Polishing a Turd: 5E Houserules?

[Koumei]

So I've been invited to a tabletop game in actual real world "around a table" format, which could be a one-off or a campaign - after a long time, the host has bought the books for 5Ed and is running, so I figured it'll be a bit of fun, and is the kind of limited socialisation I can manage.

Anyway, he did confess to being new to running games and all, and isn't sure how well he'll do, so if he doesn't want to DM a campaign, I could end up taking the reigns for that. But once I have that kind of power, obviously I'll want to fix the system in some way.

How would you do that in this case?

One thing I'd want to do is take away the "at levels 4, 8, 12, 16 and 19 you get +2 to one or +1 to two" nonsense and put actual class features in. Then every four levels, everyone just gets a feat. No, it really should be a feat, not just a stat boost. This may involve needing to write up more feats, whatever. I'll hold a pen while I sleep and see what happens.

Then, for the stat increases... I'll want to take the "bounded accuracy" idea, stuff it in a sack of bricks, then throw it onto the river.* I don't think just giving out +1 to every ability score every level will work. For one thing, people will outgrow their armour. For another, HP will inflate faster than damage outputs. For another, even that increase is seriously +10 to modifiers for level 20 characters, meaning they're still not off the RNG. Instead it might need something mental like "Proficiency Bonus is now +2 per level. Yes really." And then... ability score increases are basically limited to what you get from feats. But maybe that's okay.

What would you do? Having accepted that the first step cannot be "set fire to 5E and go back to 3rd" (that could happen later down the track).

*The local river here is really shitty, it reminds me of the River Ankh of Discworld. It's such a solid sludge that you don't have to be Jesus to walk on it.

[Dean]

Mechanically 5E works fine. It's a playable game it just doesn't support the setting assumptions they want it to. If 5E was called Conanworld it would be a pretty great game because Conan fights Frost Giants and Golems but still surrenders any time he's surrounded by like a dozen guys. In Conan or Game of Thrones or whatever it would be perfectly acceptable that any threat in the setting can also be killed by a couple dozen archers. In the Game of Thrones RPG that would be things working correctly, it's just that 5E D&D still wants you to believe that CR 20 monsters and 20th level characters are world conquering threats. A max level 5E Barbarian is a guy who can kill like 20 men and that's really impressive in some worlds but absolutely not in the world that 5E tries to sell you. I think it's a mistake to try to fix all the underlying math with tons of house rules when you could just refluff the world into one where the math tells the stories appropriate to that world. The moment you accept you're playing Robb Stark not Drizzt it all gets better.

Anyway. The main house rule I would implement would be to split the Concentration mechanic into "Weave" and "Otherweave". Any magical character has both a "Weave" and "Otherweave" slot they can maintain effects in. A Weave slot can maintain any concentration spell targetted on themselves and the Otherweave slot can maintain any concentration spell on anyone but themselves. Multiple target spells go into the Weave slot if any of the targets is the caster and the Otherweave slot only if all targets are not the caster. This would allow the concentration duration offensive spells to be put back into the game and would also allow the buffing of other party members which no one does in 5E. No one even pretends that Wizards buff fighters anymore and the only person a selfish buff paradigm hurts is fighters so get rid of that.

[Koumei]

Mechanically 5E works fine. It's a playable game it just doesn't support the setting assumptions they want it to. If 5E was called Conanworld it would be a pretty great game

Yeah, but that's not the game I want to play. I want to play Dungeons and fucking Dragons, so if I have to get involved in 5E, then I don't want to just refluff it and play "The game where everyone hires archers by the squadron", I want to fix it into being D&D.

Also, after a recent chat it actually looks pretty likely that I'll be running something in the future. But if turning this into the actual game it claims to be is just too much trouble, I might just bust out the 3E.

[Grek]

If you want to de-Conanize things, put in a DR based tier system. Everybody gets DR 20/"X or more HD" where X is the PC's character level -4.

E: If you're not sure your players will accept this, give it to them in magic item form. Like, at level 5 they each get a magic amulet protects them from non-magical weapons. Then have stuff that isn't supposed to be a threat not carry magic weapons.

[Shady314]

It seems like everyone's biggest gripe with 5E is badass monsters being slain by skeleton archers so giving every monster of a certain CR or above immunity to non-magical weapons seems like a quick fix.

I haven't even read 5E so forgive me if this is dumb for some reason I don't know.

[erik]

Pretty much you would have to institute "You must be this high" limits across the board in order to counter the fact that the greater numbers of peasants can objectively achieve better results than a single hero.

That has its own problems of course but probably would be an improvement.

[Koumei]

Yeah, that could work.

