is so specific to that situation that their elaborate strategies defy believability.
I've created something for a less serious campaign called "The Unreliable Narrator". I haven't come across anything like it so here it is: As a DM I hand out little letter tokens, or word tokens for different reasons, usually if they succeed at something difficult or do something cool, etc. What this allows a player to do is mess with my words when I describe things. For example, if they come around a corner and find themselves face to face with a fiend, one of them could use a token and say "We come face to face with a friend?" Or if they find a settlement of elves, someone could chime in and say "We find a settlement of Elvis?" This could drastically alter what a DM has set up which is why it's used for less serious campaigns or very very sparringly, or if the DM is very careful with their words, but I find it has players engage a bit more and pay attention to things more in case they want to use their token. Pro tip if using this rule: Never describe anything as Ramshackle, cuz your players will want to unshackle the ram.
@@Gleebaer Uhhhh truth be told I've never played a traditional game of DnD, I've just really been into the community for about a year at this point. I've played call of cthulu, pathfinder, lancer, a homebrew jojo and power rangers, and 1 me and a buddy are currently making, so I guess the answer is no, but that shouldn't stop you or anyone from using them if you can, I just don't know what they are lol. Sorry.
There was something like this, instead of inspiration somebody gave cards out and the cards told what can be changed… but I don‘t know who was it… Not Luke, Not guy, not the Nerds, not the matt and also not the other matt,… damn it
On Languages: I had a similar thought some time ago, but instead of it being percentile, it was a rating between 0 and 20. However, instead of rolling once, one would roll 3d20 to speak or understand a language: 0 successes - Nothing 1 success - Nouns and verbs 2 successes - Most things, but not the subtleties or anything too complex 3 successes - Everything
Took part of an idea and mixed it with my own. I have a kid's plastic practice clock. (the small circle you can move the minute and hour hands around however you want) Time within a "day" in dnd has always been odd to me. The party wakes up at dawn, visits a few shops, gets a quest, leaves the town, travels for a few hours to a near by cave and it's... What time? Noon? Evening? Night? 🤷♂️ So what I do is pretty simple. They are in town. They tell me what they plan to do can take generally 1-3 hours. Travel based on distance can take 1-8 hours in a day. Any more risks levels of exhaustion. While in a dungeon, cave, structure (away from the sun and sky) I set up a d6. Each room the die goes up a number, every 10 rounds of combat the die goes up one, they choose to spend more time in a room investigating it the die goes up one. Each time it gets to 6 and cycles back to 1 I move the clock up an hour. They may enter a cave at 5pm but not leave it until 2-3am and who knows what's out in the dark that late at night
One of my favorite life wisdoms Ive learned is that there is no stealing if you cite your sources. Credit who you steal from as best you can and everyone wins.
One house rule that I play with that I'm honestly a fan of is using advantage and disadvantage in piles, rather than as a checkbox like it usually is. What I mean by this is that while you can't necessarily get super-(dis)advantage, if you have 2 sources of advantage and only one source of disadvantage, you still have advantage on the attack because the disadvantage doesn't totally counteract all of the advantages active. Worth noting is that this does work both ways, and is not exclusive to players, so monsters and NPCs can do so as well. It encourages teamwork from the players, as well as providing an extra layer of thinking when there are multiple enemies on the board. I will note that if you play with advantage flanking this whole rule might break apart a bit.
One really cool mechanic my brother came up with was 'Telegraphed.' It's a downside for a powerful monster attack, like recharge. When a monster uses a telegraphed attack, the players that can see it make a survival check. If they succeed they get a description of what the monster is trying to do (e.g. "The monster's six eyes spin independently, locking on to each of you. It's mouth begins to swell. What do you do?") Then every character that noticed can burn their reaction to take a *full action.* They can dodge, dash to reposition, attack again etc. It breaks up the turn order in the favor of the players which keep players engaged off their turn.
I have been DM'ing since the late 70's and love the rumor idea for the game. Especially for one offs with random players at a local game store or during a convention. Going to make this a must from now on. Chris
We used to have an idea of "signature moves" that are like once off abilities a character can use by spending inspiration, like an acrobatic performer rogue might use their signature move to get an extra move action and make a performance check to stun nearby enemies who can see them. Of course this only works if you give out inspiration at least semi regularly but it helps martial classes feel special and unique, you can even tie them into that characters specific backstory
This is epic. I've done something similar with custom "feats" (stolen from Dawn Forged Cast) but love the idea of them coming up with their own move they can spend inspiration on. Stealing this for sure.
I like the concept of languages, but I was even thinking of maybe making some table that is a "sister languages" table. For example, Infernal and Abyssal might be similar in language type, but not the same. A character that knows Abyssal will roll a percentile die for an Infernal text that says "Here there be monsters." If they roll under 50, they can't get much meaning out of it, maybe even only getting the word "Here". If they roll over, they will get a roughly accurate translation. You could even go far enough to prep some of this by having it be awkwardly translated to something like "Here is the creatures." It gives players a little information when they would have none.
Cyberpunk 2020 the trpg ( not the video game coming out soon) has a very deep system like this with sister language and how hard they are to learn like if you speak English French is "quite easy" but something like Japanese would be a "lot harder " with different costs for each level of difficult
I have a similar thing, but instead of rolling, its just that languages that use the same script might have loanwords. This way there will be things the player can gleam from a text they know the script for but not the whole language
Sister languages could be the ones that share the same script. Like Dwarvish, Giant, Gnomish, Orc and Goblin and Goblin, which all share the Dwarvish script. Or like in your example, since both Abyssal and Infernal share the Infernal script.
@@diogoamerico1029 but lore wise celestial would also be a sister language of Infernal being that the native speakers of Infernal are fallen angels or their descendants
@@dylanflynn1895 Indeed. That's a very good point that brings many assumptions and interpretations about languages. Also, that would be highly setting-dependant. In my homebrew scenario, I've spent some time toying with a "idiom treaty" that records linguistic roots, common parenthood and similar scripts and alphabets. That's a work I have done in my worldbuilding that would remove the need of rulings during play. But in any other setting where you don't have such solid answers, it all depends on DM fiat. If I were to DM in the Forgotten Realms, I would probably rule that Celestial and Infernal are sister languages while other DMs might stay true solely to the script similarities, and a bunch of them (most, I guess) would simply stick with RAW and state that if you don't have a language in your sheet, you don't know shit about it.
My favorite rule(s) that I've come up with as a DM -If you go down to zero hitpoints you take a point of exhaustion -If you fail a death save you also take a point of exhaustion This helps my players take going down more seriously and it takes a character days of rest to recover from a near death experience or multiple near death experiences instead of just being up and ready to go again a minute later. It also gives players a strong incentive to revive someone immediately even if they haven't rolled any death saving throws or haven't failed a death save. The rule stops my players from going down, getting 2 hp from healing word, and then charging back in to take another breath from that great red dragon they're fighting. Lastly it gives another way for a player to die, too many exhaustion points equals death with no saves. It really has made my players feel more mortal while still being a high enough bar that in the campaigns I've run no one has actually died from the rule. The mechanics of going down to half speed, or being immobile with too many exhaustion points has also created interesting challenges for my players too. Having to carry the rogue who did that awesome thing that almost cost him his life back to town can be a fun mechanic. Hiding him in illusions and guarding him while the ranger tries to lead the pursuit away from the wounded party was a very fun and tense narrative moment for the group. A friend of mine developed his own version of this, he has death save failures not go away until after a long rest. I tried his rule with a modification of: one death save failure goes away per long rest, but ended up going back to my original rule. I included the alternate to be used with or in place of the above rule. A second alternative is to record death save exhaustion separately from regular exhaustion especially if you have a barbarian that builds up a lot of exhaustion or other rules in play that incorporate more exhaustion than normal. Thanks for reading my Ted talk on fantasy death!
I like this idea. it kinda gives a reason to be careful and everything, I will have to give this a try! I found when I was a healer that I was waiting until the last second (if not past) to heal someone because I knew even if someone went down I had a round or two before I really had to worry.
I like the idea and will propose incorporating it to my players. It also boosts the usefulness of things like the Relentless Endurance ability of half-orcs.
[Split second decision X seconds]: Let your players roll for initiative. Then tell them what happens. For example; "the roof starts to collapse". Then let them decide what they do in reversed order (Lowest initiative goes first) giving them only X seconds to decide. If they stay silent or try something impossible they freeze. This gives the faster more perceptive players more info and time to decide how they'll react. It's fun, funny and often dramatic :)
Looks like the "click rule" from the AngryGM (mentioned by Dael in her previous video about stolen stuff) in which something happens or is about to happen, so the DM telegraphs it to the players and they have a few seconds to decide what to do. A smart (or lucky) decision could bypass the saving throw entirely (or give advantage) while a not so applicable choice could doom the PC's reaction. This is specifically designed for traps but could easily be adapted to any "quick-time events" you want. Your version seems like how initiative works in World of Darkness, allowing faster and/or more perceptive characters to use their reflexes to predict what other will do by making slower characters in the initiative declare first but act last. But that is how combat works in WoD. Your ideas seems very nice to me, but rolling for initiative could remove the sense of impeding doom and time pressure in a fast-paced decision. It would be less like reflexes and more like "bullet time", when things go into slow motion while characters decide what to do. Both are great ideas with different outcomes.
I used to do this with World of Darkness games, because combat turns are supposed to be 3 seconds long and usually involve firearms so everything is effectively happening at the same time. So I figured those with the higher initiative we're reading the situation and reacting just a split-second faster.
I like the idea of placing time-pressure on the planning portion of combat. But ... I also think that allowing more time is an opportunity for players to inject more role-playing, and having role-playing as part of combat planning is something I want players to try to do. Time-pressure seems like it will just reward those players who already think tactically, and the "regular" players will be left out.
I love the language house rule so much. I’ve always loved the idea of a character who has learned X language, but only through conversation or cramming a test or whatever, so they’re always getting something wrong. It does seem like it puts a strain on the DM, as you don’t want a failed roll to be a full failure, but rather garbled translation so the party ends up with some missing or misleading information or a social roll gets harder. And a wizard with Tongues will take away all the fun.
Great video, thanks for the ideas! I'm definitely going to start using the 3 minutes strategizing time before initiative. Two of my players introduced me to what they call the 'Boromir Health System'. It's a quick way for me to describe an enemy NPC's health during combat. When the players ask how a specific enemy is looking, if it is at 3/4 health I say it's at 1 arrow Boromir, 1/2 health is 2 arrow Boromir, 1/4 health is 3 arrow Boromir, and barely staying on their feet is 4 arrow Boromir. This gives the players a little more detail about an enemy's health than just saying they are bloodied vs not bloodied, and it gives a consistent picture from enemy to enemy.
The group I play with agreed to what we call "The spear rule". It states that "If you are proficient with either martial weapons, Glaives, Halberds, Lances, Pikes, or Tridents, then Spears and Tridents gain the reach property for you." This is because we dislike the spear not having reach, since it is the prime feature of a spear (as compared to ex. a javelin). The idea is that if you only have proficiency with simple weapons, you have no real martial training so you can't hold the spear properly to utilize its full length, and your fighting style becomes simplified. However, if you have any of the stated proficiencies, chances are you have martial training and understand how to couch and lunge with your spear for maximum reach. Spears have also been used historically because they were such an easy weapon to teach someone to wield, but even the most base soldier needs instructions in how to do that (hence the martial weapons proficiency) because proper spear fighting is not as intuitive as one might think. I am thinking about adding more of these properties/features to other simple weapons, giving them more versatility for a trained warrior. Ex, even if the sling in D&D is considered a simple weapon, using a sling properly requires hella dedication. Historically, they have seen a wider and more lasting use on the battlefield than almost any other weapon short of the club, dagger, javelin, and spear.
As someone trained in spear, please, please, make spears finesse weapons when used in 2 hands. It's both realistic and opens up the thematic style of the lightly-armored nimble spearman that can be so cool.
@@dynamicworlds1 Yes! Give us another finesse reach weapon! The whip is boring, even reducing the two-handed finesse die to 1d6 would still be awesome if t had reach
@@dynamicworlds1 In the same vein as what Johan did, you could give spears used with martial weapon proficiency the finesse property. Players who only know simple weapons are stuck using STR, as they're not sufficiently trained to use a spear with finesse.
Been DMing for 15ish years on and off, and my favorite house rules: +Occasional Mad Lib content generated by players, e.g. name a creature--they don't know if they'll fight it, it's an NPC, it's just part of a pub's name, or they'll find a dead one. Lots of fun! +During first round of combat, go in reverse order of initiative and narrate what PCs, NPCs, and baddies' intentions are, and those with higher initiative get to react better to those with lower initiative. +Damage that is a high enough percentage of a creature's (or PC or NPC) HP, special effects happen, such as loss of limb, and it's a fun narrative to give players control over what happens to enemies when this happens
Being a language/linguistics nerd, I'd like to see something like language "family trees" in D&D - like if your character speaks Dwarvish, you have a greater than 0 chance of interpreting Gnomish for example, since the two languages are linguistically similar and in the same language "family". They *kind of* did that with Primordial and Aquan/Terran/Ignan/Auran, but they again just made it so they're all the same language and if you speak one you speak them all, which I think is kind of a crappy way to hand-wave it (though understandable for simplicity's sake). Using your percentile example, I'd say if you speak Dwarvish, you have a 10% proficiency in Gnomish and maybe other related languages like Giant. Also if you fail, it's not a pure black and white pass/fail. I'd say the closer you get to success, the more you're able to interpret. Like if you've got 20% proficiency and you roll a 25, you can get the general gist of what it's saying, but not the whole thing (it could be that you get the literal translation but since it's an idiom/cultural reference you don't have, you don't necessarily understand the intended meaning); roll a 40 and you might be able to pick out one or two words, but that's it (and those words aren't necessarily correct). For a real world example - if an English speaker looks at a paragraph of written German or Dutch, they can probably work out a fair bit of it even without actually speaking that language since the languages are so closely related. Same goes for Slavic or Norse languages - you might not be able to speak multiple languages, but they're close enough to the one you *do* speak that you can make an educated guess as to the meaning, as opposed to an English speaker looking at Chinese or Russian or Arabic without education in those languages, it just looks like complete gibberish and you wouldn't have any idea what it means outside of the context of where you found it.
I do this. In my campaigns, I call it dialects. If you speak giant for example, you can understand orcish and goblin phrases, and vice versa, but not everything. Or, if you speak elvish you can understand parts of sylvan. And there is a unique version of elvish for each subrace of elf. Which means sometimes you can be an elf talking to another elf and not get the whole picture, but there's always a chance.
I love this, and I guess I kinda do that, if someone knows like Dwarvish i allow them an INT check to read the base of what something in Giant is saying or something like that.
I actually do something like this in my game. The common language in the setting is Ilthean, which is a corrupt form of true northern Ilthean (called high Ilthean) with some grammar stolen Grosvenoren. A person speaking high ilthean will be mostly understandable to a person who speaks ilthean, they’ll just sound like they use a lot of archaic words. A person speaking ilthean will be somewhat understandable to someone who speaks high ilthean, but the strange grammar and weird new words will make it difficult.
- Languages - Another great video! I'm running a globe-trotting pulp-era setting using the Hero System RPG that already has gradations for their languages baked in. I informed the players that languages and literacy were going to be important in the campaign. It's also a Cthulhu horror setting, needing some academically inclined characters, so everyone received extra points for non-combat skills. The players ended up partitioning out all the populated continents and each specialized in the local languages. It kind of puts a realistic spotlight on the local language specialist as they act as interpreter and the "face" for the group for that session or story arc. And when they come across a trove of ancient tomes, they hand them out according to ability. It has created some really interesting situations--sometimes there are benefits to being the reader and other times you go a little mad...
