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From my experience, birds are loose butthole.

top 1 house rule for playing dnd 5e: stop playing 5e altogether

How does one use the skull dice? I'm assuming the skull means max health, then it goes 5-4-3-2-1 from there. Is that correct? Also, is there a d10 version of the skull dice?

I love these. Especially because they are from EVA foam

This is something I really love about games. It's not just different means to the same ends. Different goals, rules, mechanics, etc, result in unique experiences unavailable with other systems, even if they're all in the same genre.

That poor cleric that will have so much work to do... also balancing on this is really wack, the 5% lower chance of losing the spell is not enough incentive to not upcast everything and blood magic damage is mostly only relevant at the first few levels which kinda takes off the whole point of it being there. If id run this id make it dc 8 + twice the spell level, and potentially give them scrolls to regain spells as a consumable, also completely disregard blood magic cuz its dumb, just let them cast it, most spells already need a save, this just nerfs cc and gives a constant self-damage for spellscasters which is not the most interesting nerf tbh

1) I never burn sheets, because I don't do permanent death. I do Winchester death. Characters can be brought back, but almost always at a terrible price. 2) That dice box in your minimalist kit is badass and I'm totally going to make one at some point.

Yeah, Tale Of The Manticore is just great! ...and would be even better with Shadowdark.

I have been using a roll to cast system in my home game and playing in another game run by a buddy who is also using it. It makes casting more fun and adds risk. One of my players nearly killed themselves and another player trying to cast cure wounds, after rolling a nat-1 on their roll to cast.

I'm about to implement a rule that when they long rest out of town they will have to start tracking rations and water, and I want to have exhaustion start after some amount of time in the field

Anyone that doesn’t house rule crits is committing crimes lol😅 I use the same rule you do !

I'll preface all of this by saying: I don't like things that make it so that my class features are risky, and will go out of my way to mitigate those risks, to the point of treating ones that are even moderately risky as "unavailable" in most circumstances. So this could just be a sign that this system isn't for me, in general. Now, to the system itself: I _particularly_ dislike that failing the first time you try to use a spell means that you don't get to use that spell _at all_ that day. Not, "you only get one use out of it," but "oops, you didn't get any uses." This means that you're going to need to prepare backup spells not just for different elements or the like, but the same kind of spell jsut a little different in order to ensure that you aren't forever out of fire spells just because you failed to cast _searing ray_ once. This sharply narrows what the caster can prepare (and makes it even worse for the known caster with a more limited array of spells). "With this system, there's no need to track spell slots; you can either cast a spell, or you cannot cast a spell." This is only technically true. You're still tracking spells castable, which is going to functionally take the same amount of energy and thought as tracking spell slots. So, again, technically true, but you're still tracking something and that something is as much effort to track. Recovering a failed spell on a critical cast is nice, but doesn't make a lot of narrative sense: why would critically casting _fly_ let you recover the ability to cast _burning hands?_ It also seems to me that you're more likely to burn out on spells with only 2 or 3 ever successfully going off than you are to get a critical cast and recover even one of them. (Yes, I'm pessimistic about the odds of success in this system. To be more fair, if we assume a +4 casting stat modifier and a +2 proficiency bonus, a first level spell is going to succeed on a 5+, which in theory is pretty good. You have an expected value of about 3 castings of that before you fail and lose it. The problem for me is the possibility that, on a bad rolling day, you get literally nothing out of your spellcasting. While that can happen "anyway" if you keep rolling badly to hit, the number of to hit rolls is sufficient that it's far less likely you'll wind up with a single bad streak costing you the entire game day.) It doesn't sound like fun to me. It sounds like a recipe for anxiety and frustration as I have to hyper-focus my spell selections in order to have a _chance_ of getting the focused-on effect to work, making my spellcaster a one-trick pony, and generally making the game less fun. "The chance at infinite spells" is also the "chance at no spells at all."

I reworked the entire D&D spell casting classes all the way back with 2.0 and even stopped buying their shit rulebooks after 3.0, went back to 2.5 and have not looked back. A DM must be free from the confines of someone else's rules once he has...mastered...how to run a campaign. Anyway. None of this "Must re-learn" spells after casting and being limited to how many times you can cast it garbage. The magic user already has enough limitations on them by TIME to cast that also requires full concentration, hand movement/reagents and the like that prevents them from just quickly casting fireball after fireball and wiping out a battlefield themselves.

I love removing armor class

Incredible!

The reason we like OG versions of d&d vs. Everything past first edition AD&D is because the newer versions ALL SUCK!!!!!

