D&D 5e Houserules & Homebrew!

...

...

...

This is a low-magic Druid replacement.

This is a low-magic Paladin replacement.

This is a low-magic Cleric, Sorcerer, and/or Wizard replacement.

(Note that low-magic is not the same as no-magic. Think Conan)

This is a low-magic Ranger replacement

This is a low-magic Bard replacement. And also I'm now out of stuff.

Daft person here who hasn't DM'd but was thinking about it:

At a CR8, the party is likely to have magical weapons. To my understanding, I thought magical weapons bypassed the resistances associated with them?

Or is there things that specify NON-MAGICAL sources, and since this doesn't, you still halve damage on attacks from magical weapons?

Planning on running Curse of Strahd soon, does anything need tinkering with it before game start?

I was just over at my friends place who has a 196 page Dark Sun PHB homebrew for 5e that he says he downloaded. But I can't find it for the life of me on google. It has like the talents from UA: Mystic, so it must be new.

Does anyone know where to find it?

Why are rogue players consistently suffering from special snowflake protagonist syndrome? I never notice it with literally any other class.

There was a dark sun homebrew on athas.Com

That would be my first look

I just found it now. It's 8.88mb so I can't straight up upload it, but it's on the Dark Sun fb page. The one on Arthas was for 3.5 right?

Depends entirely upon the party and the DM, DM may drop less magic gear, party may not focus on mag weapons. Gear can't be assumed for determining CR.

The 3.5 one from the athas site isnt there anymore. They have a 5e one now.

>supposed to be a sneaky thief that no one notices until it's too late
>hog all of the spotlight and want constant attention.
Every fucking time.

Does anybody have any homebrew for companions for the other classes?

Ideally stuff that follows similar design to ranger revised.

>druid with animal/plant/fey companion.
>wizard/sorc/cleric/warlock/paladin with fiend/celestial/construct/undead/dragon/fey companion
>fighter/barbarian with beast companion
>rogue with beast/fey companion
>ranger with fey companion
>monk with beast/dragon companion.

Just, all the companions.

What do people have, anything?

House rules:
Rations:
>Every long rest, reduce your number of rations by one.
>If you have no more rations, your maximum health is reduced by 1d4 at the end of the rest. For each consecutive long rest, reduce your maximum health by an additional 1d4. For example, if you take three long rests in a row without rations, your health is reduced by a total of 3d4 at the end of the third rest. Your health returns to your normal maximum once you eat.
>If you are in a non-hostile city, you may pay 10cp instead of using rations.
>If you have eaten since the last long rest, such as in a tavern, you may ignore this requirement.

Surprise:
>Any characters sneaking prior to the battle have their Stealth roll compared to a group Perception check on the opponents.
>Characters with higher Stealth rolls than the check have a Surprise round, in which they may take an extra turn. For the purposes of class rules, all enemies are treated as Surprised during this round.

Knowledge Checks:
>Anyone who wants to roll for these may do so. However, all rolling parties must roll simultaneously, and an average (rounded up) will be taken of all rolls, which will serve as the final roll for purposes of the check.

Additionally, Loremaster Wizard is now a Sorcerer option, Bladelock has been given some allowances on the invocations for balance. Wild Mage has been given more frequent chances of wild surge.

No one picked any of the UA I altered or pre-approved.

Lmao.

Maybe they wanted to play a jack sparrow type, not a sneaky type. In which case, attention whore is the character concept.

"swashbuckler" is not a sneaky concept.

>rations
I found one I like where they follow the rule of 3, and if you go past it, each day you take 2 levels of non removable exhaustion that only goes away with nutrition , and can make a con save to reduce that to one level of exhaustion.

You die of thirst in 3-6 days, you die of hunger in 9-18 days, and you start passing out if you go without sleep. Works well.

check out MiddleFingerofVecna

Which is fine if they take Swashbuckler but god dammit they never do.

This post doesn't seem very houserule or homebrew related.