For my house rule, at the beginning of a campaign, I make an npc relating to each character. This NPC could be anywhere from friend to family. Then they will start with some items related to the npc. For example, if there friend is an alchemists, they might get a potion of some type.
In theory this is what the "Bonds" section on your character sheet is for. It makes sense that someone close to a character would see them off with a gift. I like this.
What's funny about watching this video, is half of these are represented in Pathfinder 2e. Like the shield rule for example. A character with a shield gets no AC just for holding it, they have to use the Raise a Shield Action during their turn to get +2 AC until their next turn. When they do this and an attack hits them anyway, they can use their reaction to Shield Block, having the shield take the brunt of the hit. Shields are assigned a Hardness value and a durability, for example a steel shield base has 5 hardness and 20 durability. If you Shield Block, you reduce the damage you are taking by the hardness, so in this case 5 damage, then you and the shield take the remainder of the damage. So an attack deals 12 damage to you, you use Shield Block, reduce it by the 5 hardness so now its 7, and both you and the shield take 7. The other element is the bonus hp at lower levels. When building a lvl 1 character, lets say for example a human Swashbuckler, their ancestry (human) and the Swashbuckler class grants them hp equal to heir hit die, no rolling for it, you always get max, then add con mod. So for this example, 8 hp for being human, 10 hp for Swashbuckler, then a con mod 2 grants this lvl 1 character 20hp, and they will get another 12 hp when they level up (class hit die of 10 + con mod of 2).
I also found a language houserule writeup a year or so ago that I geeked right out over. It uses a scale from 0-100 in proficiency or fluency with tiers at the 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 marks. a score of 20 in a language is basic familiarity, can catch words either written or spoken and potentially get the gist of a conversation; 40 is a conversational familiarity allowing a player to comment on condition or ask for directions or whatever, but they stand out like a sore thumb. It goes on in that fashion, and what I enjoy about it is that someone with a ~60 score in a language only then becomes proficient in skill checks relating to that language. I love the idea that an adventurer with a 60 in Fiendish might try to negotiate a devilish contract but try to decipher a legal contract in a foreign language. The DC for negotiating and catching fine print could be ridiculous unless that adventurer has a 90+.... I agree that it is highly beaurocratic and essentially introduces a new mini-game on par with tracking spell components, so it's not for everyone. I wonder if there is a way to make it an optional hassle for those players who want a "hard mode". I've been playing around with a house rule recently to widen the ranger's appeal as both a martial type and roleplay boss by giving them a bonus trait at certain levels reinforced by their backstory. Using Aragorn as a bit of a model, I saw that his experience and time spent with elves endowed him with advanced medicine knowledge and an ability to keep watch similar to trancing. I thought it might encourage my players to delve into rangers a bit more if they were able to learn from civilizations that they'd spent time around. Based on favoured terrain/enemies, it could be interesting to give a ranger resistance to poison damage if they spent a tremendous time around Mountain Dwarves, drinking with them and traversing their mines. A ranger might gain the ability to trance instead of sleeping once every long rest. They might gain a resistance to a different damage type based on if they were exposed to burns or electricity by living amongst dragonborn; or maybe they discovered how to use anger to their advantage while traveling with a barbarian tribe. In the same way that Bards can gain spells from multiple spell lists, I think it would fit a ranger's feel to be able to learn skills exhibited by fellow travelers. Rangers are the watchers, they are students. They might not learn to take on a wild shape, but they certainly could pick up other druidic or fey skills. Edit: I played a game recently where the DM introduced a "know someone" rule, where each player, in each city on the active campaign plane, could claim to "know a blacksmith that could help with that", or "Know a former thief that could get us into x", which is then realized as true or false based on a roll justified by the claim. For example, let's say our party just entered a small village along the coast. As a fighter with a sailor background, I might claim that I know someone in this town that can get us a ship. The DM would decide if this will be decided by a history, charisma, intelligence, or other check and set the dc. In this case they might say, since I was a sailor, there is a very good likelihood that I know someone that can get me a ship, then they get me to roll a history or luck check on a dc 15. If i get it, the person is in the town, if I don't they might not be in town (away on travel, moved, dead, etc.). In another case my halfling monk sage companion might claim that they know a thief that can show us around a large city capital on another continent. Based on the halfling's backstory and years of meditation and study, there's a possibility they are telling the truth, but a real slim one, so the dm sets the dc at 25 and asks for a disadvantaged history check based on the halfling's claim that they were penpals while studying at the monestary. This prompts some fun player-led npc generation as well as encouraging player investment in the world. As soon as an actor claims to already know someone or something about the world they inhabit, they've also decided to have existed in that world for a longer time.
I love this. It should be a regular series. It's great. Some house rules: If someone is floundering on a turn, I give them an intelligence saving throw. This, in essence, is your ability to critically think under time pressure. I call this a meta check. Further meta checks: History - Doubles as military strategy. Want some help coming up with a strategy? Roll History and I'll help you identify assets, threats and strategic targets. I won't give away secrets, but based on what they know I will help you strategize. Nature - Doubles as understanding creatures. Insight works great, but Nature will tell them much more about the basic creature itself in a conversation. Religion - Morality. Trying to get an intuition on the right thing to do? Religion check. It can help you figure out a more ethical path, and sometimes even a more moral one for yourself. This is direct DM guidance sometimes, often pushing players towards outcomes they couldn't rationally have come to. It's also subtly a way to beseech a god, so you might pray for guidance, and get it from unexpected inspiration. Typically this is a moral compass for players "lost" on what the right thing to do is. Reverse Social Checks - Players make social checks in lieu of roleplaying, so if they roll poorly it's easier to RP out a bad exchange, if they roll high, I offer them some useful RP and work with them to come up with a clever dialogue or get a little costumed bugs bunny action going. Help them determine a tact - barbarians get to roll to move boulders, bards get to roll to move minds. The player doesn't actually have to LIFT the boulder, and doesn't have to be that suave either. Animal Handling - Just take a look around and familiarize yourself with some animal life. Lots of rats? Dirty city. Lots of cats? Lots of charity. Lots of birds? Maybe they're being fed. I encourage rangers and druids with free time to just do this. Acrobatics - They get to make a save to take half-damage from falls. It's weird Acrobatics has 1-2 raw use (resisting shoves/grapples and evading odd traps). Zone of Truth (spell) - I tend to RP this as weird mouth-changes as players try to bend the truth. I don't stop the RP, so when they try to bend the truth, the truth bends out of their mouth. Think "Liar Liar". They CAN shut up, but most people just wouldn't shut up. This is also a religious spell, so they need decent Int to know what that's about. One other thing - in homebrewing I almost always favors ways to help the players and simplify the game --- but often times instead of homebrewing a rule, it's better to introduce things in world. Like, I like how that "Dm gives you HP early" thing works, but paying it back over time is a slog. Introducing a low cleric willing to cast Aid on the team whenever they come into town? Solves that issue, creates an interesting NPC. Even more interesting? It's the guard to a dangerous area, who doubles as the one who'll protect you if you come running home "hot". A weird necromancer who sends you off with a few extra zombies as pack mules? Trained ones, utterly incapable of harming anyone, and they were criminals who volunteered their bodies post-death. That shattering shield? Cool idea, totally could just be an item in game. How about a mechanized shield built by dwarves, that in response to an attack you can do 2d4 pierce, spitting out blades, but losing further defense until you can manually rig the spring trap back (1 minute, like setting a bear trap). 3-minute strategy when initiative is rolled? If you give players access to Telekinetic Bond, this lets players strategize live, and I love this, because it makes players feel more like their adventurer's. I open the table to full-meta so I can stop worrying about cracking down on communication they wouldn't logically have. When they lose access to say, those rings, it becomes REALLY interesting now to be separated and "on your own", or if a player ditches their ring. It's like dropping those comms or destroying your cellphone, or ripping up your social security card. This makes great combinations too - "True Strike" The most infamously useless cantrip? Now it's a great way for a wizard to get insight and look to the rogue and go, "He overstretched on that attack, his shoulder is open!". Fun teamwork moments for a normally useless spell. My favorite homebrew rule? Recently some players introduced me to a concept. Their DM at the end of their session would let them experience a dream, or a vision, with a different pretext every time. Sometimes it'd be conventional obsessing, sometimes it'd be magical insight, sometimes it would just be fridge-logic. But he'd let them re-rollplay a scene that occurred earlier, except it's in a non-dangerous state. It's a memory, or a dream, or an insight. This way they could do something they WANTED to try, and roleplay it out at the end of the session. It couldn't go longer than a few minutes deviation, but checking doors they ran past or trying a different tact with an NPC helps players to wonder less, explore more, in a safer space. I'm probably going to homebrew a helmet of hindsight just for this.
Having some checks require "Effort". Basically you first roll to see if you succeed in the task, as you normally would, but then instead of it being a binary pass/fail, you instead have your player roll to progress through that task, pretty much treating the task like an enemy where you roll to hit, then roll to deal damage. An example would be, an evil cult has opened a portal to hell and the party has got to close it, and while the fighter and the paladin fend off hoards of demons, the wizard is trying to translate the ancient text so that the portal can be sealed. Or maybe the party is trying to convince the guard that "No, we didn't just light the tavern on fire". Sure maybe the bard is super convincing and throws the guard off the scent with a single lie, but odds are the guard is going to ask a few follow up questions, and the party has three rounds of questions to either convince the guard of their innocence, or they might be asked to come back to the guard house for further questioning. To sum up, combat is usually the focal point of most rpgs, so treating more mundane tasks like combat makes them a lot more engaging, particularly for players who aren't combat focused, and it gives players a chance to shine in a way that doesn't involve killing.
A rule i've thought of recently is the rest helper rule: On a short rest, you can expend any amount of your hit dice to have another player roll additional hit dice equal to the amount you have expended. The hit dice the player you have helped relates to their own class, not your own, so when a barbarian helps the wizard rest by giving up one of their hit dice, the wizard rolls a d6, not a d12. If the helped player has levels in classes that use different hit dice, it rolls the hit dice of the class they have more levels in. If they have the same level in every class, they take the lowest number die. This rule is made to create a feeling of comradery between the players, but if you feel it could be overused by players, you could make it into a feat
But what's the narrative behind the barb helping the wizard? Are they clamping the wound shut (which isn't actually healing anything)? Are they giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? It makes no sense. Comradery comes from ACTUALLY helping, like administering a heal potion/salve or medicine check.
On the subject of languages; I love Dael’s advice on DMing because it’s usually all about what you want the players to do, or know, not what they get with a good or bad roll. So if it’s a crucial bit of info, it will never be in a language no one knows. And if I want it mysterious, I might call for a roll, but no matter what the result, they’ll just get a hint. The only time I stick with the roll is when the players success or failure is acceptable to the story either way. Then if there isn’t a rule for it, I set an appropriate DC considering the skill level of party and how difficult the task. Boom!
My players and I developed the concept of "Friendship Maneuvers". As the PCs roleplay together and form bonds with each other, they gain "Friendship Points" and they can unlock maneuvers that they can use in combat. I liked the 'Support' system in the Fire Emblem games, and was aiming for something with that feel. For the maneuvers themselves, I adapted most of them from 4E - mainly from the Warlord character class.
I have two house rules worth mentioning that I use at the moment. 1 - Each time someone is resurrected, it requires a higher level spell than the last time (eg: first time, any spell can be used, so let’s say it was revivify, second time would at least require raise dead, etc). The point being to limit resurrections without leaving it to chance (like in Matt Mercer’s resurrection rules), or putting a hard limit of say one resurrection, and it also makes higher level spells like resurrection more relevant. As an alternative, you could also say that second res needs raise dead or higher, third needs resurrection or higher, etc, since the party will probably use them in order anyway. 2 - I don’t remember where I saw this, but it basically adds a system called exposure that acts as an inverse of cover. So if a creature is on unsteady footing, or being flanked, or the attacker has the high ground, the attacker gets a +2 to their attack. If a creature is in an even more precarious situation, such and hanging from a ledge or dangling from a rope, the attacker gets +5 to their attack, and this also counts as advantage for things like sneak attack.
The DC for a Wild Magic Sorcerer's surge goes up by 1 for every time they succeed! The main reason to play wild magic is for the chaos of that surge, and the narrative element of the surges getting easier mimics the bubbling up of chaos with the sorcerer's spells!
My players' absolute favorite houserule is Snackspiration! Despite being a lightweight rule, it brings the group together, gives players more control over narrative without skewing game balance, increases the power of dramatic moments and it simmers on through the entire session. Basically, everyone gets a d6 at the end of a long rest. It can be added to attack rolls, saving throws or skill checks. This represents a reservoir of energy or willpower the characters have as a result of being well-fed and rested at the inn. The crucial twist is: anyone can give snackspiration to someone in the moment before the outcome of a roll is declared, for free. The ability to give it to others incentivizes watching closely what others do. It becomes this gamble of 'Guys, should I use snackspiration...?'. It's used most often on average rolls when a monsters' AC isn't certain, or when making saves of unknown DC. As a DM I love how it naturally attracts the attention of players outside their turn. However, as the session goes on, this resource runs out. This way, it works in lieu of a fatigue system, yet I find that psychologically, adding something positive works better in the players' minds than punishing players with penalties to rolls, even if mathematically the effect or balance is the same. They still get the thrill of increasingly savoring those last few dice as secret cards up their sleeve. As a DM, you'll find the impact is small enough that balancing for it is hardly necessary. The players quickly learn this is their joker card: there are many like it, but this one is THEIRS, for when THEY need it. It's similar to potions, in a way, but for rolls. The last few snackspirations are almost always saved for crucial, dramatic moments. Finally, it greatly helps to extend dramatic moments by adding an extra step, drawing out the moment when it matters the most, as they consider the use of and observe the almost ritualistic rolling of this sacred resource. It is funny how sometimes they consider it for a longer time when stakes are average, while in other situations it becomes this snap moment decision when a roll NEEDS to succeed. It doesn't stack: only one snackspiration per roll. It can turn around a scary moment, but the RNG keeps it unpredictable. It's already turned around one or two very close death saves, with cheers erupting around the table!
Even I have something language-related! This is a house rule I have in my back pocket, inspired from older editions: Bonus proficiencies, based on a character's Intelligence bonus. If their score increases with leveling, they also add the new benefit. For a +1, the PC adds one additional tool set, instrument, or language prof. For a +2, they add one skill from their class list. At +3, they add another tool, instrument, or language. At +4, add any one skill proficiency of their choice. At +5, they gain Expertise in one proficient skill.
My group has modified the Deck of Cards system for Role Playing inspiration from your old video (A Tale of Love, Pain, Loss, Gain) & turned it into a Random Encounter Generator for our games. I pass out cards & let my players generate random encounter prompts which they write on index cards. When I'm planning a session, if there's space for some random encounters (which there usually is), i use a deck of playing cards to determine which of my player's suggestions I'm going to try & incorporate in that session. Two important notes: First, as the DM, I get to write random encounter prompts too! (They shouldn't know every possibility in the deck!) Second, I stress to my players that the prompts do not need to be automatically positive or negative. A "Tale of Gain" can totally be a cursed item, for example! My players really enjoy the creative outlet - and they love it when one of their ideas suddenly drops into the game. Fair warning though, you may end up needing to figure out how to incorporate a "Dire Corgi" into your next session... My players are weird...
