D&D 5e Rules – Overview and Table of Contents

I’m trying to make use of stuff I’ve researched and written up for my players to help the community at large.

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.

House Rules!

… to be continued …

Reading through “Unearthed Arcana 2022 – Character Origins”

UA 2022 Character Origins is the first of the “OneD&D” playtest docs. My reactions to reading through the doc it fall into three categories (not exclusive):

1. Huh. Not a bad idea.
2. Ugh. That is a bad idea.
3. Yeah, this is 5.5e.

So … let’s take a look.

1. Huh. Not a Bad Idea

Simplifying Tool Proficiency and tool kits: This has always felt a bit fussy in 5e to me, to the extent that most folk I know engaged in these a little as possible. Sure, it’s unrealistic, but it smooths a bumpy area.

Orcs as Player Characters: I’m okay with that. I mean, at some point the number of intelligent races in the world starts to get a bit ridiculous, esp. if they can now all interbreed, but, hey, whatevs.

Making Backgrounds more important: I think that makes a lot of sense. I like getting a Feat out of it, at least. And getting a Language (with suggestions) makes some sense. Except … shifting the Ability bumps to this seems a bit weird, at least 3 points worth.

Level-associated Feats: Probably a good idea. While it begin to smack of feat trees from 3.5e, it does mean that trying to make Feats all fit the same level of power can be given more nuance. At the very least, it shakes up all of those “These are the best Feats to take” articles, but represents another awkward moment for backwards compatibility.

Natural 20s: I don’t think it was necessary to make nat 20s and nat 1s auto-successes/failures for everything (I know people have said it was a common house rule, but it wasn’t at our house). But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, either, so fine. (As noted below, I’d be inclined to house rule that a nat 1 gets you Inspiration, rather than a nat 20.)

Having crits only double damage on weapon and unarmed attacks (but not attack spells) is … also okay. It balances Martials vs Spellcasters a bit.

Spell groups: Narrowing the groups of spells (Arcane, Divine, Primal) is a nice bit of efficiency, at least on the face of it.

Grappling: The Grappled condition changes are interesting. I like the Disadvantage for non-Grappler attacks. It’s interesting that they’ve shifted to a Saving Throw with Dex or Str vs the Athletics/Acrobatics skill roll.

Unarmed Strikes: I haven’t done a lot with fisticuffs in the past, but the expansion here (combined with the Tavern Brawler feat) looks like some added detail that will be useful and handy.

2. Ugh. That’s a Bad Idea.

Half-races. “But I don’t wanna be a half-orc or a half-elf. I want to be an Orc-Gnome. I want to be an Ardling-Tiefling. I want to be a Halfling-Ent!” Ugh. I mean, maybe just as well that they came up with a standardized mechanic for it, but it just seems kind of silly to me. It’s not like there’s a shortage of races and demi-races already.

And, of course, that begs the question of quarter-races (“My character has a human-elf hybrid father and an orc-dwarf hybrid mother”), and how to handle them in the rules. “And so, ad infinitum.”

Muddying racial differences. This one is contentious, I know. I am very aware (admittedly from my cis-het-white-male perspective) of the very powerful arguments behind getting rid of race-based Ability Point tweaks. Human history is full of ugliness where different “races” of humans were (and by some still are) assumed to be fundamentally different from “normal,” physically and mentally. Tropes in the game that resonate to that should be examined critically, if not discouraged.

At the same time, it’s one thing to say that Black humans and White humans and Asian humans and whatever pseudo-racial classifications you want to come up with (because we are all, after all, one species) are really the same, and quite another to continuously grind away the differences to say that Dwarves = Humans = Elves. In that case, why bother having those distinctions at all? (“Bob is a sentient who happens to have pointed ears, high cheekbones, and celebrated his 147th birthday last week.”)

Or, as one consders it, why keep the distinctions you are keeping or adding (lifespan, size, appearance, old and new innate abilities) vs. getting rid of the ones you aren’t (stat increases and decreases). Especially since a number of those special innate abilities are just stat bumps in disguise (lookin’ at you, Dwarves).

