My 6 D&D 5e Ho use Rules
Today I wanna share some of the house rules I use for my D&D 5e home game, and I’ll share why I do it too. I want to preface this by saying I don’t have any game design chops so I’m sure I’m screwing with the balance or intended experience or whatever but doing this stuff lets me run the kind of game I want to run, where my players feel like badasses. This doesn’t mean everything goes their way all the time but I want them to feel like their names are in the credits and I like putting my thumb on the scale to tip them to success, or at least feel like they really tried if they failed.
Inspiration
I give out inspiration which are a meta currency - like XP in Cypher or Bennies in Savage Worlds - which can be used to reroll ability checks, saves, and attack rolls (which are ability checks). Basically, it’s a roll with advantage. I don’t have a cap to how many a player can have. I give them out to all players, as a group, when they’ve completed a part of the story or individual players when they use the rules interestingly or someone has a really good piece of RP. This is not a huge departure from how it’s written, but where I do differ is that every session, each player starts each session with one inspiration point to give to another player of their choice to use immediately. It doesn’t stack, it can’t be saved. This player inspiration evaporates at the end of the session if not given and used. The reason I do this is twofold - one is that it encourages players to pay attention to the successes and failures of other PCs and second, subtly facilitates an environment where players are rooting for each other. It just makes the whole thing more collaborative.
2. Modifiers for tool use
I give a +1 to rolls with tool use (e.g. ladders/ropes for scaling a wall vs doing it freehand). I want to reward my players for being clever and working smarter. I also definitely forget to ask so I ask my players to remind me.
3. Nat 20 on initiative rolls
When this happens, players get to choose where in initiative they are among other players. I just do this because initiative rolls are the only type of roll in the game where a nat 20 doesn’t ‘mean’ anything, so this is just a little thing that ultimately doesn’t really affect much about the combat where the player can feel good about the great roll. It’s almost like a participation trophy - though like all participation trophies, it is more about making me, the GM-parent analogue, feel good. I’m sure the player doesn’t care, but I care, dammit.
4. Critical damage on a non-spell attack
When this happens, instead of doubling the dice, players have a max die and one rolled die (e.g. 12+1d12 instead of 2d12). Modifiers are added once.
The reason for this is that I’m super not here for something that should be a big hit do like… 3 damage. So with my method, the hit is going to be - assuming damage is d12 and modifier is 1 - at a minimum, 14.
This goes back to my original point of making players feel like badasses. The reason I don’t do it for spells is that I haven’t figured out a consistent way to make it work.
5. Healing potions
I don’t like variable healing amounts coming out of healing potions conceptually so I kind of have it that out of combat, players just always get the max healing amount from healing potions. In combat, I tend to really play with action economy so I have it as - if a player spends an entire action drinking a healing potion, they get the full amount. If they use it as a bonus action, they roll to see how much they got. I kind of flavour this as being intentional about drinking it all versus doing it in a rush and getting as much as they can.
6. Hit points during leveling
When rolling HP, if players roll below the class/level average, players can just take the average that’s listed for that level. so essentially - avg or better, never below. Again, this goes back to making the players feel like badasses, and my general thoughts around crit damage - It just feels weird to me that when you do something as big as level, you could end up with like 4 additional HP and thats all. It just feels weird.
So yeah - Those are my house rules for D&D 5e. You may notice that for the more mechanical ones, it has to do with reducing the randomness of the dice - For me, those elements don’t benefit from failure so I modify them a little to work better for the vibe I’m trying to capture. Again, I’m not a game designer or anything so I’m sure I’m fucking with ‘balance’ but capturing a certain vibe is more important to me so I modify this stuff to enable that. Also, giving my players tools to succeed means I can throw harder shit at them. Tougher monsters, bigger fights, higher DCs all around.. So their victory feels compelling and failures feel devastating, and I want those big cinematic moments which you can’t have if everyone is just middling.
