Questions tagged [house-rules]
House rules are small fan-created additions and replacements to core rules in a rules set, and this tag should be used when there are locally-created rules at the core of the question. In most cases, they are not officially sanctioned by the designer, in contrast to optional rules (see the [optional-rules] tag). For creation of substantial new content or rules subsystems, use the [homebrew] tag instead.
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Magic Stone + Enlarge [duplicate]
Can a thrown magic pebble be a target to the enlarge spell? For that matter, can anything from an arrow to a hurled table become enlarged while in mid-air and if so how would you suggest fantasy ...
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Give disadvantage always, when attacking a non-visible target [duplicate]
RAW, advantages and disadvantages cancel each others out, always. Here I am interested in the case, where these two (found at PHB - Combat - Unseen Attackers and Targets) cancel each others out:
When ...
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Allowing Disengage for free
I'm the DM, and I'm concerned that combat feels pretty static.
As I understand it in RAW:
Once you've reached melee range, moving further away will provoke an opportunity attack, unless you disengage
...
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Assassinate ability and two-weapon fighting [duplicate]
I have been reading about this and am finding a lot of questions similar to what I'm asking, but they also all have extra components and I just want a simple answer. I think I already know but I am ...
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Is the "Bone of Animation" magic item in Mordenkainen's Tome of Marvelous Magic unbalanced?
I'm running the Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus adventure.
In a session 0 for one my PCs, they acquired a Bone of Animation, which is an item in Mordenkainen's Tome of Marvelous Magic (a pretty ...
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Is this change to the Protection fighting style balanced?
I feel the Protection fighting style has some problems that make it mechanically marginal at best, and not very much fun to play with. In brief, while it's a decent defense bonus, your chance of ...
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Grabbing & releasing with dragons
I'm planning a combat situation with a dragon and trying to understand what happens if the dragon grabs and attempts to drop players from height.
So far this is how I'm thinking about ruling it:
The ...
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Do 10 second turns/60 second rounds make spellcasters horrible?
My DM insists on the combat being 10 seconds per turn and the round time to be the sum of all turn times (so a minute for 6 participants, for example). I am aware that this is not how turn/round time ...
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Are there any game breaking consequences in this house rule for multiclass spell slots?
Follow up to this question.
So, as stated in that question, I feel that it is quite weird that a 3rd level paladin + 2nd level Ranger is not equivalent to a 5th level Half-caster (such as a 5th level ...
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What would be the effects of changing the duration of a round from 6 seconds to 5 seconds?
I'm introducing the following house rule:
A round lasts 5 seconds.
What would be the effects of such a house rule? Would there be any? Would this break the game?
Out of the top of my head, I cannot ...
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Tarokka effect for a given die roll and critical success/miss. Is this balanced?
I'm now setting up my first session as DM. I don't have the whole story yet, but I have a very simple first session that will introduce 3 players to the game (they are 4 in total).
I'm thinking of a ...
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Is this house rule to balance the college of whispers bard balanced?
As a player and a dungeon master, I feel like the Psychic Blade of the college of whispers bard is really unbalanced regarding the Sneak Attack feature of the rogue.
First of all, they mostly does the ...
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Is this modified Dual Wielder feat balanced?
The Issue
So, it is well known that the Dual Wielder feat is bad. Even if you are building a Two-Weapon Fighting character, the feat is still worse than simply getting straight-forward ASI. Unlike ...
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Do any serious balance issues result from this houserule: Floating Ability Score at Character Creation?
I've recently been considering the phenomenon that "unusual" race-class combinations are often 1 modifier behind on their primary ability score - i.e. that they would start, using point buy ...
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What would be the ramifications of replacing Multiattack with Extra Attack?
There are a lot of questions on "Extra Attack vs Multiattack" and it's become my opinion that the act of separating the two generates more confusion than value as a gameplay and balancing lever.
It ...
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Can a druid/trickery domain cleric use Invoke Duplicity and Wild Shape, then cast spells through the illusion?
I am DMing a D&D 5E game. I have a player who wants to use Invoke Duplicity and Wild Shape, then cast spells through the illusion. My thoughts are Wild Shape says the druid can't cast spells, and ...
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What would be the effects of allowing dual Pact Weapons?
