Our Best Combat House Rules | 5e Dungeons and Dragons | Web DM

hey there gamers i'm pruitt and this is jim davis and today's show is going to help you and your combat speed it up make it a little bit more realistic things of that sort because we're going to introduce some of our favorite house rules for combat on this web dm this episode is brought to you by the devil made us do it by our sponsor money cook games available for pre-order now pull off the perfect heist by bending reality in this trio of games with absolutely no prep the players are liars time traveling agents from the future with the ability to change details about the past that shaped the game the gm and players work together to create their scenario and goal then choose characters introduce complications and you're already playing this game is perfect for any table that loves heists low prep play and improv we got to play this game in play test it's perfect for one shots but the meta plot lines make for great campaigns too and because it's monty cook you know it's going to be full of weird sci-fi awesomeness that your table will remember forever reserve your copy today link in the comments and description all right jim let's uh let's have this little convo about some uh about some house rules yeah things to uh you know you know just change up the game make it run smoother make it run a little different make it run however you know just to make it run the way the table wants to run the game right yeah yeah certainly this is a this is a time-honored tradition of uh d d players and dms like you know of taking that game and tweaking it the way they want it to especially for something as mechanically detailed as like combat because then that allows you to fine-tune the game and i think some people see house rules and the like is like oh it's evidence of there being a flaw in the system or like you shouldn't have to something whereas i come at it from like the completely opposite perspective which is like we get to like like yeah you get to tailor this game to exactly what you want it to by tweaking and the like but that doesn't mean you know just unfettered uh alteration of the rules is going to produce perfect gaming sessions you gotta go about it thoughtfully and um you know the like and with as minimal disruption as you can so that's where i'm coming from with a lot of the house rules that i use for fifth edition yeah and the thing is is d d itself offers plenty of optional rules right and we're going to be drawing on some of those but like those optional rules exist in a you know over there and but if you take them and put them at your table and make them a standard thing that's where it becomes a house rule and so yeah yeah that's that's that's where we're coming from this so first off let's start with one of our favorites uh and and it's fitting to start off a a conversation on combat with talking about initiative and ways to tweak the initiative um so jim first off what's what's what's what's a house rule that you use and and how does it how does it relate to the game and make it better for you yeah so i find that that moment when you're uh you know about to fight the you know the action's about to start the whole having to pause and everybody rolls their uh you know initiative and notes the result and then i've got to like put it in order and keep track of it and establish that order like even with you know table tents and tokens and vtt support i always find it like interrupts the flow of that moment and what i'm looking for is that from the minute danger is introduced from the minute act you know an action moment or combat is introduced that we don't break for that and so i use a initiative style uh modified from shadow the demon lord for dungeons and dragons and it basically is there are fast and slow turns and the order of initiative is pc fast turns monster fast turns pc slow turns monster slow turns and the difference between a fast and a slow turn is essentially are you trying to do one thing and one thing only then it's a fast turn and anything that has multiple steps or there's multiple resolutions to it like attacking more than once or you know moving to this position using your bonus action and doing something else then that's a slow turn and i find that even with new players who've never used this usually within a round or two of just saying okay are you taking a fast turn or a slow turn are you doing one thing or many things and then resolving it pc fast you know monster fast pc slow monster slow and just to keep that pace up and the only thing that i do differently is at the top of every uh round of combat i ask if it's going to be a fast or slow turn for each character and that's about it yeah because sometimes you just need to chug a potion right quick and so that's when you just go no no no fast turn potion just yeah yeah you need to hit points or you yeah you need that effect you know because you realize oh there's a dragon luckily i have this potion at the ready you know fire resistant exactly let's go and you get it in before the breath weapon so that's yep i want to fire off one spell i'm not trying to move and do that i'm not trying to do another thing i just i'm casting this one spell and you're attacking from yeah yep it does it makes for very fast and fluid combats and it has sort of like some of the same advantages that say like popcorn initiative has a more like narrative style initiative has where you just sort of go with the flow but it still has the turn-based rhythm and structure that makes d d combat uh work and you know and so i find it works uh it works very well although it does take some getting used to you know for players who are used to more traditional role your initiative score and compare it kind of methods i mean and uh and another another version of initiative that it takes a little getting used to uh but one that i've used in the past is where you just do the us and them like somebody makes the initiative roll so you determine does the party go first or does the bad guys go first and that way you can you but that way you can set up your combos you can have the clerk hit him with a whatever uh somebody hit him with a feeble mind then the clerk hits him with a banishment uh or you know whatever but you can set your your thing up so that your party can can execute the way that they want to um yeah and and again it's the same thing where it takes a little bit to get used to because again people are used to okay who goes first now i go well i want to bring my action can i do that so that he