Rolled 3, 9, 2, 4, 3 = 21 (5d12)

HP fix
>Start off with highest health possible at level 1.
>Roll HD+CON for level 2-6
>Level 7+, add your CON modifier to total HP.
So basically, for a Barbarian with 16 CON
>Level 1: 15 HP (12+3)
cont.

Level 2: 21 HP (15+3+3)
Level 3: 33 HP (21+9+3)
Level 4: 38 HP (33+2+3)
Level 5: 45 HP (38+4+3)
Level 6: 51 HP (45+3+3)
and then from Level 7 on, their health would be
>Level 7: 54 HP (51+3)
>Level 8: 57 HP (54+3)
>Level 9: 60 HP (57+3)
>Level 10: 63 HP (60+3)
Etc. etc.

Do you somehow compensate high HP classes for not receiving important bonuses? Do you somehow change monster HPs to balance it, or just use weaker monsters? Do players still get HDs for healing on short rest? Why rolling for HP on 2.-6. instead of average roll?

I kinda like the idea, but i see a lot of problem with implementing it without breaking anything.
What exactly are you trying to achieve? Just faster combat, or is there more to it?

Then for monsters, what you pretty much do is take the average HP for their total HD without adding any modifiers to the results.

So a CR 7 Young black dragon, which would normally have (15d10+45) HP would instead have 90 HP (15*6).

So if a Level 8 Barbarian were to fight a Young Dragon on their own, assuming the Barbarian had 16 STR, was at full health, with rage, and wielding a great axe (1d12+3+2, avg: 12), it would take him 4 turns to kill it if they hit with both their attacks and roll average each time (avg: 24/turn)

On the flipside, a young black dragon has three attacks, a Bite (2d10+4, plus 1d8 acid damage, avg: 16+4) and two bites (2d6+4, avg: 12), in addition to its acid breath attack (11d8, avg: 55).

If the young black dragon hits with each attack and rolled average, it would take it about 1-3 turns to kill a Barbarian.

Now, if a breath weapon can OHKO a Barbarian, imagine how much deadlier combat gets for classes with less HP.

>Do you somehow compensate high HP classes for not receiving important bonuses?
I generally use the standard array/point buy for my games so a character will have at least two stats with a 16 in them.
>Do you somehow change monster HPs to balance it, or just use weaker monsters?
see >Do players still get HDs for healing on short rest?
They would receive the average of their HD per short rest.
>Why rolling for HP on 2.-6. instead of average roll?
Because most games generally don't go beyond level 10-12 on average and it generally gives you a solid chunk of HP even if you roll under average like I did >What exactly are you trying to achieve?
Honestly, I just wanted to get rid of the HP bloat so that combat was generally more deadly without making characters completely ill equipped to handle tougher enemies.

One of the weirder house rules I used for 5e was to combine strength and con into strength and wisdom and charisma into spirit. Perception was based on intelligence.

Full casters added +1 to their HP per level and had proficiency in both mental saves
Half caster added +2 per level and got one physical and mental saves
Martial's added +4 per level and got both physical saves

Health was rolled but you took half as the minimum.

Reroll init every round,
Damage dice for weapons and cantrips
D12 for 1st level & above spells
D6 for everything else unless GM specifies
Size related hit die for NPC initiative

Advantage on initiative if you don't move
Disadvantage if you change out equipment, can cancel each other out
Things that usually increase initiative just make the dice one category smaller

Two weapon fighting:
If you have two weapons you get one extra attack without mods as part of your normal attack action.

The two weapon fighting style allows you to add your mod to that attack.

Allows you to add mod if you use bonus action, excuse me. That way rogues can dual wield with more bonus action versatility.

That would be super lethal in OotA

These items.

We're doing something quite similar with Hit Dice.

