Most of these spells have seen a nerf (by me, your cruel DM) and the most common nerf is that the spell now requires and consumes components.
The RAW in 5e is that if a material component costs money (like the 300 gp diamond for Revivify), you need to actually have the component. And if the material component doesn’t cost money, there are two ways to get around the material component: you can assume that it’s something you already happened to have in your component bag, or, you can use your arcane focus instead of the material component. (Of course if you happen to not have your component bag or your arcane focus at hand, but happen to have the actual material components, that’s good too.)
I think this is a very good rule and I want to keep using it.
However I’m going to add prices to some of the components, for light-giving and food-giving spells. I want you guys to be starving and lost in the dark.
New players… I don’t want them to be overwhelmed by all the rules, both RAW and house. Anyone who can genuinely convince me that they were unaware of this rule are assumed to have components enough for four uses of these spells and I’ll also waive the weight requirement for those four uses.
In the RAW, this already costs 50GP, but then burns forever.
In the house rule:
| Put in rubies worth… | to get… |
|---|---|
| 50 GP | 50 hours |
| 100 GP | 100 hours |
| 500 GP | 1000 hours (over a month) |
| 2500 GP | 10000 hours (over a year) |
| 12500 GP | 100000 hours (over a decade) |
| Generally, for n bigger than two: 10ⁿ/2⁽ⁿ¯²⁾ GP | 10ⁿ hours |
Rubies are tiny items regardless of value. Finding that many rubies, or rubies of especially high value, is a quest of its own…
A bit of phosphorus or wychwood, or a glowworm. Is a tiny item (coin sized) and costs two copper pieces.
No added components. Works like RAW.
A sprig of mistletoe worth 5sp and is a small item.
Half the weight compared to a day’s ration and feeds ten people instead of one? A good deal for one slot.
Firefly or phosphorescent moss as per Light, or rubies as per Continual Flame. This is only if you want light in there, you can sit in the darkness for free.
A firefly or phosphorescent moss. Six uses costs 1 silver and is a small item. If the spell is ended prematurely, you can reuse that component later for the remaining time. For example you shine the light for 40 minutes. Later you can shine the light for 20 minutes. But then it goes out. In that regard, it’s more similar to a bundle of torches than a flask of oil.
Dry balsa wood. A six-pack costs 1 silver and is a small item.
Works normally.
Can’t reset starvation days, but does count as eating normally for the day.
Resets all starvation for sure. What a great spell.
Just because I missed them doesn’t mean that they don’t cost. Let me know and I’ll add them here.
Generally, all spells that hit an area now affect a specific number of people instead.
Some spells and abilities, I’ve created specific rules for. I do these as we go and so far it’s five:
No more than 6 people can be lit just by moving through them. Also, if you want to light people who are in separate mêlée groups, you need to light everyone who is in your group before moving on.
Thorn Whip in Chase or Volley works with the listed ranges.
Getting pulled out doesn’t trigger opportunity attacks, the rule book says:
“You also don’t provoke an opportunity attack when you teleport or when someone or something moves you without using your movement, action, or reaction. For example, you don’t provoke an opportunity attack if an explosion hurls you out of a foe’s reach or if gravity causes you to fall past an enemy.”
With Haste, you can make your extra mêlée attack in the last volley round, the same round as you cast your Haste spell.
(We are switching over to Crawford’s suggested house rule.)
The amount of d6 that can be handed out is now limited to twice your casting mod.
Houserule: max six targets.
You can use “Mending” to help you fix broken ammo, if you can find it.
XGE opened a can of worms on how to adjudicate counterspelling. But, I don’t want to change our normal flow of the game too much, even if our normal flow makes Counterspell stronger than Brian intended. So this is how it’s gonna work.
There are now two ways of casting a spell. Once is the normal way we’ve been using, “Drooma, you get five fireballs to the dome”. In that case, you can counterspell the fireballs right away as normal. And one is saying “I’m casting a mysterious spell”. In which case you can either try to counterspell it unseen, without knowing what it is, or you can try to identify it (int ability check vs DC15 + [Spell level], adv if it’s from your own class), but not both. But two people can work as a team, one to identify and one to counter.