can do this well now you can just do that and so yeah that's that's another kind of initiative uh house rule that you can do certainly and especially if you're not using like a map and grid and minis and all that right you're not using dtt these are looser forms of initiative that keep the looser form of theater of the mind combat uh in in in mind and i think they work really well with it and like to me side-based initiative where it's like i go hugo is really fast it allows for like those combo moves and and you know coordination between team members um and then it's also you know most dm's are going with all their monsters at the same time anyway so it just kind of it sort of speeds things up in a lot of ways there's a lot of fights where all the monsters exactly once anyway yeah instead of in the combat turn you know some allies go the enemies go then the other allies go let's just just just get that and go who goes first uh because it does yeah it does allow you know everyone to kind of shine a little bit better in the right order uh because you want to get the paladin up front first with that aura rocking before everyone else joins them or something like that yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah you don't have to worry about the fact that fifth edition doesn't have a delay action where you can't really change your position in initiative order that way although you know dm could easily do that for you um but yeah these sort of simplified initiative systems really help and as long as you've got players willing to be flexible in their understanding of the game and that you know when there's a battle map out there's precision there's the you know the turn structure that kind of thing when there's not a battle map it's more like this then i think that you'll be able to really benefit from these most definitely another way you can benefit if you do take the initiative is to go on over to patreon and follow us over there so you get a whole other podcast every week uh i think you'll enjoy it and we've got a good community over there so check it out um next up this is one that some people might hem and haw if they found out that their dm was doing it but variable monster hit points and damage yeah so yeah jim how how do you do this in a way that a pc if they found out couldn't be like oh that's just changing the rules uh midstream so for one the average values that are listed in the monster manual are just conveniences you know they that you know you can have any range uh within that uh die value as part of that monster statistic and that is why i like using variable monster hit points and variable monster damage because i understand that the using average monster hp and using average monster damage is there to speed things up and to keep the combat moving at a quicker pace but i found from both a dm side and the player's side that it results in in like more predictable combats less swingy combats and i play dungeons and dragons for the swigginess i play dungeons and dragons because it has a d20 and it's wildly swinging and sometimes you have a streak of misses and sometimes you have a streak of good hits and sometimes you fight a goblin and it's got two hit points and sometimes it has 11. and as a dungeon master i like finding that out in the moment of play so it's a huge hassle to have a big battle with a lot of uh weaker monsters and you know i've rolled up all their individual hit points ahead of time and i'm keeping track of them which monster is which who just got hit all that stuff so i i dispense with all of that i don't worry about uh fixing that up for myself ahead of time i just say i have 12 goblins in this fight and then when one of them is hit i roll their hit points so goblin has two d6 hit points they just got hit i tally again i roll my two uh hit point die for them and like i immediately know are they dead or how many hit points they have left and then i write that number down and now i'm tracking it because that is a goblin who survived a hit and it's relevant and i find it's very quick it's very easy it's really there for like low hit die or low hit point uh monsters to like speed up those kinds of encounters and like if i go any higher in terms of like number of creatures i'll use a different uh house rule that we're gonna talk about in a minute uh but i find for like mid-level fights you know the the pcs are outnumbered um but it's not enough to justify the mob rules yet um that this helps combat go really quick for tracking their hit points and and then i just roll their damage randomly because i like variable damage too oh like that swinginess yeah yeah rolling like because here's the thing uh it that's the thing i've noticed in in fifth edition is a lot of people adopt just the average of everything they had the average hit points as a dm like i i fell into it too because it's just damage yeah you know fixed damage you know you take 12 every time you take 12 from this person you know and it's one thing that i've changed in the last couple of uh of uh adventures that i've run in fifth edition which was i would roll the damage because come on yeah like you might get a really good hit you might get a crappy hit and it it adds to the variability uh because you never know because somebody's sitting there with three hit points left and they're like well i'm dead now and you get hit up you got hit for two yeah what you know damage over here you know it wasn't a good hit yeah you know and so yeah you can have a little more tension um how else would you is there any other way that you would tweak that i you know i think that like you could easily do it where you have like a big hp pool and you sort of like subtract from that but that's really getting into more like grouping monsters together into their own and and that's to me how i handle mobs essentially but for me this one is it's simple enough that i don't really tweak it it's it's more about when to use it and it's really there for fights with a lot of low hip point creatures um that you know that that's what qualifies for it if i start having to get like big numbers certainly by the time it's like triple digits i'm i'm gonna probably track monster hit points uh in a more traditional way that time instead of like rolling for them immediately but who knows like sometimes there's a fight and i don't know uh you know uh what monster i'm gonna use until the encounter happens and you know either flows from the narrative or a random encounter table and i even then i'm gonna wait until the monster gets hit before i roll uh