Introduction
On this site you will find a variety of house rules I’ve created for my current Dungeons and Dragons 5e home game. Each section gives the rules listed first, followed by my Thoughts on Game Design for those rules. The rules assume the reader has a fair amount of experience with 5e D&D. If these house rules inpire you, I welcome you to adapt them to your own game.
History
My introduction to Dungeons and Dragons was in 1986 via the Mentzer Basic Set (the “Red Box”) given to me by my parents. I was nine years old at the time. Other than playing the Dungeon! board game, reading a few Endless Quest books, and watching the Saturday morning cartoon, I had no knowledge of D&D.
After reading through the Players Manual and completing the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style introduction, I was in love. I DM’d my first game with two neighboorhood friends, and a life-long hobby took off from there. From elementary through high school, my friends and I played an amalgam of Basic (B/X and BECMI) D&D, AD&D (1e), and AD&D Second Edition (2e). Homebrew and House Rules were part and parcel of the game back then. Every group played a little differently, and every DM ran a slightly different game, but most of the problems this created were glossed over in the name of fun.
Fast-forward to 2014 and the launch of (the not-officially-titled) Fifth Edition (5e). Most of my gaming friends and I had been away from tabletop roleplaying games from the late 1990s onward as our lives took different paths. As a way to reconnect, we began a regular game night and decided to give this newest edition of D&D a go. Though some of us were familiar with 3e/3.5e and 4e (mostly through video game adaptations), none of us had played them at the table. I had kept my ear to the ground during those 20 years and knew the general game design for each, but lacked the table-time. This newest edition had us hooked pretty quickly — it was quite a bit different from the game of our youth, but still had a core that felt like D&D.
Now with eight years of running and playing 5e under my belt, I’ve begun to see some rough spots that can be refined. I’m also looking to bring back more of the feel of the earlier editions without sacrificing the solid game design of its current incarnation. I’m also looking to the future of where a next edition of D&D might be headed. We’re giving this homebrew a run in our regular game; expect updates to this site as we refine the house rules through play.
Update May 28, 2023
The campaign I developed these rules for began in May 2021 and wrapped up in an appropriately epic way with the high-level PCs saving the Prime Material Plane from oblivion, one of them becoming the new Sun God along the way. While I won’t be adding more to this site, I’ll be leaving the current content up as a source of inspiration for other 5e homebrewers…or One D&D designers *wink, wink*.