The DM's Guide to DMing

kenada wrote:

Anyone here do homebrew mechanics in 5e? I’m working on new races for my homebrew setting, and I’m looking for some feedback on some of the mechanics. Spoilered in case OT

That seems pretty interesting to me, anyhow. I like mechanics that do something new and different, so another use for hit dice seems like a good way to go to get that feel. No clue about how balanced it is against other sorts of powers (I guess you really need to observe in play to know if it feels right).

MikeSands wrote:
kenada wrote:

Anyone here do homebrew mechanics in 5e? I’m working on new races for my homebrew setting, and I’m looking for some feedback on some of the mechanics. Spoilered in case OT

That seems pretty interesting to me, anyhow. I like mechanics that do something new and different, so another use for hit dice seems like a good way to go to get that feel. No clue about how balanced it is against other sorts of powers (I guess you really need to observe in play to know if it feels right).

Cool. And sure, definitely need to see how it plays out in practice. My group is pretty good about making adjustments when things aren’t working right. I used to have a player who was extremely inflexible about that, so I’m grateful for my current ones.

This is a homebrew setting that originated outside of D&D. We’re switching back from Open Legend to 5e, and I decided to convert my races over (plus add a few more to round things out a bit). It’s been fun but also a lot more work than I expected originally (since it doesn’t have any of the core races, and even though it does have humans and elven, they are still fairly different from their core incarnations).

I'd think you'll need to be aware of the short/long rest balance in your game. (This is unbalanced in my current game -- we play infrequently, for short amounts of time, so the end of a session is often a "fade to black" with an implied long rest -- but that means there's no pressure to save a high level spell slot for later use, or in the case of your idea, not to go ahead and spend those hit dice.)

But if you've got your encounters balanced for both short and long rests, I really like the idea of attaching blood-based powers to hit dice -- it seems like a good thematic connection, at least.

My approach to encounter balance is to not really worry about it, but that’s something I’ll keep in mind (in case the mechanic doesn’t really work very well in that kind of environment). It’s not that I don’t care about balance, but it’s more that it doesn’t fit the style of game I want to run. I prefer to have things there that make sense to be there, and the players have to figure out how to deal with it.

The campaign itself will be exploration-focused. I expect there to be a rotating cast of characters, though it’s more of a traditional hexcrawl than a West Marches type of game. I don’t have any particular plot planned out. There’s just a directive to explore the area beyond the river, which has been more-or-less off limits since the War of the Giants many, many generations ago. The world is in decline (and it’s also flat, though that’s probably not relevant beyond setting tone), areas away from civilization are dangerous, and the players’ characters are not heroes (even though they may occasionally do something heroic).

The overall setting aesthetic probably draws more from anime and JRPGs than it does contemporary D&D. Well, there’s a bit of Vance (Dying Earth) and Sanderson (Stormlight Archive), so there’s some literary influence too.

Spending hit dice is a fun mechanic, but I would suggest assigning a fixed cost to each ability rather than a dice roll. The possibly of spending 6 hit dice to cast augury is waaay too much risk for relatively little reward. 1-2 hit die seems a lot more reasonable, it’s a level 2 spell but it’s not really all that powerful. Honestly 1 hit die is still a pretty big investment, since for most classes that’s already more healing than any 1st level spell can offer (except maybe goodberry). If you really want some element of risk maybe do 1d2 hit dice.

Commune is potentially a lot more powerful (depending on the answers you give), but even then 1d8 still seems like much too high of a risk.

In my experience players tend to be pretty risk-averse when there’s a chance they might end up wasting valuable resources (how often do you see a player ready an action to cast a non-cantrip spell? It’s pretty rare in my experience, the risk of wasting a spell slot is a major deterrent). If you make the risk too high then nobody will actually use it.

Hmm. I don't do homebrew mechanics, this does strike me as unusual. Here, you use an indeterminate amount of hit dice to duplicate powerful spells. That's different from how hit dice are used everywhere else in the game: to recover HP during a short rest (or, in one rare case and with a feat, dwarves can use hit dice to recover HP during combat). And, players get to choose how many hit dice to use during a rest. By the same token, other abilities (1) either consume specific amounts of resources (a spell slot, some ki points, some sorcery points) or (2) have limited uses per short or long rest.