it's hit points because it's a surprise for me how strong this monster is what you know what kind of encounter this is going to be and like that's just the style of d that i like of being surprised and sometimes you're in over your head yeah i could i could see right quick uh uh a way to do a higher uh uh number of hit die monster where you just roll one and that's your average that you multiply by yeah instead of taking into account average you know instead of taking that what the d10 is six well you roll i rolled a four well it has eight hit die four times eight it's 32 you know instead of right the the normal average uh but we've mentioned a couple times here uh handling mobs uh and that's that's another one here uh there's some rules for this in the dmg on page 250 yeah but uh but handling mobs is something that i find like in cypher there are specific rules for and i really enjoyed that and trying to port that over to d d is is something that's like yeah why why don't we do this more often when you have just a huge group of orcs yeah well what are those rules because i'm curious how it differs from from sort of how i uh i handle them how do you handle mobs so in a in a recent cipher game like you know uh the party's getting attacked by like eight level two creatures so they broke up into four two groups of four and so since there's four of them they're now level four creatures you double it and then you know if one or two of them die now they go down to a level three group and but they they attack as that and do that much damage as these multiple creatures are attacking so you know i could see something very similar where uh in a in a mob of of monsters you know when they hit you know depending on what you roll you're gonna like you know like the mob rules say in the book you know you they do x amount of damage based on what you roll uh because so many of them hit um but jim how do you handle it yeah yeah so well the way i like to handle it is is a combination of those rules that are in the dmg and then what sounds like you're dealing with cypher which is like mobbing them up and grouping them up so the rules on page 250 of dmg are there to reduce the number of dice you have to roll when you have a large group of creatures and i really like encounters that have like you know dozens if not hundreds of other creatures in the in the background and sometimes the foreground fighting the the pcs so this is really handy for that the chart there lists the minimum die roll that the creature would need to roll to hit a creature right in this case one of the characters and then it corresponds with how many creatures uh it would take to actually deliver that attack so that you can just say like well i've got like 50 enemies in this mob of creatures and so i know that for every x number of them this is that's how many it's going to attack and so they just deal damage you don't have to make attack rolls for them and i find that that speeds up combat uh considerably when you don't have to make attack rolls you just assume a certain amount per uh size of the mob uh hits and then uh one of the modifications that i make to that is to then just pool all of the creatures hit points together and treat them as one creature that occupies a much larger space and then i note like okay for every eight hit points or for every 20 hit points whatever that represents one of these creatures being killed and it just simplifies things a lot i'm not having to roll a bunch of attacks i'm not having to like take dozens and dozens of turns or whatever it just treats it as like one group of creatures as one monster it has this many creatures in it so this is how many of its attacks hit automatically and then i just look up its damage and i you know i still roll uh variable damage for those but i find it speeds up combat considerably and you can have like combat in mid-level dnd where you're like upper tier two or into tier three and it's like there's a hundred of these you know bandits coming after you or you've upset an entire village of of these creatures like they're all coming after you and it doesn't completely bog down play you can have that moment and it's fast paced and it's still a threat to the pcs because they're automatically getting hit um and it doesn't take forever so i find it's very helpful in those moments to use that rule yeah and it cuts down on how many times you could possibly get cripped by enemies so pcs should love this exactly yeah there are no yeah there's no way to deal uh crits with that yeah let me roll these 12 d20s oh you got credit on five times you know make a new character um absolutely but yeah like in in and when dealing with mobs like this uh you know uh how would you how would you handle uh you know that mob getting its ass kicked and possibly fleeing which dovetailing into our next point here of morale which is to me like i love using morale i'm sorry it just it to me it reflects i know we're not going for realism but it reflects more of a realistic reaction to species just curb stomping the first few enemies um if the the remainders roll that morale like up yeah they're they're bugging out they're they're leaving exactly not having any particles so for me like it morale and and uh the both variable monster hit points damage like they really speak to me of why i use these house rules and that is to expand the variety of experiences we have at the table i find that like a lot of times when i when fifth edition gets stale or just well any game really gets stale it's because like subconsciously or without really thinking about it or whatever we've cut off certain options for ourselves and so fifth edition combat can be one of those when i find that every fight is to the death with the enemies that there's never any talking there's never any parlay there's never any follow-up then that's when i feel like i've stopped playing a role-playing game and i'm playing something else and so morale is important to me because when i'm a dm i'm trying to portray this living world that the players can understand and learn and then interact with as they go about their adventures and so like not every npc wants to die for you know wants to sell their life dealing dearly against these uh heroes you know and sometimes they're gonna run and i find that the the guidelines on page 273 of the dmg are pretty handy for that um there is a 2d6 morale system that dnd used to have but i find more and more that i default to 5th edition's morale system of just making a wisdom saving throw um because then at the very least i