How does hardcore mode interact with healing spells? I feel like between rolling for health each day, rolling for hit dice recovery, and rolling for heals for spell slots they get every day while resting you'd end up with resting becoming just a frustrating slog of rolling dice until everyone has full resources without any meaningful decisions being made. How would you combat this as a DM?

I have used these exact same rules, but with two addendums: 1. Rests no longer recover MaxHP. (We use an injury system, where damage you take from criticals, damage that reduces your hp to 0, and failed death saves cause injuries in the form of maxHP penalties). Temples are usually needed to restore maxHP. 2. Short Rests allow spellcasters to restore 1 spellslot of their choice excluding their highest available spell slot.

I don't like the random dungeon at all. My immersion is broken when I wander into a dungeon when I pass a dragon, then a room with traps, then three rooms with goblins and then a hall with flesh eating spiders. Yech. How did the goblins get there? Why the traps there. I want story more than I want fights.

hi

SInce there still is a to hit or save roll to overcome for the spell to have an effect in addition to the roll to cast this makes it harder and sometimes just unfair to cast spells. At least make the spell always go off and change the roll to cast to roll to retain. If you fail then you lose the spell after casting it. Just a suggestion

Well, the first problem is that modern D&D characters have to many hit points, the second is losing hit points has no real consequences until you hit zero (unless you still have to save vs massive wounds like in 3rd ed). I play GURPS (and totally prefer it over D&D any day of the week) and I never had this issue with hit points. That's because you don't get many hit points, you generally don't increase in HP in most games and when you take damage you *feel* it. Unless you have the High Pain Threshold advantage, you take a -1 penalty to all DX and IQ (i.e Int) based actions per point of injury you took up to a max of -4. If you take more then half your HP in a single hit, you need to make a HT (Con) roll or you're knocked out and out of the fight. Once you're down to less then 2/3 of your base HP your movement is halved and your ability to carry loads is basically halved. Oh and did you get stabbed or shot (damage types in GURPS also matter, getting shot sucks a lot more then getting clubbed for the same about of damage)? You're also now bleeding out unless you can get patched up real quick. Taking damage has weight and this builds tension and makes my players fight smarter or even surrender if they think they're not going to make it. You also have the option (which I use because it's a damned good idea) to have use moral to keep fights from become meat grinders. Also how armor works in GURPS makes a difference as well. Armor doesn't make you harder to hit (in fact depending on how heavy it is, it came make you easier to hit) but rather reduces damage, and this can easily turn a mortal wound into a minor cut or even a glancing blow if it's good enough. So the problem isn't hit points, it's giving them out like candy and have no downside to just eating damage. Being able to take 10 slashes for a sword before being close to death is boring, being able to just barely survive one, maybe two, hits and now having to find a way out of this while being reduced in combat effectiveness do to his injuries and exciting, make for a good story and that player will remember this and talk about for years to come.

So question. Example: scorching ray. Do you roll for spell success and to hit? Or if the spell succeeds does it automatically hit. I think it would feel pretty bad to roll success then miss the attack, and then roll failure the next turn.

Keep up the great content! 🎉 This is something I have been looking forward to as a new ShadowDark RPG DM

Initiative has always been some thing my table struggles with and has persisted into my career as a game designer, I feel it’s such a tough one to get down because it differentiates between the preference of each table. Great video to cover nonetheless! 😊

Lol it surprised me when u started singing the mailbag day song. And it makes me want to go listen to runehammer

I use the spell point system out of the DMG, but learned I had to account for the increased flexibility. For example, I ruled paladins (and other characters with smite-like abilities) could only smite once per turn since they could deal a lot more low-level smites, only going big for crits (or crit fishing and dishing out multiple big hits when they would only have one top slot under Vancian). TLDR: beware unintended consequences.

there are two systems I want to try for spellcasting. Instead of spell slots roll a Con save vs Spell DC (10 + spell's level). On success you cast the spell as is, on a fail, roll and additional Con save or gain a point of exhaustion! ... The second is cast spells by coin flippin. choose heads or tail and cast a spell. If you're lucky you cast the spell, if not either nothing happens or WILD MAGIC happens... The final is the one on the DMG that uses spellcasting by points.

HackMaster 5e's armor works different - with bulkier armor, you increase your damage reduction, but you also increase your likelihood of being hit.

Hags are by far my favorite monsters in all of D&D, every edition, etc.

Had a dm try something similar. He was the only one in the group who would dm so we had to go along with it but all the players unanimously decided none of us eould do characters that had the ability to cast any spells at all since we were against it. After a few sessions our table just decided to permanently remove magic as a player option entirely. Magic is solely the province of a select few magic beasts almost all evil or villains. Been a lot of fun the past few years