And yeah, the problem is that:
A. You can hire a bunch of archers (or summon skeleton archers) to kill any monster for you.
B. A mob of ten orcs or bandits will always threaten you.

So handing out DR 20/magic in vast amounts could totally work.

Other problems are personal ones of some classes being very boring (which other people might not find to be the case), and some classes just not having options on a day to day basis (most of them, really), though some people will say that's a plus because they want simplicity like that.

The fact that the game has all the races and classes that came out the door in 3E (plus some extras), and that each class has at least two options that (pretend to) shape progression, almost baking prestige class ideas into them (at the cost of the "and now Jimmy realises his destiny to be a Flame Prince of the Secret Order" story element) was nice, and you really can see all the places where they said "Okay, we fucked up with 4E".

[OgreBattle]

What would you do? Having accepted that the first step cannot be "set fire to 5E and go back to 3rd" (that could happen later down the track)

Make non-caster characters gain class features (but not hitpoints) twice as fast, so a fighter would look like this:

Level/ Proficiency Bonus/Features
1st +2 Fighting Style, Second Wind, Action Surge (1)
2nd +2 Martial Archetype
3rd +3 Extra Attack
4th +3 Martial Archetype Feature
5th +4 Indomitable (1), Martial Archtype Feature
6th +4 Extra Attack (2)
7th +5 Indomitable (2)
8th +5 Martial Archtype
9th +6 Action Surge (3), Indomnitable (3), Martial Archetype Feature
10th +6 Extra Attack (3)

So the 'Champion' archtype fighter gets these features:

Improved Critical (lvl2)
Your weapon attacks score a critical hit on a roll
of 19 or 20.

Remarkable Athlete (lvl4)
You can add half your proficiency
bonus (round up) to any Strength, Dexterity, or
Constitution check you make that doesn’t already use
your proficiency bonus. In addition, when you make a running long jump, the
distance you can cover increases by a number of feet
equal to your Strength modifier.

Additional Fighting Style (lvl5)
You can choose a second option from the
Fighting Style class feature.

Superior Critical (lvl 8)
Your weapon attacks score a critical hit on a roll of 18–20.

Survivor (lvl9)
You attain the pinnacle of resilience in
battle. At the start of each of your turns, you regain hit
points equal to 5 + your Constitution modifier if you
have no more than half of your hit points left. You don’t
gain this benefit if you have 0 hit points


For level 11+ you just write PrC's for them to go into, though I doubt the game will reach that level. As for ability score improvements, you can just make that based on total character level instead of a class feature.

On saving throws, just collapse them into Fort(STR, CON)/Ref (DEX) /Wil (INT, WIS, CHA). Have non casters get all 3 good, partial pick two to be good, and full casters pick one.

[DSMatticus]

1) You can't just make the proficiency bonus bigger. Every character gets to add their proficiency bonus to their attacks and saving throw DC's, but not to their AC or four of their saving throws. So if you increase the proficiency bonus, the end result is that everyone hits everyone all the time and every character has four Achilles' heels. I suggest leaving proficiency as it is and adding X*level to attack rolls, AC's, saving throws, and save DC's, where X is a multiplier you're happy with (.5, 1, 2). Obviously, you use CR for monsters instead of HD or level or whatever.

2) That thing OgreBattle said is great and I'm doing it in a 3.5-with-a-splash-of-Tome campaign right now. The players get two levels worth of class features per level (numerical progression and spellcasting still based on actual level, so a level 3 rogue only has 2d6 sneak attack and a level 3 wizard can only cast level two spells, but a level 3 rogue has their level 4,5,6 abilities). In my 3.5 game I'm only doing it for the first five levels, but for 5e I'd just do it the entire time.

3) You might want to change the way concentration works (Dean's idea wouldn't be too bad). It has completely failed to stop clerics and wizards from winning D&D, but it has guaranteed that in practice a lot of the interesting story-changing things you'd use magic for never actually happen. You can definitely see the influences of 4e's "magic shouldn't do things," except instead of having magic just not do things outright they've made it awkward to maintain effects indefinitely, particularly for anyone in the 'adventuring lifestyle'.

4) 5e uses only resistance and immunity, where resistance halves damage and immunity negates it. This is pretty ass. Replace resistance with "subtract 10" and immunity with "subtract all." Give everything over level/CR X resistance to nonmagical weapons, including the PC's.

[codeGlaze]

Between DR, creating two separate concentration slots and Ogre's suggestions... I believe a new game has already been created, haha.

[Seerow]

As far as killing Bounded Accuracy goes the primary target is going to be the proficiency bonuses. Right now they scale from +1 to +6 over 20 levels. Give a straight up multiplier to that to make each increase feel more noticable. Say you go with a x3 multiplier, so each point of proficiency bonus is actually worth 3 points on the to-hit bonus.