Using these other abilities as a guide, I'd suggest something like this:

Blood Divination
You open your veins and read portents of the future in the blood you let upon the ground. Once per long rest, you may use your blood as the material component to cast either augury or commune. When you do so, you gain a level of exhaustion and suffer either 2d6 damage (augury) or 2d10 damage (commune).

On a different note, I was DMing yesterday night in an ongoing homebrew game, and one of my players told me that, by mistake, he asked a woman out on a date to one of the fictional bars in the city that the party's been exploring. This felt like very high praise.

My only note is that ideally if you're going to add more than one ability to a race, you're probably better off developing it into a full on subclass instead. I had to rewrite a players 'Vampire Race' into a new class because he literally mapped out 20 levels worth of abilities it got.

It may be something you want to develop out where you do a full on class of the post-ritual Og Ri and do the 'forms' as subclasses.

However if you want to keep it as a race then you can check how the rules are for Aasimar. That's one of the most ability-heavy races in the current ruleset.

Thanks all for the replies! I appreciate the feedback. I’d gotten some feedback from one of my players on vixenform, which can shapeshift (but the cost is exhaustion if you do it more than once). I think I may be getting close to a basic cost mechanic that I can apply to most of the forms. (Warform basically gets armor, because it’s like the singers’ warform in the Stormlight Archive. There’s no cost to turn it on and off. It just requires a short or long rest.)

muttonchop wrote:

Spending hit dice is a fun mechanic, but I would suggest assigning a fixed cost to each ability rather than a dice roll. The possibly of spending 6 hit dice to cast augury is waaay too much risk for relatively little reward. 1-2 hit die seems a lot more reasonable, it’s a level 2 spell but it’s not really all that powerful. Honestly 1 hit die is still a pretty big investment, since for most classes that’s already more healing than any 1st level spell can offer (except maybe goodberry). If you really want some element of risk maybe do 1d2 hit dice.

Commune is potentially a lot more powerful (depending on the answers you give), but even then 1d8 still seems like much too high of a risk.

In my experience players tend to be pretty risk-averse when there’s a chance they might end up wasting valuable resources (how often do you see a player ready an action to cast a non-cantrip spell? It’s pretty rare in my experience, the risk of wasting a spell slot is a major deterrent). If you make the risk too high then nobody will actually use it.

I was expecting the PCs to be risk-averse, but I think you’re right the variable cost may be too high. I had considered reducing maximum HP (like drain effects usually do), but I couldn’t come up with an amount I liked that wouldn’t also feel too punishing. Also, I think a racial trait that could make the character more likely to die (or kill the character) would not be well-received by the players. How does SL−1 seem like a cost? For augury, that would be 1 hit die while for commune that would be 4. It also gives me a benchmark to calibrate the other subrace traits against.

LastSurprise wrote:

Hmm. I don't do homebrew mechanics, this does strike me as unusual. Here, you use an indeterminate amount of hit dice to duplicate powerful spells. That's different from how hit dice are used everywhere else in the game: to recover HP during a short rest (or, in one rare case and with a feat, dwarves can use hit dice to recover HP during combat). And, players get to choose how many hit dice to use during a rest. By the same token, other abilities (1) either consume specific amounts of resources (a spell slot, some ki points, some sorcery points) or (2) have limited uses per short or long rest.

It’s unusual, but I’m not the first to have that idea. Blood Magic was (apparently) featured on Unearthed Arcana a while back. I stumbled upon it seeing if anyone else had a similar idea while responding to this thread. I haven’t read it.

Using these other abilities as a guide, I'd suggest something like this:
Blood Divination
You open your veins and read portents of the future in the blood you let upon the ground. Once per long rest, you may use your blood as the material component to cast either augury or commune. When you do so, you gain a level of exhaustion and suffer either 2d6 damage (augury) or 2d10 damage (commune).

The immediate level of exhaustion sounds like it would be a non-starter. A couple of the other forms also spend hit dice, and they would be punished much harder than savantform, because they would immediately have to roll with disadvantage when doing anything using that trait.