I love the Team Instinct idea. My campaign is full of new players and I've noticed that they often don't know what to do next. They get stuck often, and I tried to remind them that there are actions other than Attack in combat, hoping that this will inspire them, but they still get stuck. I like this idea of giving them time to "plan" OOC and having it feel like since they've worked together for so long that at the top of the round the players exchange knowing glances, signifying that they know what each other will do and how to coordinate their actions.
Whispered/Secret death saves! Keeps the tension super high not knowing how many saves have been passed or failed, and changes up how the PCs go about saving their downed buddy
I like letting my players drink a potion as a bonus action, or take a full action to drink it and treat all dice as max. Like taking the time to make sure they drink every last drop
One thing I like that was in 4th edition if I remember correctly is skill challenges, where basically anyone can make a roll to solve this problem but they need an X amount of success to succeed while also avoiding X amount of failures. It adds a way to make non-combat encounters more interesting and gives everyone an opportunity to work together to overcome the obstacle in a way that isn't determined by one die roll. This especially works for adding an element to exploration and gives players more of an incentive to go exploring and makes rangers feel a bit less useless, because their key feature often doesn't get utilized because 5e doesn't have an exploration mechanic so DMs are left to either make up their own. Of course it by no means solves that problem entirely but does something to help.
In my DnD game a DM has decided to put a 1 minute timer on everyone's turn while in combat. I loved it. Instead of giving the players enough time for a perfect move every time everyone now needs to be making on the fly decision and just accept the fact that they might not be the best move available. And that's fine. It builds up pressure and forces the players to be thinking about their strength and synergies in between games. It keeps the players focused and involved. The downside of this approach is that it also.makes the player more tense and the whole party not as powerful as it might be. Also it puts a lot of strain on the DM, because if your rogue keeps forgetting the use the uncanny dodge, the DM needs to remind about those.
Something that's sort of become a house rule in my campaign is that players whose characters aren't present in the scene can jump in and play a random NPC. It adds a fun, light improv element to the game and helps keep the players involved. One of my favorite examples of this was when one player was speaking to a crime lord another player jumped in as the crime lords beefy bodyguard, who basically just repeated everything the crime lord said in a deep cockney accent. "We have eyes and ears everywhere, my friend." "Roight, 'ave eyes an' ears everywhere, we do, roight." "...yes."
I started having the optional flanking rule be a 1d4 bonus to hit, this created an incentive to play more tactically, a reason to roll more dice, and it doesn’t seem to slow anything down. It also doesn’t step on the toes of other ways of gaining advantage, i always hated saying “sorry you can’t have double advantage, so the hard work to position was useless” 40 or so sessions in, me and my players are loving it.
I really like the extra hit points one. I tried to make my own rules that would help with that called "Fine Dining" where, depending on what class of food you eat or prepare (With a few complex rules on hunting, foraging, and cooking), you would get some Temporary Hit Points. It makes those short rests before a delve into the dungeon feel a little more meaningful and can give a nice boost of survivability to the squishy 1st and 2nd level characters. As you level up, they become less useful, because you don't need them anymore and, by 10th level, it no longer has a beneficial effect, but rather if they don't eat good enough food to sustain their bodies, they'll basically get negative temporary hit points. By this point, their bonuses are so high that this will almost never happen, but it makes things feel a little more realistic.
I'm not sure where I got it from: When a player has to do a death save, I take him outside the room (or behind my DM screen) and he rolls it in front of me only and can't share the results with anyone else. I find that it increases the pressure of the fight when someone is unconscious and no one know if he's gonna be ok or not. I also keep them rolling once or twice after they had 3 failures or 3 success so that no body know when it's safe.
Oh my god, I *love* that. I'm running my game online these days, like most folks I guess, so that would be really easy to do. (Not that I hope death saves come up of course!)
I love this a ton but i wouldnt be able to bring myself to ask the player with a dead character to keep up the rues by rolling another roll with me. The other players watching the dead character stop rolling death saves would heighten everything to a zenith where the character is either dead or stabilized and no one knows until they check the body.
Tyler Lewis I see your point, I just feel like they wouldn’t know realistically and it could give away the result if he does a nat 1 and a regular failure.
@@cyrillelibert5236 yeah its more or a morals thing for me, like telling my player who is clearly holding back tears to come roll another death save feels like im kinda evil but i can definitely see how it makes suspense during the combat.
Tyler Lewis if there’s tears of course I wouldn’t be that cruel, it would be on a case to case basis. The goal is always to have an enjoyable time for everyone
I usually give players a chance, if their backstory supports it of being able to understand simplified concepts in another language. I really like the idea of players trying to piece together what someone is saying. For example the players interperate the foreign guard say "Man bring animal" whereas the guard actually said "Hastor Go to the Barn and get the Bloodhounds".
My only house rule as a dm is for inspiration, if you gain a point of inspiration it is specifically tied to what causes it, a combat inspiration for a cool description, a roleplay inspiration to use to gain info from good roleplay and lastly a skill inspiration for generally thinking outside the box using skills ie. Making a check using a different skillset or a combination of skills, using sleight of hand + intimidation to show a person how much more skilled at something you may be
One rule I've really come to love is team initiative. Basically I just have the total of the party's initiative modifiers and compare that total to the total initiative modifier of all the enemies they are fighting. Then bigger number goes first with no roll. It lets both the party and the enemies operate as a single unit, increasing both the danger of the fight and the amount of control the player's feel like they have over the situation. In every campaign I've done this in, I have noticed players starting to use the help action frequently and just generally supporting each other more in the fight. I've also never run for a group that had more than two people able to perform even the most basic math and initiative was always 5 minutes of me grinding my teeth as a player struggled to count to 7 on their fingers.
I completely agree with all of your criticisms of the initiative ritual. My solution is to get rid of the initiative roll entirely. We track turns with the rules from Descent and Star Wars: Imperial Assault. In short, let the players decide their turn order on the fly, and alternate heroes and villains as best you can such that everyone still gets one turn in a round. Major upside #1: When the gauntlet drops and I announce that we have entered combat, we throw down immediately. No need to write anything down, no need to roll 7 dice for the goblin squad, no need to confirm that yes, you add your dex. The instigators go first and get the party started. Major upside #2: The person taking their turn is always someone who knows what they want to do. Players can react to things organically and jump in when something catches their attention. "That bugbear hit me? I want to hit him back. Can I go next?" Villains do the same and react to heroes getting in their faces. When the mid-fight surprise bullette appears, I time it at the start of a new round so the first player to think of an idea can have a go at it right away. It's like flying around the battlefield in little vignettes, both smooth to run as a DM and easy to follow as a player. There are mechanical and balance consequences, like the Alert feat and assassin rogues and class features that affect initiative, but we patch those up case by case. If you give people spotlight time and exciting combat, balance issues come out in the wash.
Some really neat stuff for higher-level players. Newer ones might find it a bit too complicated, but once you've got a group who's really with it and understands how things work, there's some good material to work with in this video.
I loved the concept around languages and how learning multiple idioms might impact fluency in each of them. I have a few house rules regarding linguistics: --The INT modifier denotes literacy, in which -1 you can barely read and write simple sentences and +5 means you're basically Noam Chomsky. This revolves around the concept of INT being more akin to education than the elitist concept of intelligence per se. So that would change how characters passively get information from each language. I will incorporate your concept of percentages of fluency, probably making the first two languages use the full modifier while each subsequent language work with 1 less (not sure if 1 score or 1 modifier yet). So to be able to read in the two first languages you are able to speak, you'd need at least a -1, the next language you learn would have 0 as cap for literacy, while the next one would have +1 and so on. In this manner, you could have many languages in you SPEECH capabilities, but the minimum study needed to actually read and write in those would be raised. I would like to find a way to deal with proficiency... But I'm not sure yet, it would probably involve the scripts each language share, like Dwarvish, Gnomish, Orc and Goblin all using thr Dwarvish script. --The INT modifier allows for extra languages (or tool proficiencies) during character creation. That's a minor tweak to compensate for Intelligence being a dump stat for many players. I try my best to make use of INT and STR in my games because of that. Also, your concern abour languages being race-locked is finally being dealt with officially: the Adventurers League player guide for Season 10 already came with the new rules that will make their way on the upcoming book Tasha's Cauldron of Everything: profficiencies in tools and languages will be tradeable to other tools and languages that better fit the character; actually, skills will have this to just like ability score bonus, allowing for characters be original without revolving around racial stereotypes.
Great video as always. I'll leave here a couple of my own house rules. They are intended to make the game grittier because that's what I like: 1. Wounds. When a PC drops to 0 HP it gets 1 wound (a proper debilitating injury narratively speaking, like a thrust through an arm). 1 wound = 1 level of exhaustion (as per PHB table). Wounds are cumulative and can only be healed with an extended rest; you can heal only 1 wound per rest. (you can change the time to heal a wound to make the game harder or easier). I think narratively it's a great device, because sure, you can go to 0 and then come back, but now you're wounded, and the more you fight the bigger the risk. 2. Treating a wound (optional with the above). Once per long rest a PC can attempt a Medicine check to stabilize a patient's condition (DC 15 + nr. of wounds). On a success the wounds are treated and they start to heal, on a fail you make it worse and the patient gets 1 more wound. You can retry this check only once per long rest. Untreated wounds DO NOT heal! (Alternatively an untreted wound worsens by 1 every day, but this is a bit too punitive even for me) 3. Food and water. A PC needs 1 "meal" per long rest (i.e. day). A PC can go without a meal for a number of days equal to their Constitution modifier (if positive). If a character doesn't eat it suffers 1 level of malnourishment. 1 level of malnourishment = 1 level of exhaustion (as per PHB table). The use of exhaustion as a common denominator (with different names for narrative purposes) makes it easy to keept track of different things and add up the effects. A PC may drop do 0 in a combat, then the Medicie check fails, and they don't even have enough food! Now this PC suddenly starts the new day with 3 levels of exhaustion (wound + wound + malnourishment), pretty bad way to start... I have more if anyone is interested!
My favourite house rule I saw on reddit somewhere, but can't remember who said it first is the Quick Thinking rule. Basically it means in combat a player can make any mental ability check (one that uses Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma) as a bonus action providing that they are proficient with it. I like this because it gives (especially new) players ways to try and role play a bit better and helps classes who don't have that many bonus action things like wizards to actually feel like they're helping out. It makes it so there could actually be a use to trying to scare away the enemy with the Intimidation skill, learn something about them with Insight, quickly try and find the creature that hid with Perception/Investigation, or for a trained medic character to perform a medicene check as a bonus action. It also gives more weight to proficiencies in general which i personally like the feeling of. If someone's trained in something, it would make sense it would take them less time to do said thing than your average joe.
I try to use the motivations of the party. When given the choice of two paths, one bright and sunny filled with flowers and pleasant scenery, and one thats dark and foreboding filled with nasty and potential dangers, most times the party will take the dark path avoiding the bright and pleasant one. So giving the proper description of options, you can get the party to go and do exactly what you want.
We're playing a variant where short rests take 8 hours and long rests take a full day. It makes the number of encounters per long rest much more close to the recommended balanced limit since we tend to have at most 2 encounters per day, and a lot of things can happen in the world if we take a whole day off!
The HP loan can be implemented without a homebrew. Just have your questgiver cast aid on your characters, or give a scroll containing it. I've used this before and it's great, specially for 1st and 2nd level.
I usually use group checks for stealth (as described in the PHB). However my "Taking Point" houserule is that whoever isthe point person ie leading the party, counts for two in the group check (they roll once but their result is counted twice). This gives stealth specialists a chance to shine and encourages them to lead the group when stealth is required. It also means more thought is required when deciding on Marching Order. This houserule can be extended to other things like perception checks if you wish.
Our DM has us preroll initiative. So before we even get started, we roll 3-5 initiatives and she records them. Really helps to not have that awkward transition between RP and combat.
The idea of allowing the PC group time to strategize really interests me as a player. There's a lot of times where another player in my group has commented that they thought my strategic choices were poor, regardless of whether or not they were poor I think this brief pre-combat strategy session would be beneficial to get everyone on the same page.
My homerule for languages separates listening/speaking and reading/writing. Every character gets two extra language proficiencies, and the first time you add a language proficiency you can speak/understand it. The second allows you to write and read it.
I know that the Professor on Dungeoncraft institutes a similar system in combat at his table which I stole. The players get to plan and decide their actions over a 60 second period immediately upon initiative being rolled while the GM/DM is sorting his plans for combat on the part of the enemy force, you can even use a timer. Upon said time having passed each of the players must state their intended action for the round and they can't change their planned action during the round. This lends to a true feeling of combat where it becomes the truly confused cluster fudge it can become once combat breaks out. This is repeated every round. Having one or two backup plans for your action becomes important and it encourages players to maintain attention on the board so that they don't drift out of the battle momentarily. It also emphasizes ideas like holding an action to respond to enemy forces or to assist fellow players that may need assistance once combat is underway. I really like the emphasis on the idea that on a surprise round players do not receive such time to plan or react until that first round has come to pass. Two thumbs up on some great ideas. Love the language idea.
I looove this series😍 one of my house rules, is that my players under level 3 just get advantage on hit dice rolls. If the result is half or less than their hit dice value, they reroll again and take that roll.
A thematic rule I like to use is when a player fails their last death save (don't do this often) they can call upon a devil or God or other powerful being that they've encountered before. Make sure they always know there is a price that they don't know yet but will most likely be worse than death. Players in the material can simultaneously try to resurrect their friend. If they manage to in time, they can even stop the deal. A mortal with a deal like this can't make another and has a curse applied to them in addition to the unknown price (which is most likely going to be working towards freeing or empowering the entity which makes a campaign goal to stop or help the entity. End goals made by the Party itself are the best) Edit: I just realized I described more of a story trick than a rule. Ignore this I guess
I ran a heist campaign and during session zero had the players come up with a minimum of three npc's. These npc's each had a specific skill, ie. Smithing, Cartography, Arcane influence, Explosive expert etc... I had them put the information on index cards, and gave them back to me to use during game play. So, usually how heists go down in the movies. The characters are always stuck trying to figure something out but then someone says, "I may know a guy, who could help." My players really took advantage of this concept. Even though I had regular npc's through out the town they could interact with they were contacting their npc's sometimes more than 2 or 3 times a session. It went over pretty well.
We already do the pre-plan! It certain does give the players a chance to plan and work as a team, which is always a good thing. I took it from Professor DM's everyone roll as once plan at the start of the round and then narrate the effects afterwards. This gives them a minute or so to work out what's happening and then make combat quicker in the long run.
I use a house rule to foment cooperation and good sport between the players. I call it "Meta Inspiration" and it works somewhat like bardic inspiration, except for 2 key things: 1- it is a "bonus" given from player to player. whenever a player thinks another one had a great idea, did great roleplay or devised an amazing strategy, the player can call "meta inspiration" for the one that did the cool thing. giving one "meta inspiration point" to her. 2- each player can accumulate a maximum of 20 meta inspiration points. and whenever it rolls a d20 and wants to get a boost, it can spend a number of points fro her pool to roll a dice with equal sides as the points spent. for example? it can spend 6 meta inspiration points to add a d6 to the roll. It's working like a charm! since I've been using this, my players have developed more respect for each other's plays and roleplay and the value of cooperation had a big increase. and i swear it is very easy to use. just track the meta inspiration pool in the back of the sheet and, if players are abusing it, you as the DM can just veto some of the points given for not that great things. if someone uses it for some time, please let me know if you got any results. :)
Oh oh! I have another one! When characters have to make a skill challenge that requires them to exert themselves physically, but they fail, give them the chance to take on a point of exhaustion instead. This really helps out when your players are doing a difficult task that could easily spiral into a tpk if the dice don't help. It also represents the characters choosing to overexert themselves to achieve otherwise impossible tasks. While they survive the immediate effect, they have to take on long term penalties!