don't have to come up with like a morale score for every monster on the spot and i can just use the existing stats uh in that way and they're good guidelines right i think that it's very um helpful to have like all right they might flee when surprised or reduced to half hit points or fewer for the first time they might you know if they cannot harm the enemy at all they might test for morale and then it's like other ways you know that they might you know if their leader is hurt or incapacitated or if more than half of their allies are you know gone or something gone dead uh you know like their allies right like what are you thinking of oh they just uh i don't know what happened they died um you know and that's a way to differentiate enemies right a group of kobolds might test the first time one of them goes down but a group of hobgoblins like they're renowned for their discipline like you're going to be fighting them for a long time you've got to take out their leader and if you have skeletons or zombies like they're never going to run like they might be weak but you're never gonna force them to flee you're gonna have to kill all of them you have to destroy them all and i found like that variety really spices up my combats and i i really like morale is like one of my favorite house rules to support into pretty much any version of d d uh that i run but any game that has a lot of like combat in it oh definitely i still use the 2d6 because i just i like that bell curve and i just adjust the break point up or down based on how hearty they are you know it's like yeah no if they if i if it's above a five they're they're still in it you know like just take that midpoint um but uh but let's let's move on to our our last one here which is which is one i don't know i to me it's like i want to get back to fifth edition because this is the death saves is the one thing for me i've played enough games and had watched people go down and play the freaking whack-a-mole like hop up get knocked down you know it's like chumbawumba and you know that's that song is in the past we need to leave it in the past so a rule that i want to use for for death saves is you get one you get one and whether it's after x amount of rounds like i would say rounds in con mod so if you have a 14 con you got two rounds before you make that death save and it's a one and done like you live or die you make the save but your allies have that many rounds to stop you from bleeding out to to get you get there at least do some healing or a heel check uh medicine check um but uh also i can see just wait till the end of combat you're down wait till the end of combat you get your roll and you're either stabilized or that's it because it's just my my last character death antonia really just annoyed me because i took it to the fifth role and it's there was just this this un like it wasn't a fun tension it was strenuous and just like i didn't i didn't enjoy the experience of it and i just realized like i haven't really any character i've had drop i don't like the whole well let's roll this round roll for your life you know like i don't want to i don't want to be on this game show i didn't buy this lottery ticket i've already gotten knocked down you don't have to kick me while i'm down i don't know what do you think jim i definitely feel that like i i've recently played a character who i know i mean i lost track somewhere north of the 30s how many times that like been rolled to death saves you know like it was one of those things i was like how many i'm going to track how many and i like so many i lost track of them and i yeah i had i had all those experiences the five saving throws is this going to be the last one the getting a 20 and and realizing that like hey you know the monster goes next i'm i'm better off like just playing dead to survive this what might be a tpk like there's a lot of moments that i've had with death saving throws and i don't to me like i'm not a big fan of those moments like they weren't an enjoyable tension a lot of times they were a i would rather my character just not you know have died and i can get on with making a new one and finding out how i'm going to fit it in than this on state of uncertainty that exists and i know that for a lot of dm's and players like they like that and they even take it a step and like they make it secret so that the other players don't know how long uh you know or where that character is at or what their death saves but i i can see that like yeah when you're just sitting there and all you can do is roll this one die and it it's not helping you know it's it's not making the combat going any faster you're not really contributing like in prior editions of d if that happened that character is cracking open a php and is engaged in making their character and i don't know that i've ever seen a character or sorry a player in that moment who's been like not engaged i think there's a worry that the players like well i'm not in combat so i might as well not even be playing but if they're making a new character to to jump in as soon as they can then they're looking forward they're they're they're you know exploring other possibilities for what kind of character they want to play you know this is assuming they don't want to just get their character raised from the dead you know which is an option as lowest level you know like extending that state of uncertainty of are they dead are they not let's make this save oh there's a five percent chance you'll come back and whatever it's not a fun tension for me and so anything that like gets that over with quickly i'm i kind of like yeah no uh and uh you know you might have noticed that this show ended a little bit more quickly uh if you want something a little bit longer we always have our web dm talks podcast uh so i hope you check that out we usually answer some patreon questions things like that also make sure you like subscribe hit that bell leave a comment work the algorithm for us you know how it is hope you come back next week thanks

Channel: Web DM

Views: 42,226

Keywords: DnD, dungeons and dragons, d&d, dungeons & dragons, web dm, webdm, rpg, how to play dungeons and dragons, dnd, dnd 5e, dnd 5th edition, dungeons u0026 dragons, role-playing game, roleplaying game, dungeon master tips, DM tips, dungeon master advice, DM advice, house rules, dnd house rules, dnd 5e house rules, dnd random encounters, dnd house rules to improve game, initiative, hit points, morale, death saves, saving throw

Id: twBHHqVt8pI

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021