Following three sessions of the Red Box of Dungeons & Dragons, the Friday Night Gamers have decided that they wish to return to the 5th Edition game that we started back in November 2015.
In response, I’ve updated my House Rules document to tweak how I want things to play from the stuff I posted a while ago.
Most notable of all of my House Rules will be the Experience Awards section. That has been dramatically influenced by my experiences with the Red Box – in short, I want to include experience for treasure in many circumstances but I also want to limit the value of monsters for experience purposes.
My house rules are evolving and need some testing, as they arise from several sources, but look promising and feel about right.
For a quick look, simply grab the .PDF file from my DropBox.
Expanding Choices
First, a comment on the expanding range of 5th Edition products due to the release of the System Reference Document in January 2016.
For the Dungeon Master, more products is both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, you can access lots of exciting new ideas and monsters; on the other hand, you can quickly lose track of what’s available. The worst moments are when players want to introduce a spell, feat, power, or item from a source you don’t own.
My house rules on spells and feats exist to handle this. Simply put, you can bring them in but there’s a price to pay.
This approach allows you to say “yes” to cool stuff but exact a tribute in-game terms for the new thing. Maybe the new spell must be earned through a quest, or the new feat learned by trading in something else. The specifics are case-by-case and players are expected to make an offer to the Dungeon Master, thus removing my need to think too hard.
Hopefully, this is not enough to deter new stuff but equally does away with the potential free-for-all.
New Races
As a long-time fan of David Hargrave, I love the idea of new Races in the setting. As he always insisted, more choices enrich the game.
My house rules include the Bruxx (rat-men) that I created for Mykovnia.
I am considering adding in the options I created for playing full Orcs and Goblins too, as well as the Krixx that I created for Whitegrave. I just want to tweak them all first.
Experience Awards
This is more complex than I wanted, but less complex than it looks. You can read the full details in the file, but the basics are as follows.
Experience awards are made in a modified manner to better reward the style of play that I prefer. This style of play rewards focus on agreed party goals but also offers options to the players each session, such as whether to seek treasure or to deal with a particularly troublesome faction.
Each session, the player party must agree on one or more Party Goals. This should reflect the general aim of the game and current direction of the story. The Party can decide on more than one goal, but a single goal must be declared the Major Goal; all others are declared Minor Goals. Major Goals earn the most experience while Minor Goals earn some experience. The idea here is to ask the players “what do you want to do?”… and then to reward them when they stay on task.
Sometimes the combat awards will also credit the party with a Treasure Award. This is equal to 1 Experience Point for every Gold Piece (or equivalent) taken from a given encounter. To receive the award, however, the treasure must be taken to the party’s recognised “home base”. I’ll track accrued Treasure Awards and players will receive them when the characters return to “home base”.
When engaging in combat encounters, the situation plays very strongly into how experience points will be awarded. A table modifies the combat encounter’s basic experience point value depending on the type of opponent and their general demeanour. In short, the party gets less experience from the creatures they kill in combat but can gain treasure awards; they gain more experience from bypassing or other neutralising threats than from killing them.
To make the combat awards and treasure work, I’ve decided to make sure that my treasure awards total 50% of the experience points the party would normally be awarded by the Dungeons & Dragons rules as written. For example, a 50 XP creature might have 25gp worth of treasure. This acts as a good guide on how much treasure to award but also means that players can earn effective experience boosts by finding ways to befriend, bypass, or neutralise threats.
Finally, I’ve brought back Brian Jamison’s experience point session awards table that I pilfered from Gamemastering.
Game on!