One of my favorite house rules I call hobbies and pastimes. They can be anything from knitting to herblore, leatherworking to cooking. When they camp or rest they have a chance to work on their hobby and slowly get better at it. One of my groups gave each other gifts they had made in the newfound real-life hobbies they got from their D&D game. If they role play it well I find a way to make it helpful to them in-game beyond just something to bond over.
These are awesome! Recently I've been thinking about how you choose a race, class and background, but still don't have a JOB. Like yeah, you're a human monk hermit, but the way you pay the bills is by growing the best wine grapes in the valley. Or yes I'm an half-orc barbarian noble, but I'm also a single mom, and I make our way in the world as an herbalist and medicine woman. This gives me as a DM way more to dig into (and threaten the PCs with), and makes their "life style" feel more fleshed out. Instead of Bond, Flaw etc. I have my players choose a Job instead. It's more relatable, and makes for richer interaction with NPCs.
What might be interesting with your combat idea is during their planning stage, after rolling initiative, players can choose to reduce their initiative score to adjust turn order for their plans. They can only do this at the beginning and can only LOWER their initiative. Then, the enemy Initiative is inserted into the turn order. That way they set up specific combos. Say they want the mage to distract an enemy with Color Spray, but the fighter is going before that. The fighter would drop their initiative to 1 point below the Mage's, so they can tag team and combo.
This is exactly what I do. After initiative is rolled players can elect to permanently knock themselves backwards any number of slots in order to re-order the turns at the potential cost of yielding initiative to the enemies, as I do not reveal the enemies' initiative slots until their turn actually comes up the first time. It works well and gets them thinking about how they want to strategize. I think I will try Dael's "Team Instict" idea in combination with this.
One house rule, that I believe came from XP to Level 3, is to roll the death saves secretly for your players. The don't know if their comrades are dying unless they go and check. It makes the game way more tense and makes stuff like spare the dying or medicine kits way more useful.
For languages, everybody I play with is current or former expat English teachers and we have sort of naturally put imperfect fluency into our current game because it's something we're all SUPER familiar with in our daily lives. I don't know if I would like to make it completely rely on percentile though, of course it's not about simulation but maybe I would add extra factors like the teleportation botch system? To add that extra verisimilitude for our specific table, with a lot of experience of language barriers. I have already roleplayed a lot of like "you get the gist/literal meaning but not the full connotation" with one player who wrote a complicated relationship with a heritage language into his backstory and I like the texture that adds to the world.
I have something that my d&d group has been playing around with, in the event that a character is beat down to 0 hp and are making death saves, when healed or brought back from death they gain a level of exhaustion to show how badly they were injured
Luck checks. I'm a big fan of %s and encouraging my players to shoot for the moon with what their characters wish for. Whenever they wish, they can ask "... is there any chance that ______" and I let them call high or low, roll a %, and then narrate their good or bad fortune. I think it's a nice way to keep things moving with "yes, and..." rather than saying "no" to their ideas, and also it organically establishes a theme of "be careful what you wish for" when they inevitably call "low" and you roll 100. I also use this method behind the screen to keep tabs on important NPCs who are living lives and accomplishing tasks off-camera. I think it's easy world building for your NPCs to live lives without the PCs, but also takes away the burden of having to write detailed stories that the PCs might not encounter.
I am almost more excited about Dael ideas, concepts and brainstorming videos than I am the games themselves :) I really like these ideas and your thoughts on implementation, and you enthusiasm is contagious
On the topic of partial language proficiencies, one thing I have been kicking around is developing a map of related languages so characters can sort of understand messages in languages they don’t “know.” For example, the lore states that many devils are fallen angels, so perhaps Infernal is derived from/similar to Celestial. Then, a character who speaks Celestial could understand parts of a scroll written in Infernal. It might require an Intelligence or percentile roll (I don’t know: this is just a concept at this point), but it might go a long way in preventing players from getting stuck because they can’t read something. In addition, there’s always the chance that players will misinterpret something, which could result in some interesting stories (or just make everything go off the rails).
I'm working on an armor rules variant that works a little like than "shields shall be broken" rule, where each kind of armor comes in light, medium, and heavy varieties, and the material of each armor determines a set number of damage reduction. You reduce the AC bonus of most of the armors a little, and the player gets to choose when to apply the damage reduction, once for light, twice for medium, and thrice for heavy, and after that, the armor is broken. Still needs some play testing to work it out, and make it good, but I think it's a nice way to gamify armor, and bring in the idea that armor is getting worn out as it's being hit. You can also give some enemies or attacks the effect of using up these uses - like a sunder attack.
A homerule for health I use: When rolling for health, if you roll below half the max roll you gain half the max roll for health (so if you're rolling D8 and roll a 1,2 or 3 that counts as if you rolled a 4) It doesn't badly mess with the health distribution between tanky vs squishy players and it just means no one's sour after rolling 1's for the past 3 level ups. (It also means as a GM I can throw larger rocks at them safely)
I'd like to try Healer's Kit Dependency and Slow Natural Healing (from the DMG), but then take the edge off somewhat by letting them roll half their HD (rounded up) during a long rest. I'd also like to try having failed death saving throws persist until a long rest is complete. For level 1 characters in a survival situation.
Not a house rule per se, but it is a method to roll for initiative that I used last session to great effect. I printed out and laminated some playing cards. One for each of my players, and a few for monsters. When I called for initiative to be rolled, instead of going through the dance of asking for initiatives 21+, 15-20, 10-14, 5-9, 4-, I just laid the cards in front of me and wrote each player's initiative on their respective cards with a dry erase marker. Then I did the same for the monsters, and simply put the cards in a deck, sorted by initiative. It is by far the fastest way I have ever used to set up initiative, and it also made sure that I never skipped anyone's turn because deciding who's going next was as simple as taking the card from the top of the deck and putting it at the bottom.
I like the combat time idea. One thing I am a big advocate for is meant to combat what is known as combat paralysis. You get 5 seconds to declare action or you are defensive until next action/reaction
for the strategy thing: I thought of making "party actions", because the party as you said, are traveling together and probably don't fight like individuals that don't know each other. The idea was to give small actions at initiate count 10 (like the lair actions mechanic but in the middle of the round) like allowing one character of the pary choice to move up to half movement speed as reaction, and improve their abilities as they advance and 'act like a team' but i never wrote rules for that actually. I did create a magic item that more than one can attune to and have similar effects....
I use the following rule for critical hits: roll the dice like you normally do for a crit (as in, they're all doubled), and if any of then low less than half their maximum, that dice is increased to it's maximum. Meaning, if you roll a d6 as pat of that crit and it rolls a 1, it is increased to 3 (as 3 is half of 6). This helps to avoid getting a crit that just doesn't do enough, while still maintaining the fun of rolling a bunch of dice.
One that I've been using since I started DM'ing that I really like is that when you level up and are determining your health, you roll and if the result is less than the average, just take the average instead. It makes beefier PCs and allows you to throw some harder enemies at them earlier on, without fear of causing a premature TPK. Something I've borrowed recently has been the idea of Ancestry and Culture, instead of race. There's a pdf on the DMs Guild that goes into detail with it, that I downloaded, but the gist of it is that race is now divided between things like your ability score improvements, language and skill prificiencies; and features such as resistances, breath weapons, etc. The first section would represent the culture you grew up in (and can be swapped around, if you were raised in another race's culture), while the second section is considered your ancestry. If you wanted to play a character with a mixed ancestry (for instance if your mother was a tiefling and your father was a dragonborn) you would get to choose one ancestral feature from each of your parents. If one of the player's parents has darkvision, they can choose whether or not they want their character to have it.
for languages I would do this, I would split into the three categories; read, speak, and understand. Basically at character creation they would get two languages that all three categories apply to. and then 4 other languages that two of the categories apply to. and finally 4 languages that only one category applies to. (The player can choose individually for each. Also Druidic and Thieves' Cant are not counted in this.) Just a breakdown for how each category affects the language for clarity: Reads - written script can be deciphered Speaks - can physically utter the language Understands - knows what words mean in that language and can translate it if heard. I have a lot of homebrew rules but here are a couple: 1.) Floating Initiatives - Roll initiative as normal but afterwards the players can decide in what order they choose to enter combat (The rolling is for me to know where the enemies fall into place). 2.) STR based AC - monsters that rely more on their natural hide/skin, or bulky armor to defend themselves rather than being nimble use STR as their AC mod instead of DEX 3.) Character Incentives - This I use to as a bribe to receive more engaging backstories or plot arcs for my PC's. Basically I have a couple of rewards I give out at character creation. (homebrew tailored item, pet/familiar, extra prof in a skill/saving throw etc.) I have my player's choose two from the list and they have to be able to provide adequate justification as to why their character obtains this reward. In the case of items, the better the item the more justification needed which can be through backstory or I will make a quest for that character that if passed grants them said item.
I have a small collection of rules that my group uses, "borrowed" from others or created from my own thoughts: 1. Two-handed weapons will add 1.5 times your Strength modifier to damage rolls. 2. Potions can be drank as a full action for the max roll of health restored or drank as a bonus action for their rolled die. However, players must use a Healer's Kit to recover health during a short rest. 3. The bloodied condition from earlier editions where if you drop to half health or lower, you gain a -1 to your AC but a +1 to all chances to hit. 4. You have to be proficient in a skill in order to use the Help action to assist another player in a skill check. 5. Your Intelligence modifier will give bonuses/penalties depending on the modifier: -1 or lower you lose a language, +1 you gain 1 skill proficiency, +2 you get 2 skills and 1 language, +3 you get 3 skills and 1 language, +4 you get 3 skills and 2 languages, and at +5 you get 4 skills and 2 languages. 6. Click Trap, honestly you gave inspiration to it and we love it. 7. Druids can wildshape into CR 0 creatures regardless of limitations and without limits, but they cannot attack or use any actions (i.e. you can turn into a mouse, but you can't attack or use the Help action). Just feel like CR 0 creatures are never used by Druids. 8. Wizards can craft scrolls. Warlocks, Bards, and Clerics can use scrolls naturally. Others require a +2 Intelligence modifier or proficiency in the Arcana skill to use them. 9. Critical hits will have the first die at max damage and rolled die that come up at max can be rolled again. Crits should feel powerful, so it sucks to see a Crit deal two damage because the dice decided to roll snake-eyes. 10. When rolling initiative, players that roll a nat 20 for initiative have advantage on the first turn while players that roll a nat 1 for initiative have disadvantage on the first turn.
“They’re based on Aristotle quotes.”
YES!
“I won’t get into it right now.”
DARN IT
For real though.. I got rather excited
Whether or not that part was true, it seemed true enough. Verisimilitude, is it not?
@@tasselhoffburfoot3252 I cheered.
But when ?!
You're not an illusionist, you're a _Verisimilimancer._
Try saying that ten times...
That is a very 'prideful wizard' thing to say. It's going in my spell book for later reference
“I am not an *illusionist*! I am a Verisimilimancer. I bring forth Truths, manifestations of reality that lies not within the tangible realm, but the realm of identity, perception, and belief. I reshape The world more firmly than any transmuter, for belief defines reality and I define belief”
“So, you make illusions?”
“Sigh”
My home rule is I don't like that mundane medicine seems so unimportant since there is magical healing. So if you have proficiency in medicine, during short rests you can use med kit charges and each use grants another player to automatically have the max result of rolling a hit dice. Basically they are being a field medic.
I like this. I steal this. Thank you
STOLEN! Thank!
Yoink
OoooOo love this thank you
Two language house rules:
At character creation, I allow people to leave languages un picked, then during the game I allow them to announce that they know a language if they can give a good reason for how their character acquired it. This solves the problem of people picking languages that never come into play.
I use language proficiencies as proficiency in the history/lore/culture of the people who speak that language.
i.e., if you speak dwarfish then you know "dwarf" stuff. So I'll allow you make a INT (dwarven) check if you aren't proficient in history or a INT (dwarven) check to know how to behave before dwarven nobility.
I really like both of these and may steal them.
Remind me the way Starfinder tie language to a Skill named Culture. If you have more ranks (points) in Culture you are allowed to pick more languages.
I tie culture to the History Skill, with language proficiency granting advantage. If they are asking about a culture their background does not justify, disadvantage.
I usually do this with skill points as well (not necessarily DnD), I let people keep (or keep for them) say 5-10% of their skill points to invest in "obvious stuff my character should know but I forgot about" when it comes up. There's always a knight who forgot to learn heraldry, or that hunter who mysteriously doesn't know how to repair their own gear, or a druid who doesn't know which plants are edible. This saves that embarrassment and "but my character should obviously know this!"-arguments :)
Thats the good stuff, fits nicely into an etiquette role for D&D
Couple of thoughts I've had of my own that I felt like sharing:
Morale: This one is more of something to tease RP moments out of characters. Essentially it's rewarding players for having characters do things they like and avoid things that are obviously uncomfortable. We've all had those moments in game where you describe how cold and unpleasant it is outside or how hard it's raining and the PCs just kinda shrug it off like it's no big deal, even though the paladin grew up in a lavish castle, the wizard came from a wealthy family and bounced from expensive inn to expensive inn up until this point and the thief spent 90% of their formative years in the desert.
Basically whenever a character tends to their creature comforts, they add a 1d6 to their "morale pool" that they can spend, one per check, on any ability check, saving throw or attack roll... and whenever a character has to deal with a highly uncomfortable situation (wading through sewers, keeping watch outside the tent in a downpour, etc) they lose a morale die. They can accumulate negative morale dice that I as a GM can apply in the same way if I'm feeling particularly punishing. Some things will have a pretty universal morale effect, like nice food, a good quality inn stay, etc, but some characters/backgrounds might be unbothered by bad weather and uncomfortable in a classy inn.
Pushed Rolls: This is something I hijacked wholesale from Call of Cthulhu, but basically whenever a character attempts a skill and fails they can opt to push the roll on a higher DC with bigger consequences if they fail. The fighter climbing a rough stone cliff fails their athletics check, so they make it up a short distance before hitting a dangerous or uncertain handhold. They can push their roll and try to proceed, but if they fail they fall and take a ton of damage. The rogue is trying to pick a lock, but they fail their check. They hear a guard coming from down the hall, and they've got enough time to make a break for it... but they're very close, they think they've almost go the lock open. Would they like to push their roll?
Morale dice and pushed rolls are great ideas! Consider them the good kind of stolen :)
Fantastic ideas. I'm going to see if my players are interested in these.
very interesting. so a push roll raises the DC and consequence but you get to reroll and moral Dice are added or subtracted based on background and circumstance? I love the push idea but am a little iffy on the moral dice. I do like the idea of punishing or rewarding them for treating their characters well.
So with the moral dice pool. you spend a day in a nice inn you get +1 moral die but the next day you go out in the rain you subtract one moral die? also is the die used up after the skill check or is it reusable?
@@Taven03 There's some noodly bits for the morale rolls that I'd have to iron out before I were to treat it like a real, legitimate mechanic, but essentially you can spend one morale die at a time, and it's lost when you use it. I think it would have to be up to game master adjudication to determine when they're distributed though, as I could see ways people could metagame to exploit it. (If there's a hard cap on morale, I could see characters sleeping in a nice inn until it's full up and then switching to a cheaper inn, for example... but without a cap a character could theoretically spend a month in a nice inn and come out with 30 morale dice.)