On a different note, I was DMing yesterday night in an ongoing homebrew game, and one of my players told me that, by mistake, he asked a woman out on a date to one of the fictional bars in the city that the party's been exploring. This felt like very high praise. :D

That is totally awesome.

b12n11w00t wrote:

My only note is that ideally if you're going to add more than one ability to a race, you're probably better off developing it into a full on subclass instead. I had to rewrite a players 'Vampire Race' into a new class because he literally mapped out 20 levels worth of abilities it got.

It may be something you want to develop out where you do a full on class of the post-ritual Og Ri and do the 'forms' as subclasses.

Fortunately, each form gets its own trait, and that’s basically it. I’m doing all new races for this setting (seven races; 17 or 22 with subraces depending on how you count). I think I’d go mad trying to a full class with subclasses on top of that.

However if you want to keep it as a race then you can check how the rules are for Aasimar. That's one of the most ability-heavy races in the current ruleset.

Thanks. The important point seems to be establishing a benchmark. Given the idea to use a constant number of hit dice, that may be easier to do.

Point for consideration raised by the discussion above: Homebrew and other additional content is exactly the opposite of what D&D needs. The least popular versions of D&D have been the most complex ones. Rules bloat is like heart disease for RPGs.

The single smartest changes they made in 5e were proficiency bonuses and advantage/disadvantage; two mechanics that vastly simplified the game.

Whoa buddy! Take those thoughts to the Hot Takes thread!

I generally agree with Maq here, but I think the real key is that it's all group specific. People who wanted complex rules stuck with Pathfinder when D&D started simplifying, and that's just fine.

I think there's a place for complexity, and I generally prefer them as "optional rules". The DMG is choc full of these sorts of things.

Agree with Maq and Skiptron. Ran a one shot last night of Lasers & Feelings, a one page RPG. Very simple, silly fun that made 5e feel crunchy. It was a nice change-up when people were unavailable for the regular campaign and some others want to jump in. We will probably add in Honey Heist, Crash Pandas, and Everyone is John to the fill-in rotation.

To be fair, I’m not looking for complexity for its own sake. This is a setting that started life in another system (Open Legend) where it was much easier to do whatever you want. Races in that system have no mechanics except to provide narrative permission for appropriate perks and flaws. That was liberating, but it means porting the setting back into D&D requires a bit of work.

The single smartest changes they made in 5e were proficiency bonuses and advantage/disadvantage; two mechanics that vastly simplified the game.

I’d include bounded accuracy on that list. It just makes sense that a bunch of lower level monsters should be suitable as minions and fodder, and having a single DC ladder for all levels of play makes improvising challenges so much easier.

I've looked around but is there a player's guide to playing thread I'm missing? Been 14 years since I played last, going to be joining a Pathfinder 1e game after the first of the year. Just trying to sort out some of the available classes as I've not played in so long, and never Pathfinder before.

Skiptron wrote:

I generally agree with Maq here, but I think the real key is that it's all group specific. People who wanted complex rules stuck with Pathfinder when D&D started simplifying, and that's just fine.

I think there's a place for complexity, and I generally prefer them as "optional rules". The DMG is choc full of these sorts of things.

Yeah I think judicious cherry-picking works really well.

bhchrist wrote:

Agree with Maq and Skiptron. Ran a one shot last night of Lasers & Feelings, a one page RPG. Very simple, silly fun that made 5e feel crunchy. It was a nice change-up when people were unavailable for the regular campaign and some others want to jump in. We will probably add in Honey Heist, Crash Pandas, and Everyone is John to the fill-in rotation.

John Harper is amazing. I love Lady Blackbird and Blades in the Dark. Would love to see either of those on the GWJ play podcast.

Checkout Danger Patrol as well.

Thanks, Mix and Maq! Will do.

Had a REALLY good session (if i do say so myself) with my Euro GWJ bunch this evening. We're still running Phandelver, which I am taking heavy liberties with because some of the stuff in that book is fairly generic tedium and it's in dire need of sprucing up in points.

Currently they had a little side quest to go and retrieve some information from a Banshee that's said to haunt the ruins of a nearby village. In the base book this plays out like this (minor spoilers for those who haven't played it).

Spoiler:

The Pcs get a gift from the cleric in town, they travel to the ruin, maybe with a general random encounter on the road, they talk to the banshee and hand over the gift in order to find the answer to whatever question they ask. They leave (assuming they aren't stupid enough to attack a banshee at level 3 or 4) . The whole thing is maybe 8 or 9 paragraphs of text so i thought it needed a bit of expanding to make it more interesting.

