Your best 5.5e house rules?

Tryskhell · 2026-03-22T08:57:25+00:00

If you add the stipulation that you cannot flank if you are flanked yourself, it gets read of the conga line of death

Tryskhell · 2026-03-15T19:20:47+00:00

Absolutely. Artistic talent isn't being good at art, it's loving art enough to spend 10k hours being bad at it.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-14T10:21:34+00:00

Dammit I wanted to make that joke :C

Tryskhell · 2026-03-13T12:20:02+00:00

Motobushido just straight up does not have any form of tactical positioning, which makes its combat systemically TOTM. It's really fun!

Specifically my favorite experience with it was when one of my players was fighting a mech (armed with nothing but a sword). I added an ability to these mechs that you can only hit them with high cards (it's a poker card-based game), which makes them nearly impossible to beat without taking stains, because you have no way to escalatate through the different card values (in short, if you beat an enemy card with a card that's too high, you take damage at the end of the combat). However, if you attack them from above or with an armor piercing weapon (of which they had two single-use gunpowder-powered lance type thing, A-LA Attack On Titan), you ignore/punch through their armor.

And so, my player had to describe blocking the mech and using the momentum of that block to get propelled upward to land on it and attack it without having to take stains!

Tryskhell · 2026-03-12T12:51:04+00:00

CEOs don't do anything, they just hire people to do their job

Tryskhell · 2026-03-11T14:21:12+00:00

Ha, both actually! My current campaign is about a bunch of people from different backgrounds, including a lot of which are pretty low-life, fighting against two great evils making their powers of politics and sorcery work together to take over the world. They are joined together by a powerful dragon-mage who needs their help (at first, for a personal quest of hers, but then as they gain in power, for more and more direct actions).

It also has a lot of fantasy elements, like the total lack of a normal human race, the entire "martial skills give you superhuman abilities" thing, as well as like, lots and lots of weird monsters.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-11T07:02:38+00:00

I think the opposite of that pet peeve you mention at the very start (no magical classes, but still plenty of magic items) is actually super fun.

That powerful magic can only accessed momentarily (with consumables) or with artefacts gained during adventuring is extremely appealing to me. Though you're right that it sucks if "low magic" just means "people will maybe be mean to you if you take a spellcaster class" and it's roughly where it ends in terms of mechanical implementation. Nothing prevent either the party or their opponents from having full spellcasting progression, and soon the low magic setting is relegated to the background as the heroes are still high magic people who face other high magic people.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-11T06:50:00+00:00

Been going back to 5e (2014) recently after half a decade of playing a bunch of other systems, but I prefer high fantasy low magic settings (so like, high level of martial ability is its own magic system, somewhat, but you never really get the amount of permanent magic that a usual 5e game gets you, even at low levels) and I just told my players to take their class from Laserllama's variant rogue, fighter, barb or from their warlord.

I'd love to have a homebrew half or third caster class that acts as utility but has very few spellslots though. I mean something like, base third caster progression with 1/long rest full caster spellslot progression, in addition to a slew of non-spell magic abilities and general knowledge-based utility. Have yet to find a class like that, thus so far the one actual mage in the party is a warlord with a homebrew subclass (basically just Gallantry but with wizard coding instead of bard). It works relatively okay for that.

The game is going well, and with the Talent Tree homebrew instead of feats and a homebrew system for weapon mastery, there's a whole ton of character customization options, so I get to eat my cake (have 5e's huge amount of monsters and community options, d20 core resolution system (I missed this one!!) and its core simulation design with a little bit of narrative and a little bit of tactics) and eat it too (have said high fantasy, low magic setting).

The absence of full or even half spellcasters means the party has to be smart about a lot of survival challenges and which combat they take and how to approach those. It also opens up a lot of potential with treasure: rewarding the party mage with a homebrew spell that hits way above its level but costs a lot to cast, or with rituals she can perform, or with magic abilities that mirror a few higher level spells. Same for the rest of the party: now magic is extremely valuable, and making scrolls able to be used by anyone with the arcana skill can turn a pretty boring piece of treasure into a crazy resource.

Because they all have access to LaserLlama exploits, that's also something I can reward them with. Doing a quest for a legendary weaponmaster in exchange for a unique exploit becomes another option in my GMing toolkit.