I'd suggest maybe no more than 5 morale dice in either direction, which will encourage the characters to spend them since they aren't difficult to get in mass if you're not out in the wilderness, but also so they won't build up such a massive morale debt that they're just sad for life and don't care anymore if they don't get any personal time for a while.
@@kevingriffith6011 The 5 dice cap sounds good. Also I don't think it's a problem for them to stay in a nice Inn till it caps out then switch. That's kind of how a lot of people behave, treating themselves when they're feeling depleted, then being more cost effective when they're feeling up.
Dael the extra hp for low level players was my suggestion from your last video. I'm so glad you like it.
Timestamps:
1:05 Player-create “rumors” related to their backstory, shuffled and handed to the other players
2:41 Double STR mod on 2-handed weapon damage (PCs and monsters alike)
4:02 Shields can be splintered (sacrifice shield to avoid damage)
4:58 HP “loan” for low-level characters
5:52 Percentile comprehension for languages (instead of just “fluent or not”)
10:08 Give players 3 mins at the start of combat to discuss strategy so each turn is quicker
Thank you for this! It's like the Table of Contents for videos, and makes it super easy to scan when trying to find that video I was looking for that I saw sometime.
aren't there already timestamps in the description?
@@aceistheplace6215 there are now! They weren’t included at first
I've got a fun little one to give the party a bit of a fighting chance when they're getting owned.
Whenever a PC drops to 0 and falls unconcsious, they can choose one party member to grant a d6 of Bardic Inspiration to.
This is an easy way to show the whole "I'll avenge my friend" moment while allowing them to have a better chance of bouncing back.
In the same vein, if a PC actually dies in combat, EVERYONE gains a d12 of inspiration. Inspiration won't totally derail an encounter, and it only comes up when they're already on the backfoot.
I'm not sure what to call it, though...
Blood Avengeance
:D I got picked! Here's some more for Round 3!
1. "You Gotta Fight It!" If you're being charmed or mind-controlled, your allies can use an action to plead with you to snap out of it, and you get to make a Wisdom save (or whatever you need to make to resist).
2. Machine Gun Spellcasting! Cast as many spells per turn as you want-bonus action, action, who cares. You’re the one spending the spell slots chief!
3. Radial Ass Kicking! Allies within 5ft can choose to fight back-to-back. While doing this, they can't be flanked.
#3 is just a common sense thing, not a homebrew thing.
I actually love it when my players are strategizing, I'm always like "I hope your plan works"
Me too! Sometimes when the plan is really good narratively but wouldn't work I bend things a little in favor
I almost entirely agree. The only exception is when my players stop combat to discuss elaborate strategies that they could not have come up with beforehand.
If the strategizing is in relation to things they would have known beforehand it's easy enough to retcon it as a flashback, but some strategizing is so specific to that situation that their elaborate strategies defy believability.
It's nice to be able to toss stuff to the players. Like reminders if they forgot something.
Right its like your own private heist movie
I've created something for a less serious campaign called "The Unreliable Narrator". I haven't come across anything like it so here it is:
As a DM I hand out little letter tokens, or word tokens for different reasons, usually if they succeed at something difficult or do something cool, etc. What this allows a player to do is mess with my words when I describe things. For example, if they come around a corner and find themselves face to face with a fiend, one of them could use a token and say "We come face to face with a friend?" Or if they find a settlement of elves, someone could chime in and say "We find a settlement of Elvis?" This could drastically alter what a DM has set up which is why it's used for less serious campaigns or very very sparringly, or if the DM is very careful with their words, but I find it has players engage a bit more and pay attention to things more in case they want to use their token.
Pro tip if using this rule: Never describe anything as Ramshackle, cuz your players will want to unshackle the ram.
This is hilarious, and I may steal it for a silly one-shot. I love it.
@@spiritandsteel I hope it leads to a great funny story!
This is wonderful. Do you still use inspiration tokens in these kind of games?
@@Gleebaer Uhhhh truth be told I've never played a traditional game of DnD, I've just really been into the community for about a year at this point. I've played call of cthulu, pathfinder, lancer, a homebrew jojo and power rangers, and 1 me and a buddy are currently making, so I guess the answer is no, but that shouldn't stop you or anyone from using them if you can, I just don't know what they are lol. Sorry.
There was something like this, instead of inspiration somebody gave cards out and the cards told what can be changed… but I don‘t know who was it… Not Luke, Not guy, not the Nerds, not the matt and also not the other matt,… damn it
I always steal ideas from different things and add my own flair to them! I used your alignment in my campaign and loved it
On Languages:
I had a similar thought some time ago, but instead of it being percentile, it was a rating between 0 and 20.
However, instead of rolling once, one would roll 3d20 to speak or understand a language:
0 successes - Nothing
1 success - Nouns and verbs
2 successes - Most things, but not the subtleties or anything too complex
3 successes - Everything
Took part of an idea and mixed it with my own. I have a kid's plastic practice clock. (the small circle you can move the minute and hour hands around however you want) Time within a "day" in dnd has always been odd to me. The party wakes up at dawn, visits a few shops, gets a quest, leaves the town, travels for a few hours to a near by cave and it's... What time? Noon? Evening? Night? 🤷♂️
So what I do is pretty simple. They are in town. They tell me what they plan to do can take generally 1-3 hours. Travel based on distance can take 1-8 hours in a day. Any more risks levels of exhaustion. While in a dungeon, cave, structure (away from the sun and sky) I set up a d6. Each room the die goes up a number, every 10 rounds of combat the die goes up one, they choose to spend more time in a room investigating it the die goes up one. Each time it gets to 6 and cycles back to 1 I move the clock up an hour. They may enter a cave at 5pm but not leave it until 2-3am and who knows what's out in the dark that late at night
One of my favorite life wisdoms Ive learned is that there is no stealing if you cite your sources. Credit who you steal from as best you can and everyone wins.
One house rule that I play with that I'm honestly a fan of is using advantage and disadvantage in piles, rather than as a checkbox like it usually is. What I mean by this is that while you can't necessarily get super-(dis)advantage, if you have 2 sources of advantage and only one source of disadvantage, you still have advantage on the attack because the disadvantage doesn't totally counteract all of the advantages active. Worth noting is that this does work both ways, and is not exclusive to players, so monsters and NPCs can do so as well. It encourages teamwork from the players, as well as providing an extra layer of thinking when there are multiple enemies on the board. I will note that if you play with advantage flanking this whole rule might break apart a bit.
"Zone of Truthiness" is now my favourite spell, thank you.
One really cool mechanic my brother came up with was 'Telegraphed.' It's a downside for a powerful monster attack, like recharge. When a monster uses a telegraphed attack, the players that can see it make a survival check. If they succeed they get a description of what the monster is trying to do (e.g. "The monster's six eyes spin independently, locking on to each of you. It's mouth begins to swell. What do you do?") Then every character that noticed can burn their reaction to take a *full action.* They can dodge, dash to reposition, attack again etc. It breaks up the turn order in the favor of the players which keep players engaged off their turn.
I have been DM'ing since the late 70's and love the rumor idea for the game. Especially for one offs with random players at a local game store or during a convention. Going to make this a must from now on.
Chris
We used to have an idea of "signature moves" that are like once off abilities a character can use by spending inspiration, like an acrobatic performer rogue might use their signature move to get an extra move action and make a performance check to stun nearby enemies who can see them.
Of course this only works if you give out inspiration at least semi regularly but it helps martial classes feel special and unique, you can even tie them into that characters specific backstory
This is epic. I've done something similar with custom "feats" (stolen from Dawn Forged Cast) but love the idea of them coming up with their own move they can spend inspiration on. Stealing this for sure.
I like the concept of languages, but I was even thinking of maybe making some table that is a "sister languages" table. For example, Infernal and Abyssal might be similar in language type, but not the same. A character that knows Abyssal will roll a percentile die for an Infernal text that says "Here there be monsters." If they roll under 50, they can't get much meaning out of it, maybe even only getting the word "Here". If they roll over, they will get a roughly accurate translation. You could even go far enough to prep some of this by having it be awkwardly translated to something like "Here is the creatures." It gives players a little information when they would have none.
Cyberpunk 2020 the trpg ( not the video game coming out soon) has a very deep system like this with sister language and how hard they are to learn like if you speak English French is "quite easy" but something like Japanese would be a "lot harder " with different costs for each level of difficult
I have a similar thing, but instead of rolling, its just that languages that use the same script might have loanwords. This way there will be things the player can gleam from a text they know the script for but not the whole language
Sister languages could be the ones that share the same script. Like Dwarvish, Giant, Gnomish, Orc and Goblin and Goblin, which all share the Dwarvish script. Or like in your example, since both Abyssal and Infernal share the Infernal script.
@@diogoamerico1029 but lore wise celestial would also be a sister language of Infernal being that the native speakers of Infernal are fallen angels or their descendants
@@dylanflynn1895 Indeed. That's a very good point that brings many assumptions and interpretations about languages. Also, that would be highly setting-dependant. In my homebrew scenario, I've spent some time toying with a "idiom treaty" that records linguistic roots, common parenthood and similar scripts and alphabets. That's a work I have done in my worldbuilding that would remove the need of rulings during play. But in any other setting where you don't have such solid answers, it all depends on DM fiat. If I were to DM in the Forgotten Realms, I would probably rule that Celestial and Infernal are sister languages while other DMs might stay true solely to the script similarities, and a bunch of them (most, I guess) would simply stick with RAW and state that if you don't have a language in your sheet, you don't know shit about it.
My favorite rule(s) that I've come up with as a DM
-If you go down to zero hitpoints you take a point of exhaustion
-If you fail a death save you also take a point of exhaustion
This helps my players take going down more seriously and it takes a character days of rest to recover from a near death experience or multiple near death experiences instead of just being up and ready to go again a minute later. It also gives players a strong incentive to revive someone immediately even if they haven't rolled any death saving throws or haven't failed a death save. The rule stops my players from going down, getting 2 hp from healing word, and then charging back in to take another breath from that great red dragon they're fighting. Lastly it gives another way for a player to die, too many exhaustion points equals death with no saves.
It really has made my players feel more mortal while still being a high enough bar that in the campaigns I've run no one has actually died from the rule. The mechanics of going down to half speed, or being immobile with too many exhaustion points has also created interesting challenges for my players too. Having to carry the rogue who did that awesome thing that almost cost him his life back to town can be a fun mechanic. Hiding him in illusions and guarding him while the ranger tries to lead the pursuit away from the wounded party was a very fun and tense narrative moment for the group.
A friend of mine developed his own version of this, he has death save failures not go away until after a long rest. I tried his rule with a modification of: one death save failure goes away per long rest, but ended up going back to my original rule. I included the alternate to be used with or in place of the above rule. A second alternative is to record death save exhaustion separately from regular exhaustion especially if you have a barbarian that builds up a lot of exhaustion or other rules in play that incorporate more exhaustion than normal. Thanks for reading my Ted talk on fantasy death!
Loved your Ted Talk on fantasy death
I like this idea. it kinda gives a reason to be careful and everything, I will have to give this a try! I found when I was a healer that I was waiting until the last second (if not past) to heal someone because I knew even if someone went down I had a round or two before I really had to worry.
I like the idea and will propose incorporating it to my players. It also boosts the usefulness of things like the Relentless Endurance ability of half-orcs.
We use exhaustion on zero HP, too.
@@acrolyt that's cool! Great minds think alike!
[Split second decision X seconds]: Let your players roll for initiative. Then tell them what happens. For example; "the roof starts to collapse". Then let them decide what they do in reversed order (Lowest initiative goes first) giving them only X seconds to decide. If they stay silent or try something impossible they freeze. This gives the faster more perceptive players more info and time to decide how they'll react. It's fun, funny and often dramatic :)
noice - consider this idea redistributed to me.
This is AWESOME!!!
Looks like the "click rule" from the AngryGM (mentioned by Dael in her previous video about stolen stuff) in which something happens or is about to happen, so the DM telegraphs it to the players and they have a few seconds to decide what to do. A smart (or lucky) decision could bypass the saving throw entirely (or give advantage) while a not so applicable choice could doom the PC's reaction. This is specifically designed for traps but could easily be adapted to any "quick-time events" you want.
Your version seems like how initiative works in World of Darkness, allowing faster and/or more perceptive characters to use their reflexes to predict what other will do by making slower characters in the initiative declare first but act last. But that is how combat works in WoD. Your ideas seems very nice to me, but rolling for initiative could remove the sense of impeding doom and time pressure in a fast-paced decision. It would be less like reflexes and more like "bullet time", when things go into slow motion while characters decide what to do. Both are great ideas with different outcomes.
I used to do this with World of Darkness games, because combat turns are supposed to be 3 seconds long and usually involve firearms so everything is effectively happening at the same time. So I figured those with the higher initiative we're reading the situation and reacting just a split-second faster.
I like the idea of placing time-pressure on the planning portion of combat. But ... I also think that allowing more time is an opportunity for players to inject more role-playing, and having role-playing as part of combat planning is something I want players to try to do. Time-pressure seems like it will just reward those players who already think tactically, and the "regular" players will be left out.
I love the language house rule so much. I’ve always loved the idea of a character who has learned X language, but only through conversation or cramming a test or whatever, so they’re always getting something wrong. It does seem like it puts a strain on the DM, as you don’t want a failed roll to be a full failure, but rather garbled translation so the party ends up with some missing or misleading information or a social roll gets harder. And a wizard with Tongues will take away all the fun.
Great video, thanks for the ideas! I'm definitely going to start using the 3 minutes strategizing time before initiative.
Two of my players introduced me to what they call the 'Boromir Health System'. It's a quick way for me to describe an enemy NPC's health during combat. When the players ask how a specific enemy is looking, if it is at 3/4 health I say it's at 1 arrow Boromir, 1/2 health is 2 arrow Boromir, 1/4 health is 3 arrow Boromir, and barely staying on their feet is 4 arrow Boromir. This gives the players a little more detail about an enemy's health than just saying they are bloodied vs not bloodied, and it gives a consistent picture from enemy to enemy.
The group I play with agreed to what we call "The spear rule". It states that "If you are proficient with either martial weapons, Glaives, Halberds, Lances, Pikes, or Tridents, then Spears and Tridents gain the reach property for you."
This is because we dislike the spear not having reach, since it is the prime feature of a spear (as compared to ex. a javelin). The idea is that if you only have proficiency with simple weapons, you have no real martial training so you can't hold the spear properly to utilize its full length, and your fighting style becomes simplified. However, if you have any of the stated proficiencies, chances are you have martial training and understand how to couch and lunge with your spear for maximum reach. Spears have also been used historically because they were such an easy weapon to teach someone to wield, but even the most base soldier needs instructions in how to do that (hence the martial weapons proficiency) because proper spear fighting is not as intuitive as one might think.
I am thinking about adding more of these properties/features to other simple weapons, giving them more versatility for a trained warrior. Ex, even if the sling in D&D is considered a simple weapon, using a sling properly requires hella dedication. Historically, they have seen a wider and more lasting use on the battlefield than almost any other weapon short of the club, dagger, javelin, and spear.
As someone trained in spear, please, please, make spears finesse weapons when used in 2 hands.
It's both realistic and opens up the thematic style of the lightly-armored nimble spearman that can be so cool.
@@dynamicworlds1 Yes! Give us another finesse reach weapon! The whip is boring, even reducing the two-handed finesse die to 1d6 would still be awesome if t had reach
Ooh, this is such a good base for modification. Locking certain weapon properties behind proficiencies, so intuitive
Do something similar, martial weapon users spears are d8, and when used 2 handed have reach.
