I’ve been DMing D&D going back to the AD&D v1 era, and recently wrapped a 2½ year 5e campaign. One of the things I ended up doing for that was writing a lot of “rules summaries” explaining or exploring (or in some cases “house ruling“) on concepts or specifics that need a bit more explanation than what shows up in all those expensive D&D books.
We were using Roll20, so I’d been keeping those rules summaries in the Campaign Forum there for my players, but I think I’m going to start posting copies of them here on my blog, as a longer-term (and more searchable) resource.
A few caveats:
- I tend to try to go with Rules As Written (RAW) when given a choice. When I need something more clear than that, I lean heavily on the RPG Stackexchange, because those folk are rules lawyers in a very reasonable fashion.
- That said, this is still just me saying things, though I try to document what I say. If you, or your DM, think differently on any of this, that’s up to you and your table.
- There are cases where I go with house rules that I think make things easier, more sensible, more fun — without, I hope, gutting major gaming subsystems.
- This is all going to be focused on D&D 5e — and with One D&D (or whatever it turns out being called) ramping up, all or most of this may be obsoleted (claims of backwards-compatibility notwithstanding). Caveat lector.
Table of Contents
- Action Economy!
- Advantage and Disadvantage!
- Athletics and Acrobatics!
- Actions, Attacks, MultiAttack, Extra Attack, and Attacks of Opportunity!
- Bonus Actions!
- Bounded Accuracy!
- Cone Attacks!
- Cover!
- Death (and Unconsciousness)!
- Element vs Element!
- Falling!
- Flanking, Facing, and Fumbling!
- Grappling and Restraint!
- Help!
- Initiative and Cunning Plans!
- Insight!
- Inspiration!
- Invisibility!
- Jumping!
- Magic Items: Buying and Selling!
- Magic Items: Investigating and Using!
- Mounted Combat!
- Moving Through a Hostile Creature’s Space!
- Perception and Investigation (and Passive Perception)!
- Ranged Attacks and Relative Height!
- Ready!
- Rolls, High and Low!
- Round Down!
- Size!
- Skills – Abilities, and Mixing and Matching!
- Skills – Group Checks!
- Skills – Retrying!
- Spell Scrolls!
- Spells – Exceeding Range / Line-of-Sight!
- Spells – Spell Components (and Conspicuous Consumption)!
- Spells – Spellcasting per Turn!
- Spells: Augury!
- Spells: Call Lightning!
- Spells: Create Bonfire!
- Spells: Fireball!
- Spells: Moonbeam!
- Spells: Spike Growth!
- Spells: Spirit Guardians!
- Spells: Stinking Cloud!
- Spells: Thorn Whip!
- Spells: Thunderwave! (and other cubical AoE range Self spells)
- Spells: Wrath of the Storm! (and what triggers it)
- Swimming! And Drowning! And Water Combat!
… to be continued …
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