1) You can't just make the proficiency bonus bigger. Every character gets to add their proficiency bonus to their attacks and saving throw DC's, but not to their AC or four of their saving throws. So if you increase the proficiency bonus, the end result is that everyone hits everyone all the time and every character has four Achilles' heels. I suggest leaving proficiency as it is and adding X*level to attack rolls, AC's, saving throws, where X is a multiplier you're happy with (.5, 1, 2). Obviously, you use CR for monsters instead of HD or level or whatever.

DSM has a good point here, but personally I think that a big jump every few levels is better than small incremental progress every level, even if at the levels of the big jumps it looks the same. It just feels better to suddenly have your bonuses boosted up several points at once.

That said, shoring up weak saving throws and AC in this is critical. Personally I'd say for all values that aren't currently affected by proficiency bonus, take a value between 1 and 3. Your bonus is effectively negative that much, but you don't care until it becomes positive. So if you say the Fighter's Int save is -2, at whatever level he would normally get a +3 proficiency bonus, he now gains a +1 bonus to int saves. So for the first half of the game some things are progressing while other things don't. For the second half of the game, everything progresses so combat stays on the RNG.

I would also totally combine this with some common form of DR as others upthread have mentioned. Giving everyone above a certain level "fuck off lowbie" damage reduction is good.


As for skills, you could either run it the same way I suggested running combat proficiencies above, or just shove in other skill systems as you like. 5e's skill system is so nonexistent that you can shove in practically anything you want without meaningfully affecting the rest of the game.

[DSMatticus]

Proficiency scales from +2 to +6. If falling further behind on your bad saves as you level bothers you, I would just make proficiency a flat +4 bonus.

So you add X*level to attacks, AC, saving throws, and DC's. Then you get +4 to your two good saves, your saving throw DC's, and any attacks using a weapon with which you are proficient.

[OgreBattle]

Do you also want to change Advantage/Disadvantage? There's discussion about it here:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=362977

It largely boils down to making disadvantage/advantage activating off of short but versatile conditions (such as flanking or prone), and definitely not something at-will like the fighter giving it as an immediate action or the cleric granting it as a buff.

I think you've also suggested many times that advantage/disadvantage should cancel each other out on a 1:1 basis, so if I have 3 disadvantage granting effects but 1 advantage granting effect I just have disadvantage.

[Koumei]

I think you've also suggested many times that advantage/disadvantage should cancel each other out on a 1:1 basis, so if I have 3 disadvantage granting effects but 1 advantage granting effect I just have disadvantage.

Indeed, I would do that. For the purpose of this "Well it's printed in the book, may as well go for small changes" thing, I'll grudgingly keep the mechanic, but having them cancel one-for-one is at least a sensible response.

[Username17]

I don't think that the armor classes and proficiency bonuses are that big of a deal. The game cannot handle big ticket monsters. At all. Full fucking stop. There is no such thing as a Dragon or a Pit Fiend or a Kraken or a Lich. Those things do not exist because they can't exist in the system. But you know what? Who fucking cares? You can just fight Orcs and Ogres until you get bored of the game and never worry about how there's never a second shoe to drop.

The big issue, the issue I think is pretty much unsolvable, is the interaction of character skills with DCs. There really aren't any DCs, which means the game as whole is fundamentally fraudulent. But even if there were DCs, the fact of the matter is that player character "specialists" and "random hobos" do not differ enough in bonuses to make there be any task that a nominally skilled character can do a reasonable amount of the time that you cannot also accomplish with comparable reliability by throwing 20 peasants at the problem.

And for that, I submit that the game would work fundamentally better if you used 2d6 for your RNG instead of a d20.

-Username17

[Aryxbez]

I'd say convince your players to run it as Game of Bones.

You get to do hardcore D&D things early on, that people picture doing when hear about all this Fantasy-D&D jazz. Then, ye have a potentially exciting political-esque premise they themselves can interact with (plus be all over making Game of thrones references I'm sure). Best of all, that just requires to give out optimal plays generally available, and can get it running.

Other than that, I'd agree you need to get some Skill DC's set in stone for their actions to matter.

[DrPraetor]

If you use 3D6, you don't even need to change the DCs (well most of them are bullshit or unstated anyway, but the few that exist and make any sense you wouldn't need to change.)
http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/troll.msp
3D6+1 beats 3D6 alone 55% of the time (~9% ties), which is a good baseline.
3D6+3 beats 3D6 alone 72% of the time (~5% ties).
3D6+5 beats 3D6 alone 85% of the time (~5% ties again).

