Rules and Mechanics from D&D books that I really like

hey everybody today i thought we'd go over one of my favorite things about role-playing games and dungeons and dragons rules there's a lot of rules in d d that can really enhance story role playing and flavor and today i wanted to talk about some that i really like that i've used throughout the years and continue to use to this day we're going to be going over some third party books but also some d d books i just want to point out that i wasn't paid by anybody to make this video about a rule in their book this is just me genuinely talking about rules and mechanics that i like i'll be having time stamps in the description so you guys can skip ahead if you want to look at some of the rules i'm going to talk about or you're just like this this guy's talking too long next rule book time i just leave these right here the whole time so i'm not gonna go over like every rule that i use in my games for the most part we play like pretty default fifth edition dozens of dragons which you know guys can we just talk about fifth edition for a second just like two like two seconds before we start this video i just want to point out that i think it's really dumb that is talking about sixth edition i don't think that watsi is going to release a sixth edition i think that's what these new books have been these reprints of 5v that they've already released it's just its own edition now but it's not really fifth edition either because if you notice on a lot of the marketing they're not calling it fifth edition they're just calling it dungeons and dragons so i don't think we need to panic about there being a brand new addition that we all have to learn and suddenly get used to i think they're just gonna update fifth edition to just be dungeons and dragons because it'd be really stupid if they decided to change everything about the system that currently everybody plays and really really likes okay i got that out of my system we're going to stop talking we're just going to talk about we're going to talk about good things today we're trying to be more positive here in xp to level three i've been very positive on xp to level 3. where where's my trophy where is my award for being positive no i jus i genuinely want to make a video today about stuff that i like in d d i've i've just been seeing a lot of mechanics and that i've been using in games and i'm like these deserve recognition and that's what this video is we're giving recognition to the rules and to the people who wrote this genius role-playing game so first off we're going to start with ice from dale rime of the frost maiden first of all adventure great love it so far playing it on our can arcade it's a great time and one of my favorite mechanics to come from this book is actually the encounter tables in chapter two it details a lot of locations that your players can go to and uh there's side quests and it's sort of this open world in the frozen tundra of the ice windale and it's really great and there's one portion of it that has random encounters and what i love about it is it's just one table it's just one table with a bunch of stuff that you can encounter but one of the coolest parts about this encounter is that it takes into account the weather now i've always had a really difficult time with weather in d d because i feel like it's really hard to manage and sometimes it doesn't really make a difference it's like oh there's wind so if you guys use a bow you're gonna disadvantage like i don't know it's not that big of a deal it's more of like a flavor thing if anything but icewinddale does a great job at managing blizzards because blizzards are really dangerous to travel in sometimes you can travel in blizzards and you walk slower and the visibility is reduced and you can't hear anything and it's easier for creatures to stealth but when are you supposed to have encounters in a blizzard in rhyme the frost maiden instead of just rolling one d20 and that being your encounter you roll two d20s one of them being your encounter dice one of the meeting your blizzard dice if the blizzard dice exceeds the number on the encounter dice that means that the encounter takes place in a blizzard which first of all is just a really easy way to calculate if you're going to be in a blizzard or not and second of all they made the table specifically so that certain encounters are more likely to be in a blizzard than others for example a yeti is a one meaning that a yeti will always be encountered in a blizzard while peritons or a herd of beasts or humans are higher up on the table meaning it's less likely to encounter them in a blizzard which makes sense peritons fly around they wouldn't be flying around in the middle of a blizzard while right dead in the middle is arvera curtis who you know is 50 chance of being a blizzard she's a big ass flying dragon and she might just swoop down in the middle of a blizzard and that'd be a bad time i think that that is just such a simple ingenious way to create different kinds of encounters it's also really cool because it details in the encounter so you like you roll and then you go to the thing you go to thing on the page and then it details if it's any different inside of a blizzard i think that this is just a really simple and genius way to have a variety of wilderness encounters and i think that's cool so great job ice from dale around the frost maiden next up we got this little book called stipples codex of companions in case you know uh though runesmith wrote this book and gosh dang i gotta say it's quite good it's a book filled with a bunch of monsters and it's awesome it's got little beasts and monsters and little guys and they can be your pets you got everything from small demon creatures to oozlings to um baby owl bears to possums but my favorite mechanic in the entirety of the book that logan put in here is let me see hang on i'm finding it i'm finding it is bonding with your companions how many times your players have pets or are you a player character with a pet and you want it to be more than just a one hit point creature that sometimes uh gives your character a little bit of flavor well in stills codex of companions you can actually bond with your companion and bonding with them levels them up