I've also houseruled 5e to Baator and back to make it palatable, and largely second pragma's suggestions, but I do have a few more anecdotes/suggestions:
RobbyPants wrote:Is there any benefit to tracking multiple advantages/disadvantages? I mean this in two ways:
- Tracking that if you have two disadvantages and one advantage, that it nets you to disadvantage (I'm not sure how the system currently does this).
- Allowing the system to also have double advantage/disadvantage (as in, roll three, take the best/worst respectively).
I'm not sure if having double A/D breaks anything, but it seems like it'd give you a bit of incentive to care about further buffing/debuffing beyond the first effect. Maybe A/D is too prolific for this to matter?
As soon as my party realized that A/D doesn't stack, some of my players built toward ways of getting advantage for their PCs as reliably as possible, while the rest figured it's pointless to build toward something you can easily get and did the opposite. It resulted in a weird dichotomy where some PCs completely ignored high ground/flanking/attacking from stealth/etc. because they couldn't benefit at all, while others went all-in on situational advantage and played Mother May I all the time to try to eke advantage out of every situation, and teamwork and tactics correspondingly suffered.
I ended up houseruling along the lines of your first bullet point, and that mostly resolved the issue, but the wonky vision thing required separate houserules to make that make sense.
Do people just look up 3e skills and modify DCs to plug into 5e's lack of a skill system?
Yep. I dropped all DCs by 5 points, added the explicit ability to take 10 on all skill checks (on top of the handful of "passive X DC" rules), and boosted that to "take 15" if you have advantage on the check.
Also, when introducing custom items and perks, I included lots of abilities of the format "You gain proficiency with X. If you have or later gain proficiency with X, you gain expertise with X. If you have or later gain expertise with X, you gain constant advantage with X checks" to raise specialist competence across the board without changing the whole skill system.
I think I've seen recommendations to use both ability improvements and feats, both to stay on the tight bonus accumulation treadmill and to give some customization.
Yep, I did this, on top of handing out a free feat at 1st. It definitely helped with providing more choice (though as I mentioned before even getting 3-4 feats wasn't enough in some cases given the short and very restricted list available).
I was thinking to make races less class specific to change how ability bonuses work. Perhaps just +2 X and +1 Y, you choose which abilities? So if you want +2 Str, +1 Con on a gnome, go for it.
Several players in my group didn't like the idea of decoupling specific stat boosts from race because they found beefy elves and seductive dwarves a bridge too far, so I just let them mix and match stat boosts within races while having subrace determine the racial trait package as normal.
For instance, an elf would have +2 Dex and could choose +1 Con, Int, Wis, or Cha regardless of whether they're a high elf, wood elf, sea elf, or drow, but they couldn't pick +2 Dex/+1 Str or +2 Int/+1 Dex or similar. It was a good compromise between players who felt restricted by the subrace packages and players who liked to lean into stereotypes.
If your players are fine with totally free stat boosts, though, you won't run into any issues if you go with the +2 X/+1 Y approach.
Anything else?
Mook casters with access to
counterspell are a huge issue, above and beyond the normal issue of mook stacking. Once you hit mid levels, a basic "mid level boss cultist with 3-5 cultist minions" encounter can utterly shut down PC casters because having
counterspell prepared is a no-brainer, they can counterspell as a reaction without impacting their normal spell output, and each counterspell attempt is around a 50/50 shot regardless of how much higher level the PCs are than the minions.
Likewise, unless your entire party is a bunch of antisocial murderhobos it's not difficult for them to hire/attract/ally with/etc. other low-level casters and shut down boss casters the same way. So I'd highly recommend banning that or houseruling it somehow.
It's hard to say what else I'd change, since I've been playing with my homebrew version for so long it's hard to remember how core handles a bunch of things.