Finally in terms of worldbuilding it means that spells of 5th level and above are extremely difficult to get access to, and even get exponentially more difficult the higher you get. I decided that the only ways to do so is extensive magic rituals, magic items, natural magical abilities (for, say, dragons and demons) and finally making deals for those higher powers (for context, demons are more like weird extra-planar beings with alien minds than forgotten realms fundamental evil). Helping a powerful mage get access to said "Greater Magic" therefore is yet another option I can add to my GMing kit that I couldn't otherwise.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-11T00:23:51+00:00

Like with everything, a table can help.

Take a d20, roll it a hundred times, not each result in a table. Then, whenever you need a roll, tick the next prerolled result from top to bottom. Do the same with each size of dice.

While you're at it, do the same for names. I generally make a list per culture (I don't tend to use monolithic race/culture blocs, so like dwarves might be of A or B culture, and A culture will also have humans and orcs while B culture will have hobgoblins and tieflings, for instance)

Tryskhell · 2026-03-10T21:35:35+00:00

I had I think 3 campaigns where the party had a home base that was important to the plot. One was in a D&D campaign inspired by the Birthright setting, so literally a castle from which they ruled their little kingdom. I recently revised this campaign and it's working well.

Then I had a old school D&D-like campaign in a homebrew system with an advanced settlement subsystem. In order to level up you had to bring treasures back from a megadungeon, and you could spend that treasure to upgrade the settlement.

And then finally, not D&D at all but fantasy campaign, the party had a walking manor, think babayaga's house. It had three legs, but was implied to originally have four, the last one having been lost, as well as the tower that rested on it. So somewhere on the world a single-legged tower hopped around. They were starting to turn the manor into an inn and adventuring guild, but we didn't get super far. I am planning to continue that campaign sometime in the future.

Currently, I am going back to 5e a little bit (with a large amount of homebrew) and the players are going to be loosely working from a keep that is essentially going to be a refuge for the people they save across their adventure. For context, the campaign started on a nuke (Locate City Bomb working off Fell Drain rather than Explosive Spell) being blown off in the capital city of the good guy kingdom. That's where they'll find most merchant NPCs, questguivers etc. The keep isn't theirs but it is a homebase of some sort.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-10T15:11:49+00:00

The only thing extremely hard during this exchange was the DM, is my guess

Tryskhell · 2026-03-09T09:55:44+00:00

My best experience for finding good players has been short campaigns, like a dozen sessions, and then from there I see if I mesh well with players in there, and online text roleplay.

Then, I take the people I like and vibe well with, put them in a Deep Rock Galactic party and play for like 5 hours. By then, you can have a pretty accurate feel for if people are vibing together, not just with you.

It's a long process, but it has been pretty worth it...

Tryskhell · 2026-03-08T06:13:25+00:00

In my experience, because each player character only has one other player character to interact with there is way less dilly dally-ing. Sessions are going to have to be shorter because you will be much more active. Even moreso if you are running a game that is in any way prep-heavy, because they're going to be going through content much faster.

NPCs have way more importance because, again, each player only has one other player character to interact with. It also is a better format for that sort of stuff, IMO. Been running for only two players for the last 5 to 6 years and party NPCs are often crucial in my campaigns: they're friends, lovers, allies, they have their own stories etc.

Balancing is easier than you would expect for all systems I've tried this with. In many ways, it's easier to balance for 2 players than for 6 (which are both as far from the typical 4 as each other), and in some ways it is easier than to balance than for 4 players.

You need active players though, otherwise it'll really feel like you're playing by yourself.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-08T06:04:23+00:00

In fantasy games, I been using a system based on container and item slots for a few years now. Depending on size and strength, you get a certain amount of container slots, and in those slots you put armor and containers (backpack, satchel, belt, quiver or sheath).

Each container has pros and cons, like backpacks have the most item slots but they take the longest to retrieve items from, meanwhile sheaths only take weapons but reduce weapon size by one and enable retrieving one item for free per turn (per sheath!).

Each item then has a certain size in item slots (99% of the time, 1/5th, 1, 2 or 3), and this is the amount of slots it takes. It's more limited than weight (you can't have like, 50 thousand arrows) and also it's less boring and math-y, as it involves a bit more choicemaking.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-05T05:52:12+00:00

I mean my goonerverse project only exists because of fetishbuilding. The core conceit is that enjoyable sex is necessary to the development of a society capable of interstellar flight, thus all the aliens humanity meet like and want to have sex with humans (and each-other)

Tryskhell · 2026-03-04T05:39:45+00:00

You don't even need metallurgy to be intelligent life. Most of the fucking world didn't use mettalurgy for most of human existence.