@@dynamicworlds1 In the same vein as what Johan did, you could give spears used with martial weapon proficiency the finesse property. Players who only know simple weapons are stuck using STR, as they're not sufficiently trained to use a spear with finesse.
Been DMing for 15ish years on and off, and my favorite house rules:
+Occasional Mad Lib content generated by players, e.g. name a creature--they don't know if they'll fight it, it's an NPC, it's just part of a pub's name, or they'll find a dead one. Lots of fun!
+During first round of combat, go in reverse order of initiative and narrate what PCs, NPCs, and baddies' intentions are, and those with higher initiative get to react better to those with lower initiative.
+Damage that is a high enough percentage of a creature's (or PC or NPC) HP, special effects happen, such as loss of limb, and it's a fun narrative to give players control over what happens to enemies when this happens
Being a language/linguistics nerd, I'd like to see something like language "family trees" in D&D - like if your character speaks Dwarvish, you have a greater than 0 chance of interpreting Gnomish for example, since the two languages are linguistically similar and in the same language "family". They *kind of* did that with Primordial and Aquan/Terran/Ignan/Auran, but they again just made it so they're all the same language and if you speak one you speak them all, which I think is kind of a crappy way to hand-wave it (though understandable for simplicity's sake). Using your percentile example, I'd say if you speak Dwarvish, you have a 10% proficiency in Gnomish and maybe other related languages like Giant.
Also if you fail, it's not a pure black and white pass/fail. I'd say the closer you get to success, the more you're able to interpret. Like if you've got 20% proficiency and you roll a 25, you can get the general gist of what it's saying, but not the whole thing (it could be that you get the literal translation but since it's an idiom/cultural reference you don't have, you don't necessarily understand the intended meaning); roll a 40 and you might be able to pick out one or two words, but that's it (and those words aren't necessarily correct).
For a real world example - if an English speaker looks at a paragraph of written German or Dutch, they can probably work out a fair bit of it even without actually speaking that language since the languages are so closely related. Same goes for Slavic or Norse languages - you might not be able to speak multiple languages, but they're close enough to the one you *do* speak that you can make an educated guess as to the meaning, as opposed to an English speaker looking at Chinese or Russian or Arabic without education in those languages, it just looks like complete gibberish and you wouldn't have any idea what it means outside of the context of where you found it.
I do this. In my campaigns, I call it dialects. If you speak giant for example, you can understand orcish and goblin phrases, and vice versa, but not everything. Or, if you speak elvish you can understand parts of sylvan. And there is a unique version of elvish for each subrace of elf. Which means sometimes you can be an elf talking to another elf and not get the whole picture, but there's always a chance.
I love this, and I guess I kinda do that, if someone knows like Dwarvish i allow them an INT check to read the base of what something in Giant is saying or something like that.
I actually do something like this in my game. The common language in the setting is Ilthean, which is a corrupt form of true northern Ilthean (called high Ilthean) with some grammar stolen Grosvenoren.
A person speaking high ilthean will be mostly understandable to a person who speaks ilthean, they’ll just sound like they use a lot of archaic words. A person speaking ilthean will be somewhat understandable to someone who speaks high ilthean, but the strange grammar and weird new words will make it difficult.
Love this! Then you could also incorporate learning the language differently too, like maybe it takes you less time to learn a related language!
- Languages -
Another great video!
I'm running a globe-trotting pulp-era setting using the Hero System RPG that already has gradations for their languages baked in. I informed the players that languages and literacy were going to be important in the campaign. It's also a Cthulhu horror setting, needing some academically inclined characters, so everyone received extra points for non-combat skills. The players ended up partitioning out all the populated continents and each specialized in the local languages. It kind of puts a realistic spotlight on the local language specialist as they act as interpreter and the "face" for the group for that session or story arc. And when they come across a trove of ancient tomes, they hand them out according to ability. It has created some really interesting situations--sometimes there are benefits to being the reader and other times you go a little mad...
For my house rule, at the beginning of a campaign, I make an npc relating to each character. This NPC could be anywhere from friend to family. Then they will start with some items related to the npc. For example, if there friend is an alchemists, they might get a potion of some type.
In theory this is what the "Bonds" section on your character sheet is for. It makes sense that someone close to a character would see them off with a gift. I like this.
What's funny about watching this video, is half of these are represented in Pathfinder 2e. Like the shield rule for example. A character with a shield gets no AC just for holding it, they have to use the Raise a Shield Action during their turn to get +2 AC until their next turn. When they do this and an attack hits them anyway, they can use their reaction to Shield Block, having the shield take the brunt of the hit. Shields are assigned a Hardness value and a durability, for example a steel shield base has 5 hardness and 20 durability. If you Shield Block, you reduce the damage you are taking by the hardness, so in this case 5 damage, then you and the shield take the remainder of the damage. So an attack deals 12 damage to you, you use Shield Block, reduce it by the 5 hardness so now its 7, and both you and the shield take 7.
The other element is the bonus hp at lower levels. When building a lvl 1 character, lets say for example a human Swashbuckler, their ancestry (human) and the Swashbuckler class grants them hp equal to heir hit die, no rolling for it, you always get max, then add con mod. So for this example, 8 hp for being human, 10 hp for Swashbuckler, then a con mod 2 grants this lvl 1 character 20hp, and they will get another 12 hp when they level up (class hit die of 10 + con mod of 2).
I also found a language houserule writeup a year or so ago that I geeked right out over. It uses a scale from 0-100 in proficiency or fluency with tiers at the 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 marks. a score of 20 in a language is basic familiarity, can catch words either written or spoken and potentially get the gist of a conversation; 40 is a conversational familiarity allowing a player to comment on condition or ask for directions or whatever, but they stand out like a sore thumb. It goes on in that fashion, and what I enjoy about it is that someone with a ~60 score in a language only then becomes proficient in skill checks relating to that language. I love the idea that an adventurer with a 60 in Fiendish might try to negotiate a devilish contract but try to decipher a legal contract in a foreign language. The DC for negotiating and catching fine print could be ridiculous unless that adventurer has a 90+.... I agree that it is highly beaurocratic and essentially introduces a new mini-game on par with tracking spell components, so it's not for everyone. I wonder if there is a way to make it an optional hassle for those players who want a "hard mode".
I've been playing around with a house rule recently to widen the ranger's appeal as both a martial type and roleplay boss by giving them a bonus trait at certain levels reinforced by their backstory. Using Aragorn as a bit of a model, I saw that his experience and time spent with elves endowed him with advanced medicine knowledge and an ability to keep watch similar to trancing. I thought it might encourage my players to delve into rangers a bit more if they were able to learn from civilizations that they'd spent time around. Based on favoured terrain/enemies, it could be interesting to give a ranger resistance to poison damage if they spent a tremendous time around Mountain Dwarves, drinking with them and traversing their mines. A ranger might gain the ability to trance instead of sleeping once every long rest. They might gain a resistance to a different damage type based on if they were exposed to burns or electricity by living amongst dragonborn; or maybe they discovered how to use anger to their advantage while traveling with a barbarian tribe. In the same way that Bards can gain spells from multiple spell lists, I think it would fit a ranger's feel to be able to learn skills exhibited by fellow travelers. Rangers are the watchers, they are students. They might not learn to take on a wild shape, but they certainly could pick up other druidic or fey skills.
Edit:
I played a game recently where the DM introduced a "know someone" rule, where each player, in each city on the active campaign plane, could claim to "know a blacksmith that could help with that", or "Know a former thief that could get us into x", which is then realized as true or false based on a roll justified by the claim. For example, let's say our party just entered a small village along the coast. As a fighter with a sailor background, I might claim that I know someone in this town that can get us a ship. The DM would decide if this will be decided by a history, charisma, intelligence, or other check and set the dc. In this case they might say, since I was a sailor, there is a very good likelihood that I know someone that can get me a ship, then they get me to roll a history or luck check on a dc 15. If i get it, the person is in the town, if I don't they might not be in town (away on travel, moved, dead, etc.). In another case my halfling monk sage companion might claim that they know a thief that can show us around a large city capital on another continent. Based on the halfling's backstory and years of meditation and study, there's a possibility they are telling the truth, but a real slim one, so the dm sets the dc at 25 and asks for a disadvantaged history check based on the halfling's claim that they were penpals while studying at the monestary. This prompts some fun player-led npc generation as well as encouraging player investment in the world. As soon as an actor claims to already know someone or something about the world they inhabit, they've also decided to have existed in that world for a longer time.
I love this. It should be a regular series. It's great.
Some house rules:
If someone is floundering on a turn, I give them an intelligence saving throw. This, in essence, is your ability to critically think under time pressure. I call this a meta check.
Further meta checks:
History - Doubles as military strategy. Want some help coming up with a strategy? Roll History and I'll help you identify assets, threats and strategic targets. I won't give away secrets, but based on what they know I will help you strategize.
Nature - Doubles as understanding creatures. Insight works great, but Nature will tell them much more about the basic creature itself in a conversation.
Religion - Morality. Trying to get an intuition on the right thing to do? Religion check. It can help you figure out a more ethical path, and sometimes even a more moral one for yourself. This is direct DM guidance sometimes, often pushing players towards outcomes they couldn't rationally have come to. It's also subtly a way to beseech a god, so you might pray for guidance, and get it from unexpected inspiration. Typically this is a moral compass for players "lost" on what the right thing to do is.
Reverse Social Checks - Players make social checks in lieu of roleplaying, so if they roll poorly it's easier to RP out a bad exchange, if they roll high, I offer them some useful RP and work with them to come up with a clever dialogue or get a little costumed bugs bunny action going. Help them determine a tact - barbarians get to roll to move boulders, bards get to roll to move minds. The player doesn't actually have to LIFT the boulder, and doesn't have to be that suave either.
Animal Handling - Just take a look around and familiarize yourself with some animal life. Lots of rats? Dirty city. Lots of cats? Lots of charity. Lots of birds? Maybe they're being fed. I encourage rangers and druids with free time to just do this.
Acrobatics - They get to make a save to take half-damage from falls. It's weird Acrobatics has 1-2 raw use (resisting shoves/grapples and evading odd traps).
Zone of Truth (spell) - I tend to RP this as weird mouth-changes as players try to bend the truth. I don't stop the RP, so when they try to bend the truth, the truth bends out of their mouth. Think "Liar Liar". They CAN shut up, but most people just wouldn't shut up. This is also a religious spell, so they need decent Int to know what that's about.
One other thing - in homebrewing I almost always favors ways to help the players and simplify the game --- but often times instead of homebrewing a rule, it's better to introduce things in world. Like, I like how that "Dm gives you HP early" thing works, but paying it back over time is a slog. Introducing a low cleric willing to cast Aid on the team whenever they come into town? Solves that issue, creates an interesting NPC. Even more interesting? It's the guard to a dangerous area, who doubles as the one who'll protect you if you come running home "hot". A weird necromancer who sends you off with a few extra zombies as pack mules? Trained ones, utterly incapable of harming anyone, and they were criminals who volunteered their bodies post-death.
That shattering shield? Cool idea, totally could just be an item in game. How about a mechanized shield built by dwarves, that in response to an attack you can do 2d4 pierce, spitting out blades, but losing further defense until you can manually rig the spring trap back (1 minute, like setting a bear trap).
3-minute strategy when initiative is rolled? If you give players access to Telekinetic Bond, this lets players strategize live, and I love this, because it makes players feel more like their adventurer's. I open the table to full-meta so I can stop worrying about cracking down on communication they wouldn't logically have.
When they lose access to say, those rings, it becomes REALLY interesting now to be separated and "on your own", or if a player ditches their ring. It's like dropping those comms or destroying your cellphone, or ripping up your social security card.
This makes great combinations too - "True Strike" The most infamously useless cantrip? Now it's a great way for a wizard to get insight and look to the rogue and go, "He overstretched on that attack, his shoulder is open!". Fun teamwork moments for a normally useless spell.
My favorite homebrew rule?
Recently some players introduced me to a concept. Their DM at the end of their session would let them experience a dream, or a vision, with a different pretext every time. Sometimes it'd be conventional obsessing, sometimes it'd be magical insight, sometimes it would just be fridge-logic.
But he'd let them re-rollplay a scene that occurred earlier, except it's in a non-dangerous state. It's a memory, or a dream, or an insight. This way they could do something they WANTED to try, and roleplay it out at the end of the session. It couldn't go longer than a few minutes deviation, but checking doors they ran past or trying a different tact with an NPC helps players to wonder less, explore more, in a safer space.
I'm probably going to homebrew a helmet of hindsight just for this.
Team Instinct is brilliant and spot-on! Steal-worthy for sure!
Having some checks require "Effort". Basically you first roll to see if you succeed in the task, as you normally would, but then instead of it being a binary pass/fail, you instead have your player roll to progress through that task, pretty much treating the task like an enemy where you roll to hit, then roll to deal damage.
An example would be, an evil cult has opened a portal to hell and the party has got to close it, and while the fighter and the paladin fend off hoards of demons, the wizard is trying to translate the ancient text so that the portal can be sealed.
Or maybe the party is trying to convince the guard that "No, we didn't just light the tavern on fire". Sure maybe the bard is super convincing and throws the guard off the scent with a single lie, but odds are the guard is going to ask a few follow up questions, and the party has three rounds of questions to either convince the guard of their innocence, or they might be asked to come back to the guard house for further questioning.
To sum up, combat is usually the focal point of most rpgs, so treating more mundane tasks like combat makes them a lot more engaging, particularly for players who aren't combat focused, and it gives players a chance to shine in a way that doesn't involve killing.
A rule i've thought of recently is the rest helper rule:
On a short rest, you can expend any amount of your hit dice to have another player roll additional hit dice equal to the amount you have expended. The hit dice the player you have helped relates to their own class, not your own, so when a barbarian helps the wizard rest by giving up one of their hit dice, the wizard rolls a d6, not a d12. If the helped player has levels in classes that use different hit dice, it rolls the hit dice of the class they have more levels in. If they have the same level in every class, they take the lowest number die.
This rule is made to create a feeling of comradery between the players, but if you feel it could be overused by players, you could make it into a feat
But what's the narrative behind the barb helping the wizard? Are they clamping the wound shut (which isn't actually healing anything)? Are they giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? It makes no sense. Comradery comes from ACTUALLY helping, like administering a heal potion/salve or medicine check.
On the subject of languages; I love Dael’s advice on DMing because it’s usually all about what you want the players to do, or know, not what they get with a good or bad roll. So if it’s a crucial bit of info, it will never be in a language no one knows. And if I want it mysterious, I might call for a roll, but no matter what the result, they’ll just get a hint. The only time I stick with the roll is when the players success or failure is acceptable to the story either way. Then if there isn’t a rule for it, I set an appropriate DC considering the skill level of party and how difficult the task. Boom!
My players and I developed the concept of "Friendship Maneuvers". As the PCs roleplay together and form bonds with each other, they gain "Friendship Points" and they can unlock maneuvers that they can use in combat. I liked the 'Support' system in the Fire Emblem games, and was aiming for something with that feel.
For the maneuvers themselves, I adapted most of them from 4E - mainly from the Warlord character class.
I have two house rules worth mentioning that I use at the moment.
1 - Each time someone is resurrected, it requires a higher level spell than the last time (eg: first time, any spell can be used, so let’s say it was revivify, second time would at least require raise dead, etc). The point being to limit resurrections without leaving it to chance (like in Matt Mercer’s resurrection rules), or putting a hard limit of say one resurrection, and it also makes higher level spells like resurrection more relevant. As an alternative, you could also say that second res needs raise dead or higher, third needs resurrection or higher, etc, since the party will probably use them in order anyway.