My house rules on filtering players:

Session 0:

Here is where I filter obviously shit players you know the usual stuff but I have added a few more indicators

Mentions (or behaves) something exactly like or similar to:

>Do you have a table for critical fumbles?*
>I'm rolling a drow*
>My character is a woman*
>My character is an underage woman
>Here is my homebrew snowflake race*
>I wanna play CN because I do what I want when I want*
>Don't be stingy with magical items or this game becomes boring
>Is fat*
>Is a mega fat
>Bad hygiene
>Story of the character involves being somekind of superhero yet we are lvl 1*
>Snowflake backstory used to gain in game advantage
>Makes a character to make a political point (I'm a strong woman who fought the evil lich donal drumpf, you know that kind of shit)
>Arrives late*

The ones with * are huge redflags and must be investigated closely, 80% of the time it means a shit player, the ones without a * it means straight up getting the boot.

I mean, it's good that you can be honest with yourself at the fact that you're an asshole who refuses to compromise.

>My character is a woman
>red flag

here's your (You)

Obviously when played by a male. A girl playing a girl is not a problem you dense user.

>Letting girls play girls
>Not forcing them to play male characters rather than risk poisoning the game with female characters

I'm new to 5e and like it overall but found the combat a little boring (just trading shots, limited tactical thought) so I thought of this as a house rule: players call where they aim on a creature before they make their attacks, if they roll a 19 or 20 then not only do they get the crit but they also impose a status effect (limited movement if legs, can't attack with a hit arm etc.). I like it because it adds flavour and thought to attacks but doesn't require major balances so long as the tougher enemies get the same advantage. What does Veeky Forums think?

in our group, we usually give the person disadvantage if they want to make an aimed shot. Usually we only bring it into play if a monster has a weak point, like staking a vampire, or if it has a third eye that seems magical, or a golem with a control gem, etc.

Your system sounds fine though. Note that players with advantage will have a higher chance of making the roll - you may or may not want that (I think it makes sense).

It doesn't sound like there's any reason not to always attempt a called shot though - since you're going to attack, you might as well always go for the neck or something to kill them faster, unless there's a pressing reason to hit a different limb. You might consider introducing an element of risk. Since DnD has meatgrinder HP, players generally want to maximize damage.

...

>Or is there things that specify NON-MAGICAL sources, and since this doesn't, you still halve damage on attacks from magical weapons?
It usually specifies.

Bumping with my homebrew

homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/user/c0re

That's where I'm using it. And yeah. They're a bunch of starving adventurers.

Maybe reduce it to a CR7 and make blasphemous contact a Constitution saving throw.
Obviously a very high DC...

How would one go about creating a ratfolk/skaven race without just re-skinning goblin or kobold?

what cultural, physical and/or magical traits would you want to highlight about your ratfolk?

You could start with this: docs.google.com/document/d/1ViqLSEN67mmd2Lo_OJ-H5YX0fccsfI97kFaqx7V1Dmw/edit#heading=h.x017si95j8v8

Help me, Veeky Forums! I'm desperately craving robust rules for brewing a wide variety of poisons, ideally one that contains extremely basic potions that can be brewed very quickly and cheaply. The cantrip of toxins, if you will. I swear I remember seeing an Assassin Rogue rework that doubled down on poison mechanics but I cannot find it again for the life of me.

In exchange, here's my take on Jason Voorhees, a massive mound of meat whose Reactions, deceptive mobility, and unique flaw are designed to encourage a dynamic fight where players must strategically pester the poor guy, luring him from player to player into traps and such. Recommended for extremely underleveled players.

That covers Druid. Anyone have others?

Been a while since I read it over but maybe this?

and this on a similar vein of thought

I'm starting next week. Nervous.

> Anyone who wants to roll for these may do so. However, all rolling parties must roll simultaneously, and an average (rounded up) will be taken of all rolls, which will serve as the final roll for purposes of the check.

Why on God's green earth??

"Normally I can recall the capital of Paraguay but if dumb Steve, dumb Joe and dumb Betty ALSO try to remember it then I can't."