I have been considering a Hexblade Warlock with a houserule to allow two Pact Weapons, so that they could dual-wield. What would the effects of such a houserule be? It is an extra option for Pact of ...
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Is moving between separate attacks of the same spell unbalanced?
As stated in this question, you can't move between attacks when casting spells like Eldritch Blast as per RAW.
My question is, if a GM would allow this to happen (cast a beam to a creature, move, and ...
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Would allowing Wizards to use Wisdom for AC be unbalanced?
I find myself frustrated that Wizards have high incentive to invest in Dexterity and Constitution so that the aren't quite so squishy whereas they have little incentive to increase Wisdom except to ...
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Would allowing Primeval Awareness to specify numbers and directions make the feature unbalanced?
The 3rd level class feature of the ranger, Primeval Awareness, says:
Beginning at 3rd level, you can use your action and expend one ranger spell slot to focus your awareness on the region around ...
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Allowing more spell slots at the expense of fatigue: Will this house rule break the game?
I'm playing D&D 5e. PHB (Chapter 10: Spellcasting) states that (emphasis mine):
Regardless of how many spells a caster knows or prepares, he or she
can cast only a limited number of spells ...
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Would it harm game balance to allow the Haste action to be used to drink a potion?
The haste spell specifies:
[The target] gains an additional action on each of its turns. That action can be used only to take the Attack (one weapon attack only), Dash, Disengage, Hide, or Use an ...
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How unbalanced would be a homerule allowing any 1 lightsaber technique to be "career"?
I'm thinking about running a FFG Star Wars campaign with Force and Destiny careers allowed for characters. I've been looking over those career specializations though, and a lot of them (ok, all of ...
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Are there rules to create Troops of casters?
So a person I play Pathfinder with showed me the Troops sub-type which opens up a whole lot of possibilities for high level parties to deal with high numbers of enemies.
But I don't find much about ...
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Are there any balance issues with familiar from the Find Familiar spell to be of the elemental creature type (instead of celestial, fey, or fiend)?
The spell find familiar allows a character to summon a familiar, which is a spirit of creature type celestial, fey or fiend. From the spell's description (PHB, p. 240):
You gain the service of a ...
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Balance implications of these output to input luck change house rules? [closed]
What classes and approaches are helped and/or hindered by this set of house rules?
For an upcoming DnD 5e campaign I am considering two house rules, both of which substantially effect one another. ...
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Would this house rule on initiating combat be balanced?
My question is similar to this question about a house-rule that the initiator of combat acts first but skips their first turn in initiative, but about the opposite situation. The author of that ...
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Are there any larger implications of allowing a variant rule Ability Score Improvement/Feats in a multi-classing campaign? [duplicate]
Are there any larger implications of allowing a variant rule Ability Score Improvement/Feats in a multi-classing campaign?
In one campaign we have all multi-class players. There has been a ...
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What happens to Cleric builds when Divine Metamagic is banned?
For optimized Clerics, Extend Spell, Persist Spell, and Divine Metamagic: Persist are often as good as class features. However, a not too rare house rule is to ban Divine Metamagic (due to its extreme ...
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Would swapping the Assassin's Imposter feature for the Scout's Ambush Master feature be unbalanced?
Inspired by this question: Would allowing the Rogue sub-class (Assassin) to benefit from Supreme Sneak be unbalanced?
The Assassin roguish archetype is considered by some to have very weak class ...
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Would letting the Assassin rogue replace its 9th-level Infiltration Expertise feature with the Thief's Supreme Sneak feature be unbalanced?
I wanted to ask about allowing the Rogue sub-class (Assassin) to benefit from Supreme Sneak.
I have a player in my campaign who plays as an Assassin Rogue and would like to have access to the Supreme ...
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Aside from Encumbrance and HP, what mechanical problems arise from removing raw ability scores and only using the modifiers?
I started to look at DW to see how well the move and general rules work out in real life. Looks good, but one thing bothers me: Why do the stats need a 3-18 value if 9 out of 10 moves and/or rules ...
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What problems may arise from my house rules on grappling and restraining?
Introduction
I am dissatisfied with the rules for grappling in 5e. Well, it's more that I'm dissatisfied with the fact that there's no way to restrain someone in 5e via grappling.