SO

...the way my session played out was as follows:

(might be some "behind the scene" spoilers here for my group, if any of them are reading this, but for the most part this is just a report of what happened).

Spoiler:

So... I started off the same way, but as luck would have it the Pc's are in dire need of information themselves after failing to recover the location of an important NPC from a previous raid of a bandit stronghold in town. So they collect the gift and get pointed in the direction of the ruined village. Sensibly, the mage of the group has a chat with the experienced retired adventuring half-elf in town who fills her in on some of the details about banshees (basically spelling out some of the stuff from the monster manual, including that Agatha is very obviously the type of Banshee that covets precious items and is enraged by her own reflection. Which are useful facts to know.

They camp for the night en-route, where I have them encounter an ambush by a mysterious figure using trained, armoured giant spiders. It's a tricky encounter and could have gone very badly for them but they handled it well, although the mysterious figure escaped more or less undetected.

From there they rest up again and arrive at what's left of the town around mid-day. I decide since it's pretty close, that this is going to tie in nicely into the other side quest in the area : investigating signs of undead near old owl well, and I have them notice that a lot of shallow graves in the area have been upended and torn open, with bare footsteps running south into the hills...

For now though they turn their attention to the village ruins. I added a small mini-dungeon in the form of three ruined buildings here. Cora (Maq), the cleric of the group, had her own little personal quest here to try to recover some rare waterdavian steel ingots from the blacksmith's in order to forge a sword she saw in her dreams. As luck would have it, one of the buildings that was still standing just so happened to be the blacksmiths

After a mini surprise ambush from a starving ghoul, the team search the ruins (with the aid of detect magic) and discover a pair of magnificent magical throwing axes (i thought it wise to have SOMEONE with a magical weapon just in case they are foolish enough to go toe to toe with a bashee when they find it). custom magic weapons of my own design - two twin enchanted throwing axes.

They also find an empty box where the ingots should have been stored, with a cryptic note saying the blacksmith had hidden them somewhere else to keep them out of the hands of a feuding shopkeep who was attempting to reclaim them. The clue points them towards the well in the centre of this part of the ruins.

Quickly searching the rest of the village they find another clue to the location of the ingots (which they could have found earlier and basically just confirmed their location in the inn, plus a bloody warning that "only death lives here", etc, etc

As they approach the well, the hear the cries of a woman coming from within, but on investigation it appears to be empty, save for a pool of brackish, stagnant water below. Two of them, the cleric and the mage (who had cast detect magic again) attempted to climb down and investigate. Unluckily, Mel, the mage (Eleima) slipped and fell, taking damage from the fall and unearthing the rotting corpse of a long dead woman. Investigating the base of the well they discover the missing steel ingots and a small silver locket with a well preserved painting inside and the name Agatha on the back in elvish.

Then follows a comedy of errors section in which they attempt to get the heavy box of steel ingots out of the well, constantly failing their strength rolls and eventually causing the box to split open and spill the contents into the muddy water. After that was all cleared up and what ingots they could find recovered, they climb out of the well and see a strange, spectral figure drifting north west through the trees, followed by a deathly silence and ear shattering scream.

They follow the figure into the woods, which are growing increasingly dark and haunted as they go. Hearing cries from help off to one side they take a small detour into a boggy clearing, at the centre of which lies an elaborate carriage. Not particularly old looking, and the cries for help are coming from within, but there's something odd about them. Tarin (Higgledy) the halfling rogue, who happens to be a stiltwalker, dextrously makes his way across the bog on his stilts and investigates on his own, discovering that close-up the carriage is MUCH older than it looked from the distance, and inside are two well dressed skeletons wearing evening dress... A whisper in his ear asks for "rest". Unable to do much for them now, they pledge to come back later once Cora has made the necessary preparations. For now, Tarin picks up a silver pocket watch from the figure in a suit, and notices they are both wearing gold wedding bands. Making his way back across the swamp, he compares the watch with the locket in the well and they determine that they are both made by the same hand (there's a makers mark with a "k" intial on both).