I just raise the dc by a lot, and then make everyone roll a d10 instead of a 20 then add modifiers. This is for a few reasons.
1. It keeps the numbers lower and variation lower so to minimize inflation
2. It makes having any sort of bonus more important when the best case scenario for the barbarian its worst case for the wizard.
3. It allows dumb luck to be a factor in knowing something, but it isn't a sole decider. I hate that bounded dc in 5e means that a functional retard has a reasonable chance of knowing esoteric bullshit, but that hatred is only tempered by my distaste for telling my players that their successes don't matter.

Dealing with Merchants.

Setting the DC for merchant interactions is 1d12 + 8.

Will buy things from players at 50% listed price by default.

Players can try to sell for more but have to roll persuasion or deception depending on how they try to sell item. Player rolls really well and they sell for full price. If they roll bad merchant points out flaws that lower the price to below 50%.

Same technique for discount, except merchant never sells for less than 50%.

Players want to steal an item they roll Sleight of Hand against generated DC. On failure they are caught. Merchant might allow them to buy item, bribe to forget incident or calls the guards (have a guard encounter ready and waiting).

Dude, if you want to protect the know-it-all's niche then you just rule that only someone proficient in the knowledge skill can roll. Your houserule is an unintuitive and over-complicated way to ensure that only that guy wants to roll. Just rule that only that guy can roll. Keep it simple.

5e defaults to any character being able to attempt any check, but you can change that. It's actually a good idea to change it in a larger party. You'll often see charoping posters talk about how you "need" to have expertise and a high ability mod to feel like a skill is your personal spotlight area, and that's a fair observation in a party of six when there's a good chance that you'll have the highest modifier but you won't have the highest roll. In a party of three on the other hand, just let everyone roll. The Barbarian will beat the Wizard's Arcana roll so infrequently that you won't mind the occasional "ha, my tribe sings songs of this creature!" rationalizing narration to explain his good luck.

I am mostly stealing Matt Colville's advice here. I'd post the video, but I can't remember which one it was.

>Knowledge checks, alternate take
1. The party is entitled to a single roll, with the ability to assist.
2. You can only assist if you can theoretically beat the DC by 5.
3. The party doesn't roll, I roll, and tell them what they know /see /find. They don't know if they rolled well or rolled poorly.

I like it

How shit is this for my first attempt at homebrew

Whats stopping party members or hired NPC's from casting their best spells on a blue mage immediately at game start?

Not playing with powergamers

That's simpler, but even less fun. Point 3 is massively heavy handed.

Knowledge checks already feel a bit arbitrary, because they're a way to ask the GM for extra information and the GM can always just give it up regardless. Not to mention the classic
>you rolled badly, you only learn A and B
> you rolled well, you get to learn A and also B
switcheroo where you provide the same information regardless of the roll without the players knowing. If you're adding not telling the players whether they succeed to that, then you're removing their confidence in their characters. If you're not even letting them roll the die, then why would they even bother? You've removed every part of this system that could be fun for them.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?

But I concede that's a valid point. Maybe once per short rest or similar to wild magic where you can't choose whether to absorb or not its a % chance

You know only powergamers are going to be interested in reading the rules for a new class, right? Especially a class that you've described exclusively in terms of its power and what it can do. (Druids, Rogues and Paladins have a built-in assumption about where they fit into the world. What you have here does not.)

What do you think a powergamer is if it's not the guy who reads the first sentence of your homebrew and thinks "yes, I too want to charge a dragon unafraid"? (Not to mention the dude who is literally exploding with power that you chose for your concept image.)

Don't fear the powergamer. They're one of the easiest players to entertain. You want to be entertaining, right?

This guy got EVERY point i was about to make. Powergaming is not a problem when its the only logical use of the feature outside of combat.

Also friendly spellcasters' spell slots are relevant, and the known spells cap

Because in our previous game, the DM let everyone roll individually, and it's a big party. It ended up being that someone would always pass a knowledge check and there was no point rolling.

I considered having only people with proficiency be able to do it, but no one was going to take proficiency in religion or history and they'd end up unable to do any sort of roll.