The rules, as they ...
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What are the ramifications of changing Armor Class to be Constitution-based instead of Dexterity-based?
It's never made much sense to me that your Armor Class is based on your Dexterity modifier, which carries the implication that you're harder to hit because you're somehow nimbly moving out of the way ...
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What are the mechanical implications of allowing all expended hit dice to be regained on a long rest?
Are there any mechanical implications, short of the fact players can heal more on a short rest, to a house rule allowing them to restore all their expended hit dice after a long rest (instead of only ...
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Would this hit/miss houserule be balanced with bounded accuracy?
Would this houserule be balanced with the bounded accuracy system?
If an attack roll is made and "misses" by one, the defender takes a glancing blow. This glancing blow does not count as a ...
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Is this houserule about hit points balanced?
As a D&D5e DM, I always feel that HP in D&D are somehow unrealistic. Either it's "there is no difference between 1 HP and 100% of my HP" or "I took too much damage in one hit, ...
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What are the balance ramifications of always preventing creatures from taking reactions before their first turn?
I've recently been toying with some rule modifications to 5e's Initiative rules in an attempt to resolve the rule/reality inconsistency where a player "gets the jump" on a monster, but the monster is ...
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How do we deal with my DM's house-rule about critical damage?
In the campaign I'm playing in, our DM has set a house-rule for critical damage. So, we do
maximum damage for one set of dice, roll the second set and add modifiers at the end
instead of the typical ...
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Is this random area of effect spell deviation house rule broken?
Whenever an AOE spell is cast, the actual target center (for circles) or target angle (for cones) differs from the intended target by a factor of 5 feet/degrees * spell level / caster level. Direction ...
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Is there a way to make an Invisible Stalker-like player character?
I'm DMing a game of DND 5e and one of my players really really wants to be an invisible stalker character. The characters will be level 5.
I told him no right off the bat, because being invisible 24/...
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Is changing concentration rules for 1h+ buff spells a bad idea?
I have noticed that many long duration (1h+) spells in 5E D&D have concentration, effectively meaning caster cannot cast other concentration spells while using such a spell (or end the spell). For ...
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How can a tiny-sized gunslinger increase the base die when we use houserules that favor larger creatures?
I plan to go dwarf gunslinger with dual revolvers.
So in our game, size class rules have the following changes,
size classes scale closer to what an IRL human would 4' 1" is the highest end of tiny ...
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House-ruling spells about evil and good to give them back their flavor from old editions
As an ex D&D 3.5 and D&D 2 player, I feel bad that 5e don't make spells that about evil and good (like "Protection from Evil and Good" and "Detect Evil and Good") don't actually interact with ...
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Magic Weapon Critical Hit Houserule
My DM runs his game without allowing players access to homebrew options - including Unearthed Arcana - but something came up last season that gave me pause for thought.
A player’s character - a 4th ...
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What would be the difference between dual-wielding a rapier and dagger vs. two shortswords?
In a game I'm playing, I have a Swashbuckler rogue, and my DM gave me the okay on using two-weapon fighting with a rapier and a dagger instead of two shortswords. (But not rapier and shortsword, ...
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Would it be unbalanced to allow non-warforged to have armblades if they also have a prosthetic limb?
I bought the D&D 5e book Eberron Rising From The Last War. I saw there were magic items in it, and in particular prosthetic limbs. That reminded me of a prestige class, the renegade mastermaker (...
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Are these change to Penetrating and Impervious overpowered?
I'll be the DM for a new campaign and I don't particularly like how Impervious was handled in this edition. But, I also think that the 2nd edition one was OP (overpowered). The idea behind the ...
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How unbalanced would it be to allow all natural weapons to be considered monk weapons?
Inspired by this recent question
What would be the balance implications of allowing all natural weapons to count as monk weapons (for the purposes of enabling the martial arts feature)? I am aware ...
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Would it be unbalanced to allow a non-warforged artificer to use a wand sheath if they make it themselves using one of their infusions?
One of my players is thinking about going artillerist but they don't have enough hands to hold a shield, an arcane firearm, and a sword. In going down the rabbit hole of animated shields and dropping ...
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