Or, put another way, nobody seems to have a problem with Vulcans being stronger and smarter than Humans in Star Trek, as long as there are countervailing disadvantages. Why is it wrong for an Elf to be more Dexterous than a Human, or even, given their ages, have a higher Intelligence. I mean, nothing in the old rules actually prevented a Half-Orc from becoming a powerful wizard; it was just a bit more difficult to min-max the stats that way. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. People can do anything, but the Halfling basketball player is going to have some special, epic challenges.

In short, I’m quite fine with backing away from dictating cultural-biological absolutes (“Orcs are all evil! Evil, evil, evil! And they eat human babies, too!”), even with creatures of demonic origin (the convolutions over Tieflings are fascinating, even if they inadvertently let an actual alignment show up in one of the Lineages). But I’m also okay with saying “The physical differences we’re literally describing here are reflected in the Ability stats of characters of those races.” (Mental stats are a bit more dodgy; I’d be okay with leaving them out of the picture for races.)

Character Sizes: Small (2-4 foot) Humans? Even when we are talking about Pygmies or people with Dwarfism, that’s below average. I don’t object, it just seems an oddly specific call-out. (They also show up as an option only with Humans, Ardlings, and Tieflings; all other races are other Medium or Small only, which seems … racist? What about tall Halflings? What about diminutive Elves?)

Racial Spells: More races have literal spells that they get to use on a dailyish basis (once per Long Rest if you don’t have additional spell slots). That seems to muddy the magic waters some, giving spells to all classes. Especially with Feats that do the same thing. I’m not sure creating a more magic-rich environment is actually needed.

Ubiquitous Inspiration: Inspiration is a mechanic that seems to be quite underutilized in 5e by too many DMs. The “solution” to this in OneD&D is to make it pop up all over the place, robbing it of its RP-supporting intent.

True, it gets lost after a Long Rest now — except for uber-versatile Humans. But PCs get Inspiration from rolling a nat 20 (i.e., after 5% of all rolls). Players can get Inspiration as a group from someone with the Musician Feat. In short, everyone’s going to have and use plenty of Inspiration to gain Advantage on rolls.

That’s not necessarily bad, but I’m not sure it’s good. It certainly waters down the “Wow, that was an awesome bit of character play, so take an Inspiration,” because it increases the chance they already have some.

(Frankly, I’d house-rule-tweak at least one thing there, if nothing else: you gain Inspiration on a nat 1 — anger and determination to do better — rather than on a nat 20! That’s a very non-D&D idea, to be fair.)

Backgrounds and Ability Bumps: Are Acolytes really that much Wiser than the average person? Are Cultists that much more Intelligent? Not in my gameplay experience. I know the Ability Bumps need to somewhere if you can’t baldly do it with races, but allocating 3 points here seems a bit extreme.

Multi-Lingualism: I guess maybe it makes life easier, but everyone knowing three languages (Common, a Standard Language, and a language from your Background) does seem to be a lot of linguistic lore (and, if players cooperate in chargen, allows for covering pretty much all the languages they might need).

Long Rests: These are so baked into the game at present (even if they do ridiculous amounts of healing) that having it be interrupted by any Combat feels like a major shift.

3. Yeah, this is 5.5e.

There is a qualitative difference between characters generated under the present 5e rules, and characters generated under these rules. The two will not mesh well together, and efforts to run both types in any given campaign will lead to madness. If nothing else, automated character sheets and tools will have to choose one or the other (whether from WotC or a third party like Roll20).

By extension, that implies a difficult fit between existing 5e modules and the new system. That’s already true to a degree (just as the Genasi), but will continue to grow over time.

That does not mean the 5.5e changes are, per se, a disaster. There are a lot of good changes in the system already that have evolved it from the baseline 5e of 2014 to where it is today. All those changes in supplemental tomes (Volo’s, Tasha’s, Xanadar’s, Mordenkainen’s, etc.) have changed the game in mostly good ways.