I considered having only the person with the highest stat in it be able to do the check, but that felt like if one person had it quite high but not high enough, they'd always be left behind.

By having the averaging system, it encourages people with any bonuses to their stat to roll and feel like a valuable contribution (as they have a higher chance of increasing the roll rather than lowering it) without erasing anyone's experience.

>what are you trying to accomplish here?
1. ensure they can't break the math by getting 7 rolls vs the DC, because I have a large group
2. Make it so they can't metagame the roll after seeing they rolled a 2, and either ignore it, or fish for rerolls.

Anybody have a better suggestion at how to accomplish 1 & 2 than making knowledge rolls hidden?

I mean, maybe I could maybe say the party can only roll once per thing , and keep a log of what they've rolled for knowledge for? That sounds like a lot of work though.

Im open to suggestions on how to better accomplish 1 & 2

#1 is tricky when, as you say, there are knowledge skills that the party doesn't have so you can't limit it to just those who are proficient. You might go broader than the standing proficiency definitions on a case by case basis. For instance, "no one has History, but your character is a noble, so he might have heard of this battle. roll to see if he has".

It does seem odd to me that between seven players you have proficiencies listed that no one has, but you'll know better than me how your group works.

For #2, you might occasionally want to keep a knowledge check secret, but as a general principle, I prefer to answer an obviously bad knowledge roll with "you don't know anything about this topic" or with incomplete information than with false information.

I try to avoid secret rolls as a general case. In general, players are players, they want to make decisions and feel a sense of empowerment and agency. Secret rolls deny them information and make them feel less powerful. Even for a classic hidden roll, the opposed Perception check for a stealth roll, I'd personally recommend keeping the roll open and visible unless the creature being snuck around is supposed to be especially intimidating. If it's a goblin scout, who cares if they know. If it's the dragon in its lair, then I want the players to feel at least a little disempowered, so I'll keep it secret.

I don't know if nobody will have it. They haven't rolled characters yet. With 7 player odds are someone will have it. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea. My concern is that "roll 7x take highest" breaks the system math by skewing massively towards high rolls.

>tell them they know nothing rather than give them bad information.
Them knowing nothing can be "nothing springs to mind that could help you in this situation". Which like "you find no traps" is just as easily a "there's no traps" as it could be "you don't see the traps." if they see their roll, they have a good sense of whether they did see the traps, and they avoid the area if they rolled low, or try to weasel into getting additional rolls.

>avoid secret checks entirely
Thats great advice, but again, that doesn't fix my issue.

I suppose I could turn all those checks into passive checks.

>I'm not sure where you're getting this idea
From this.
>I considered having only people with proficiency be able to do it, but no one was going to take proficiency in religion or history and they'd end up unable to do any sort of roll.

If you're going to have seven players, tell them that "your characters will need to be proficient to make some checks" while they're still making their characters. Either they'll co-ordinate so that every skill is covered or they won't co-ordinate and your campaign will collapse from bigger problems than what happens when someone asks "does my dude know the thing?".

>Which like "you find no traps"
No it's not. It's you saying "there's information that you might have gotten but aren't". You're telling them they failed their roll and do not get the extra clue. You can't meta around that. They know they're missing something, and they'll have to move on without the information.

This ties into the secret rolls thing. What exactly do you think is going to go wrong if the players know they rolled badly on the knowledge check?

>try to weasel into getting additional rolls.
No one should ever be given another roll after failing with no consequences. If rolling doesn't mean anything, then you don't ask for a roll, you just describe what happens next. No rerolling perception checks, no rerolling knowledge checks. No rerolling a check to see if you can lift something; either the character can or can't, and if luck isn't a big factor then you don't call for a roll, you just make a ruling.

You're confusing two separate posters.

Are me.

The others are someone else.

>what can go wrong if they know they rolled badly?
Assuming I'm not letting everyone roll in the party separately until someone succeeds?