2 - I don’t remember where I saw this, but it basically adds a system called exposure that acts as an inverse of cover. So if a creature is on unsteady footing, or being flanked, or the attacker has the high ground, the attacker gets a +2 to their attack. If a creature is in an even more precarious situation, such and hanging from a ledge or dangling from a rope, the attacker gets +5 to their attack, and this also counts as advantage for things like sneak attack.
#2 is called being flat-footed and it's been in D&D and Pathfinder for a long time (except 5e got rid of it in favor of advantage and other uses).
The DC for a Wild Magic Sorcerer's surge goes up by 1 for every time they succeed! The main reason to play wild magic is for the chaos of that surge, and the narrative element of the surges getting easier mimics the bubbling up of chaos with the sorcerer's spells!
My players' absolute favorite houserule is Snackspiration!
Despite being a lightweight rule, it brings the group together, gives players more control over narrative without skewing game balance, increases the power of dramatic moments and it simmers on through the entire session.
Basically, everyone gets a d6 at the end of a long rest. It can be added to attack rolls, saving throws or skill checks. This represents a reservoir of energy or willpower the characters have as a result of being well-fed and rested at the inn.
The crucial twist is: anyone can give snackspiration to someone in the moment before the outcome of a roll is declared, for free. The ability to give it to others incentivizes watching closely what others do. It becomes this gamble of 'Guys, should I use snackspiration...?'. It's used most often on average rolls when a monsters' AC isn't certain, or when making saves of unknown DC. As a DM I love how it naturally attracts the attention of players outside their turn.
However, as the session goes on, this resource runs out. This way, it works in lieu of a fatigue system, yet I find that psychologically, adding something positive works better in the players' minds than punishing players with penalties to rolls, even if mathematically the effect or balance is the same. They still get the thrill of increasingly savoring those last few dice as secret cards up their sleeve. As a DM, you'll find the impact is small enough that balancing for it is hardly necessary. The players quickly learn this is their joker card: there are many like it, but this one is THEIRS, for when THEY need it. It's similar to potions, in a way, but for rolls. The last few snackspirations are almost always saved for crucial, dramatic moments.
Finally, it greatly helps to extend dramatic moments by adding an extra step, drawing out the moment when it matters the most, as they consider the use of and observe the almost ritualistic rolling of this sacred resource. It is funny how sometimes they consider it for a longer time when stakes are average, while in other situations it becomes this snap moment decision when a roll NEEDS to succeed. It doesn't stack: only one snackspiration per roll. It can turn around a scary moment, but the RNG keeps it unpredictable. It's already turned around one or two very close death saves, with cheers erupting around the table!
Even I have something language-related! This is a house rule I have in my back pocket, inspired from older editions: Bonus proficiencies, based on a character's Intelligence bonus. If their score increases with leveling, they also add the new benefit. For a +1, the PC adds one additional tool set, instrument, or language prof. For a +2, they add one skill from their class list. At +3, they add another tool, instrument, or language. At +4, add any one skill proficiency of their choice. At +5, they gain Expertise in one proficient skill.
My group has modified the Deck of Cards system for Role Playing inspiration from your old video (A Tale of Love, Pain, Loss, Gain) & turned it into a Random Encounter Generator for our games.
I pass out cards & let my players generate random encounter prompts which they write on index cards. When I'm planning a session, if there's space for some random encounters (which there usually is), i use a deck of playing cards to determine which of my player's suggestions I'm going to try & incorporate in that session.
Two important notes:
First, as the DM, I get to write random encounter prompts too! (They shouldn't know every possibility in the deck!)
Second, I stress to my players that the prompts do not need to be automatically positive or negative. A "Tale of Gain" can totally be a cursed item, for example!
My players really enjoy the creative outlet - and they love it when one of their ideas suddenly drops into the game.
Fair warning though, you may end up needing to figure out how to incorporate a "Dire Corgi" into your next session... My players are weird...
I love the Team Instinct idea. My campaign is full of new players and I've noticed that they often don't know what to do next. They get stuck often, and I tried to remind them that there are actions other than Attack in combat, hoping that this will inspire them, but they still get stuck. I like this idea of giving them time to "plan" OOC and having it feel like since they've worked together for so long that at the top of the round the players exchange knowing glances, signifying that they know what each other will do and how to coordinate their actions.
Whispered/Secret death saves! Keeps the tension super high not knowing how many saves have been passed or failed, and changes up how the PCs go about saving their downed buddy
I like letting my players drink a potion as a bonus action, or take a full action to drink it and treat all dice as max. Like taking the time to make sure they drink every last drop
One thing I like that was in 4th edition if I remember correctly is skill challenges, where basically anyone can make a roll to solve this problem but they need an X amount of success to succeed while also avoiding X amount of failures.
It adds a way to make non-combat encounters more interesting and gives everyone an opportunity to work together to overcome the obstacle in a way that isn't determined by one die roll.
This especially works for adding an element to exploration and gives players more of an incentive to go exploring and makes rangers feel a bit less useless, because their key feature often doesn't get utilized because 5e doesn't have an exploration mechanic so DMs are left to either make up their own.
Of course it by no means solves that problem entirely but does something to help.
In my DnD game a DM has decided to put a 1 minute timer on everyone's turn while in combat.
I loved it.
Instead of giving the players enough time for a perfect move every time everyone now needs to be making on the fly decision and just accept the fact that they might not be the best move available. And that's fine. It builds up pressure and forces the players to be thinking about their strength and synergies in between games. It keeps the players focused and involved. The downside of this approach is that it also.makes the player more tense and the whole party not as powerful as it might be. Also it puts a lot of strain on the DM, because if your rogue keeps forgetting the use the uncanny dodge, the DM needs to remind about those.
Something that's sort of become a house rule in my campaign is that players whose characters aren't present in the scene can jump in and play a random NPC. It adds a fun, light improv element to the game and helps keep the players involved.
One of my favorite examples of this was when one player was speaking to a crime lord another player jumped in as the crime lords beefy bodyguard, who basically just repeated everything the crime lord said in a deep cockney accent.
"We have eyes and ears everywhere, my friend."
"Roight, 'ave eyes an' ears everywhere, we do, roight."
"...yes."
I started having the optional flanking rule be a 1d4 bonus to hit, this created an incentive to play more tactically, a reason to roll more dice, and it doesn’t seem to slow anything down.
It also doesn’t step on the toes of other ways of gaining advantage, i always hated saying “sorry you can’t have double advantage, so the hard work to position was useless” 40 or so sessions in, me and my players are loving it.
I really like the extra hit points one. I tried to make my own rules that would help with that called "Fine Dining" where, depending on what class of food you eat or prepare (With a few complex rules on hunting, foraging, and cooking), you would get some Temporary Hit Points. It makes those short rests before a delve into the dungeon feel a little more meaningful and can give a nice boost of survivability to the squishy 1st and 2nd level characters.
As you level up, they become less useful, because you don't need them anymore and, by 10th level, it no longer has a beneficial effect, but rather if they don't eat good enough food to sustain their bodies, they'll basically get negative temporary hit points. By this point, their bonuses are so high that this will almost never happen, but it makes things feel a little more realistic.
I'm not sure where I got it from:
When a player has to do a death save, I take him outside the room (or behind my DM screen) and he rolls it in front of me only and can't share the results with anyone else.
I find that it increases the pressure of the fight when someone is unconscious and no one know if he's gonna be ok or not.
I also keep them rolling once or twice after they had 3 failures or 3 success so that no body know when it's safe.
Oh my god, I *love* that. I'm running my game online these days, like most folks I guess, so that would be really easy to do.
(Not that I hope death saves come up of course!)
I love this a ton but i wouldnt be able to bring myself to ask the player with a dead character to keep up the rues by rolling another roll with me. The other players watching the dead character stop rolling death saves would heighten everything to a zenith where the character is either dead or stabilized and no one knows until they check the body.
Tyler Lewis I see your point, I just feel like they wouldn’t know realistically and it could give away the result if he does a nat 1 and a regular failure.
@@cyrillelibert5236 yeah its more or a morals thing for me, like telling my player who is clearly holding back tears to come roll another death save feels like im kinda evil but i can definitely see how it makes suspense during the combat.
Tyler Lewis if there’s tears of course I wouldn’t be that cruel, it would be on a case to case basis. The goal is always to have an enjoyable time for everyone
I usually give players a chance, if their backstory supports it of being able to understand simplified concepts in another language. I really like the idea of players trying to piece together what someone is saying. For example the players interperate the foreign guard say "Man bring animal" whereas the guard actually said "Hastor Go to the Barn and get the Bloodhounds".
"I have many thoughts about this; they are based on Aristotle quotes... we won't get into it right now" has there ever been a more Dael statement?
My only house rule as a dm is for inspiration, if you gain a point of inspiration it is specifically tied to what causes it, a combat inspiration for a cool description, a roleplay inspiration to use to gain info from good roleplay and lastly a skill inspiration for generally thinking outside the box using skills ie. Making a check using a different skillset or a combination of skills, using sleight of hand + intimidation to show a person how much more skilled at something you may be
One rule I've really come to love is team initiative. Basically I just have the total of the party's initiative modifiers and compare that total to the total initiative modifier of all the enemies they are fighting. Then bigger number goes first with no roll.
It lets both the party and the enemies operate as a single unit, increasing both the danger of the fight and the amount of control the player's feel like they have over the situation. In every campaign I've done this in, I have noticed players starting to use the help action frequently and just generally supporting each other more in the fight.
I've also never run for a group that had more than two people able to perform even the most basic math and initiative was always 5 minutes of me grinding my teeth as a player struggled to count to 7 on their fingers.
I completely agree with all of your criticisms of the initiative ritual. My solution is to get rid of the initiative roll entirely. We track turns with the rules from Descent and Star Wars: Imperial Assault. In short, let the players decide their turn order on the fly, and alternate heroes and villains as best you can such that everyone still gets one turn in a round.
Major upside #1: When the gauntlet drops and I announce that we have entered combat, we throw down immediately. No need to write anything down, no need to roll 7 dice for the goblin squad, no need to confirm that yes, you add your dex. The instigators go first and get the party started.
Major upside #2: The person taking their turn is always someone who knows what they want to do. Players can react to things organically and jump in when something catches their attention. "That bugbear hit me? I want to hit him back. Can I go next?" Villains do the same and react to heroes getting in their faces. When the mid-fight surprise bullette appears, I time it at the start of a new round so the first player to think of an idea can have a go at it right away. It's like flying around the battlefield in little vignettes, both smooth to run as a DM and easy to follow as a player.
There are mechanical and balance consequences, like the Alert feat and assassin rogues and class features that affect initiative, but we patch those up case by case. If you give people spotlight time and exciting combat, balance issues come out in the wash.
Some really neat stuff for higher-level players. Newer ones might find it a bit too complicated, but once you've got a group who's really with it and understands how things work, there's some good material to work with in this video.
Love the great weapon change because they're swing with far less dexterity, you usually don't just hit one person and stop
I loved the concept around languages and how learning multiple idioms might impact fluency in each of them.
I have a few house rules regarding linguistics:
--The INT modifier denotes literacy, in which -1 you can barely read and write simple sentences and +5 means you're basically Noam Chomsky. This revolves around the concept of INT being more akin to education than the elitist concept of intelligence per se. So that would change how characters passively get information from each language. I will incorporate your concept of percentages of fluency, probably making the first two languages use the full modifier while each subsequent language work with 1 less (not sure if 1 score or 1 modifier yet). So to be able to read in the two first languages you are able to speak, you'd need at least a -1, the next language you learn would have 0 as cap for literacy, while the next one would have +1 and so on. In this manner, you could have many languages in you SPEECH capabilities, but the minimum study needed to actually read and write in those would be raised. I would like to find a way to deal with proficiency... But I'm not sure yet, it would probably involve the scripts each language share, like Dwarvish, Gnomish, Orc and Goblin all using thr Dwarvish script.
--The INT modifier allows for extra languages (or tool proficiencies) during character creation. That's a minor tweak to compensate for Intelligence being a dump stat for many players. I try my best to make use of INT and STR in my games because of that.
Also, your concern abour languages being race-locked is finally being dealt with officially: the Adventurers League player guide for Season 10 already came with the new rules that will make their way on the upcoming book Tasha's Cauldron of Everything: profficiencies in tools and languages will be tradeable to other tools and languages that better fit the character; actually, skills will have this to just like ability score bonus, allowing for characters be original without revolving around racial stereotypes.
Great video as always. I'll leave here a couple of my own house rules. They are intended to make the game grittier because that's what I like:
1. Wounds. When a PC drops to 0 HP it gets 1 wound (a proper debilitating injury narratively speaking, like a thrust through an arm). 1 wound = 1 level of exhaustion (as per PHB table). Wounds are cumulative and can only be healed with an extended rest; you can heal only 1 wound per rest. (you can change the time to heal a wound to make the game harder or easier). I think narratively it's a great device, because sure, you can go to 0 and then come back, but now you're wounded, and the more you fight the bigger the risk.
2. Treating a wound (optional with the above). Once per long rest a PC can attempt a Medicine check to stabilize a patient's condition (DC 15 + nr. of wounds). On a success the wounds are treated and they start to heal, on a fail you make it worse and the patient gets 1 more wound. You can retry this check only once per long rest. Untreated wounds DO NOT heal! (Alternatively an untreted wound worsens by 1 every day, but this is a bit too punitive even for me)
3. Food and water. A PC needs 1 "meal" per long rest (i.e. day). A PC can go without a meal for a number of days equal to their Constitution modifier (if positive). If a character doesn't eat it suffers 1 level of malnourishment. 1 level of malnourishment = 1 level of exhaustion (as per PHB table).
The use of exhaustion as a common denominator (with different names for narrative purposes) makes it easy to keept track of different things and add up the effects. A PC may drop do 0 in a combat, then the Medicie check fails, and they don't even have enough food! Now this PC suddenly starts the new day with 3 levels of exhaustion (wound + wound + malnourishment), pretty bad way to start...
I have more if anyone is interested!
Why the need to have "malnutrition" and exhaustion if they are the same thing? Just call it what it is. Not eating = exhaustion. Done. Easy.
"Now that you've watched this video on language proficiency: why don't you e-mail it to your Grammar?" :P
My favourite house rule I saw on reddit somewhere, but can't remember who said it first is the Quick Thinking rule. Basically it means in combat a player can make any mental ability check (one that uses Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma) as a bonus action providing that they are proficient with it. I like this because it gives (especially new) players ways to try and role play a bit better and helps classes who don't have that many bonus action things like wizards to actually feel like they're helping out. It makes it so there could actually be a use to trying to scare away the enemy with the Intimidation skill, learn something about them with Insight, quickly try and find the creature that hid with Perception/Investigation, or for a trained medic character to perform a medicene check as a bonus action. It also gives more weight to proficiencies in general which i personally like the feeling of. If someone's trained in something, it would make sense it would take them less time to do said thing than your average joe.
Ahh, the zone of truthiness. That's a great way to sum up those feelings and make them understandable.
I try to use the motivations of the party. When given the choice of two paths, one bright and sunny filled with flowers and pleasant scenery, and one thats dark and foreboding filled with nasty and potential dangers, most times the party will take the dark path avoiding the bright and pleasant one. So giving the proper description of options, you can get the party to go and do exactly what you want.
We're playing a variant where short rests take 8 hours and long rests take a full day. It makes the number of encounters per long rest much more close to the recommended balanced limit since we tend to have at most 2 encounters per day, and a lot of things can happen in the world if we take a whole day off!