and you can give them abilities along with more hit points and they can actually become like a useful member of the party for example in our even fall campaign logan played stibbles and then he died but he had a small tree son by the name of stibbles jr this little figure of him and throughout the game the party has been leveling him up and stibbles junior can now like cast it in tangle and he can create good berries like from his tree head he's not just like let's roll initiative where's stibbles jr he's in danger constantly there's a lot of really cool feats and abilities that are not just spells that you can give to your companions you can also lose bond strength by being a big old stinky head to your uh little beast companion friend and uh that's not very cool so don't do that but yeah you can you can do everything from making them uh have fairy tricks to getting angry to having dueling abilities or armor there's also companion personalities which is really fun and you can give them basically like a background or like a feat effectively and it depends on what their personality is which is like grumpy energetic clever creative impulsive moody it's it's fun it's a great time i highly recommend you check it out have you guys ever heard of this little book called uh the dungeon masters guide okay yeah it's the [ __ ] fifth edition dm's guide i know but there everybody knacks on this book i just want to say that there's some really good stuff in the dms guide two things i want to bring up first of all i love that they give a really good breakdown of cities cities are such a difficult thing for me to write sometimes because it's just overwhelming there's so much stuff there it's a center of populace you don't know what to throw in there and the dm's guide has so much inspiration that just gives you a canvas to create what you want to create within a city a village or a town i like that they also give you a lot of examples and they give you like tables in which you can change up your city to make it a little different from every other city but one of my favorite parts about the fifth edition dungeon masters guide page 292. uh you can create dungeons i love this so much much like a city uh whenever i have a dungeon i i need like a jumping point i can't just like a dungeon just will come into my mind i need to have at least a little bit of inspiration order to jump off of and the dm's guide has all of these tables where you can just create random rooms is it a layer is it a maze is it a mine a mine and you can roll percentage dice to be like this is a kitchen what's in the kitchen maybe the chamber state is that it is used as a campsite and then that can get your brain rolling and being like why was it used as a campsite what's inside of it you can roll the chamber contents there's a trick inside a trick what's that uh it's a brain preserved in a jar that contains an imprisoned creature that's that's just random table that's really cool anyways if you're struggling to make dungeons uh it is a great time to sit down and just roll on these tables and figure out what kind of dungeon you're gonna make and some sort of narrative and story will come to your mind even if you don't want to just randomly create a completely random dungeon okay uh xanathar's guide is probably one of my favorite d d source books ever since it came out it has added so many things that have made d d so great and so fun and uh there's so much i love about it but i think the one mechanic that i use in this book consistently to this day is the downtime activities oh my god they are so fun whoever wrote those down time activities i want more of them there there's not enough we need more there's so many and they're so cool and they're really interesting in case you don't know about the downtime activities in xanathar's guide there's a bunch and they're just things that your character can do over the course of like a week and they get benefits by the end of it and these things include buying a magic item cool gambling awesome working just for money great how about um crime you can just commit crime and it's a good time you can do pit fighting you can do you can relax research research is actually one of my favorite ones and what i typically do is instead of writing up a bunch of random books and the players being like okay i guess i'll just read all these tomes instead they spend a week they spend money they use intelligence they help each other and they get to learn pieces of lore and the way that i rule it is that my players just ask me a question and i answer it to the best of my ability so maybe they're researching mind flares and they want to know if a mind flare has a weakness and they're like okay i want to learn one weakness of a mind flare and i would tell them that there's not really any mind flare weaknesses um maybe elder destroy the elder brain that might be a mindful or weakness but the other really cool part is that there's complications so something can go wrong and in the book it details that you're supposed to roll a d100 and it's a 10 chance i think that's boring i think it's more fun if you just kind of let it happen sometimes and the complications are great like a research complication is you accidentally damaged a rare book that's a brand new situation or adventure even for them or like there's the crime complications the crime one is really fun because they're all different and so the crime one depending on how well you do is the amount of loot that you get but also you get to like scope it out so you get to know the dc before you do the crime so it's like do we want to hit this noble who's got a lot of money or this like poor merchant we won't get as much money but the dc's 10 and it'd be really easy and if you fail too much then you go to jail you can also find out one of the complications could be your victim was financially ruined by your crime or your victim asks one of your adventuring companions to solve the crime and it's so good it's just so much opportunity for game and adventure and it's just in these tables and i love it there's a little book that was written by a bunch of people over on dm's guild called xanathar's lost notes to everything else and i love it so much while there's a lot of really cool stuff like sub classes