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.