What 5e variant/house rules do you play with that work?
What 5e variant/house rules do you play with that work?
I'll be DMing some more 5e soon and I want to take the opportunity to try some different ways of playing (I'll post my own suggestions as comments so they can start their own discussion threads). What alternate rules have you tried that you thought worked well? They can be larger changes to the game or little QoL tweaks (though if you can respond to the suggestion with "at this point just play [different game] instead" then that's probably more than what I'm looking for!)
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Oh I do so much actually. Well, I have a ton of house rules in a doc that are 99% pretty little things, minor QoL stuff, mostly to buff martials and character options that need the help. For example:
- Artificers can learn arcane weapon, the one UA spell that was designed to be unique for them.
- Barbarians get a Fighting Style at 2nd level and expanded crit range as a small buff to Brutal Critical.
- College of Valor and College of Whispers Bards can use a weapon as a focus, since College of Swords can.
- Clerics can freely choose between Divine Strike, Potent Spellcasting, and Blessed Strikes. Twilight Domain has the amount of temp HP they generate nerfed a bit (one of the very few nerfs I use).
- Druids get Wild Shape scaling up to CR 3 if they're not Circle of the Moon. Circle of the Shepherd has its temp HP ability for summons changed to be a total amount of temp HP equal to spell level×5 divided between the creatures summoned, so that summoning a ton of small things isn't the obvious choice.
- Fighters all learn the Superior Technique Fighting Style for free at 1st level. Arcane Archers, Champions, and Purple Dragon Knights all get a handful of buffs.
- Monks get a bunch of buffs, including upgrading their martial arts die one step and giving them proficiency in light and medium armor, like Barbarians have.
- Paladins can smite with unarmed strikes.
- Rangers are prepared casters like Paladins, have additional spells added to their list (including all of the smite spells, which I also allow to work with ranged weapons), and can gain both the Tasha's "replacement" features and the old PHB features, which are mostly flavor anyway. Favored Foe does not require concentration.
- Rogues get proficiency in medium armor and a Fighting Style at 2nd level.
- All Sorcerer subclasses get an expanded spell list like the Tasha's ones do. They also can learn more Metamagics. I've tweaked Wild Magic so you can roll for it more often.
- Warlocks learn the spells on their expanded spell lists automatically. Eldritch blast is a class feature you get automatically at 1st level rather than a spell, and you can change the damage type to a type related to your subclass. I've adjusted Hexblade by moving the ability to freely weapon attack with Charisma into the Improved Pact Weapon invocation.
- Wizards can use their spellbooks as a focus. They're mostly untouched though because they're really good enough already.
Blimey, that's a rewrite of half the classes! Have you found any problems with these changes?
Hmm, not particularly; most of them are fairly small changes in play even if they take up a decent amount of text in the doc. I'm mostly just trying to put the weaker options more on par with stronger options. If something comes up in a game where I realize "Whoops I made that too strong" I'll reassess.
So far my players have liked them as it's mostly buffs: I've definitely seen the weaker Sorcerer subclasses get more play because of the changes. You could argue that Sorcerers are casters and don't need the help, but I feel it just puts them on par with Wizards at worst.
Fair, I might just ask the players if there's anything they'd like to play but that they feel is a bit weak and offer some of your buffs if required!