And, to be fair, the changes discussed are not the 3.5 to 4, or 4 to 5, full-edition levels of significance. The basic underlying systems, action economy, etc., are there. But this is more than just “5e Forever, man!”

So why not bite the bullet and admit this is a new (or distinct sub-) edition? If WotC’s plans involve you buying a new set of hardcover books for “OneD&D” (and they do), then why not just call it 5.5e and be done with it? For the sake of marketing?

Because, really-truly, I guarantee that more supplemental books will come out after that. And every 5-10 years they’ll do a true-up of new PHB/DMG/MM tomes, “backwards-compatible” claims or not. If “OneD&D” in 2024 is not comfortably compatible with 5e, what will it be in 2028?

(Which argues the intent to pivot to a new direction and go to all-digital rules that you license on a regular basis. Want access to Xebulon’s Big Bucket o’ Game Mods? That’ll be $2/mo, or $20/year if you want it to plug into your official WotC modules and official WotC character generator. But I digress.)

I’ll continue to read the feedback (which is all over the map), and when 1 September rolls around, I’ll provide my feedback. If 5.5e came out like this, I would suck it up and play with it that way. But I would want WotC to admit this is not a backwards-compatible seamless evolution of 5e, from 2014 or 2022. This is something new that deserves to be recognized as such — and identified as such to WotC’s customers.

“One D&D” to rule them all (maybe)

So WotC has announced what they’re doing with D&D 6e. Or 5.5e. Or, maybe … no e.

Instead, they say, we will have “One D&D,” with the whole concept of “editions” becoming instantly obsolete, because WotC believes 5e doesn’t need complete revamping, just evolution. Sort of like an OS being constantly patched, the baseline ruleset will be updated over time so that there is just “D&D the way it is today” and no need to ever, ever, roll out a new version.

How that will work with books isn’t clear. Will they keep coming out with “patch” books like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything? Or will the core ruleset be republished (and rebought) every X number of months/year. In either case, that’s different from what we have now because …?

Of course, maybe the idea is that we won’t have “books” at all, but online rules that can be slipstreamed electronically to the current text (with some sort of versioning so that you figure out what’s going on), but that you have to subscribe to …

None of that was really discussed, just three broad pillars for “One D&D”:

Ongoing updates to the current baseline 5e (ssshhh!) rules.
Expansion of D&D Beyond, the compendium toolset they recently bought.
Creating D&D Digital, apparently a 3D VTT, the pre-alpha version pictures for which look pretty impressive, and which will be both a content delivery tool (“Here’s the dungeon for this game”) and content creation tool.

Now, just because they are dealing with the rules on a patch basis doesn’t mean there are potentially significant things coming out beyond additional content. For example, Backgrounds are being completely revamped, to give Ability score modifiers and feats, which does sound kind of keen.

Other changes already raised: simplification of spell lists, and making a Nat 1 a miss for any roll, not just attacks.

Color me … somewhat dubious.

I get the idea that completely revamping the rules every several years is increasingly more difficult. I even buy the idea that 5e is a pretty decent platform to build on, with caveats.

But one reason why D&D is still with us, several editions on, is because audiences and tastes change. What people want in terms of crunchiness vs simplicity, hack-and-slashery vs role-playing, not only changes with an individual over time, but with the industry.

If D&D doesn’t change, in its bones, every now and then, those changes in society and audience will lead people to go elsewhere.

Here are the dates for rule releases:

1974 – original
1977 – AD&D 1e
1989 – AD&D 2e
1995 – AD&D 2e Revised
2000 – D&D 3e
2003 – D&D 3.5
2008 – D&D 4e
2014 – D&D 5e

5e is already 8 years old — older than any except the longevity from the original AD&D to 2e, when the audience was much smaller. It’ll be a decade old 2024 when One D&D is planned for release.

At what point will everything start to feel a little creaky, no matter how many patches and content packages are released?

So maybe — and if how rules changes are handled is well-planned and -executed — this extends the 5e platform another 5+ years, with the homebrew variations that we have today multiplied as various rules continue to evolve and change (and the similarity on the surface to the 5e of 2014 continues to dwindle, without, somehow, breaking the “backward compatibility that WotC has promised). When will whoever owns Hasbro decide what the world needs is to put out One D&D 2nd Edition?