The group made the conclusion that Agatha must have thrown herself down the well in grief at her lover going off and marrying another man, and that's what led to her current condition.

Suddenly, there is another ear splitting shriek from the north, closer now, and they take off in that direction...

...and that's where the session ended.

I didn't read your spoiler section but I hope you praised my bold and heroic decision to head straight down into the presumedly haunted well without any of this namby pamby dithering about.

Great list of 20 Questions to ask yourself about your fantasy campaign setting to help flesh it out.

http://jrients.blogspot.com/2011/04/...

That's a really solid list, thanks for the link!

Oh, that is great. Thanks!

Not sure if folks are interested, but I recently put a video up on Twitch detailing and showing how I use Scrivener to organize and run my 1E AD&D campaign.

Do you have a video up on Twitch detailing and showing why you organize and run a 1E AD&D campaign?

Just finished running a test game of Forbidden Lands (I'm going to be offering it at a con in two weeks). It's pretty great fun... we used the random character generation system to get a crew of misfits, and then I gave them a few rumours of sites to explore and they went and checked one out.

A few interesting things going on in the system, and I am sure it would be good to check out in more depth, but also worked well for the one-shot. Approve!

High point was two of the characters wrestling an undead king for the king's magic sword (the undead king lost and was subsequently murderated).

Maq wrote:

Do you have a video up on Twitch detailing and showing why you organize and run a 1E AD&D campaign?

Yes. Should be under the same account as the video about Scrivener.

That was the first video I recorded for
twitch, so there are some audio issues that I think only showed up in that one.

TheHipGamer wrote:
Maq wrote:

Do you have a video up on Twitch detailing and showing why you organize and run a 1E AD&D campaign?

Yes. Should be under the same account as the video about Scrivener.

That was the first video I recorded for
twitch, so there are some audio issues that I think only showed up in that one.

Hahahaha, that's me told I shall watch this evening.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/5...

Humble has an RPG Book Bundle going on right now, with a lot of maps, 5e modules, module add ons, and other fun stuff

I’m throwing this out here to see if anyone can poke some holes in my thinking, or maybe it’s an already solved problem.

I like the threat structure used by PbtA games, but I don’t normally run PbtA games. I’ve tried to use it in other games, but I’ve had limited success making it work well. There's usually friction making a move that follows when my players look to me to see what happens next or give me a golden opportunity.

There are two blog posts that helped me realize I wasn’t just doing it wrong. The first a blog post by Ryan Macklin about descriptive versus prescriptive RPG structures, particularly his experience trying to use PbtA structures in Fate. The second is an Angry GM article about redesigning random encounters. It seems so obvious in retrospect.

I normally run D&D-likes. That’s just what my group likes, and that category is actually pretty broad if you squint at it just right. For the sake of this discussion, consider anything with descriptive mechanics that structures gameplay into scenes or encounters a D&D-like. Yep, it’s encounters (or scenes). By forcing those games into a move-based discourse, I was forcing them to work against their native structures.

The idea I have for making threats work well in D&D-likes is to drop GM moves and replace them with encounters. Between sessions, I use my threats to come up with random encounters that I can incorporate into my game. These random encounters would not just be some monsters or whatever but focused encounters that come up when the game calls for a random encounter (per the Angry GM article). Ideally, I never have to look at my threats at all while I run and can rely on the system’s native structure (encounters) to advance them appropriately. Of course, these encounters would be in addition to the ones normally planned (e.g., for a dungeon).

I gave this a try last session for my new D&D 5e game. So far, it seems promising. One issue I have is it's a sandbox game, so some of the threats are far away from the PCs. I want to have encounters ready for them, but I don't want them showing up unless it’s appropriate, which calls for some organization. For next session (this weekend), I'm going to have tag them by location, so that I can filter and find them should e.g., my players decide to strike out east and travel for twenty miles to find the undead they think are over that way (as they tried to do last session but got distracted).

And to be clear, these encounters are still very minimal. For something like a “Barrow Mounds” threat with the “to spawn evil” impulse, I might have a foreshadowing encounter like “dead dinosaurs; stinks of undeath” or an ambush encounter like “skeletons show up unexpectedly”. Thanks to D&D Beyond, I can pretty easily pull up stats for whatever I need on a moment's notice.