Wednesday, November 19, 2025

How to Die, and XP for Failure

Ok, so like I said in the last post, I made some changes to the 5e 2014 rules. The major change is to the dying and resting rules, which ties in to how I award XP. You may be able to apply the basic principle in other games.

Dying: When you go to 0 HP, you gain one level of exhaustion. Then, the party gains XP equal to your level of exhaustion, times your level, times 100. This XP is shared equally among all PCs at the end of the session.

When you fail a death saving throw, you gain one level of exhaustion, and the party gains XP in the same way as above.

Exhaustion: The normal penalties for exhaustion do not apply, except you still die if you reach six levels of exhaustion.

Short rest: During a short rest, you can spend hit dice to regain hit points as normal. You always regain the maximum amount of hit points from each die, no need to roll.

Long rest: A long rest does not let you recover any hit points by itself, but you can spend hit dice just like during a short rest. You recover all hit dice and spell slots at the end of a long rest. But if you have exhaustion, there is an X in 6 chance to not recover an expended hit die or spell slot, where X is your level of exhaustion. Roll a d6 for each expended hit die and spell slot.

After determining what hit dice and spell slots you recover, remove one level of exhaustion.

Channel Divinity: A cleric or paladin with exhaustion must roll to recover expended uses of Channel Divinity during a short rest, in the same way as for hit dice and spell slots during a long rest. They always recover Channel Divinity during a long rest. (We agreed to implement this after the Life Cleric went crazy with her Channel Divinity healing.)

Base XP Reward: At the end of each session, in addition to the XP gained from dying, each character earns XP equal to the highest level among the surviving characters, times 100.

New Characters: If your character dies, your new character starts one level lower than your high score (minimum 3).


The guys who survived the dragon fight found themselves mysteriously dumped in the wilderness. They headed to town and someone had the idea "hey, maybe we should tell the queen there's a friggin dragon in her castle." So they returned to the castle and screwed around, killed some wolves and more suitors, never got around to telling the queen anything, and then an old guy with an arrow in his back showed up in town and said the elves were coming. I didn't mention this last post, but our heroes did previously break a statue of the king's grandpa that had a weird pointy-eared monster inside. Which they killed. Well what they don't know is that it was the elf lord of the land, twisted by his long imprisonment, who was sealed in there by the first human king, and with the old elf lord dead, the great fey has finally chosen a new ruler of the land's elves, and she has called upon them to take back what is theirs, and now the elf war is about to begin.

ELF WAR PARTIES

Roll d4 for Frontline and Support, and combine.

Frontline

  1. 1d4 elfmaidens riding unicorns
  2. 1d2 fey trolls (cannot regenerate while touching steel)
  3. Vine mech piloted by an elf
  4. 1d6 foxfolk mercenaries

Support

  1. 1d6 stealth archer elves
  2. 1d4 singing bard elves
  3. 1d4 solar priest elves
  4. 1d4 flying wind wizard elves 

Friday, November 14, 2025

The Old-school 5e Renaissance Has Begun

 The new edition of D&D 5e has been out for a while, and people seem to agree that it's kinda bad but it's all right. I have no interest in playing it. But it did make me think back to the olden days (mid-2010s) when I first ran 5e. It was fun! 5e was, at the time, an OSR game. We had weird player characters wandering the wilderness and delving dungeons, searching for treasure and dying horribly to my home-made monsters. Why not return to those rose-tinted days of high adventure!

My friends were thinking the same, so we've started a 5e 2014 campaign. There's a talking cat, and a servant of cosmic Law, and a kobold that can turn giant, and more, and they came to the sick king's castle that had turned into a dungeon, and they fought poison-spitting stag lizards and creepy suitors looking to marry the queen, and they met a raven man who gave them random prophecies of doom, and the queen wanted them to cure the king and also find the lost princess, and they looted the princess's bedroom and found a secret door, and they fought a dragon that kicked their ass and killed the kobold, but the player came back with a githyanki stand-user... Yes, this is just like I remember it!

Of course I had to make some changes to the rules, but that's all part of the fun. Here's what I think needs fixing in 5e 2014. Maybe I'll go into more detail on how I did it later.

  • All player options are allowed
  • Put ability score bonuses wherever you want 
  • Start at level 3
  • No feats or multiclassing
  • Fix or ban the annoying spells
  • Fix the druid
  • Fix the ranger
  • Don't fully recover after a single long rest if you got really beat up
  • Add a travel system
  • Decide how to reward XP
  • And most importantly: Make the monsters deadlier

I know there have been people trying to make 5e into more of an "old-school" game before, but I'm not really trying to make 5e like the early editions of D&D. I'm trying to make it into the 5e I remember playing, the game from my blurry nostalgic memories. And I'm succeeding!

To be continued...?