Playtesting for the rule updates can be found here.

Game Review: “Dwindle”

Caro Asercion, 1-5+ players, 2-3 hours, $7.77

⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ — Ease of Play
⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ – Replayability
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Fun

Dwindle is a self-contained indie RPG designed to let you run an “occult cyberpunk” scenario in the dying tech metropolis of Vector City.

VECTOR CITY used to gleam, its wireframe skylines shimmering against a perpetual pixel sunset. But the Vector’s heyday is long gone, and you — the ECHOES of this former metroscape — are left tending to the wreckage.

You’re no more special than any of the other stragglers stubborn enough to stick around; people here live hardscrabble lives full of risk and danger, and the difference between success and obliteration is as fickle as static in the wind. But without somebody to keep things running smoothly, it’s only a matter of time before the ghosts and the glitches and the corporate bastards eat away at every last bit of data and render this husk of a city entirely unrecognizable.

You won’t let it disappear without a fight.

Written by Caro Asercion, the game does a quite decent job of letting you generate characters (it can be played GMless if you like) and develop a scenario. Characters and the city are seeded (randomly, if you wish) by tables with interesting people, gadgets, goals, and problems to guide game play. There’s enough there I suspect for a number of replays before things might to seem repetitive.

One of the tables to help you build your character. Using an item from your pocket adds a die to your roll.

Dwindle’s most unique mechanic is its use of a grid to place seven dice into. The sum of dice for each row and column give you dice to roll for different actions/attributes (with bonus dice for reputation or use of a trinket in your pocket) — the highest die rolled provides a range of success or failure for the group to interpret.

The digital grid. I can see that one row means I have a Hack (modify tech) of 1 die, and the other column means I have a Heed (awareness) of 2 dice.

The trick is, those dice you rolled get removed from your grid, meaning, as the game name implies, your abilities and options dwindle over time, until you reach a situation where the highest die you roll (or, if you are at 0 dice available, the lower of two dice) scores a 1, at which point you can replenish the grid in whatever way you like.

It sounds a little complex, but it’s mechanically simple, esp. if you use the digital interface by Tim Busuttil. The main thing is figuring out when best to shoot big dice, realizing you’ll be seriously weakened until you can figure out how to replenish.

The Good

Intriguing setting, neatly set up for a variety of adventures.
Clean and pretty rule set, plus a text-only version if that’s how you roll.
Interesting attribute / rolling grid (with digital tool).
Great for a one-off / fill-in session.
Can be run without a GM.
Can be played tabletop or virtually (if you trust your players’ rolling).

The Not-As-Good

Limited replays without brainstorming some new elements for the tables.
Characters may feel a little generic, as dice can replenished in whatever arrangement you wish.
Most die results are mixtures of success and failure, making it difficult to feel an unalloyed success.
Attribute tags sometimes drive, rather than guide, the action (“I have dice left in this, so that’s what I should do”).
In the session we played, we dwindled pretty quickly, and didn’t have a lot of luck replenishing.

It’s a fine one-night stand-in when a key player or the GM can’t make it for the regular session. I’m glad we played it, and I’d enjoy playing (or even GMing) it again.

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Game Review: “One Last Fight”

Superrobotbear, 2-6 players, 2 hours, $10
I ran this as a one-night fill-in when my normal D&D campaign couldn’t run because of absent players. We’ve been playing in Roll20 as a Virtual Tabletop, so I wanted something that would use that. I also wanted something I was pretty sure would fit into one evening; picking a “short” D&D crawl was a recipe for it spilling into multiple weeks.

I ended up with One Last Fight, by Ethan Hudgins, released back in late 2019. Ethan describes the game as “A GM-less Card-Prompt RPG for 2 to 6 players,” and that’s pretty accurate. I purchased and ran this through Roll20, which seems like a much superior choice to buying PDFs and printing up your own copy of the game.