and rule changes and critical miss effects which are brutal and really funny but um just tables i love tables tables are so much fun my favorite part of this book that we still use to this day is the is page 54 it's called you fireballed my leg off and it's an expanded lingering injuries table the way we rule it in our games is if you fall to zero hit points and you took more than half of your health you have to roll a constitution saving throw a 15 and if you fail you get a lingering injury and the expanded table in my opinion is much better than the dms guide because the dm's guide is kind of just like you have a wound and then you can cast your wounds and then it's gone but the fireballed my leg off table not only can you go from losing an eye to losing an ear a nose having blurred vision you could break a finger you can also get your teeth knocked out but one of my favorites is 46 to 50 which is break an item a randomly determined non-magical item you hold wear or carry on your person is broken or ruined you roll a d10 and if it's one it's a weapon on a two it's an armored shield and a three to a ten it's any weapon or item that isn't a shield i just open up the players character sheets on dnd beyond and just scroll through their equipment and go that's broken now there are some that are in the higher percentage areas that are just like a festering wound and as soon as you get magical healing it goes away but this is really fun for low level play because sometimes magical healing isn't readily available all the time we've had a lot of fun with it because it's really interesting to see your character go from like level one being pristine little adventurer to like level 10 and by the time they're level 10 they they're missing fingers they have scars uh maybe they have a prosthetic arm now it's crazy and it's led to a lot of really interesting character moments and decisions and i just i just you just use it it's fun it's a good time the new teldere reborn campaign setting book is so cool some of the original book was reprinted but look at how thick this boy is there's so much more in this book than what was in the original and i love it so much but one of my favorite things that they put into this book that was in the original book is matthew mercer's resurrection rule i know a lot of people are probably familiar with matthew versus resurrection rules but we use it in our game so i figured i'd detail it in this video in the new teledory reborn book it's on page 215 they actually detail a lot of optional campaign rules like accelerated rests rapid quaffing which i first read as rapid queefing and there's three different resurrection rules which are really cool one of them is harrowing return and it has my favorite thing a table and you roll on this table to see what happens to your character when you come back to life things like having memories from the beyond where your character knows what dying feels like and you gain a level of exhaustion until you uh spend 30 days with forced down time to make peace with your memories or opaque thoughts you obsessively recall the sensation of life tearing you from the jaws of death these ever-present memories fill your mind making you immune to any effect that would sense your emotion or read your thoughts pretty cool but what i really like is the fading spirits uh resurrection rule which is where whenever you cast something like revivify or raise dead in which the ritual requires a player to beat a dc in order to come back to life and this dc starts off pretty high but it can go down and become easier if other players participate in the ritual by giving offerings or maybe uh intimidating the soul back into the body by yelling at them about how much of a good friend they are what's fun about this is that it's a really cool role play moment where a character characteristic and everybody kind of has to remind themselves why they want them back and uh while most of the time this does succeed in bringing the character back and just serves as a really cool role play moment to cast revivify we have had it fail before and wow it's crazy to go through those motions which my players did where they took the body of their ranger where they dragged it across the coast and brought it to a city where they hired a cleric in order to cast revivify and as they all brought offerings and things that they had kept from this character to bring them back to life to beckon them back into their body to help them finish their mission and their quest their soul stayed in the beyond and it was really cool because of course it was colton colton described how his character had made peace with death he was with a lot of his family and his friends and he didn't want to return back to his body it was really sad it was really bittersweet but god damn i love role playing games so much and uh this rule just makes it a lot of fun speaking of critical role the explorer's guide to wild mount really really cool book i don't know if you guys have heard this is so pretty pretty neat pretty interesting on page 190 this book details the heroic chronicle which is a system that allows players and dungeon masters to work together to build a compelling character story gives characteristics for additional proficiencies magic items spells and feats before the campaign begins well i really like xanathar's guide's backstory table creation stuff which i think is really unique and helps really flesh out a character before you start a campaign the heroic chronicle is great because it adds a lot into the campaign so xanathar's guide builds up all of this while the heroic chronicle sets up a lot of things for the future of your character by giving you social status relationships homelands while also diving in deeper into the world of alexandria and wild mountain you've got your family size and whatnot you've got the different settlements that you can come from and then there's like relationships that you can have with characters fateful moments which are really neat and just once again set up like a canvas for you to just paint away your character's story who they are and where they came from to me the xanathar's guidewind does a really good job at creating like a d d heroic character while i feel like the heroic chronicle