Homebrew Rules: How to Ensure your Players Feel Like Protagonists

We all know that D&D (well any TTRPG but let’s focus on 5th Edition) has a TON of rules that players and game-masters alike both need to know. Did you know that one of those is essentially, “yeah, we don’t care. Make something up and listen to the GM.”  Don’t you think that’s just so fun? The ability to customize your games to fit what you would think is fun is the coolest idea that Wizards of the Coast and other game makers have ever accommodated their systems for. Below I’ve included a reference sheet for my players in our upcoming second campaign. I’ll be sure to cite where I took these rules from so you can check out the original videos/content. 

The Reference Sheet:

We will use rules as written (RAW) for the most part, but I believe that the fun in D&D comes from twisting and contorting each and every world to fit what the players want to do. It’s my philosophy as a game-master that I am here to facilitate opportunities for my players to collaborate on an overarching story, that can’t be done without changing stuff up right? This is a reference sheet for you to use to not only reference (duh) but also keep me honest! 

Enemy Statuses: XP to Level 3

Too often have we asked “how’s he looking” to try and metagame and end a long combat session because we want to get to the juicy parts of why your character decided not to attack the evil werebeavers stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat. For my games, I’ve standardized our statuses and they are written below!

• Enemy statuses

• Wounded - the current HP of the monster/villain is above 50% of their total pool. 

• Bleeding - Their current HP is between 50% - 10%.

• Mortal - When a monster has just 10% of their total HP left, they will enter this status! 

Keep in mind - as part of me homebrewing the world and many of the villains I will attach certain features to each of these statuses. Think mythic and legendary phases from RAW but attached to health thresholds! It makes it more cinematic and video game-y to have boss “phases” for you to worry about. This idea is ripped straight from the youtuber XP to Level 3 - if you haven’t seen his stuff, you’re MISSING out. Go listen to the video 

Death Saving Throws: 

Who has been pulled out of the game and immediately lost all tension of the moment when you learn that the party leader succeeded their death save? I know I have! In an effort to combat that, in all of my games death saves will be secret. Now what I mean by that is only the player who is dying and the GM will know. The score will not be announced, and the turn will be skipped essentially. 

The purpose behind this rule is to keep tension alive and add to the cinema of the moment. Personally, I don’t love when I know that I could wait two more turns because Lilith rolled a natural 20 so she’s sitting pretty. I’d rather have my character make a choice to not take an attack to save his best friend than have Danny meta game. 

Attunement:

Congrats! You just looted a really cool magic item but oh no, there’s a second wave of the mindflayer polycule that is coming to attack you and the GM calls for that dreaded initiative roll. “Oh nice, I get to use this cool new Sword of Zariel, I’ve heard Brennan Lee Mulligan call this the best magic item in dnd I can’t wait!!!!” But you have to wait…RAW says it takes an hour to attune before you can actually use any of those cool items. 

In this game, I say to hell with that idea! Attunement will take an action and de-attunement will take a minute. This allows for you to see your rewards much faster and get back into the action. PLUS - it makes curses more punishing and gives you more of an in the moment choice to make. 

Spell Components: 

Spell components add such cool flavor to playing a class that actually makes you turn your brain on (source - literally any clip of Liam O’Brien from Critical Role playing Caleb). OF COURSE I want to hear what you do with bat guano to cast fireball, however sometimes going through the monotony of finding all of those minor things is tedious and annoying. The only components that I will take note of are those with a cost associated. 

For example, if you want to cast revivify I will definitely make you get a diamond, but if you wanted to cast mage armor, I don’t particularly care if you go and buy a piece of leather - you probably have one somewhere in your adventuring pack. This is especially true if you play a tiefling, you’re a freak. 

Health Potions: 

Health potions are a controversial item in the D&D community. TONS of GMs change how they work because it just feels like trash to spend your whole action to potentially get like… 6 HP, “Like why didn’t I just wait and beg for a healing word from the cleric.”

My point is that I’ve co-opted a rule that many follow, where if you spend your entire action drinking the potion you’ll get the maximum healing possible. That being said, if you want to do some other stuff during your turn, that’s totally fine! It will be a bonus action to drink a potion normally, or an action to hand it to another player/force them to drink it so they don’t die. 

Spell Action Economy: 

Action economy is everything when you’re playing any TTRPG. I’ve found that the RAW on how our spellcasting friends are dumb…to say the least. Has anyone else played Baldur’s Gate 3 and LOVED that you could cast two spells in one turn without having to worry about if one is a cantrip and one is a leveled spell. This allows for more nuanced uses of spell casting and gives your protagonists that god-given right to play a cool ass magic practitioner who slings spells left and right. At the end of the day, don’t we want our players to feel really cool? I know I do! 

We’re going to take that idea and implement it into an actual real play scenario. For the purposes of gameplay, all that will matter is the casting time of a spell. I don’t care if one of them is a cantrip and one is a 9th level spell. For all that I care you can cast two 9th level spells at once so long as one of them says “bonus action” under the casting time. 

Sanity Scores:

Guys, Call of Cthulu (CoC) is really freakin’ cool. In particular, the idea of playing around with fear and having players make choices and narrate what they do when things are hard and they need to run away or flee, or just simply become a deer in the headlights. We’re going to steal something from this game and pivot it to D&D. 

Sanity scores are a way for you to dive deeper into who your character really is and what they may be afraid of and what would give them an uncontrollable reaction that only dice will decide. Let me explain more and give you the exact ways this is going to be integrated. 

EVERY character will have a sanity score. It’s calculated as your wisdom score multiplied by 5 (16x5 = 80 San). This score will only increase should you decide to level up that stat. For example and in this scenario let’s pretend that your character starts with a 16 wisdom, if you raise it during the game to an 18, you’ll raise your sanity by 10 points - that’s REALLY good because during the game it will be going down. When you are confronted with something that your character fears (you’ll be sending this to me during our character creation phase), or something so terrible that it makes a character question if that was real or not (this one’s up to my discretion) you’ll be rolling a d100 against your current sanity score as the DC. If your roll is above your sanity score - congrats, you managed to shake off the fear! However, if you roll lower than your sanity score you’ll be quite spooked and lose some sanity points. If you lose more than 5 points in a single roll, you’ll be given a bout of madness. This is another feature from CoC that is super interesting and cool to use and think about. 

One other thing since we will likely have a paladin or someone that is immune to fear effects. If this is the case it will simply make you immune to features/actions in game that cause fear. Sanity will go a level deeper than basic D&D fear. To help balance you and make sure that your character doesn’t lose those cool traits, I will add a +10 to your sanity checks and all those that may be affected by your ability.

That’s a wrap! At the end of the day, there’s only one more rule that we follow at my (virtual) table - the rule of cool! Your players made heroes and they want to feel like heroes…makes sense right? Give them that extra five feet of movement to get to the BBEG, let them use an attack to grapple instead of their whole action because they’re super into it and the way they described what they wanted to do was so much fun. Let your players feel like protagonists and they’ll love you for it.