What 5e variant/house rules do you play with that work?

This one's short and sweet. At level 4 PCs get the Score Improvement AND to pick a Feat. This has propagated throughout my whole group, but the original DM that started it reasoned "I think a lot of Feats are really cool, but a lot of people aren't comfortable passing on their first Score Improvement to pick up something situational. So they get a freebie, because I want to see what uses they come up with.

As PC's progress, falling to 0HP in combat gets less and less meaningful. So I have used a rule that whenever a PC is at 0HP at the end of their turn, OR fail a death save, they take a level of exhaustion. It makes the 0HP yo-yo more dangerous, and makes it so "death" has some longer term consequences.

I try to keep house rules to a minimum. My biggest one is a change to inspiration. Inspiration is a reroll and you need to keep the new result. You can have multiple inspirations (max 3) and you start each session with one for free. If you end the session with more than one, then you can take one extra inspiration with you to the next session

I have been using the bonus action to drink a potion optional rule. As a bonus action you get to roll but as an action you get the maximum from the potion. Its been pretty easy to implement and is only rarely used in my campaign.

This might be in the 5e DMG and I'm just forgetting, but I'm a big fan of the 10 minute exploration turn while the party goes through dungeons. I find that it helps things move faster and helps players feel like they're getting enough time in the spotlight during the exploration phase. Rather than figuring out how far they can move in 10 minutes, I just allow characters either to move into an adjacent room (provided there is an unblocked passage to do so) or an action inside of the room. Actions in the room take the whole 10 minutes, but I usually let it slide if a player wants to perform a short sequence of actions to achieve a single result, the whole sequence getting represented by one roll if necessary.

To streamline combat, I have ported over minions from 4e (Matt Colville and I actually converged on this, I had been doing it since I switched to 5e and didn't find his video on it for years) and a modified version of the coup de grace rules. Minions are monsters with full stats and attacks but they die in a single hit, no matter how much damage they were dealt. For the modified coup de grace, if a player character deals half or more of a monsters HP in a single hit, even during normal combat, that monster dies immediately. Anything that gets the monsters off the field before they get boring really, since it allows me to throw out large waves of enemies that only take a few minutes to fight since many of them go down in one hit. I run a fairly heroic game of d&d so letting the players plow through enemies helps create the vibe I want during the game.

The only reason this is a "house rule/variant" is because everybody allows the optional rules by default and doesn't understand what "optional" or "check with your DM first" means.

I don't allow multi-classing. Subclasses do it better and are actually balanced. When I don't disallows multi-classing I get 1-3 hexblade dips every group because of how OP the dip is.

I've had a ton of Paladin/hexblades, more than a few Wizard (Bladesinger)/hexblades, and even a rogue/hexblade with a fucking double-scimitar.

I'm sick to death of hexblades.

Fuck hexblades. No more multiclassing in my games. Assholes abused it so much it's no longer an option because I like my hair where it is, and the alternative is for me to quit DMing altogether.

...and nobody else seems willing to run the fucking game...

Spell points instead of slots for sorcerers. Makes em feel more distinctive, works better with the limited spells known, and they need the flexibility to compete with other casters.

Variant: "Gritty Realism" a.k.a. the "Adventuring Week"

I'd like to try having an "adventuring week" rather than an "adventuring day", i.e. have X encounters per in-game week rather than the same number per in-game day. The Gritty Realism variant rules basically provide this though I think the name really puts people off; I'm not trying to add realism, just make it so you can have actual meaningful resource-draining encounters as part of something like a week-long travel (currently I'd need to throw in so many encounters that it becomes tedious, or have one-encounter days which we all know the problems with!)

Has anyone tried Gritty Realism before, and if so how did you implement it and how did you find it? My main question would be:

• How many days did you have per long rest?
• How long were your long rests and did they need to be in a "safe haven"?
• How did you adjust spell times?

Knockouts. It's a very simple rule. If you successfully sneak up on a creature and successfully hit them with an attack that deals bludgeoning damage, they need to pass a con save with a DC equal to 10 or half the damage dealt (whichever is higher) or they immediately fall unconscious. I feel like 5e doesn't really encourage stealth enough otherwise, and this way players have a decent way to pick off sentries and such before raiding a camp.

In theory you could do assassinations with a similar rule, but I haven't tried it out in a campaign.

I've adopted the "you get Inspiration whenever you roll a nat 1" idea that the playtest floated for a while and it's turned out well.

