Chapter 0 - Introduction
In this book, you will find a collection of homebrew rules for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, based on and working with the rules found in the 2024 Players Handbook. The core of these homebrew rules is threefold: martials and casters receive fundamental changes to their playstyles, and dungeon masters gain access to a new toolset to challenge their players with.
The primary concern of these rules is combat, and the goal is to make combat more engaging, flavourful, and tactically enticing. For this, how defence works is reworked from the ground up, positioning is made more relevant, and new options are introduced for players to give in to risk to potentially reap more powerful effects for their spells or attacks.
This can bring a breath of fresh air to those for whom D&D combat has grown stale and that long for a novel experience within an otherwise well known system.
In implementing the rules and features above, this book orients itself around two cornerstones in the choice of which rules to change, how to design these changes, and when and how to introduce new rules. These big cornerstones are interactivity and narrative embedding.
Interactivity
Rules and features should consider how other players interact with them. This can come in the shapes of synergy, counterplay and multiplicity, and primarily pursues the goal of improved agency and engagement.
- Synergy: When a player tries to achieve something, there should be options for other players to assist with that or enhance the effect. Additionally, there should be ways for players to protect one another in combat, as well as actions that are deliberately cooperative.
- Counterplay: It should be possible to avoid or mitigate harmful effects within reason, and it should be possible to undo them with adequate effort. Especially powerful effects may be an exception to this rule when it comes to being avoided or mitigated, but those should remain special.
- Multiplicity: There should be meaningfully distinct ways for players to interact with the challenges the dungeon master offers. The more choice the players can meaningfully exercise, the better, and the more tools the dungeon master has to challenge the players, the better.
Narrative Embedding
Rules and features should be explainable in narrative terms, and things that are possible should be represented by game mechanics. This, however, should not escalate into highly accurate simulation, and the rules and features should not be too concerned with realism.
What the players imagine to be possible or intuitive in fiction should be supported. This should naturally lead to the descriptions of what players do and how the world is to be both more expressive and more mechanically important. After all, we play this game to tell a story that is exciting to follow, coherent and enjoyable.
Ideally, this should mean that everyone at the table can know what a narrative description of an action or creature means mechanically, and that there is no rule and no feature without a narrative representation.
Notes on Simplicity and Balance
Rules should be simple. However, the core interests explained above do not yield easily to that demand, as they require increased complexity. It is thus necessary for simplicity to take a secondary role in this book. The game is not simplified by this book. Still, it should try to keep the new rules and features as easy to understand and as intuitive as possible.
Characters and challenges should be balanced. However, the complexity added through the rules and features in this book makes it more difficult to playtest and evaluate the balance properly. There is no guarantee that the contents of this book are well balanced. Still, the rules and features should be balanced enough to not establish playstyles that render too many challenges trivial and are themselves too hard to challenge. Every character should have a chance to shine.
Notable Influences
These reworks have taken inspiration from Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Das schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye), D&D 3.5, the D&D 5e 2014 books, Pendragon, Splittermond and other games, both video games and tabletop games.
This homebrew ruleset has been playtested and reviewed by some of my friends, and some features have been their suggestion. Special thanks to Magnus, Noah, Lia, Chad, David, Meta, Merlin, Johannes, Paul and Lee.
Content Overview
In the spirit of interactivity, Contests are reintroduced from the 2014 rules. Armour Class is replaced by a new system that relies on reactive defence through contests, as described in the chapter on AC-less Defence and implemented through Blocking, Dodging, and Parrying. This reactive defence is further supported by changes to the action economy that revolve around Reactions. Surge Dice are introduced to convert remaining reactions into bonuses for the following turn.
Passive defence is also reworked, featuring the introduction of Damage Reduction and a Hit DC based on size that also changes the inner workings of Cover. Shields now work through Cover and were separated into three kinds of shields to allow for more differentiated benefits, thus allowing for more flavourful and diverse characters. Armour now works through Damage Reduction.
In response to attack rolls losing importance due to targets being generally easier to hit, Aimed Strikes bring new flavourful options and tactical complexities to the game by allowing creatures to target specific body parts with their attacks. This can wound or disable the body parts in question. To work against the detrimental effects of these, Surgery and the Rite of Regeneration were added to allow their restoration. Distinct armour pieces are introduced to fill in defence against Aimed Strikes.
Spellcasting has been reworked to work through Spell Points and Spell Limits instead, allowing for more variance between spellcasters and their playstyles. In the same vein, Upcasting has been changed a bit, Overcasting has been introduced to allow the risky choice of offering ones health for more powerful spells, and the effects of having a Spellcasting Focus are more impactful now. Spells are now also rolled with a Spell Check that can enhance spell attacks and that replaces the Spell Save DC to, once again, shift the focus more towards contested rolls. There is a small load of new spells to interface with the new spell rules and reaction economy, and many spells have seen changes to fit into this system better.
Martial Training is introduced to unify a multitude of features and benefits for martials, such as Fighting Styles and Weapon Mastery. Caster Training is introduced in turn to offer a parallel system for casters.
Vision & Focus are described in detail to encourage more strategic positioning and give attackers a way to bypass their targets reactive defense.
Aspects of Stealth are described to rework stealth in terms of various senses that can work against it and thus can be manipulated in favour of it.
Finally, there are adjustments to class features, feats, and spells, mainly to bring them in line with the changes to defence, grappling and shoving are reverted to their 2014 version, and last but not least, there is a section offering a short guide on how monsters are affected by the reworks offered here.