Do you go to the dungeon?

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Instead, this text is for those who have played D&D with other DMs and want to learn our

House Rules

  1. Something you might want to have in mind when choosing skills:

These seven skills: Deception, Intimidation, Performance, Persuasion, Insight, Investigation are all removed. If you want your character to say something, say it. If you want your character to look in a drawer, say that you look in a drawer.

  1. Something you might want to have in mind when choosing spells:

Spells that targets an area of effect instead target a fixed number of enemies. For example, Burning Hands hits two enemies. (This is is less of an house rule and more of an optional rule from the DMG, I think it's page 249.)

  1. Something you might want to have in mind when choosing weapons:

You can recover the arrows you use, minus one for every enemy you actually killed with an arrow shot. So if you kill five goblins with your bow, after the battle you scratch five arrows from the inventory even though in the heat of battle you fired like 30 arrows. You just recover 25 and only five of them broke.

Since HP isn't just "body points" but also a measure of position, stress, fear, fatigue etc this rule also enables you to use FEWER arrows. For example, you can describe your first three successful attack rolls as you taking aim at the enemy centaur and your last, killing attack as you actually releasing the string. Your aiming at it reduced its HP by making your position more favorable. The rule is made so that it's up to you what you think is coolest. Firing a bunch of arrows making the orc look like a porcupine? Go for it, and you can recover all but one of them. Careful aiming with every notch a killing blow? Go for it. It's fair because the actually arrow expenditure from your inventory becomes the same.

There's also some other things but they don't really matter for character generation:

  1. A TotM-approach to simple-but-consistent adjudication of distances, speed & position
  2. Defense rolls i.e. you'll roll to defend instead of enemies rolling vs your AC.
  3. I don't like using a lot of maps&minis. You're standing in a room, not looking down on a room. But, I don't want to make that punishing for you either; if you want to say "we go to the room where we saw that bull statue", for example, that's fine. It's not about making you get lost in the dungeon. That's what we have the wilderness for.
  4. More uses for Inspiration, and more ways to get it.
  5. Probably more things that I forget now. I'm an idiosyncratic DM :/

Also optional rules from the books that we use:

  • Targets in areas of effect (as listed above under spells)
  • Cleaving (i.e. if you one-shot an undamaged enemy with a weapon attack, your damage can carry over to another enemy) from the DMG
  • Eliding skills (as listed above under skills) is also something that the DMG suggests
  • The defense roll thing is from UA so it's not completely new either, I just fixed the math
  • Feats & multiclassing (I resisted for like two years before introducing these)

and don't use:

  • Point buy for stats. Use standard array or roll 4d6-drop-the-lowest-arrange-in-any-order. PS have a witness if you choose to roll your stats, it's gonna be epic if you start racking up a bunch of eighteens.
  • Flanking (the DMG optional rule, that is — the rogue still get their normal Sneak Attack) and a bunch of other stuff.