1D20+1 beats 1D20 53% of the time (5% ties)
1D20+3 beats 1D20 62% of the time (4.5% ties)
1D20+5 beats 1D20 70% of the time (4% ties)

So switching to 3D6 would be *very roughly* equivalent to doubling all bonuses (a bit less), while pushing only a few very large modifiers entirely-off the existing (fairly narrow) RNG.

Almost looks like a playable game; and, in fact, I've been saying that D20 should've been 3D6 since about the time that it came out.

[DSMatticus]

If you want to inflate the skill range (and you probably do), you can still use the X*level trick. If you really want, you can even declare you only get the X*level bonus on trained skills. Meaning even level 20 people can suck at things and getting a few levels under your belt is worth as much as proficiency.

[Dogbert]

When I tried the system, I used the following houserules:

1) Use of d20's Flaws in order to get as many feats as you're going to need in chargen. Given bounded accuracy crap and how the game is no longer zero-to-hero, getting a bit extra but making sure that's all you're going to get technically does not go against the spirit of the game.

2) Use of the d20 Hero SRD's Complications and Hero Points. Now, giving the player any sort of actual agency does go against the spirit of the game but fuck it, agency happens to be my sine qua non, so there.

Just that made 5E a lot more palatable for me, even if we ended up going back to pahtfailure because I couldn't stomach 5E making d&d's premises a worse lie than Portal's cake.

[Koumei]

You can just fight Orcs and Ogres until you get bored of the game

The main problem there is, that's like one fight, and I want to try to extend the lifespan of this bland dough.

The big issue, the issue I think is pretty much unsolvable, is the interaction of character skills with DCs. There really aren't any DCs, which means the game as whole is fundamentally fraudulent.

Perhaps then, the solution is actually to do a 2E style thing with this:

"If you are proficient with a skill, you succeed at it. Against someone with a lower level, you succeed more."

Because the smaller the changes that need be made, the better all round, but it's looking more and more like I should just rock up to the game half drunk, and then if I do end up running, declare we're using a better system.

[ubernoob]

..

[Emerald]

Perhaps then, the solution is actually to do a 2E style thing with this:

"If you are proficient with a skill, you succeed at it. Against someone with a lower level, you succeed more."

One proficiency houserule I've heard of that's supposed to do that "succeed harder against less proficient people" thing well is to have three levels of proficiency, Basic, Expert, and Master. Basic proficiency is normal proficiency, gained in the normal ways. Expert proficiency also grants you advantage on all rolls relating to the proficiency, Master proficiency also imposes disadvantage on whoever you're rolling against, and each level you can upgrade some number of proficiencies by one step. Impose whatever extra constraints you want to prevent reaching Master proficiency "too fast" or to give rogues more benefits or whatever.

It gives you some 3e-style customization and reliability, while still feeling very 5e-ish due to its not changing the proficiency bonus and involving advantage/disadvantage.

[tussock]

[*]The final game screwed everyone who wants to do damage, while the summoned skeletons at least tripled in damage output for no reason at all. Adding the proficiency bonus to all PC damage (blast spells too, not summons) sort of works to cancel that out.

[*]DCs need set, and as almost everyone has between +5 and +11 to everything ever (+17 with the right class features), DC 15 needs to be very hard things, DC 10 tricky shit, and DC 5 for "newbs sometimes fail this". DC 20 is "even the Gods might fail this".

[*]Disadvantage is fucking stupid. PCs with disadvantage on attack can't do anything, and monsters with Disadvantage on attack aren't a threat. Advantage works within their math, is at least something to care about in the game, and using disadvantage to cancel back to zero is fine.

[*]Give PCs proficiency on all their saves.

[*]The feat or stat thing, just give them the feats and the stats. They need the stats to do anything, make saves, all sorts. They need the feats to fight. Give them both.

[*]If you want the PCs to become properly resistant to low-level bullshit as they level-up, they need to hit AC 25. Give out magic bonuses to AC like candy and they'll be there in no time. The big monsters all do automatic damage and have big bonuses to hit with multiple attacks so it doesn't matter. The game itself should run smoother with a big old bunch of magic items, wands, vorpal swords, don't hold back.

[ishy]

You can just fight Orcs and Ogres until you get bored of the game

The main problem there is, that's like one fight, and I want to try to extend the lifespan of this bland dough.

Does 5e even have monsters who do not fight like Ogres & Orcs?
A Balor for example, can't do anything offensively other than melee attacking people (well exploding on them I guess).

[Koumei]

Well you can give class levels to people again, can't you? Like 3E rather than 4, so they can toss short-duration Charms and Illusions around and crap.