Casting “mysterious spells” this way is something that both player characters and non-player characters can do. It is annoying AF but that’s how it’s gonna be. Most of the time the spells cast probably won’t be “mysterious” and we’ll just go “ok you get a couple of lightning bolts roll saves” “nuh-uh, I’m countering that!” and that is fine.
If the spell casting is imperceptible (such as Subtle Spell sorcerer ability or Innate Spellcasting monster ability, if that ability removes all three component requirements), that means it’s also uncounterable! #scragnoth
TL;DR: saying your spell is “mysterious” means that that’s people’s window to counter it unseen (or roll to identify it); otherwise you can just counter it normally.
This spell is changed so that:
The PHB says “the familiar has the statistics of the chosen form, though it is a celestial, fey, or fiend (your choice) instead of a beast”. For Zakharan characters, the familiar is instead always an elemental instead of its normal type.
“Any creature who hasn’t taken a turn yet” counts main actions obv, dodging or being surprised don’t make you immune to assassination.
“At the start of your first turn of each combat” means in association with your first main action each combat.
This is a level three Thief feature. You gain two additional benefits, in addition to the ones listed (faster climbing speed and longer jumps).
You can run along routes abseiling, sloping, and hard climbs without rolling. If you end your movement there, you need to climb in order to grab hold.
It’s not clear whether Fast Hands work with the Healer feat or not, so let’s rule that it does work.
It does not work with Potions.
These abilities are stolen from an OSR-game, GLOG by Arnold Kemp. I wanted to buff the assassin a little bit!
Starting at 9th level, you gain the ability to create false identities for yourself. At any time, you may declare that you are walking off. Later on in the session, you may reveal yourself to have been a minor NPC in the background “all along” as long as there actually are minor NPCs present. You can walk back on at any time, even climbing in a window. This ability is limited by plausibility. You can’t have been seen at the same time as the NPC since they are (retroactively revealed to be) an alternate persona you’ve created and maintained. Creating a persona like this costs 25 GP and 7 full workdays, but, you can pay that retroactively, after the reveal, by removing any 7 days from your character’s past and by paying 25 GP. (However, if you neither have spent 25 GP on this in the past nor have it available now, you can’t use this ability.)
At 13th level, you no longer have to create personas for your Infiltration Expertise, you learn to replace pre-existing people, body snatcher style. You need to study them for at least three hours. This doesn’t cost GP.
We don’t normally use investigation checks, which makes this subclass pointless.
is kinda worthless the way we run but it works with the Insightful Fighting feature.
is also pretty crap as written. As a houserule, you also gain the following ability:
You search faster; you can investigate twice as big an area (for every side, so eight times the volume) per exploration turn.
I mean this is still a pretty bad rogue compared to the other fantastic rogues.
As a house rule and to speed up play, the ward can block an entire barrage, like an entire flurry of blows.
We’re using the “ability check proficiency” variant from the DMG.
Rogue can get expertise in two of the typical rogue tools instead of in an ability.
You gain proficiency in one ability and one tool, or in three tools.
As a house rule, to buff these cute “sidekick” classes, PCs using these classes for themselves, count as half when dividing up XP derived from monster challenges, but they then still receive full XP.
So if there are three normal class PCs and one Warrior, all four PCs would get 2/7 of the XP each, or 28%. More than if there were four normal class PCs, who would only get 25% each.
If there are two normal class PCs and a Warrior and an Expert, all four would each get 2/6 of the XP, or 33%.
This is only for monster CR derived treasure XP. Item value XP, item magic class XP, merchant XP, or know-each-other XP works just as normal.
This is a very convenient houserule because it’s all on the DM side, you don’t have to worry your pretty little heads about it.♥︎ You just know that you get more XP when you have these classes in the party so don’t give them any lip. They are absolutely pulling their weight in more ways than one.
This only applies to PCs using these classes. Hirelings, henches and summons have different deals depending on the situation.
You can learn off-school spells (even as a single-element mage) if you always spend sorcery points to transmute them with the Transmuted Spell metamagic. They do not cost as half-slot known.
When using the “proficiency swaps” from Tasha’s, you can now get only two tool proficiencies from your type of being, total, combining swaps and intrinsic. If you get more, you can give them to other player characters. We want a lot of tool proficiencies in the party, but, we wanna divvy up the crafting spotlight. This only applies to tool proficiencies from your type of being, not to tool proficiencies from other sources.