They suddenly get overly cautious or go in a completely different direction, to avoid the potential traps, etc.

>no one should get rerolls
That's why I called it weaseling.

If they roll badly, sometimes I esteem them do a 180 and change course until they are able to roll again, "oh we rolled low let's abandon the mission and go back to town to do research" level shit.

Yeah I might do that. Not playing today after all, one of my group is sick, so I'll be putting off game day til tuesday.

Anyone have any tips for running Dark Sun in 5e? Got the pdf that was mentioned earlier in the thread and the original sourcebooks. Also converted quite a few crestures from DS into 5e.

If you can remember the capital then don't ask for any dumb-dumb's opinion (roll for it on your own). But if you listen to dumb Steve and crew and they make you doubt yourself (rolling as a group) then it's your own fault.

Rolling is for situations where you are not guaranteed success. You MAY know the capital.

Hey tell me how shit my homebrew is. I made it because alchemist was lack luster and I want a fun throwing things class
sorry for no fancy format

I should proof read better
you can CARRY up to a max of 15

bump

The goal here was to take some of the things from 3.5 to add to 5e. Opinions or other ideas? Would these rules break anything? Also just tossing around the idea of Greyhawk Initiative, not actually gonna do it quite yet.

House Rules:

1. Greyhawk Initiative by Mike Mearls

2. Flanking gives a +2 bonus to attacks made against a creature.

3. Firing into an ongoing melee with a ranged attack incurs a -2 penalty to attack rolls.

4. A 5-foot step can be taken as a move action, not provoking attacks of opportunity.

5. Ranged attacks made within a creatures threatened areas grant attacks of opportunity.

6. You provoke attacks of opportunity when moving around a creature's threatened area, unless you 5-foot step. However, while moving towards a creature, you do not provoke an attack of opportunity, even if you move through threaten squares to get to the creature, but this movement must be in a straight line towards the enemy.

or

6. You provoke attacks of opportunity when moving out of a threatened square (not just from moving out of a creature's reach). This can be negated by a 5-foot step.

I wanted to try making a homebrew archetype. Just something for fun, and I decided on a sort of fighter that has decided "fire is rad. I'm going to dump fire all over my weapon, and also myself."

When they get the archetype, they get the ability to have their weapons do fire damage, and they get two cantrips (control flames and firebolt) and a level 1 spell (Burning hands), with a single spell slot. When they reach a level a wizard would get a new spell level, they get a single slot for that level and a single fire based spell. Obviously right now they're just a severely more limited eldritch knight, but I'm thinking of giving them stuff like an aura of fire that gives them fire resistance and does damage to nearby enemies, or something like letting them more level 1 to level 5 spells and give them fire damage. Do I have a good start here or should I head back to the drawing board?

1. I'm not a fan of complicating initiative in any way, but if you can do it quickly I'd say go for it
2. Flanking in general isn't a good thing to import since specific monster and class features mimic that, and a conditional +2 bonus goes pretty much entirely against 5e's philosophy
3. Similar to the last point with conditional modifiers it should be disadvantage instead, but I never really liked this rule since it really only made sense when medium sized or smaller creatures that happen to jump around a lot are fighting each other
4. Move actions aren't a thing.
5. Currently that grants disadvantage without a feat, but if you added this there would be absolutely no reason to not just take the attack of opportunity to walk away then fire.
6. (both) Why tho?

Frankly I would consider every one of these changes a step backwards

The DM won't let me roll on my own, is the point. It's a dumb rule.

Oh wait, I'm dumb! Nevermind

The dm shouldn't let you Rollin your own anyways. It's a single roll +assist situation.

>character is a middle aged/near elderly woman
>I am a male
General backstory; She has run an orphanage/tavern in which she raises children and teaches them to steal what they need from people who wouldn't miss it. She's leaving the orphanage in the hands of one of her elder pupils (who would be an adult) to search for a big score to fund her retirement and to leave something behind for the kids.

Curious weather this character would pass or fail your red flag test.