I say “I ran this,” but that’s not quite right. OLF is technically GM-less (I was GM as far as Roll20 was concerned, which was helpful with some card mechanics, and I knew the rules better than the players, but I tried to keep a distance regarding creatively guiding the game).

OLF’s premise is that a party of 2-6 is ending a long campaign/quest against their nemesis: slowly approaching where the nemesis is located, fighting their way in, then engaging in final battle. All of this is guided by a structured card deck built from separate decks for each phase of the approach. Twenty-five cards are dealt, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the games generally seem to take a couple of hours.

There are really two games in OLF. One is a structure for conflict resolution. Character cards have simple combat attributes, bolstered by items/treasure acquired. Those attributes represent the number of dice to be rolled vs the challenges on the Adventure Cards. The Adventure Cards are flipped from the deck, and may force a solo challenge (which can be passed on to another player) or a group challenge (faced by each individually). These could be a bad guy, a group of opponents, a trap, a challenging situation, etc.

One Last Fight - character card — Character card with questions, special powers, and conflict attributes. This character has one each of the Key, Crown, and (through a treasure item) Magic attributes.

So if the conflict has Swords and Magic as vulnerabilities, and I have two Swords and one Magic, that gives me three dice, plus the free one I get, so I am rolling 4d6. If the conflict shows “4 4” as the difficulty, then on the individual dice I’m rolling (sums make no difference), I have to have two dice that have 4, 5, or 6 on them.

While many conflicts have the stake of losing life vs gaining treasure, quite a number have a different win/lose effect, sometimes being a matter of “this helps the party a lot” vs “this helps the party a little.”

Conflicts get hairier as the adventure progresses, until you finally get to the nemesis, the titular Last Battle, where it is kill or be killed.

Additional variation in play — beyond the randomizing of the built deck — come from the characters chosen: a variety of archetypes with both different strengths (conflict attributes) and various ways they can break the rules, from changing die rolls to providing assistance to other players.

But that brings us to the second system present in OLF, because, beyond a solid conflict mechanic, OLF is first and foremost about storytelling.

A game can be set (as a collaborative decision) in any setting — high or low fantasy, science fiction, the Old West, spies, comic books, named franchises or generic pastiches. The cards and actions are set as archetypes, without any particular setting in mind — a character’s description as being able to tell the future could be magic, it could be psionics, it could be the Force, or it could be a powerful computer. This gets determined by the group defining the setting, and by every card — nemesis, characters, gear, and adventure cards — having a series of questions that describe the present or fill in the past.

One Last Fight - nemesis cards — Some of the Nemesis cards. Collaboratively answering the questions help create the game setting.

Those questions may be answered by individuals drawing the cards, or by group efforts. And while the story built by those questions and answers don’t actually affect the mechanics, they can influence how the individuals play, and, when all is said and done, the create the story that players will remember long after they recall a given die roll.

It’s those questions and answers in the end that make OLF special, from “What does this statue ask of you” to “For whom in the group would you take an arrow? Why?” to “How did you allow this enemy to escape before?” to “What does the nemesis mutter as they cling to life?” You could play without that storytelling, but ultimately they are what, to me, makes the game what it is.

And even when you reach the end, and the Nemesis is defeated (one hopes), there are final questions — the inevitable (and often most dramatic) where does you character go from here? (Or, if your character died — quite possible — how are they remembered?)

The Good

Well done storytelling prompts.
Good conflict resolution mechanic.
Pretty easy rules.

The Bad

Storytelling and conflict resolution don’t really link together.
Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be irksome.
No physical printed version available; printing PDFs would be painful.
Very indie, so not a lot of info out there about it (by no means the game’s fault).

Overall, One Last Fight is a flexible and entertaining and imagination-stretching game, perfect for fill-in sessions or killing a couple of hours. The rules setup (at least in Roll20) was a bit sketchy and disorganized, but the gaps are easily filled in; the game’s rules are picked up pretty quickly in play. It’s available on Roll20 for $10, or on the author page for the PDF version (same price).

Vigorously recommended.

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