I think that the "official" way of granting inspiration (grant when players play well into their PC's character traits) is a horrible design that both fails to achieve what it sets out to do and is both highly subjective & continuously forgotten.

The nat 1 approach doesn't break any other system, reliably hands out a small trickle of Inspiration just the way the original was supposed to do and requires little to no work.

I'm somewhat tempted to introduce QoL features like "you can hold two" or "you can use them to reroll", but part of me likes how it's a limited tactical resource rather than a safety net.

I use an inspiration variant, allow free switching of weapons, and don't track encumbrance (the line is narrative ridiculousness basically.) So far I've seen players use inspiration more but I'm always looking to encourage it. We've tried a couple of variants.

Some bonus actions can be taken if you want to sacrifice your whole action.

Potions have a straight hp gain instead of rolling, i.e. superior healing gives 20 hit points back.

Drinking a potion of healing is a bonus action. Administering it to someone else is an action.
Or you can use an action to drink it, and it restores the max roll (ie: 2d4+4 -> 12)

Flanking is +2 to hit, instead of advantage. Like reverse-cover.

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.

I use these Exhaustion rules instead of the ones from 2014 edition. They are not as brutal as original rules and use them alot more than I did the old Exhaustion rules.

-1 per level for all attacks/saves/checks/DC, -5 speed per level(min of 5ft speed) Additionally 1: 0 2: No Reactions 3: 1 Action or Bonus Action 4: Can't Ceoncentrate, Max 1 attack 5: Fail all Saves, Vunerable to all Damage

I have made the following changes to Artificer since we do a lot of downtime to create magic items in my campaign. I had added a 5th level feature to reduce the time for common and uncommon and updated one at 10th level for Rare and Very Rare:

Magic Item Capable:
5th level artificer feature
You've got the initial grasp on making magical items:
If you craft a magic items with a rarity of common or uncommon, it takes you half of the normal time.

Magic Item Adept:
10th level artificer feature
You've achieved a profound understanding of how to use and make magic items.
You can attune to up to four magic items at once
If you craft a magic items with a rarity of common or uncommon, it takes you a quarter of the normal time, and it costs you half as much of the usual gold
If you craft a magic items with a rarity of rare or very rare, it takes you half of the normal time.

I stretch out the adventuring day into the adventuring week. The party can take 1 short rest per week, at any mealtime, and 1 long rest at the end of any day. Rests refresh on sunday

Bards can use the help action at a distance by using their movement points. If you stand still and play your music to help your people, that works at a distance. The performance requires you to move in olace, playing the instrument. It has to be the full movement points for that round.

Not originally by me, but I quite enjoy it that way.

I have a bunch of houserules in my game, but here are some of my favorite and least complex:

Sprint: If you do not do anything else on your turn and you are not in difficult terrain, you can move up to 5x your speed (150ft typically). Attacks of opportunity against you are made at advantage. This is mainly to allow characters to catch up to combat without waiting 10 rounds.

Fight or Flight: Replaces the frightened condition. You can choose to flee or fight. Fleeing is unambiguous, fighting entails doing everything you can to kill the source of your fear -- no healing, no hiding, no stabilizing, no keeping your smite slots for later. Failing a save by 5 or more forces you to flee. (Taken from an XP to Level 3 video.)

Death saves are rolled in secret.

Light weapon property: we use the OneD&D version.

Critical hits: If you kill a target with one, the damage spills over to an enemy of your choice if I deem it to be within range of that attack. The damage keeps spilling over as long as you kill enemies. For instance, a critical hit with a bow worth 35 points of damage could kill up to five 7HP goblins if they are conga-lining in your direction.

QoL: PCs can choose to permanently drop down the initiative order

I believe this was just a thing you could do in older editions but there are no rules for it in 5e. Sometimes going first doesn't work well for teamwork (e.g. your Shield Master going directly before the enemy so they get up after each shove before anyone can attack them while they're prone), so letting you drop down the order can help without giving you a freebie (i.e. the enemy might get an extra go against you). I've not encountered any problems with this yet!

Idea: extra XP triggers

There are plenty of grumbles about experience points only being awarded for killing things, and the rules for arbitrarily giving out more for completing tasks are pretty vague. Does anyone have any suggestions to improve this other than "just use milestones"?

I'm tempted to borrow some ideas from PBtA/BitD and give everyone some per-session XP triggers, e.g.

• The barbarian solved a problem with violence or intimidation
• The wizard pursued their magical studies
• The character struggled with their Flaw
• The character acted in a way that lived up to their Ideal