which is funny because it's called the heroic chronicle sets your character up as more down to earth with relationships with people and sort of sets them up as a person before they come this great and mighty adventure you even get to pick like favorite foods and they listed a bunch of foods that are in different parts of wild mount and it's so great i love it so much there's also a mysterious secret prophecy i highly recommend it if you're going to create a character within wild mount or you can just use it to create a character within your homebrew campaigns or even forgotten realms and just kind of replace some of the homeland stuff with what's already in the setting it's really fun it's a good time i i recommend it well look at this another dungeons and dragons book van rickton's guide to raven loft i love this book a lot it's got a really cool stuff for horror themed games but one of my favorite parts about this book as my groups forever dm is the genres of horror section on page 45 this part of the book has all of these different types of horror that allow you to create really spooky and scary games but they're all themed and it's really fun so for example maybe you want to do an adventure or maybe a couple of games that are themed around body horror well it gives you villains and monsters that are in van ricken's guide and in the monster manual body horror torments settings adventure sites and plots especially great for when you're a dungeon master you're like i want to make a spooky game about cosmic horror stuff but i don't know how to do that in d d well here's a bun a list of a bunch of stuff that you could use have fun this is some of my favorite stuff i'd like to see this in more books just things that can kind of spur your imagination and get you writing and get you into creating the story with you and your players going more into the less story side of things and more into the player side mechanics of in the middle of the game and your player asks you a question you're like i i don't i don't know how you would know if a gelatinous cube can do that tatra's cauldron of everything has this really cool section in the back that i feel like a lot of people missed because it's in the back of the book and it's kind of a little hidden between everything else on page 148 of tasha's cauldron of everything there is a section called parlaying with monsters maybe you don't want to kill that owl bear well now you've got some tables and some rules and some ideas on what your players could do in order to not anger this owl bear because now bear's technically not a beast so an animal handling check won't work on it necessarily but that's me being oh actually but uh while that part is really cool my favorite part is actually just this tiny little section right there monster research adventures can research what a creature is likely to desire well i do like likely to desire and that makes sense i sort of use it in the way of being like uh i'm geralt orivia and i know that that's a griffin and i'm gonna tell you everything about a griffin a lot of my players like to do this they like to be like do i know anything about owl bears or gelatinous cubes or mind flares and what i normally do is just like uh yeah roll an arcana check and they're like could it be a nature check and i'm like i don't think mind flares are natural creatures so what this does is it takes each monster type and gives them an associated role to learn more about them aberrations are arcana that makes sense fae are arcana in nature while giants and humanoids are history undead are arcana or religion plants are nature and survival monstrosities are nature in survival it's great it's such a good reference especially when players are wanting to learn more about things and it details a dc which is 10 plus creatures challenge rating and that's really nice to just kind of have and be like sorry you don't know uh if lycanthropes can just one hint kill you or not volo's guide to oh god my volo's guide is it's uh she's a little crusty i've had her for a while and uh the cover um did not really hold up um one of my favorite parts about volo's guide is the monster lore section that's right before the character races in chapter one i don't have any specific tables for you but in all of these monster lore parts in this book that came out years ago we've got beholders giants knowles goblinoids hags kobolds mind flayers orcs and you on t volo details how to role play each type of creature and even goes as far to have flaws bonds personality traits names and physical features you can even create a null warband and that's a lot of fun instead of just having regular gnolls that are just here to be nulls you can make them unique and different maybe have some that are outliers and some that have personalities and overall they're not just slapped on with their chaotic evil and they're all the same it actually gives a lot of flavor to even like mind flayers who can be somewhat different creatures i don't know i'd like to see more about role-playing these types of creatures i think that was a lot of fun and also it was tables and tables are the best i just i love rolling on tables and being like that's the thing i'm using and i'm gonna roll with that improv fun those are a bunch of rules that i like to use in d d and i hope that you found this helpful if you have any rules that you really like please detail them in the comments i'm sure some people would love to see that i would love to see that i always love looking up new rules and different ways people play it's what's so fun about the d d communities just to be like oh you use that thing and now i use that thing and there's nothing wrong with that and that's what we all do we create stuff when we like to make stories and we like to have a good time so have fun in your games i love you go to bed on time tonight all right

Channel: XP to Level 3

Views: 340,878

Keywords: dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, how to, tutorial, funny, monk, fighter, 5e, player, book, dm, dungeon master, roll, ranger, rogue, paladin, cleric, barbarian, bard, wizard, sorcerer, warlock, artificer, mystic, skits, idea, character, stats, build, new, tips, gm

Id: EP9oATMKGt8

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022