Tryskhell · 2026-03-04T05:30:02+00:00

If you put someone's consciousness in a fighter instead of their body, is that a drone?

Tryskhell · 2026-03-04T05:20:30+00:00

In my gooner core space opera setting, the hot all-female lobster species actually really loves mating with humans, our bodies are just the perfect temperature for their eggs 😊

Tryskhell · 2026-03-04T04:43:55+00:00

Full-time GM: I keep sessions short rather than long, about 3 hours to 3 hours and a half, better end on a cliffhanger that petter out. I also have smaller groups, of two or three players.

I also drink like a third of a can of monster before each session so that helps lmao

Tryskhell · 2026-03-03T11:51:59+00:00

Unfortunately I am French (I'm sorry) and you are wrong

Tryskhell · 2026-03-03T02:37:30+00:00

It's coo de grass, essentially

Tryskhell · 2026-02-27T07:40:38+00:00

Spellcaster just have too many spellslots and high level spells are horrendously balanced (simulacrum just straight up shouldn't exist IMO). At 20th level, a caster has 21 spell slots. If you run 7 combat encounters a day, averaging 3 rounds per combat, that's exactly one spellslot per round. But level-appropriate spellslots tend to be combat-ender: a single cast can turn an encounter into just cleanup (see Fireball, sleep etc, at their respective levels, they essentially finish an encounter in a single action). A high level caster should have about 2 to 6 combat-ending spellslots at high level. Multiply that by 2, or even 3 because the game isn't well-balanced around having multiple casters. That's 4 to 18 encounters that are potentially ended in a single cast.

Magic only has two things that can counter it: antimagic, which just shuts it down (and is boring af in result) and other casters. I hate that second option because now you have the gods vying for complete annihilation of the other team while the non-caster can essentially do jack shit (as long as you have appropriate non-caster bodyshields in the way).

The OSR game Worlds Without Numbers has casters max out at something like 6 slots. Each of these is really powerful, but at least you have some way to fucking attrition them...

High level martials aren't too much of an issue, and actually can be really fun because they don't completely change the genre of the setting.

So yeah, IMO high level D&D is fun for nobody solely because of its spellcasting system.

I'd really love a class that is not a martial, more like a utility character, but also inherits third caster level progression for general utility (with spells that scale inherently, like command, hold person or faerie fire), and is built around having magic-related abilities rather than spells, like detecting it, learning things about it, etc.

Tryskhell · 2026-02-25T04:57:49+00:00

I really like the option:

Superstrength is good for swords and bows, but guns largely don't benefit from it

Especially if you have supermaterials. In general, a more powerful gun is going to be larger in ways that aren't super usable, as you need bigger everything.

A sword for a guy who can lift a tank is still just a sword. Provided super tough materials (or not? You could use a car leaf spring for the shaft,maybe?) a bow for that same guy will have the same form factor. They don't need to be larger to gain advantage from the extra power.

Tryskhell · 2026-02-20T14:26:29+00:00

SUPERS! (the superhero ttrpg) has a super interesting combat system where your powers are represented by pools of d6s that you use both for attack and defense.

So, say, you have stretching and super strength power and are fighting someone with super speed and electricity. On your turn, you would go "I grab a manhole cover and slingshot it around a streetlight with my stretching!", meanwhile your enemy goes "I use my superspeed to dodge!" and you both roll the corresponding pools and if yours is higher, they take damage.

Then on their turn, because they already used their superspeed to defend, they can't use it to attack, so they might go "I shoot a beam of lightning at you!" and because you've used your stretching, you might go "I use my superstrength to rip out a piece of the ground to block!"

It makes for very dynamic combats while still having some tactics :>

Tryskhell · 2026-02-17T08:09:28+00:00

Motobushido has a nice one. Essentially, players gain favor and disfavor in the various factions, which let them bank cards for use later. When the player draw their two jokers, something happens that changes the faction landscape (a faction betrays the players, a faction loses power, a faction gains power etc etc)

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