The HP loan can be implemented without a homebrew. Just have your questgiver cast aid on your characters, or give a scroll containing it. I've used this before and it's great, specially for 1st and 2nd level.
I usually use group checks for stealth (as described in the PHB). However my "Taking Point" houserule is that whoever isthe point person ie leading the party, counts for two in the group check (they roll once but their result is counted twice).
This gives stealth specialists a chance to shine and encourages them to lead the group when stealth is required. It also means more thought is required when deciding on Marching Order.
This houserule can be extended to other things like perception checks if you wish.
Our DM has us preroll initiative. So before we even get started, we roll 3-5 initiatives and she records them. Really helps to not have that awkward transition between RP and combat.
The idea of allowing the PC group time to strategize really interests me as a player. There's a lot of times where another player in my group has commented that they thought my strategic choices were poor, regardless of whether or not they were poor I think this brief pre-combat strategy session would be beneficial to get everyone on the same page.
My homerule for languages separates listening/speaking and reading/writing. Every character gets two extra language proficiencies, and the first time you add a language proficiency you can speak/understand it. The second allows you to write and read it.
I know that the Professor on Dungeoncraft institutes a similar system in combat at his table which I stole. The players get to plan and decide their actions over a 60 second period immediately upon initiative being rolled while the GM/DM is sorting his plans for combat on the part of the enemy force, you can even use a timer. Upon said time having passed each of the players must state their intended action for the round and they can't change their planned action during the round. This lends to a true feeling of combat where it becomes the truly confused cluster fudge it can become once combat breaks out. This is repeated every round. Having one or two backup plans for your action becomes important and it encourages players to maintain attention on the board so that they don't drift out of the battle momentarily. It also emphasizes ideas like holding an action to respond to enemy forces or to assist fellow players that may need assistance once combat is underway. I really like the emphasis on the idea that on a surprise round players do not receive such time to plan or react until that first round has come to pass. Two thumbs up on some great ideas. Love the language idea.
I looove this series😍 one of my house rules, is that my players under level 3 just get advantage on hit dice rolls. If the result is half or less than their hit dice value, they reroll again and take that roll.
A thematic rule I like to use is when a player fails their last death save (don't do this often) they can call upon a devil or God or other powerful being that they've encountered before. Make sure they always know there is a price that they don't know yet but will most likely be worse than death. Players in the material can simultaneously try to resurrect their friend. If they manage to in time, they can even stop the deal. A mortal with a deal like this can't make another and has a curse applied to them in addition to the unknown price (which is most likely going to be working towards freeing or empowering the entity which makes a campaign goal to stop or help the entity. End goals made by the Party itself are the best)
Edit: I just realized I described more of a story trick than a rule. Ignore this I guess
Rules that beget story hooks are the best kind of rules. That's why backgrounds exist in 5e.
I ran a heist campaign and during session zero had the players come up with a minimum of three npc's. These npc's each had a specific skill, ie. Smithing, Cartography, Arcane influence, Explosive expert etc... I had them put the information on index cards, and gave them back to me to use during game play.
So, usually how heists go down in the movies. The characters are always stuck trying to figure something out but then someone says, "I may know a guy, who could help."
My players really took advantage of this concept. Even though I had regular npc's through out the town they could interact with they were contacting their npc's sometimes more than 2 or 3 times a session. It went over pretty well.
We already do the pre-plan! It certain does give the players a chance to plan and work as a team, which is always a good thing. I took it from Professor DM's everyone roll as once plan at the start of the round and then narrate the effects afterwards. This gives them a minute or so to work out what's happening and then make combat quicker in the long run.
I use a house rule to foment cooperation and good sport between the players.
I call it "Meta Inspiration" and it works somewhat like bardic inspiration, except for 2 key things:
1- it is a "bonus" given from player to player. whenever a player thinks another one had a great idea, did great roleplay or devised an amazing strategy, the player can call "meta inspiration" for the one that did the cool thing. giving one "meta inspiration point" to her.
2- each player can accumulate a maximum of 20 meta inspiration points. and whenever it rolls a d20 and wants to get a boost, it can spend a number of points fro her pool to roll a dice with equal sides as the points spent. for example? it can spend 6 meta inspiration points to add a d6 to the roll.
It's working like a charm!
since I've been using this, my players have developed more respect for each other's plays and roleplay and the value of cooperation had a big increase.
and i swear it is very easy to use. just track the meta inspiration pool in the back of the sheet and, if players are abusing it, you as the DM can just veto some of the points given for not that great things.
if someone uses it for some time, please let me know if you got any results. :)
Oh oh! I have another one! When characters have to make a skill challenge that requires them to exert themselves physically, but they fail, give them the chance to take on a point of exhaustion instead. This really helps out when your players are doing a difficult task that could easily spiral into a tpk if the dice don't help. It also represents the characters choosing to overexert themselves to achieve otherwise impossible tasks. While they survive the immediate effect, they have to take on long term penalties!
I love how the language system is the AD&D thief skill mechanic. It's not a bad system!
One of my favorite house rules I call hobbies and pastimes. They can be anything from knitting to herblore, leatherworking to cooking. When they camp or rest they have a chance to work on their hobby and slowly get better at it. One of my groups gave each other gifts they had made in the newfound real-life hobbies they got from their D&D game. If they role play it well I find a way to make it helpful to them in-game beyond just something to bond over.
Ideas like these are actually why I trawl the interwebs for RPG content. So I can add cool stuff to my table (if the players want it that is)
These are awesome! Recently I've been thinking about how you choose a race, class and background, but still don't have a JOB. Like yeah, you're a human monk hermit, but the way you pay the bills is by growing the best wine grapes in the valley. Or yes I'm an half-orc barbarian noble, but I'm also a single mom, and I make our way in the world as an herbalist and medicine woman. This gives me as a DM way more to dig into (and threaten the PCs with), and makes their "life style" feel more fleshed out. Instead of Bond, Flaw etc. I have my players choose a Job instead. It's more relatable, and makes for richer interaction with NPCs.
Varreint human (2)+Ranger with wanderer and favored enemy (3)+lingest (3)+background(2).
10 starting languages.
What might be interesting with your combat idea is during their planning stage, after rolling initiative, players can choose to reduce their initiative score to adjust turn order for their plans. They can only do this at the beginning and can only LOWER their initiative. Then, the enemy Initiative is inserted into the turn order. That way they set up specific combos. Say they want the mage to distract an enemy with Color Spray, but the fighter is going before that. The fighter would drop their initiative to 1 point below the Mage's, so they can tag team and combo.
This is exactly what I do. After initiative is rolled players can elect to permanently knock themselves backwards any number of slots in order to re-order the turns at the potential cost of yielding initiative to the enemies, as I do not reveal the enemies' initiative slots until their turn actually comes up the first time. It works well and gets them thinking about how they want to strategize. I think I will try Dael's "Team Instict" idea in combination with this.
@@carsonm7292 this makes surprise rounds even more deadly since you have to play with the order you roll!
One house rule, that I believe came from XP to Level 3, is to roll the death saves secretly for your players. The don't know if their comrades are dying unless they go and check. It makes the game way more tense and makes stuff like spare the dying or medicine kits way more useful.
For languages, everybody I play with is current or former expat English teachers and we have sort of naturally put imperfect fluency into our current game because it's something we're all SUPER familiar with in our daily lives. I don't know if I would like to make it completely rely on percentile though, of course it's not about simulation but maybe I would add extra factors like the teleportation botch system? To add that extra verisimilitude for our specific table, with a lot of experience of language barriers. I have already roleplayed a lot of like "you get the gist/literal meaning but not the full connotation" with one player who wrote a complicated relationship with a heritage language into his backstory and I like the texture that adds to the world.
I have something that my d&d group has been playing around with, in the event that a character is beat down to 0 hp and are making death saves, when healed or brought back from death they gain a level of exhaustion to show how badly they were injured
Luck checks.
I'm a big fan of %s and encouraging my players to shoot for the moon with what their characters wish for. Whenever they wish, they can ask "... is there any chance that ______" and I let them call high or low, roll a %, and then narrate their good or bad fortune. I think it's a nice way to keep things moving with "yes, and..." rather than saying "no" to their ideas, and also it organically establishes a theme of "be careful what you wish for" when they inevitably call "low" and you roll 100.
I also use this method behind the screen to keep tabs on important NPCs who are living lives and accomplishing tasks off-camera. I think it's easy world building for your NPCs to live lives without the PCs, but also takes away the burden of having to write detailed stories that the PCs might not encounter.
I am almost more excited about Dael ideas, concepts and brainstorming videos than I am the games themselves :) I really like these ideas and your thoughts on implementation, and you enthusiasm is contagious
On the topic of partial language proficiencies, one thing I have been kicking around is developing a map of related languages so characters can sort of understand messages in languages they don’t “know.” For example, the lore states that many devils are fallen angels, so perhaps Infernal is derived from/similar to Celestial. Then, a character who speaks Celestial could understand parts of a scroll written in Infernal. It might require an Intelligence or percentile roll (I don’t know: this is just a concept at this point), but it might go a long way in preventing players from getting stuck because they can’t read something. In addition, there’s always the chance that players will misinterpret something, which could result in some interesting stories (or just make everything go off the rails).
I'm working on an armor rules variant that works a little like than "shields shall be broken" rule, where each kind of armor comes in light, medium, and heavy varieties, and the material of each armor determines a set number of damage reduction. You reduce the AC bonus of most of the armors a little, and the player gets to choose when to apply the damage reduction, once for light, twice for medium, and thrice for heavy, and after that, the armor is broken. Still needs some play testing to work it out, and make it good, but I think it's a nice way to gamify armor, and bring in the idea that armor is getting worn out as it's being hit. You can also give some enemies or attacks the effect of using up these uses - like a sunder attack.
A homerule for health I use: When rolling for health, if you roll below half the max roll you gain half the max roll for health (so if you're rolling D8 and roll a 1,2 or 3 that counts as if you rolled a 4) It doesn't badly mess with the health distribution between tanky vs squishy players and it just means no one's sour after rolling 1's for the past 3 level ups. (It also means as a GM I can throw larger rocks at them safely)
I'd like to try Healer's Kit Dependency and Slow Natural Healing (from the DMG), but then take the edge off somewhat by letting them roll half their HD (rounded up) during a long rest. I'd also like to try having failed death saving throws persist until a long rest is complete. For level 1 characters in a survival situation.
Not a house rule per se, but it is a method to roll for initiative that I used last session to great effect.
I printed out and laminated some playing cards. One for each of my players, and a few for monsters. When I called for initiative to be rolled, instead of going through the dance of asking for initiatives 21+, 15-20, 10-14, 5-9, 4-, I just laid the cards in front of me and wrote each player's initiative on their respective cards with a dry erase marker. Then I did the same for the monsters, and simply put the cards in a deck, sorted by initiative.
It is by far the fastest way I have ever used to set up initiative, and it also made sure that I never skipped anyone's turn because deciding who's going next was as simple as taking the card from the top of the deck and putting it at the bottom.
I like the combat time idea. One thing I am a big advocate for is meant to combat what is known as combat paralysis. You get 5 seconds to declare action or you are defensive until next action/reaction
for the strategy thing: I thought of making "party actions", because the party as you said, are traveling together and probably don't fight like individuals that don't know each other. The idea was to give small actions at initiate count 10 (like the lair actions mechanic but in the middle of the round) like allowing one character of the pary choice to move up to half movement speed as reaction, and improve their abilities as they advance and 'act like a team'
but i never wrote rules for that actually. I did create a magic item that more than one can attune to and have similar effects....
I use the following rule for critical hits: roll the dice like you normally do for a crit (as in, they're all doubled), and if any of then low less than half their maximum, that dice is increased to it's maximum. Meaning, if you roll a d6 as pat of that crit and it rolls a 1, it is increased to 3 (as 3 is half of 6).
This helps to avoid getting a crit that just doesn't do enough, while still maintaining the fun of rolling a bunch of dice.
One that I've been using since I started DM'ing that I really like is that when you level up and are determining your health, you roll and if the result is less than the average, just take the average instead. It makes beefier PCs and allows you to throw some harder enemies at them earlier on, without fear of causing a premature TPK.
Something I've borrowed recently has been the idea of Ancestry and Culture, instead of race. There's a pdf on the DMs Guild that goes into detail with it, that I downloaded, but the gist of it is that race is now divided between things like your ability score improvements, language and skill prificiencies; and features such as resistances, breath weapons, etc. The first section would represent the culture you grew up in (and can be swapped around, if you were raised in another race's culture), while the second section is considered your ancestry. If you wanted to play a character with a mixed ancestry (for instance if your mother was a tiefling and your father was a dragonborn) you would get to choose one ancestral feature from each of your parents. If one of the player's parents has darkvision, they can choose whether or not they want their character to have it.
for languages I would do this, I would split into the three categories; read, speak, and understand. Basically at character creation they would get two languages that all three categories apply to. and then 4 other languages that two of the categories apply to. and finally 4 languages that only one category applies to. (The player can choose individually for each. Also Druidic and Thieves' Cant are not counted in this.)
Just a breakdown for how each category affects the language for clarity:
Reads - written script can be deciphered
Speaks - can physically utter the language
Understands - knows what words mean in that language and can translate it if heard.
I have a lot of homebrew rules but here are a couple:
1.) Floating Initiatives - Roll initiative as normal but afterwards the players can decide in what order they choose to enter combat (The rolling is for me to know where the enemies fall into place).
2.) STR based AC - monsters that rely more on their natural hide/skin, or bulky armor to defend themselves rather than being nimble use STR as their AC mod instead of DEX
3.) Character Incentives - This I use to as a bribe to receive more engaging backstories or plot arcs for my PC's. Basically I have a couple of rewards I give out at character creation. (homebrew tailored item, pet/familiar, extra prof in a skill/saving throw etc.) I have my player's choose two from the list and they have to be able to provide adequate justification as to why their character obtains this reward. In the case of items, the better the item the more justification needed which can be through backstory or I will make a quest for that character that if passed grants them said item.
I have a small collection of rules that my group uses, "borrowed" from others or created from my own thoughts:
1. Two-handed weapons will add 1.5 times your Strength modifier to damage rolls.
2. Potions can be drank as a full action for the max roll of health restored or drank as a bonus action for their rolled die. However, players must use a Healer's Kit to recover health during a short rest.
3. The bloodied condition from earlier editions where if you drop to half health or lower, you gain a -1 to your AC but a +1 to all chances to hit.
4. You have to be proficient in a skill in order to use the Help action to assist another player in a skill check.
5. Your Intelligence modifier will give bonuses/penalties depending on the modifier: -1 or lower you lose a language, +1 you gain 1 skill proficiency, +2 you get 2 skills and 1 language, +3 you get 3 skills and 1 language, +4 you get 3 skills and 2 languages, and at +5 you get 4 skills and 2 languages.
6. Click Trap, honestly you gave inspiration to it and we love it.
7. Druids can wildshape into CR 0 creatures regardless of limitations and without limits, but they cannot attack or use any actions (i.e. you can turn into a mouse, but you can't attack or use the Help action). Just feel like CR 0 creatures are never used by Druids.
8. Wizards can craft scrolls. Warlocks, Bards, and Clerics can use scrolls naturally. Others require a +2 Intelligence modifier or proficiency in the Arcana skill to use them.
9. Critical hits will have the first die at max damage and rolled die that come up at max can be rolled again. Crits should feel powerful, so it sucks to see a Crit deal two damage because the dice decided to roll snake-eyes.
10. When rolling initiative, players that roll a nat 20 for initiative have advantage on the first turn while players that roll a nat 1 for initiative have disadvantage on the first turn.